Author: ArmsControlWonk.com

The Soviet Navy viewed nuclear-tipped torpedoes as aircraft carrier killers. A Soviet Foxtrot class diesel submarine, B-59, had this ace-in-the-hole when it was being depth-charged to the surface by the U.S. Navy during the Cuban missile crisis. Did Adm. George Anderson, the Chief of Naval Operations (and the Navy’s version of Gen. Curtis LeMay) suspect that he was dealing with nuclear-armed submarines when his ships were aggressively enforcing the quarantine of Cuba? Wonks: Help me out here. There was much the U.S. intelligence community did not know during this crisis, including the presence of nuclear weapons in Cuba when the Kennedy administration was contemplating military options to take out missile sites. And no American official could possibly have known at that time that three officers on board the B-59 were conducting the most important vote in the history of the Nuclear Age, on whether to fire their nuclear-tipped torpedo or alternatively, so to speak, to go up with the ship.

We learned much later, after the Cold War was over, when Americans and Russians began to swap stories, that the Captain, Second Captain, and Deputy Political Officer on board the B-59 made a private compact over the possible use of their nuclear-tipped torpedo during the Cuban missile crisis. They were, of course, supposed to check back with Moscow before doing so, but it was hard for a diesel sub to call home while under attack. (For more on how the best laid plans for nuclear deterrence can go awry, Wonks-in-training can check out Scott Sagan’s The Limits of Safety.)

And so, on October 27, 1962, the same day that a U-2 was shot down over Cuba, the three officers voted. They promised each other that, in extremis, if they were unable to work through authorized channels, they would make their own decision about using their nuclear weapon. If all three voted in favor, they would do so. If the vote wasn’t unanimous, they would hold their fire. Two of the three officers voted to fire their torpedo. The third, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkipov, voted nay.

Arkipov should have been Time magazine’s Man of the Year, but Time’s editors, like the rest of us, were unaware of his remarkable contribution to Western civilization. Time voted for Pope John XXIII, instead. I’ve never seen a picture of Arkipov – maybe Jeffrey can find one for this post. He’s the unsung hero of the Cuban missile crisis.

Oral histories are only as reliable as the memories of story tellers. So if ACW readers have reason to believe these memories are deficient, please hold forth.

A cunning rock ‘n roll showman, David Lee Roth, once opined that, “The key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Vice President Richard M. Nixon defended himself when he was struggling to stay on the ticket with Ike by calling attention to his family’s pet dog and his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat.” Those were the days when it was an article of faith for Republicans to equate security with solvency — sometimes unwisely. To maintain a balanced budget, Ike short-changed conventional forces and relied heavily on nuclear weapons for national security.

Times change. I remember wandering around D.C. during President Reagan’s inauguration week. My fellow citizens decided they had had enough of the Carter administration’s austerity and tentativeness. I felt stunned, not just by the loss of a job, but by the party goers’ ostentatious display of wealth. Washington was awash in mink coats and stretch limos. No apologies needed. Now the mink coats rarely come out of the closet, but the stretch limos have gotten longer. Both parties now thrive on the ostentatious display of wealth from their supporters while the country seeks deeper in debt.

My sense is that the Reagan years were a cultural as well as political watershed. One big shift, of course, related to the traditional Republican equation of solvency and security. The progressive tax code was bent to allow tax cuts for high-end incomes. Not surprisingly, commensurate cuts in government spending did not accompany losses in revenue. The Clinton administration accepted the thankless job of re-balancing the budget through revenue increases. A budget surplus resulted, and Democrats were then hammered as the Party of Taxation.

An old professor of mine, Robert W. Tucker, wrote:

The principal Reagan legacy in foreign policy may well be just this: that the nation’s 40th president transformed what had been a disposition not to pay for the American position in the world into something close to a fixed resolve not to do so.

The cultural aspects of the Reagan shift harkened back to the 1920s. A newspaperman who covered the Harding administration, Samuel Popkins Adams, wrote in Incredible Era, The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding, that “the country wanted an anti.” Harding was elected because he was so unlike his austere, demanding predecessor, Woodrow Wilson. Harding arrived in Washington “with little more knowledge than the average man in the street of the issues on which the world’s future was to hang… He was an actor, cheerfully responsive to the direction of the playwrights.”

