In his
statement before the US House Committee on Science last month,
Brigadier General Simon Worden, Deputy Director for Operations at
the United States Strategic Command, revealed yet another reason why
India and Pakistan may have come close to nuclear war. According to
his testimony, on June 6 of this year US early warning satellites
detected a flash high over the Mediterranean Sea. Any boat down
below on the water would have also experienced a shock wave. Both
these signals are the same as would have accompanied a nuclear
explosion that released as much energy as the bomb that destroyed
Hiroshima. In reality the flash was caused by the impact of a small
asteroid, probably about 5-10 meters in diameter, on the earth’s
atmosphere.
India and Pakistan do not have the sophisticated
sensors or the infrastructure to detect this impact or differentiate
this from a nuclear explosion. Had the asteroid struck over India or
Pakistan, General Worden pointed out, the “resulting panic in the
nuclear-armed and hair-triggered opposing forces could have been the
spark that ignited a nuclear horror we have avoided for over a half
century.”
General Worden’s statement was probably wrong on
one count. From what we know publicly, India and Pakistan are not
yet in a hair-triggered situation, i.e., they do not have missiles
loaded with nuclear warheads ready to be launched at a moment’s
notice. However, this situation may well change in the years to come
and the potential for nuclear war would increase tremendously. This
would not necessarily be because someone intentionally decides to
launch a nuclear attack on the other nation; it may be more likely
to happen because an accident — such as misidentifying an asteroid
impact as a nuclear explosion — could trigger off nuclear war.
Given his position at the US strategic command, it is not
surprising that General Worden focused on a technological solution —
namely to set up an asteroid early warning centre. That is in line
with what the US and the Soviet Union have done to deal with the
possibility of nuclear war. Since the two countries were concerned
that the other country would launch a sudden nuclear attack on them,
aimed at destroying their nuclear and military infrastructure, they
set up enormously complicated systems involving a worldwide network
of satellites and radars to detect the launch and approach of
ballistic missiles.
These early warning systems had to deal
with a variety of extraneous inputs — noise, physical phenomena like
sunlight reflected from cloud tops, the flight of other objects like
geese, and so on. Mistaking one of these to be the signature of a
missile attack is easy and happens often. From 1977 through 1984,
the only period for which official information has been released, US
early warning systems gave an average of 2,598 warnings each year of
potential incoming missiles attacks. All of these were false — i.e.,
there was no missile coming in. However, in about five per cent of
these cases authorities could not immediately decide that the signal
was false and had to evaluate it further. According to US nuclear
plans, such evaluation was accompanied by the alerting of nuclear
weapons. Should the alarm not be ruled out as false within about 10
minutes, US plans called for launching the nuclear weapons,
propelling the world into nuclear war.
An example of a truly
bizarre event that could have led to nuclear war may help clarify
the enormous set of events that these systems have to contend with
and not identify a false signal as that of an incoming missile
attack. In 1979, computers at North American Aerospace Defense
Command, the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, and the
Alternate National Military Command Center, all showed what the
United States feared most — a massive Soviet nuclear strike aimed at
destroying the US command system and nuclear forces. Launch control
centres for Minuteman missiles received preliminary warning of
massive nuclear attack. The entire continental air defence
interceptor force was alerted; at least 10 fighters took off.
Thankfully the error causing the alarm was found in time. It turned
out that the computer running the early-warning programmes was
receiving signals from a training tape.
Such errors are to
be expected in early warning systems since they are complex with
many interacting parts, and have to deal with events that occur in
rapid succession. Given their complexity, it is easy to make
mistakes. Further, the range of circumstances and contingencies they
have to deal with are truly immense and may not always have been
foreseen. The kinds of things that may not be foreseen may be
relatively commonplace. In 1960 for example the US early warning
system indicated that a massive Soviet missile attack was underway.
It turned out that the alarm was triggered by the radar detecting
the rising moon.
Following the pattern set by the US and
Russia, India and Pakistan too have been planning to set up early
warning systems. India has procured the Green Pine radar system from
Israel and has the capacity to launch satellites. In January of this
year, Pakistan’s Minister for Science Technology announced that “the
government is preparing to launch its own geo-stationary satellite
by the end of the year to meet its strategic and communication
needs.”
For reasons similar to the US and Russia, such
systems would also be prone to false alarms. However, the situation
in South Asia is made more severe by geography. The missile travel
time between Pakistan and India is only a few minutes — far too
short a time to provide any meaningful warning or permit sensible
decision making. This, in combination with the likelihood of false
alarms, implies that India and Pakistan not go in for these
enormously complex, expensive and ultimately failure prone early
warning systems and that they not deploy their nuclear weapons on
missiles that can be launched at short notice.
