[globenet] Fun With Nuclear Targeting

Fun With Nuclear Targeting

My wing o' the blogosphere is all worked up over an article -- in Pat
Buchanan's The American Spectator, of all places -- that claims the OVP
wants to nuke Iran in the event of another 9/11 attack ... whether Tehran
was involved or not:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's
office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with
drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another
9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States.

The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both
conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than
450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected
nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are
hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by
conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq,
the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act
of terrorism directed against the United States.

Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly
appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being
set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage
his career by posing any objections.

Monthly, got in on the act (with slides).

So, what's this got to do with DefenseTech?

Most discussions about target sets leave the impression that the decision
to use a nuclear weapon here or there is a deeply rational business, with
great care taken not just in the selection of each target, but also to
ensure each nuclear weapon is really necessary. After all, if we are going
to put a nuclear weapon on a tank factory sitting next to a grade school,
you'd think that someone made a careful, anguished decision about the
lesser of two evils in a morally ambiguous world.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong.

When General Lee Butler become head of STRATCOM in 1991, he did something
very strange. He actually asked to look at each and every target,
individually -- something no one else had ever done before:

In his first months at SAC, he personally undertook a painstaking review
of the million lines of computer code that constitute the SIOP. For the
first time, he saw in detail what happens when broad presidential guidance
is translated into actual weapons aimed at actual targets, what he calls
"climbing down the ladder of abstraction." He was appalled at what he
found at the bottom rung.

For example, of the 12,500 targets in the SIOP at that time, one of them
was slated to be hit by 69 consecutive nuclear weapons. It seems
superfluous to say that this is crazy, but it is important to understand
how the planning process could result in such a figure. At the level of a
presidential directive, a document of a thousand words or so, you will
have the reasonable-sounding requirement--if you're thinking about
war-fighting at all--to, say, target the political and military
leadership. That guidance goes to the Office of the Secretary of Defense,
which in a 15- or 20-page document called a NUWEP (for "nuclear weapons
employment policy") adds some detail: for example, what sorts of
leadership facilities should be targeted. The NUWEP then goes to the Joint
Strategic Target Planning Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which in
hundreds of pages of a document called Annex C to the Joint Strategic
Capabilities Plan lists specific facilities to be struck and damage
requirements to be met. Annex C then goes to STRATCOM, where the
targetting staff figures out which weapons, and how many, to apply to each
target to meet the required level of damage.

[snip]

When I mentioned Butler's 69 weapons to Dr. Bruce Blair, a former
Minuteman missileer and acknowledged expert on the operational aspects of
nuclear warfighting now at the Brookings Institution, he found in his
notes a statement by a high official at SAC in the late 1980s that the
highest kill probability for the United States' best weapon against deeply
buried, sprawling, hardened command posts was less than 5% (how they
calculate this is a whole other matter, but the short answer is, they
guess). Blair got out a calculator, assumed a kill probability of 4% for
one weapon, and started multiplying. To attain a 50% confidence in
destroying the target required 17 weapons. When Blair got up to 69
weapons, the "kill probability" had reached 94%.

The real issue here is that organizations abstract reality to manage it.
That abstraction, James Scott pointed out in his book, Seeing Like A
State, can produce disasterous consequences such as Soviet
collectivization and the Maoist Great Leap Forward.

Most of us intuitively understand the inhumanity of bureaucracies - a
perhaps necessary evil in the modern world. This understanding is why
General Butler's narrative is so compelling -- a human being acheives a

effects. Why? Because fire damage is hard to calculate and, therefore, not
real.

Which is where we get to the technology part.

Last fall, Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems & Solutions won a 10-year,
$213 million contract "to develop the new architecture and functions" for
the Integrated Strategic Planning and Analysis Network (ISPAN) --
STRATCOM's war planning system.

Although the details are classified, the contract website makes clear that
the ISPAN doesn't change how STRATCOM does business. ISPAN does not
address the fundamental myopia of "kitchen sink" target sets, artificial
damage expectencies and rigid delivery schedules that encourage the
President to use nuclear weapons before an adversary has time to take
protective measures.

That's one reason to be worried about efforts by the OVP to plan to strike
Iran -- not because there has been a policy decision to execute the plan
(there has not), but because nuclear war planning continues to define the
President's options in ways that alienate him from the execution.

--posted by Jeffrey Lewis

July 23, 2005 10:09 AM | Nukes

What Is the Plan If There's Another 9/11?

According to Philip Giraldi, writing in the new issue (not online) of the American Conservative, it's to nuke Iran:

The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing--that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack--but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.

Umm, could the Emm Ess Emm pick this up? Especially considering that several of the hardened suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites are in the middle of Tehran? So does this mean we are going to nuke the capital of Iran? And in this case would we parachute in exiles to run the place afterward, or attempt a colonial administration? What effect would the radioactive fallout have on our decision?

I mean, surely the NYT and WaPo can find a lede here: "US has plan to nuke Tehran if another 9/11." Can we get at least a bloody story out of this? Sorry to sound breathless, but the prospect of nuking Tehran is over my breathlessness threshold. As if we needed another reason to hope there's not a terrorist attack on the U.S...