Reagan was, of course, a far more accomplished actor and politician than Harding. He surprised both his critics and supporters by reducing nuclear dangers in heroic and historic ways. Reagan flummoxed wonks by demonstrating that a grasp of detail mattered far less than having sound instincts. Garry Wills, in Reagan’s America, Innocents at Home, explained Reagan’s political success this way: “Because he acts himself, we know he is authentic.” Reagan was, in Wills’ view,

… the great American synecdoche… He is just as simple and just as mysterious, as our collective dreams and memories… He is the perfect carrier: the ancient messages travel through him without friction. No wonder he shows little wear and tear… Reagan does not argue for American values: he embodies them… We make the connections. It is our movie.

When politics becomes indistinct from stagecraft, masters of fiction can be our keenest observers. Here’s E.L. Doctorow on Reagan (in “The State of Mind of the Union,” The Nation, March 1986):

The new attitude [of the 1980s] borrows something of the accelerated sense of life in the 1920s, when precocity and a daring irrelevance caught up young people as the stock market had their fathers. But there is something unrecognizable here: it is not a spirit of selling out because it lacks that moral reference entirely; it is a kind of mutancy, I think, a structural flaw of the mind that suggests evolution in a social context.

The “evolution in a social context” of American politics continues apace. The George W. Bush administration fought two wars with tax cuts. It’s hard to be secure when you are insolvent. And now my fellow Americans have elected another “anti.” Think of this: Barack Obama could never have been elected President without George W. Bush.

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These two views show a target warhead 350 km directly above the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:45 pm (local time) on 11 January 2010. The image on the left shows what the target warhead (with an altitude of 350 km) would see if it looks at the Sun and the right shows the geometry of the Sun, Earth, and target warhead at at that instant.

I am starting to conclude that the “eyewitness” to the Chinese missile defense test is probably real, the reported time (7:45 pm, “local time”) is reasonable, and the target vehicle was most likely a relatively short range missile such as the DF-21. The slower the target vehicle, the more reasonable the streak seen on the camera phone’s image becomes. One very important question can still be addressed: was the target illuminated by the Sun? The answer to this question is vastly important. If the target could not be illuminated by the sun, it would mean that the Chinese have developed much more sophisticated infrared sensors than they have flown previously. If, on the other hand, it could be illuminated by the sun, perhaps by selecting an intercept point high enough for the sun to illuminate the target, then we are not forced to conclude a dramatic improvement in IR technology.

7:45 pm sounds pretty late at night. (Especially during the winter!) However, we must not forget that China is a very large country that uses a single time zone. That means that when it is 7:45 pm in Beijing, it is also 7:45 pm local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center almost 1,400 km west. On 11 January 2010, that corresponded to11:45 UTC. How high up would the target have to be to still be illuminated by the Sun?

At that time, the Sun was 17.4 degrees below the horizon at Jiuquan SLC. It’s a simple exercise in geometry to show that an object needs to be at an altitude of 305 km or greater if it is to be illuminated by the Sun. That is easily achievable by a DF-21 flying a maximum range trajectory.

I suppose that some people will still want to believe that China has achieved a quantum leap in IR technology. I cannot prove them wrong. However, I believe that such improvements come in systematic ways; especially if the developing country wants to master the technology for the long term. This test is still consistent with the Chinese hit-to-kill technology using a visible light tracker.

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I’ve been working on a rather long piece about the recent Chinese Ballistic Missile Defense test but persistent reports of an eyewitness (complete with photos) have sidetracked me. These reports purport to be from a Chinese citizen who appears to have witnessed multiple flashes/explosions. (The original English translation seems to have disappeared, luckily I printed it out to pdf, which can be viewed here.) The question is: are these credible reports/photos?

For the moment, let us assume the photograph is associated with the interception. What could it be? My guess is that it is not the initial interception. The eyewitness seems to have watched a number of phenomena in the sky before taking out his cell phone and taking a picture. (That is certainly believable. In fact, it would be too incredible a coincidence for him to capture the interception.) Also, the first things he witnessed do not appear to have been the plume from the interceptor rocket. He certainly would have reported an initial streak of light if that had been the case rather than “moons” appearing.

Instead, the image above could be a large fragment from the target burning up in the atmosphere as it reenters. Using a typical camera phone field of view of 50 degrees implies that the streak is about 1 arc second long. If it originates at about 50 km altitude—somewhere around the altitude where the atmosphere starts to get fairly dense—then that corresponds to about 0.8 km long. Of course, it has been foreshortened by some unknown amount.

