Our picks: The BIG PICTURENukes vs. Cyberattacks? | Coexisting with Dictators | Missing the Point about Cuba
1) The growing number and severity of cyberattacks on the U.S. has led some to suggest that in the event of even more serious attacks – say, on the electric grid, hospitals, financial system, etc. — the United States should threaten a nuclear retaliation. Two nuclear strategy experts say such ideas are lunacy. 2) Also: How do democracies coexist with ambitious authoritarian regimes such as China’s? 3) And: The BLM leadership appears to be frozen in time in their assessment of the developing situation in Cuba, and of U.S. approach to the Cuban government.
1. The U.S. Says It Can Answer Cyberattacks with Nuclear Weapons. That’s Lunacy.
Recent months saw ever-more-brazen cyberattacks by Russian ransom gangs on American companies: Kaseya (which serves about 1,500 companies); Colonial Pipeline (which supplies nearly half the diesel, gasoline and other fuels used on the East Coast); JBS (the world’s largest beef and pork supplier), and many more.
Scott D. Sagan and Allen S. Weiner write in the Washington Post that
These incidents were bad enough. But imagine a much worse cyberattack, one that not only disabled pipelines but turned off the power at hundreds of U.S. hospitals, wreaked havoc on air-traffic-control systems and shut down the electrical grid in major cities in the dead of winter. The grisly cost might be counted not just in lost dollars but in the deaths of many thousands of people.
Under current U.S. nuclear doctrine, developed during the Trump administration, the president would be given the military option to launch nuclear weapons at Russia, China or North Korea if that country was determined to be behind such an attack.
This is because in 2018, the Trump administration expanded the role of nuclear weapons by declaring, for the first time, that the United States would consider nuclear retaliation in the case of “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks,” including “attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure.” The same principle could also be used to justify a nuclear response to a devastating biological weapons strike.
Sagan and Weiner write:
But our analysis suggests that using nuclear weapons in response to biological or cyberattacks would be illegal under international law in virtually all circumstances. Threatening an illegal nuclear response weakens deterrence because the threat lacks inherent credibility. Perversely, this policy could also wind up committing a president to a nuclear attack if deterrence fails. While the American public would indeed be likely to want vengeance after a destructive enemy assault, the law of armed conflict requires that some military options be taken off the table. Nuclear retaliation for “significant non-nuclear strategic attacks” is one of them.
