Unconventional Nuclear Warfare (UNW)

29 March 2022

Background to the project

This substack relates to a book Unconventional Nuclear Warfare (hereafter UNW) that is still in process (the cover of the book is shown above). The project would have been out by now were it not for the Jan 6 insurrection. That threat to US national security had become so dire and pressing the author stopped work on UNW to produce a book on what was behind Jan 6 and where that threat might be headed. That book, Civil War II: From Insurrection to Insurgency, is almost complete and should be out before the 2022 midterms. (The author has also recently published a book on the future of warfare with China, The Third Offset Strategy: A Return to Ungentlemanly Warfare).

I have been concerned about the advent of Unconventional Nuclear Warfare for many years now. My PhD at Cambridge touched on theories of nuclear warfare and I always found them wanting. The binary ‘all or nothing at all’ aspect to the issue was both comforting but also disturbing - especially if you scratched the surface. It was not until President Obama said the following in 2009 (before I entered the DOD WMD world) that I sensed time was running out. Obama said

In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.

This phrasing was a key that unlocked the essence of the issue as I had come to understand it over years of study combined with changes in the global order and ways of pursuing international interests. Little did I know I would one day work at the cutting edge of this challenge and come away from the experience deeply concerned by what I had seen and heard. In short, we are still not prepared to address the challenge President Obama outlined in 2009.

That got me on the long road to this project. I thought I had more time before the challenge would move from theoretical discussion to reality. That I could address the insurrection and return to UNW and get it printed with enough time before events would call for analysis of a real world scenario. Yet here we are. So this substack will try and fill that gap.

What does UNW Mean?

Unconventional Nuclear Warfare is a play on words. Traditionally warfare has been divided into three major types: unconventional, conventional, and nuclear. Each has a certain “logic” - key patterns that all sides follow. Unconventional warfare is complex and messy. There are no uniforms, no front lines, anyone can be a combatant and so on, think guerrilla / small wars / Vietnam / Afghanistan / Somalia. The vast majority of war throughout history conform to this pattern. Conventional warfare is comparatively straight forward, with clear rules, different sides in uniforms, lined up along lines on a map, and so on, think WWII, Korea, Gulf War. These types of wars are remarkably rare.

Nuclear warfare is the neatest and most simple type of warfare. There is only one rule - any attempt I make to kill the other side will result in my death. The idea being that any use of a nuclear weapon will trigger an ‘escalation ladder’ of bigger and bigger nuclear exchanges inevitably resulting in all-out nuclear warfare where both sides are eliminated. In the movie “War Games” it is represented by Tic, Tac, Toe - where, by definition, there can be no winners.

The problem is this thinking is far too simplistic. Nuclear weapons can be used in unconventional ways that are designed to threaten, but not trigger, the ‘escalation ladder’. In some scenarios, the existence of the ladder makes use of a single nuclear weapon not just plausible, but desirable.

Very few people, even experts, have thought much about unconventional nuclear warfare - where the rules do not conform to the standard logic of Tic Tac Toe. Admiral Chad Richard, the Commander of US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), testified to Congress on 8 March 2022 that Putin’s threats have caused USSTRATCOM to learn “a number of lessons in real time on how actual crisis deterrence works. It is different from the steady-state deterrence that most of us have experienced.” This is not reassuring but it points to the largely unaddressed challenges of UNW.

Could Vladimir Putin order the use of a nuclear weapon?: Yes.

Vladimir Putin has repeatedly issued direct nuclear threats before and during the war with Ukraine. This terrifies people and makes nuclear powers hyper cautious not to trigger a threshold. That is his intent. Behind the scenes, where real decision making takes place, the question remains, would he act on this threat? The answer is yes.

Misunderstanding UNW lies in faulty assumptions. There is an assumption that all nuclear weapons are huge and will automatically trigger mutually assured destruction (MAD). That any use of a nuclear weapon is a suicide move. These assumptions are incorrect. This book will explain why. Regrettably, nuclear warfare is much more complicated than that. Certainly, after a certain point, escalation turns MAD. The challenge is to know where that threshold lies. Small nuclear weapons, a fraction of the size of the bombs dropped on Japan, offer the user a powerful tool when used in “onesies and twosies”. Typically when these scenarios arise they are in the context of nuclear terrorism. This is a classic challenge (when a non-state group attacks a state who do you counter-target?) but it is not the only UNW challenge.

