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Putin has made thinly veiled threats about using nuclear weapons against those who interfere with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The logic of nuclear deterrence suggests that it’s never in the interest of a nuclear power to engage in war with another country possessing nuclear weapons, as that would lead to mutually assured destruction. But preventing nuclear war is not the sole goal of any nuclear power. Putin might well believe that a world without Russia in its rightful position of power is not worth existing. We can’t be sure of what Putin is thinking, or whether his decision making is compromised – all we can do is prepare for the possibility of Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, writes Herbert Lin.

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The Pentagon estimates that 600 Russian missiles have been fired at Ukrainian targets in the first 10 days of war alone. Additionally, the infamous abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant has been seized by Russian forces and, most recently, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in Enerhodar has been attacked and occupied by armed Russian soldiers. Zaporizhzhia is the largest nuclear power plant in Europe and Russian projectiles started a localized fire in an auxiliary building on the site on March 3, 2020.

Russian forces have also cut off the power supply to the Chernobyl reactor and containment site. This means that spent nuclear fuel is not being cooled at the site in accordance to internationally recognized standards. The head of the Chernobyl nuclear plant has said that the back-up generators have enough fuel to power the site for 48 hours. We can only guess what might happen after that. If this were not enough, there is still ongoing shelling at a nuclear research facility in Kharkiv. The current conditions there are unknown.

Despite these chaotic circumstances, the SaveEcoBot team, in coordination with the Ministry of Environmental Protection, has put a lot of effort into radiation monitoring and informing the public about changes in background radiation. We’ve been set back in this critical work by the damages done to our monitoring equipment by Russians, but Ukrainian technicians are restoring the systems as fast as they can.

The assaults on the Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia power plants have already had implications for the environment. The radioactive dust raised by the wheels and trucks of the Russian combat vehicles in the Chernobyl zone has raised the background radiation levels to a hundredfold excess of the normal threshold. Just imagine what chaotic attacks, with Russians shooting, firing missiles, and bombing other parts of Ukrainian territory might lead to. In Ukraine, we have a saying, “мавпа з гранатою,” which means, “Like a monkey with a grenade." Russia is playing the monkey to all of Europe.

Russia continues to assert that its forces are in Ukraine for reasons of safety and security. The takeover of Chernobyl disturbed large amounts of radioactive soil, propelling it into the air. The attack on Zaporizhzhia resulted in a fire on the site of an active nuclear plant. This is not what safety looks like. To pretend that these actions are anything but a dangerous disregard for life is an insult to all sane, rational people. We are all very lucky that none of Zaporizhzhia’s six reactors were hit by the tank shell that started that fire.

Russia, the U.S. and the UK committed 20 years ago to ensure Ukraine’s peaceful sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons program. This agreement was built on the idea that Ukraine without nuclear weapons would never have cause to be the target of any attack. This assurance was guaranteed by the signers of the memorandum.

But Russia’s violent attacks have proven that a nuclear threat still exists in Ukraine. It is not a threat of Ukraine’s making, but one engineered by Russia’s own reckless assault on our civilian nuclear facilities. The consequences of this diabolical action go well beyond a potential environmental catastrophe for Ukraine; our neighbors, including Russia itself, and even countries outside of Europe could all be affected by nuclear fallout carried on high-atmosphere winds across continent and over oceans.

One way to mitigate this threat and to realize security assurances to Ukraine is to implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine. The hesitance of the EU and U.S.  to implement a no-fly zone is understandable. But at the same time, it is critically important to develop options and generate models for other types of no-fly zones beyond the proposals being discussed today. Such alternative options could be the key to helping prevent a Ukrainian tragedy not only in terms of nuclear security, but also in averting a similar tragedy to what the world witnessed in Aleppo.

To do this, Ukraine needs more military support. We have gratefully received strong military support from our allies, but even this bounty is not enough to defend our country. Stinger missiles can shoot down small, low-flying aircraft from a fairly short distance, but are useless against ballistic missiles and high-altitude bombers. We need weapons that can shoot down planes at considerable distances and altitudes, systems to detect and shoot down cruise missiles, and planes to protect our airspace. Early Russian attacks targeted our airports to deplete our air defense capabilities and frustrate our ability to get planes in the air. But we still stand. But if we want to avert a second Chernobyl or another Aleppo, we need to strengthen our air defenses.

We learned in 1939 that making concessions to tyrants is no plan for peace. Putin is a bully. Like all bullies, he will take as much as he can get while treating all harm — including environmental harm — as merely incidental. Like all bullies, he will stop only when he meets strong resistance. Putin and the Russia propaganda machine frame all attempts to stymie Russian aggression as not only a provocation, but a provocation that could trigger a nuclear response. Such veiled threats of nuclear attacks are a form of prior restraint meant to constrain Ukraine’s allies from even suggesting that the Russian invasion is improper. But we must not accept this starkly irrational framework. Nuclear weapons are weapons of deterrence, not tools to chill diplomatic criticism.

