Nukes seem our biggest near-term disaster threat, and this worries me most: The U.S. intelligence community "doesn’t have a story" to explain the recent Iranian tests. One group of tests that troubled Graham, the former White House science adviser under President Ronald Reagan, were successful efforts to launch a Scud missile from a platform in the Caspian Sea. … Another troubling group of tests involved Shahab-3 launches where the Iranians "detonated the warhead near apogee, not over the target area where the thing would eventually land, but at altitude," Graham said. … Graham chairs the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, a blue-ribbon panel established by Congress in 2001. … "That’s exactly what you would do if you had a nuclear weapon on a Scud or a Shahab-3 or other missile, and you wanted to explode it over the United States." …
J, is there any reason to talk to Graham? When we were funding SDI under Reagan, the actual scientists and engineers said it wouldn't work. The money quote I got from Larry ****** at SAIC, "It can't work, but now my retirement is assured." But the top SDI guys said we had to spend the money anyway, that we couldn't prove it wouldn't work.
So later they said even though it wouldn't work, still there was a possibility it would work against an attack from china, who only had 15 missiles and warheads. But pretty soon china had 250 nukes and it wouldn't work against china either.
So now here's the same guy, claiming that one single missile from iran could destroy the nation, and SDI can shoot down that missile. He has a solution that's looking for a problem. He's been lying about it for 20+ years.
Why would you pay attention to him this time around?
If you want information about this potential problem, why get it from somebody who's been lying about it for a long time? "Fool me once...."
'Hersh has reported things that were verified, like Abu Ghraib. But he has also repeatedly predicted that the US military was about to attack iran, and none of those predictions has ever panned out'
While it isn't likely, you have to also consider the paradox of warning in those cases. By warning that an event is about to take place, you encourage action that will prevent the action. I yell to you that a car is about to hit you so you jump out of the way. Now, my prediction was wrong, but had I said nothing it would have been correct. It's more likely that Hersh just occasionally gets fed disinformation or has plain old bad sources, but never discount the paradox.
Another troubling group of tests involved Shahab-3 launches where the Iranians "detonated the warhead near apogee, not over the target area where the thing would eventually land, but at altitude," Graham said.
An alternative explanation comes to my mind immediately: one might do just the same to avoid a number of troubles related to not reliably hitting a predetermined landing zone. Sending a missile to, say, Russia doesn't sound like a good idea even if it is just an accident.
A tactical nuclear weapon smuggled into New York seems the most likely scenario.
It depends on the attacker's goal.
If the goal is to kill a lot of insurance salesmen, real estate agents, and telemarketers, and drive a whole lot of americans crazy, then New York City would be a good target.
If the goal is to damage our infrastructure, maybe the nearby oil facilities would be better, the largest oil port in the country. And the largest container ship facility on the east coast (second largest in the nation) is near. Someone who studied our transportation network might decide that either of those is a more important target than NYC, which by some analyses is a net liability for the nation.
It depends on what the attacker wants. An attack that damages us a little and that persuades us to take precautions that would themselves damage us far more, is one plausible goal. An attack that drives us crazy and drives us to retaliate blindly against our usual suspects would be a different plausible goal, perhaps for a different attacker.
At the risk of sounding kooky, I will talk about a dream I once had. It was in the early 1980's, and in my dream I was driving on a road south of Birmingham toward the community of Mountain Brook. A lot of other drivers seemed to go crazy, they were doing weird things, and I pulled off the road. Then a nuke went off in Mountain Brook. I counted the seconds from the flash to the weak groundswell and then the sound, and estimated it at about 200KT, a ground burst or very low. I was wondering how such a thing could possibly happen when I woke up. It was only a dream, but before that I'd been sure that a lot of smart people had devoted their lives to keeping that from happening and I trusted them, and after the dream I had doubts. I thought about the dream, wondering how it could make sense. Mountain Brook was a residential community with nothing very important, nestled behind a low mountain range that would tend to shield Birmingham from the effects of a low nuke. It didn't make sense that anybody would bomb that. The only thing Mountain Brook was known for was for having one of the largest concentrations of multimillionaires in the country.