For the moment, and for the sake of continuing to speculate, let us assume there is no foreshortening. We might expect a target velocity (depending on the unknown range of the target rocket) to be somewhere between 3 and 6 km/s. With no foreshortening, that implies a “shutter” time of between 0.15 to 0.3 seconds. (Shorter range target rockets would imply longer shutter times.) I’m not an expert on cell phone cameras, but that seems to be somewhat longer than I would expect possible. (Readers?) The inevitable foreshortening would lengthen that shutter time still further and assuming a higher altitude would imply an even longer shutter time. These same arguments rule out this being an image of the initial interception. So the credibility question comes down to: how long does a cell phone camera integrate over a scene at night?

There is still some wiggle room here. I need to try to calculate where in its trajectory (ie what altitude) a piece of debris would become visible but my initial reaction— subject to a lot of further work —is that this is not directly associated with the interception.
It is still possible that it is a piece of debris burning up.

George Bunn (above, sailing and with son Matt) is one of the founding fathers of nuclear arms control. He was present at the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and served for eight years as ACDA’s first General Counsel. George participated in the negotiation of the Limited Test Ban and Nonproliferation treaties. Fortunately, he took notes during his years of public service, which is evident in Arms Control by Committee, Managing Negotiations with the Russians (1992). George wrote this book to add to the negotiating history of key accords and to suggest lessons learned, using the case study method.

In his chapter on the test ban, George reveals that ACDA Director William Foster exceeded his negotiating instructions trying to bridge differences on the number of on-site inspections required for a comprehensive treaty. The Politburo finally budged from zero to three OSIs per year; the Kennedy administration wanted seven inspections, but was prepared to fall back to six. Before throwing in the towel, George relates that Foster held up five fingers to his Soviet counterpart, who scowled. A CTBT wasn’t in the cards in 1962-3 for this and other reasons.

There is still along way to go before the CTBT enters into force, but as George wrote in The Status of Norms Against Nuclear Testing (The Nonproliferation Review, 1999), “there are norms operating against nuclear testing even though the CTBT has not been ratified.” Norm building is a poorly analyzed, alchemical process in which political activism, risk-taking leadership, resolute negotiators, and “mere words” combine to eventually gain the status of customary and then international law. All of the key bulwarks of arms control — the tradition of non-battlefield use of nuclear weapons, the global nonproliferation regime, and constraints on nuclear testing – began as outlandish notions that have become norms. Norms can be broken, of course. So, too, can traffic laws. But we would be much less safe without them.

Without rules, there are no rule breakers. Norms, George wrote, “are international prescriptions for state conduct. They are principles, standards or rules.” Or as Abe and Antonia Chayes put it, “They are prescriptions for action in situations of choice, carrying a sense of obligation, a sense that ought to be followed.” The states of greatest proliferation concern are outliers, rejecting a widely shared sense of obligation. Norms clarify their outlier status, as well as the steps required for their rehabilitation.

Norm building was George Bunn’s life work. His handiwork now constrains political choices, and helps promote personal, national, and international security.

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The most recent satellite reported to be joining China’s constellation of Beidou navigation satellites is shown in yellow. An example of a geostationary Beidou satellite is shown in white and China’s one and only navigation satellite in a medium Earth orbit (MEO) is shown in green.

The launch of what is reported to be a seventh Chinese navigation satellite (on 16 January 2010) provides an opportunity to review what we know about this system of satellites. First, it is clear that the satellite, which has yet not been officially designated a Beidou satellite on the NASA space-track website (at least as of 12 noon, 18 January 2010), is intended to be a geostationary satellite. It, and the third stage of the CZ-3 launch vehicle, are in a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), as the image above shows. Within a few days of launch, the satellite’s apogee motor will fire, positioning the satellite in to its final orbital.

If the case of Beidou 1D is any indication, we will not know which satellite it is replacing until China moves it into position. China, as a responsible spacefaring nation, moved Beidou 1D into a supersync orbit just days after the launch of its replacement satellite, Beidou G-2. Beidou 1D as only about two years old when China replaced it with what is reported to be a second generation Beidou satellite. That is somewhat surprising since Beidou 1 was over six years old at the time and one might have expected it to be replaced before the much younger 1D. If China decided to replace 1D because it was failing, they must have had plenty of warning since they were still in control of that satellite.