American analysts say that they expect the Russian attacks to become increasingly more brutal. Any increased risks to civilian and military targets commensurately increases risks to nuclear sites as well. And any compromised nuclear facility in Ukraine inherently becomes an international problem, not just a local one. Like Putin, radioactive fallout does not respect borders.

Just ten days ago, my life changed dramatically. I used to be a successful civil leader and entrepreneur with an innovative business. Now I sleep on the floor of an abandoned building with my gun in hand. My daughter knows exactly how the air raid siren sounds. But we are still Ukrainians. We are still Europeans. We still count on our allies. So to our allies, I say: close the Ukrainian sky. Provide us with enough weapons. We will do the rest.

Click the link for a transcript of “Spies, Lies and Algorithms with Amy Zegart."

The Origins of Spies, Lies and Algorithms

When I was a professor at UCLA, I was teaching an intelligence class. On a lark, I did a survey of my students and I asked them about their spy-themed entertainment viewing habits, as well as their attitudes towards certain intelligence topics like interrogation techniques.

What I found was there was a statistically significant correlation between their spy-themed viewing habits; people who watch the show 24 all the time were far more pro-waterboarding, among other things, than students who didn't watch spy-themed entertainment.

This got me really thinking, what do people know about espionage? Where do they get this information? And what I found is that most Americans don't know anything about the intelligence community, and when you're talking about spy agencies in a democracy, that's really problematic.

The original book was going to be more of a textbook for the class I was teaching, but as I write it, so many things started to change in the intelligence community, both politically and technologically. So with that in mind, I tried to make it forward looking to where intelligence needs to go, not just backward to where it’s been.

Who are the Spies?
 

The biggest surprise for me came from the research I did on open-source intelligence and nuclear threats. If ever there was an area you would think spy agencies would have cornered the market on intelligence, it would be nuclear threats.

But what I found is that there's a whole ecosystem of non-governmental people tracking nuclear threats around the world and actually uncovering really important things. That includes some open-source nuclear sleuths here at Stanford among my colleagues at CISAC.

The more I dug into this, the more I realized that open-source intelligence and publicly available data is the ballgame in the future of intelligence. Secrets still matter; but they matter a whole lot less than they did even ten years ago.

There is so much insight that we can glean from open-source information, but the intelligence community has to figure out better ways to connect with organizations and people who are in this ecosystem.

What are the Lies?

Intelligence is about deception. We don't want our enemies to understand all of our military capabilities, for example, or what our intentions are.

But I think the technology and data revolutions of the last few decades has also changed the nature of deception. It’s gone from elites deceiving elites about where their troops are, and whether they're going to attack, to mass audience deception and this disinformation-information warfare of domestic audiences like we're experiencing here in the United States.

Understanding deception, not in a pejorative sense but as an analytic frame, is critically  important to being able to gather and analyze intelligence correctly.

The Power of Algorithms in Intelligence

We're drowning in data. The amount of data on Earth is estimated to double every two years. Think about that for a minute. It's just an astounding amount of data. And it's too much for any human to deal with.

So, if intelligence is in the business of collecting or finding needles in haystacks, the haystacks are growing exponentially. The intelligence community has to use artificial intelligence and other tools to augment human analysts. AI frees up analysts to then ask questions about things like intent, which humans can figure out much better than machines.

Imagine an algorithmic red team: you have humans that are developing assessments of what is Putin going to do in Ukraine, and you've got a red team that's just algorithms aggregating data, so that you have a sort of competitive analysis between humans and machines that can make the humans better. Those are the kinds of things that intelligence agencies need to be doing much more with AI.

The 10^th Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference—a meeting normally held every five years—was intended to celebrate the cornerstone treaty’s 50^th year. But United Nations officials postponed the April 2020 event due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, as coronavirus cases rose in October 2020, the United Nations delayed the conference again, setting August 2021 as the new target date. Enter the delta variant, which pushed the gathering back to January 2022. When the omicron variant emerged in late 2021, the NPT member states set a new target date for some time between August and September 2022.

Read the rest at the The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Listen on the BBC The Inquiry

This summer, China conducted a series of tests with nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons systems that have clearly gotten the attention of officials across the U.S. government. The tests included a hypersonic glide vehicle — a delivery mechanism that can maneuver through the Earth’s atmosphere towards its target — and also incorporated a fractional orbital bombardment system. Because a fractional orbital bombardment system can deliver its payload by entering into lower orbit and then “dropping” it on the target, it could reach the U.S. homeland via the South Pole, bypassing U.S. early warning systems and missile defenses, which are primarily geared towards the interception of ballistic missiles from the north.

Read the rest at War on the Rocks