And then it made a kind of sense. We consistently assumed that the USSR would target our population concentrations to kill as many americans as possible. But they were officially communists. If they really believed that the mass of the US proletariat was enslaved and not responsible, would they slaughter them? Or would they try to kill the capitalists? And I realised that I really didn't know what the russian communists would do. I'd assumed I knew that without a second thought, because I'd never seen anybody doubt it.
OK how hard can it be for a blog like this to just go for a few cycles of "conjecture, search, verify" for concrete data? You don't have to be a government agent to make some guesses, google around, make a few phone calls to see what's up...
Like maybe try to verify simply that the source exists?
A little work: Neither of these guys look like the guy you'd want to talk to in order to verify the story but here are the two William Graham's with D.C. LinkedIn accounts who might know him just because of the coincidence of their names:The CEO of Graham Technologies and a Vendor Manager for Sprint-Nextel. There's also three listed phone numbers in DC for "William Graham" to try and if we want to spreading the search (on the assumption that political people give each other money all over the place and it leaves trails?) maybe try drilling down through this list of 30 states with Willaim Grahams who have donated money to political causes (for example the one in MA who gave Kerry $250 in 2004) and see if contact info for each is available?
I'm sure there are people here who are more clever than me who can think of more clever googling and actually place a few phone calls or whatever. Like, shouldn't a group this committed to rationality and so drenched in warnings about politics being a "mind killer" be able to figure out some experiments to run that would settle arguments rather than drift off into the same "back seat driver" war gaming talk that you find everywhere else on the net?
--
Ping! (This was the last link I followed up on after composing the above.) I think I found some congressional testimony from William R. Graham back in 1996 that includes some backstory:
B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of TechnologyM.S. in Engineering Science from StanfordPh.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford
1962-1965: Served on active duty with the Air Force as a project officer at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base. Albuquerque. New Mexico.
1965-1971: Member, Professional Staff, Physics Department of the RAND Corporation.
1971-1985: Co-founder, Division Manager, and Senior Associate of R&D Associates.
1982-1985: Confirmed to serve as the Chairman of President Reagan's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament.
1985-1986: After confirmation by the Senate, served as the Deputy Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency.
1986-1989: Confirmed by the Senate to serve as Science Advisor to President Reagan and concurrently as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Chairman of the Federal Coordinating Council on Science and Technology, and Chairman of the Federal Joint Telecommunications Resources Board.
1989-1993: Chairman of the Department of Defense's Strategic Defense Initiative Advisory Committee.
It's still not contact information connecting to a voice on the phone, but it's a lot more info about someone who probably exists and might be able to answer questions.
"No information...about...a credible source" is closer to what Seymour Hersh does when he says things like "a high ranking intelligence official said" etc. (I'm guessing you are not a fan of Hersh's investigative journalism despite my inference that his analysis on Iran is more in line with your own?)
Yes, agreed. Hersh has reported things that were verified, like Abu Ghraib. But he has also repeatedly predicted that the US military was about to attack iran, and none of those predictions has ever panned out. Hersh can publicixe leaked info, but he doesn't have a lot of resources to tell whether the leaks are disinformation. It could be argued that he might think his job is to spread interesting stories, not to find a way to fact-check leaks of classified data.
So there is actually wonderful information in this article about a credible source, i.e. the name of the person doing the talking!
No, now you're claiming that Graham is a credible source. But the very fact that Graham presented this report to Congress -- gigantic bias, a few facts, a lot of factoids -- is solid evidence that he is not a credible source at all.
Regardless of the actual degree of risk from this specific threat, isn't the general lesson that we need to consider investing considerably more in defensive aspects of our technologies? Most of what we build is based on the assumption that it will just work as designed. We tend to ignore the three sigma events that could bring catastrophic failure. But it seems that we may be entering a more chaotic phase of the world and of human society. In this post 9/11 era, it's much harder to have confidence that some seemingly remote failure mode won't be discovered and exploited. On top of this we are facing increasing environmental problems, as we strain the carrying capacity of earth defined by our current technologies - again, often deployed to maximize efficiency at the expense of robustness.
