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Rogue State Nuke: The Ultimate IED

2 years ago

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U.S. military forces are poorly equipped and untrained to face nuclear-armed opponents such as North Korea who are seeking to neutralize American military superiority -- much as insurgents did with IEDs in Iraq.

Defense Department experts say soldiers and Marines haven't been equipped or trained to fight in a nuclear-contaminated environment since the Cold War ended a generation ago. Aircraft carriers, warplanes and military command and communications networks are insufficiently hardened against the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generated by a nuclear blast that can burn out electronics systems.

This vulnerability to battlefield nuclear attack or blackmail was seen as an "acceptable risk'' for a decade or more because an Iranian or North Korean bomb seemed a distant threat. Meantime, American diplomats struggled to bring these nuclear development and testing programs to a halt.

The failure of this effort was rudely underscored last week as North Korea's Kim Jong Il defiantly flung an A-bomb test and a flurry of missile launches at the outside world. Even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that the United States "will not accept'' a nuclear-armed North Korea, the belligerent regime is going ahead with preparations to test-launch a long-range, three-stage intercontinental ballistic missile.

With diplomacy seemingly a dead end, some analysts believe the U.S. had better get ready for the worst case.

"We're not as well prepared as we were in the days of the Cold War," Andrew Krepinevich, a former analyst at the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, told me. A retired West Point officer, Krepinevich is president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

Just as the United States has had to relearn counterinsurgency operations two generations after Vietnam, he said, "We're going to have to relearn how to operate in the nuclear environment because that kind of threat once again is growing.''

It's a scary prospect.

The enemy doesn't need a huge and sophisticated nuclear weapons arsenal like the United States has. He just needs a small bomb, or two.

North Korea has at least a half dozen bombs, although its tests indicate it has not been able to build a small enough warhead to fit on a missile, and hasn't mastered long-range missile technology. Iran doesn't have a bomb -- yet. U.S. intelligence officers say it has enough nuclear material to build a single bomb. Like North Korea, it is testing short- and long-range missile technology.

In Iran's neighborhood, the blast and mushrooming radiation from one nuclear detonation ("nu-det,'' in Pentagon lingo) would put at risk tens of thousands of unprotected American troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the right place, a single bomb could wreck U.S. naval fleets in the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean.

Even a small device exploded several miles above the ground would cause farther-reaching damage with an electromagnetic pulse that would carry for thousands of miles, blowing fuses, frying electronics, blinding sensors and disabling critical military command and control systems.

Experts believe Iran has practiced this very technique with missiles carrying conventional explosive warheads to high altitude.

In such an attack, "the loss of life might be relatively small, but the loss of military capability might be absolutely staggering,'' Lowell Wood, a Stanford astrophysicist and Pentagon consultant, told a congressional committee several years ago during a rare unclassified discussion of the issue.

The effect of what the military calls a "laydown'' of electromagnetic pulse on the principal instrument of American power, the aircraft carrier task force, would be "very somber,'' Wood said, quickly adding: "It's not appropriate to discuss the details in an open session like this.''

The effect of EMP and blast would be so somber, in fact, that a panel of Defense Department experts said that protecting all American tactical forces from nuclear attack in a regional conflict is "not practical.''

Instead, the panel said in a chilling conclusion, the U.S. would have to rely on "a strategy of replacement and reinforcement.'' That means rotating in fresh troops to replace casualties and pulling in fresh ships and aircraft from other theaters to fill the gaps left by the damage.

In a worst-case scenario considered by Pentagon experts last year, a terrorist nuclear attack at home and an attack on U.S. troops abroad could force the Pentagon to divide resources between catastrophic relief efforts at home and combat operations abroad – even with a command and communications system damaged by EMP.

Electromagnetic pulse is a term well known to Cold Warriors. In the 1960s and 1970s, some work was done to shield electronics from EMP. By the time of Desert Shield in 1990, training of ground forces focused increasingly on chemical detection and decontamination. As troops rotated home from Europe in the 1990s, exercises to teach and test tactical operations in a nuclear environment gave way to training in peacekeeping and stability operations.

During those years the assumption was that conflict would not involve nuclear weapons. What changed? Ironically enough, it was the appearance of IEDs on the battlefield.

Improvised Explosive Devices -- cheap, simple and deadly -- brought the United States nearly to defeat in Iraq, in large part because U.S. forces lacked the training and equipment to defend themselves. After more than five years, 2,373 American dead and billions of dollars of effort, IEDs still are killing and maiming troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The insight was not lost on zealots in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. U.S. intelligence officials and other analysts believe potential U.S. adversaries learned a lesson: If homemade explosives and a simple pressure plate can kill American troops and shake American confidence at home, then the nuclear bomb is the ultimate IED.

The risk that someone might make good on this idea "may be greater today than during the Cold War, as several adversaries seek nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and asymmetric ways to overcome U.S. conventional superiority using one or a small number of nuclear weapons," William R. Graham, who led a Defense Department study of the threat, told the House Armed Services Committee last summer.

A recent report by the U.S. Joint Forces Command identified "a growing arc of nuclear powers running from Israel in the west through an emerging Iran to Pakistan, India and on to China, North Korea and Russia ... Our joint forces must have the recognized capability to survive and fight in a WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction), including nuclear, environment.''

And the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared, "The U.S. must be prepared to fight and win on a contaminated battlefield.''

In 2007, the Pentagon convened a panel of experts to examine just how far the military had fallen behind this brave standard.

"We are unprepared," the Defense Science Board reported this past winter. When faced with nuclear weapons, "at best, our policies and actions will be severely constrained."

"Worse, we will enter the fray and then quit when we come to appreciate the full cost of success,'' the board said in an apparent reference to heavy casualties.

Meantime, diplomacy continues.

In Singapore this weekend, Defense Secretary Gates called for tougher sanctions to cause North Korea "real pain'' in the hopes that it will give up its nuclear weapons program.

A State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, said the United States will continue "to work with our counterparts at the UN'' to create "a strong and unified response to North Korea's defiance.''

Filed Under: Foreign Policy, National Security

Tagged: ieds, iran, north korea, NorthKorea, nuclear weapons, NuclearWeapons

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