OPINION — The Trump administration’s new attempt to open strategic nuclear talks with China “ASAP,” as mentioned in a State Department tweet last Friday, focuses on the wrong subject.
Any talks about strategic deterrence among nations should be dealing first with the future of cyber warfare and weaponry rather than nuclear deterrence. That’s because international cyber attacks already have been used between nations and more are contemplated, even today.
Russia’s cyber intervention in the U.S. 2016 election and those of other countries are one example of the quiet, cyber information warfare that’s been taking place. The 2007, U.S./Israeli attacks on Iran’s uranium-enriching centrifuges was another example, as was last June’s U.S. Army Cyber Command crippling of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s air defense system in retaliation for its destruction of a U.S intelligence drone.
The Trump administration’s National Cyber Strategy, released in September 2018, announced, “We are vulnerable to peacetime cyber attacks against critical infrastructure, and the risk is growing that these countries [Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea] will conduct cyber attacks against the United States during a crisis short of war. These adversaries are continually developing new and more effective cyber weapons.”
A classified presidential directive, NSPM 13, signed more than a year ago, authorized the military and other agencies to undertake offensive cyber operations. At that time, then National Security Advisor John Bolton said, “It’s important that our adversaries know it and the public knows it that we have authorized offensive cyber operations to protect the nation’s critical networks.”
It should be no surprise that Sunday’s New York Times speculated about U.S. Cyber Command possibly sabotaging North Korea’s expected launch of a missile capable of launching a satellite or test of an intercontinental missile.
Such cyber attacks, unlike ones with nuclear weapons, don’t necessarily kill thousands of people while making cities and towns uninhabitable for decades. Cyber weaponry also does not potentially carry long-lasting, deadly, radioactive fallout hundreds of miles from the immediate target area.
Dangerous cyber weapons are still being invented and already are proliferating among nations that could not afford to develop nuclear weapons, which are complex to build and whose production facilities could be discovered by current intelligence capabilities.
It is time to recognize that cyber weapons have replaced nuclear weapons as today’s existential strategic threat.
There are many reasons why nuclear weapons have not been used since August 1945, although tens of thousands have been built and deployed by a limited number of countries. One reason is that no one knows what the impact would be if nuclear weapons were employed, not just to the country which is struck, but also to the nation or even the group that launched the attack.
At the recent NATO Summit, President Donald Trump told the press that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin “want to work out a treaty of some kind on nuclear that will probably include China.” All three countries are spending billions upgrading their nuclear warheads and delivery systems with no real sign there is mutual interest in a new trilateral or even multilateral agreement that would cap the number of nuclear warheads for all countries as well as new delivery systems.
Right now, the simplest and most obvious arms control step is for Trump and Putin to agree to extend for at least a year or two the New START treaty, which is due to expire in February 2021. It limits Russian and U.S. nuclear forces to 1,550 deployed warheads and 700 deployed delivery systems. Those numbers are far higher than needed for deterring their use by either country, or any other nation.
Beijing has not yet responded to last week’s U.S. proposal for talks which the State Department tweet said would focus on “nuclear risk reduction & arms control and their future.” However, Beijing in the past, has said it had no interest in any trilateral agreement because China’s nuclear arsenal of some 300 weapons was just a fraction of those of the U.S. and Russia.
China, however, has shown interest in cyber security. Beijing’s July 2019 white paper titled “China’s National Defense in the New Era,” described cyber security as “a global challenge” which “poses a severe threat to China.”
The white paper called on “China’s armed forces [to] accelerate the building of their cyberspace capabilities, develop cyber security and defense means, and build cyber defense capabilities consistent with China’s international standing and its status as a major cyber country.” However, it added that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “is in urgent need of improving its informationization. China’s military security is confronted by risks from technology surprise and growing technological generation gap,” the white paper said.
Meanwhile, the Chinese paper sees other countries, starting with the U.S., “developing new types of combat forces to seize the strategic commanding heights in [cyber] military competition. The U.S. is engaging in technological and institutional innovation in pursuit of absolute military superiority.”
Back in February 2018, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called cyberwar a global threat and said that the international community had to address a lack of rules governing the use of cyber weapons. Later, Guterres said cyber warfighting between states was going on and that the U.N. had “not been able to discuss whether…the Geneva Conventions apply to cyberwar or whether…international humanitarian law applies.”
As a result, the U.N. has ended up with two different groups studying the problem, although they seem to have arisen from the Cold War, since one was proposed by Russia and the other by the U.S. and its allies.
The Russian-suggested group of some 96 countries is working to come up with “rules, norms and principles of responsible behavior of States.” At the same time, based on the U.S. proposal, a group of some 25 government experts from various countries is studying “possible cooperative measures to address existing and potential threats in the sphere of information security.”
Meanwhile, each country tends to pursue its own interests.
China has introduced ways to prevent the possible introduction of humanitarian interpretations to any international rules governing a country’s cyber activities. Russia, worried about a cyber arms race, has promoted forms of arms control agreements to any cyber weapons rules, hoping they will level-the-playing field with the U.S.
Washington, up to now, has argued against any legal treaty for cyber in the face of President Trump’s repeated claims that he believes in U.S. dominance of space and thus, the internet.
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