Defensive technology designs are likely to be extremely expensive, especially given the range of potential threats to worry about. I don't know if we are rich enough to seriously address this problem. It would be good if there were some relatively low cost investments that would offer robustness against a wide range of threats. Simple things like getting everyone to store food and water might save many lives if things break a certain way.
"The only thing Iran is lacking for an effective EMP attack is a nuclear warhead, and no one knows with any certainty when that will occur."
First, Iran would need a functioning nuclear weapon. Then, it would need to figure out how to create a small enough weapon to fit into the missile's warhead. Neither are trivial engineering problems. What about ruggedizing the weapon for the extremes of launch? This article makes it sound like the Iranians could have all this tommorrow. Wrong. Fearmongering at its worst.
But let's say a nuke were smuggled in a port or something, no missile needed. All the debate about "return adress" and needing proof is then moot. The U.S. lashed out after the non nuclear 9/11. Any Iranian strategic analysis would take into account the likelyhood that the regime would be targeted by us based merely on the suspicion of their involvement. The risk is simply too great for them to attack us with a WMD in CONUS.
Now, many argue that the regime is "irrational", so we can't be sure they wouldn't use their nuke, whenever they get one. We could argue that all day, but I have yet to see any strong evidence that Iran actually conducts policies contrary to its percieved interests (which would be irrational). Policy in accordance with their percieved interest is practically the definition of rationality. Just because we dislike their percieved interests doesn't make their policy irrational.
A ship carrying an assembled Scud would stick out like a sore thumb - so yes, WE probably would stop the ship before launching.
The result of assembling and fueling a dismantled Scud missle on an unstable platform like a ship would most likely lead to the scenario I pointed out - the crew would be the first martyrs...
Shooting a missle from a submarine or a ship is far from a routine procedure, and dangerous even for navies such as ours that have years of practice.
"Yes, but they give no information about how to find a credible source."
Well, for starters, an interested journalist could ask William Graham! "No information...about...a credible source" is closer to what Seymour Hersh does when he says things like "a high ranking intelligence official said" etc. (I'm guessing you are not a fan of Hersh's investigative journalism despite my inference that his analysis on Iran is more in line with your own?)
So there is actually wonderful information in this article about a credible source, i.e. the name of the person doing the talking!
I detect a lot of emotional rather than logical responses in this comment thread.
J, is there any reason to talk to Graham? When we were funding SDI under Reagan, the actual scientists and engineers said it wouldn't work. The money quote I got from Larry ****** at SAIC, "It can't work, but now my retirement is assured." But the top SDI guys said we had to spend the money anyway, that we couldn't prove it wouldn't work.
So later they said even though it wouldn't work, still there was a possibility it would work against an attack from china, who only had 15 missiles and warheads. But pretty soon china had 250 nukes and it wouldn't work against china either.
So now here's the same guy, claiming that one single missile from iran could destroy the nation, and SDI can shoot down that missile. He has a solution that's looking for a problem. He's been lying about it for 20+ years.
Why would you pay attention to him this time around?
If you want information about this potential problem, why get it from somebody who's been lying about it for a long time? "Fool me once...."
'Hersh has reported things that were verified, like Abu Ghraib. But he has also repeatedly predicted that the US military was about to attack iran, and none of those predictions has ever panned out'
While it isn't likely, you have to also consider the paradox of warning in those cases. By warning that an event is about to take place, you encourage action that will prevent the action. I yell to you that a car is about to hit you so you jump out of the way. Now, my prediction was wrong, but had I said nothing it would have been correct. It's more likely that Hersh just occasionally gets fed disinformation or has plain old bad sources, but never discount the paradox.
"No, now you're claiming that Graham is a credible source."
Yeah, he sounds like a real slacker.
Another troubling group of tests involved Shahab-3 launches where the Iranians "detonated the warhead near apogee, not over the target area where the thing would eventually land, but at altitude," Graham said.
An alternative explanation comes to my mind immediately: one might do just the same to avoid a number of troubles related to not reliably hitting a predetermined landing zone. Sending a missile to, say, Russia doesn't sound like a good idea even if it is just an accident.
A tactical nuclear weapon smuggled into New York seems the most likely scenario.
It depends on the attacker's goal.
If the goal is to kill a lot of insurance salesmen, real estate agents, and telemarketers, and drive a whole lot of americans crazy, then New York City would be a good target.