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050801&s=klare
The Iran War Buildup

by MICHAEL T. KLARE

[posted online on July 21, 2005]

There is no evidence that President Bush has already made the decision to attack Iran if Tehran proceeds with uranium-enrichment activities viewed in Washington as precursors to the manufacture of nuclear munitions. Top Administration officials are known to have argued in favor of military action if Tehran goes ahead with these plans--a step considered more likely with the recent election of arch-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran's president--but Bush, so far as is known, has not yet made up his mind in the matter. One thing does appear certain, however: Bush has given the Defense Department approval to develop scenarios for such an attack and to undertake various preliminary actions. As was the case in 2002 regarding Iraq, the building blocks for an attack in Iran are beginning to be put into place.

We may never know exactly when President Bush made up his mind to invade Iraq--some analysts say the die was cast as early as November 2001; others claim it was not until October 2002--but whatever the case, it is beyond dispute that planning for the invasion was well advanced in July 2002, when British intelligence officials visited Washington and issued what has come to be known as the Downing Street memo, informing Prime Minister Tony Blair that war was nearly inevitable.

What these officials undoubtedly discovered--as was being reported in certain newspapers at the time--was that senior officers of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida, had already been developing detailed scenarios for an invasion of Iraq and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been deeply involved in these preparations. On July 5, 2002, for example, the New York Times revealed that "an American military planning document calls for air, land, and sea-based forces to attack Iraq from three directions--the north, south, and west." Further details of this document and other blueprints for war appeared in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. At the same time, moreover, the Pentagon reportedly stepped up its aerial and electronic surveillance of military forces in Iraq.

This record is worth revisiting because of the many parallels to the current situation. Just as Bush gave ambiguous signals about his intentions regarding Iraq in 2002--denying that a decision had been made to invade but never ruling it out--so, today, he is giving similar signals with respect to Iran. "This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous," Bush declared in Belgium on February 22. He then added: "Having said that, all options are on the table." And, just as Bush's 2002 denials of an intent to invade Iraq were accompanied by intense preparations for just such an outcome, so, today, one can detect similar preparations for an attack on Iran.

Just what form such an attack might take has probably not yet been decided. Just as he considered several plans for an invasion of Iraq before settling on the plan described in the Times, Rumsfeld is no doubt considering a variety of options for action against Iran. These could range from a burst of air and missile attacks to a proxy war involving Iranian opposition militias or a full-scale US invasion. All have obvious advantages and disadvantages. An air and missile attack would undoubtedly destroy some key nuclear centers but could leave some hidden facilities intact; it would also leave the hated clerical regime in place. The use of proxy forces could also fail in this regard. An invasion might solve these problems but would place almost intolerable demands on the deeply over-stretched US Army.

The first step in such a process is to verify the location of possible targets in Iran and to assess the effectiveness of Iranian defenses. The identification of likely targets apparently began late last year, when the Central Intelligence Agency and US Special Operations Forces (SOF) began flying unmanned "Predator" spy planes over Iran and sending small reconnaissance teams directly into Iranian territory. These actions, first revealed by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker in January, are supposedly intended to pinpoint the location of hidden Iranian weapons facilities for possible attack by US air and ground forces. "The goal," Hersh explained, "is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision [air] strikes and short-term commando raids."

It is also probable, says military analyst William Arkin, that CENTCOM is probing Iran's air and shore defenses by sending electronic surveillance planes and submarines into--or just to the edge of--Iranian coastal areas. "I would be greatly surprised if they're not doing this," he said in an interview. "The intent would be to 'light up' Iranian radars and command/control facilities, so as to pinpoint their location and gauge their effectiveness." It was precisely this sort of aggressive probing that led to the collision between a US EP-3E electronic spy plane and a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea in April 2001.

As this information becomes available, it is no doubt being fed into the various "strategic concepts" and "strike packages" being developed by US strategists for possible action against Iran. That such efforts are indeed under way is confirmed by reports in the international press that Pentagon officials have met with their Israeli counterparts to discuss the possible participation of Israeli aircraft in some of these scenarios. Although no public acknowledgment of such talks has been made, Vice President Dick Cheney declared in January that "the Israelis might well decide to act first" if Iran proceeded with the development of nuclear weapons--obviously hinting that Washington would look with favor upon such a move.

There are also indications that the CIA and SOF officials have met with Iranian opposition forces--in particular, the Mujaheddin-e Khalq (MEK)--to discuss their possible involvement in commando raids inside Iran or a full-scale proxy war. In one such report, Newsweek disclosed in February that the Bush Administration "is seeking to cull useful MEK members as operatives for use against Tehran." (Although the MEK is listed on the State Department's roster of terrorist groups, its forces are "gently treated" by the American troops guarding their compound in eastern Iraq, Newsweek revealed.)

Given the immense stress now being placed on US ground forces in Iraq, it is likely that the Pentagon's favored plan for military action in Iran involves some combination of airstrikes and the use of proxy forces like the MEK. But even a small-scale assault of this sort is likely to provoke retaliatory action by Iran--possibly entailing missile strikes on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf or covert aid to the insurgency in Iraq. This being the case, CENTCOM would also have to develop plans for a wide range of escalatory moves.

Repeating what was said at the outset, there is no evidence that President Bush has already made the decision to attack Iran. But there are many indications that planning for such a move is well under way--and if the record of Iraq (and other wars) teaches us anything, it is that such planning, once commenced, is very hard to turn around. Hence, we should not wait until after relations with Iran have reached the crisis point to advise against US military action. We should begin acting now, before the march to war becomes irreversible.