Putin is showing that a nuclear state can engage in UNW. The UNW book has some scenarios that look a lot like the current real world UNW challenge posed by Putin. So this stubstack will explore some of these ideas in the hope of raising awareness to a current real world problem.

Below please find the back-page overview of the book project.

Original Book Summary

Monday, February 24, 2020

In traditional nuclear warfare theory, if one side can eliminate the other without fear of reprisal, then a clear incentive exists to strike first without warning: the ‘bolt from the blue’ attack. Mutually Assured Destruction between the US and Russia ensured strategic stability. But MAD has never existed in any other possible nuclear combination, even between the US and the next greatest nuclear power, China (update: PRC nuclear modernization is rapidly changing that calculus).

National interest in nuclear weapons collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the predictable failure to find WMDs in Iraq, the issue was forced underground even within US government agencies responsible for thinking about nuclear war. In the ultimate irony, official US interest in nuclear security is at its nadir just at the time when revisionist powers are imagining entirely new ways to use nuclear weapons.

From a position of economic and military weakness, Russia’s grand strategy is aimed at weakening NATO and the EU through unconventional means imposed incrementally. Agiprop was used historically to spread the communist ideal. Neo-agiprop is not designed to attract adherents to an ideology but to sow division and undermine a competing ideology - democracy. These objectives have been boosted through the innovative use of low-cost, high-impact, direct and indirect combinations of social media manipulation, cyber warfare, and special operations (assassinations including the use of chemical and biological weapons, coups, provocation of identity politics and election interference).

Russian unconventional plans and activities have a nuclear component. Would the US risk all out attack following a single Russian warhead burst over Warsaw? Traditional NATO thinking says Washington would do just that in accordance with its obligations to provide a nuclear umbrella over its allies (in exchange for them not developing their own bombs). But the rise of America First, and the dissolution of democratic institutions at home and abroad have placed such assumptions in jeopardy. Quite possibly, amidst a neo-isolationist America, a divided NATO, and a crumbling EU, the Poles would once again be on their own.

Moscow announced it is developing the Poseidon, a nuclear powered and armed torpedo with a range of 10,000 miles. It is advertised as being able to travel intercontinental distances and is virtually impossible to detect. Washington DC is on a river and New York is in a harbor. The Cuban Missile Crisis turned on missile flight times of 15 mins. The Poseidon represents a destabilizing, stealth, first-strike capability.

Russia is not the only revisionist power rethinking nuclear propaganda, threats and operations. So much debate has raged over Kim Jong Un’s missiles and whether they can fit a nuclear warhead. This is only a matter of time. Moreover one fact is certain, his warheads can fit on a shipping container. Millions of such containers enter the US every day. The government can’t scan them all. The same applies to air shipments. Perhaps the easiest way to deliver a stealth nuclear strike on Washington or New York might be FedEx.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are notoriously insecure. Iran does not need to build a bomb when it can slip next door and steal one. Alternatively, a terror group interested in mass killing and spreading fear, need only put some easily obtainable nuclear material on a drone and fly it over the White House. The US Secret Service will obligingly shoot it down, thus aerosolizing its radioactive contents. The materials need not be of high potency. The psychological-political impact of such an operation would fundamentally alter domestic and global politics. Abraham Lincoln suspended Habeas Corpus; FDR interned Japanese Americans; what might a future president of lesser political sophistication do in response to a nuclear terror strike on the White House? This is the stuff of Vladimir Putin’s wildest dreams.

This book will explore totally new concepts of nuclear warfare for the 21st century, where MAD no longer applies and where official interest in thinking the unthinkable ended long ago.

Author

Adam PhD (Cantab) was a Principal Strategist for Counter Weapons of Mass Destruction for US Special Operations Command, and thereafter, Director of a classified US Navy intel-planning-ops cell dedicated to assessing future enemy WMD concepts of operations and charged with devising innovative ways of deterring and defeating such threats.

"The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. government."

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Thanks

Adam