If the goal is to damage our infrastructure, maybe the nearby oil facilities would be better, the largest oil port in the country. And the largest container ship facility on the east coast (second largest in the nation) is near. Someone who studied our transportation network might decide that either of those is a more important target than NYC, which by some analyses is a net liability for the nation.
It depends on what the attacker wants. An attack that damages us a little and that persuades us to take precautions that would themselves damage us far more, is one plausible goal. An attack that drives us crazy and drives us to retaliate blindly against our usual suspects would be a different plausible goal, perhaps for a different attacker.
At the risk of sounding kooky, I will talk about a dream I once had. It was in the early 1980's, and in my dream I was driving on a road south of Birmingham toward the community of Mountain Brook. A lot of other drivers seemed to go crazy, they were doing weird things, and I pulled off the road. Then a nuke went off in Mountain Brook. I counted the seconds from the flash to the weak groundswell and then the sound, and estimated it at about 200KT, a ground burst or very low. I was wondering how such a thing could possibly happen when I woke up. It was only a dream, but before that I'd been sure that a lot of smart people had devoted their lives to keeping that from happening and I trusted them, and after the dream I had doubts. I thought about the dream, wondering how it could make sense. Mountain Brook was a residential community with nothing very important, nestled behind a low mountain range that would tend to shield Birmingham from the effects of a low nuke. It didn't make sense that anybody would bomb that. The only thing Mountain Brook was known for was for having one of the largest concentrations of multimillionaires in the country.
And then it made a kind of sense. We consistently assumed that the USSR would target our population concentrations to kill as many americans as possible. But they were officially communists. If they really believed that the mass of the US proletariat was enslaved and not responsible, would they slaughter them? Or would they try to kill the capitalists? And I realised that I really didn't know what the russian communists would do. I'd assumed I knew that without a second thought, because I'd never seen anybody doubt it.
OK how hard can it be for a blog like this to just go for a few cycles of "conjecture, search, verify" for concrete data? You don't have to be a government agent to make some guesses, google around, make a few phone calls to see what's up...
Like maybe try to verify simply that the source exists?
A little work: Neither of these guys look like the guy you'd want to talk to in order to verify the story but here are the two William Graham's with D.C. LinkedIn accounts who might know him just because of the coincidence of their names:The CEO of Graham Technologies and a Vendor Manager for Sprint-Nextel. There's also three listed phone numbers in DC for "William Graham" to try and if we want to spreading the search (on the assumption that political people give each other money all over the place and it leaves trails?) maybe try drilling down through this list of 30 states with Willaim Grahams who have donated money to political causes (for example the one in MA who gave Kerry $250 in 2004) and see if contact info for each is available?
I'm sure there are people here who are more clever than me who can think of more clever googling and actually place a few phone calls or whatever. Like, shouldn't a group this committed to rationality and so drenched in warnings about politics being a "mind killer" be able to figure out some experiments to run that would settle arguments rather than drift off into the same "back seat driver" war gaming talk that you find everywhere else on the net?
--
Ping! (This was the last link I followed up on after composing the above.) I think I found some congressional testimony from William R. Graham back in 1996 that includes some backstory:
B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of TechnologyM.S. in Engineering Science from StanfordPh.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford
1962-1965: Served on active duty with the Air Force as a project officer at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, Kirtland Air Force Base. Albuquerque. New Mexico.
1965-1971: Member, Professional Staff, Physics Department of the RAND Corporation.
1971-1985: Co-founder, Division Manager, and Senior Associate of R&D Associates.
1982-1985: Confirmed to serve as the Chairman of President Reagan's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament.
1985-1986: After confirmation by the Senate, served as the Deputy Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency.
1986-1989: Confirmed by the Senate to serve as Science Advisor to President Reagan and concurrently as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Chairman of the Federal Coordinating Council on Science and Technology, and Chairman of the Federal Joint Telecommunications Resources Board.
1989-1993: Chairman of the Department of Defense's Strategic Defense Initiative Advisory Committee.
It's still not contact information connecting to a voice on the phone, but it's a lot more info about someone who probably exists and might be able to answer questions.