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Current Beidou Constellation is shown (at the top) with the ground tracks for three orbits for each satellite projected onto the Earth’s surface; (lower left) an equatorial view of the satellites; (lower right) a polar view of the constellation. Note the Beidou 1D’s ground track shows both a large longitudinal displacement over three days and a large inclination—the up and down motion of the ground track. Dates indicated are the launch date of each satellite.

China’s first generation of navigational satellites did not have an onboard atomic clock. That, of course, complicated their operation and limited the number of users. Instead of broadcasting their own timing, as GPS satellites do, the satellite operated as a “bend in a pipe” with the time standard generated on Earth and, in fact, the “user” position determined by a central location after a round trip of radio signals from the center to the satellite to the user and back. It would be very interesting to know if the second generation satellites had their own space qualified atomic clocks.

With this latest satellite, we are also starting to see a pattern in Beidou launches. About every three years (2000, 2003, 2007, 2009*, 2010) a new wave of satellites is plugged into the constellation. (The asterisk for 2009 indicates that this launch might well have been accelerated to replace a dying satellite.) That might indicate the length of time it takes to design and/or build a new satellite. If it includes design time, I would expect evolutionary changes; something we might expect from China in any case given their known history of systematic development.

Ronald Reagan remains a mystery. During his first term, he was vilified by the Left. During his second term, when he sided with the deal makers around him and when hard liners began to take their leave, Reagan was slammed from the Right. An accomplished biographer, Edmund Morris, was given extraordinary access to write an account of the man and his presidency. He was so unable to gain a fix on his subject that his botched result, Dutch, was partly fictionalized.

Historians will have a difficult time to settle their accounts of the Reagan presidency. His record of accomplishment on nuclear issues should speak for itself, but what role the President played in this drama is hard to pin down. The first chapter of this history, written primarily by U.S. journalists, wasn’t kind to Reagan, picturing him as woefully deficient on substance and easily manipulated by those around him. These accounts gave most of the credit for the breakthroughs reached during his presidency to Mikhail Gorbachev and to George Shultz and Paul Nitze. A second wave of accounts, relying more on declassified documents and Reagan’s diary, picture the President in command of the momentous developments that occurred on his watch. Perhaps a third wave of historical accounts will depict Reagan somewhere in between.

For those with short memories, here’s a sampler of some of the flak President Reagan took:

[Reagan is] a man singularly endowed with an ability to hold contradictory views without discomfort.

— Reagan’s ACDA Director Kenneth Adelman

Formidable will, based on a mediocre understanding of the facts. As often in politics, ignorance sustains.

— Jacques Attali

Ronald Reagan, who taught us to distrust summitry, to disbelieve in treaties, to reflect always on the duplicity of our communist enemy, is investing his historic reputation and our security in arms control treaties co-signed by communists. The Great Communicator who preached Peace through Strength today preaches peace through parchment.

— Pat Buchanan

[He] let his name and his office be traded about by subordinates in an endless civil war within the executive branch.”

— McGeorge Bundy

To me, the White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm?

— Reagan’s Secretary of State Alexander Haig

What’s going on right now is that the crazier analysts have risen to higher positions than is normally the case. They are able to carry their ideas further and higher because the people at the top are simply less well-informed than is normally the case.”

— Herbert York

What do you do when your president ignores all the relevant facts and wanders in circles?

— Reagan’s OMB Director David Stockman

[Reagan is] a President who confused nostrums with policies and dreams with strategy.

— Strobe Talbott

In relations with the Russians, the Reagan administration most resembles March: in like a lion, out like a lamb.

— Reagan’s ACDA Director Kenneth Adelman

Many other quotes could be added to this list. Feel free to add – especially one by President Reagan’s former speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, which I vaguely recall but can’t find in my shoe boxes.

Quite a few of my friends have been urging me to write something about the “new” images of Iran’s space center that have shown up recently on Google Earth.

The trouble is, I hate rehashing stuff I wrote about almost two years ago when I “discovered” the facility—much like Columbus “discovered” America—and wrote about it in Jane’s Intelligence Review (see Geoffrey Forden, “Smoke and Mirrors: Analyzing the Iranian missile test”, JIR, April 2008, pp. 47-51; I have never understood how the editors pick titles for my papers).

Perhaps the most interesting part of the imagery now, given the connection between these two countries’ missile programs, is the similarity between a building at North Korea’s launch site and one at Iran’s. For those who would like to examine the site themselves, let me replicate the coordinates I published in the open literature for the first time nearly two years ago:

35.234440° N, 53.920798°E.