"No information...about...a credible source" is closer to what Seymour Hersh does when he says things like "a high ranking intelligence official said" etc. (I'm guessing you are not a fan of Hersh's investigative journalism despite my inference that his analysis on Iran is more in line with your own?)
Yes, agreed. Hersh has reported things that were verified, like Abu Ghraib. But he has also repeatedly predicted that the US military was about to attack iran, and none of those predictions has ever panned out. Hersh can publicixe leaked info, but he doesn't have a lot of resources to tell whether the leaks are disinformation. It could be argued that he might think his job is to spread interesting stories, not to find a way to fact-check leaks of classified data.
So there is actually wonderful information in this article about a credible source, i.e. the name of the person doing the talking!
No, now you're claiming that Graham is a credible source. But the very fact that Graham presented this report to Congress -- gigantic bias, a few facts, a lot of factoids -- is solid evidence that he is not a credible source at all.
Re: Is there a named bias for discounting a possibility [...] because its "fearful" or "scary"?
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_effecthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_biashttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking
Regardless of the actual degree of risk from this specific threat, isn't the general lesson that we need to consider investing considerably more in defensive aspects of our technologies? Most of what we build is based on the assumption that it will just work as designed. We tend to ignore the three sigma events that could bring catastrophic failure. But it seems that we may be entering a more chaotic phase of the world and of human society. In this post 9/11 era, it's much harder to have confidence that some seemingly remote failure mode won't be discovered and exploited. On top of this we are facing increasing environmental problems, as we strain the carrying capacity of earth defined by our current technologies - again, often deployed to maximize efficiency at the expense of robustness.
Defensive technology designs are likely to be extremely expensive, especially given the range of potential threats to worry about. I don't know if we are rich enough to seriously address this problem. It would be good if there were some relatively low cost investments that would offer robustness against a wide range of threats. Simple things like getting everyone to store food and water might save many lives if things break a certain way.
I agree with Ian. I see this all as being very far-fetched, but I still have bug-out bags and other emergency supplies in my house.
"The only thing Iran is lacking for an effective EMP attack is a nuclear warhead, and no one knows with any certainty when that will occur."
First, Iran would need a functioning nuclear weapon. Then, it would need to figure out how to create a small enough weapon to fit into the missile's warhead. Neither are trivial engineering problems. What about ruggedizing the weapon for the extremes of launch? This article makes it sound like the Iranians could have all this tommorrow. Wrong. Fearmongering at its worst.
But let's say a nuke were smuggled in a port or something, no missile needed. All the debate about "return adress" and needing proof is then moot. The U.S. lashed out after the non nuclear 9/11. Any Iranian strategic analysis would take into account the likelyhood that the regime would be targeted by us based merely on the suspicion of their involvement. The risk is simply too great for them to attack us with a WMD in CONUS.
Now, many argue that the regime is "irrational", so we can't be sure they wouldn't use their nuke, whenever they get one. We could argue that all day, but I have yet to see any strong evidence that Iran actually conducts policies contrary to its percieved interests (which would be irrational). Policy in accordance with their percieved interest is practically the definition of rationality. Just because we dislike their percieved interests doesn't make their policy irrational.
Robin:
A ship carrying an assembled Scud would stick out like a sore thumb - so yes, WE probably would stop the ship before launching.
The result of assembling and fueling a dismantled Scud missle on an unstable platform like a ship would most likely lead to the scenario I pointed out - the crew would be the first martyrs...
Shooting a missle from a submarine or a ship is far from a routine procedure, and dangerous even for navies such as ours that have years of practice.
A tactical nuclear weapon smuggled into New York seems the most likely scenario.
"Yes, but they give no information about how to find a credible source."
Well, for starters, an interested journalist could ask William Graham! "No information...about...a credible source" is closer to what Seymour Hersh does when he says things like "a high ranking intelligence official said" etc. (I'm guessing you are not a fan of Hersh's investigative journalism despite my inference that his analysis on Iran is more in line with your own?)
So there is actually wonderful information in this article about a credible source, i.e. the name of the person doing the talking!
All 3 articles reference the testimony of William Graham, the name of a real person with a documented position.
Yes, but they give no information about how to find a credible source.