John Wohlstetter - Sleepwalking with the Bomb

Thus the Sixth Lesson of nuclear-age history—CIVILIAN NUCLEAR POWER INHERENTLY CONFERS MILITARY CAPABILITY—expresses the tragedy of postwar Western technology-transfer idealism. And in the ultimate irony, the Nonproliferation Treaty was adopted when already there was conclusive evidence that the distance between civilian use established as a legal right under the NPT was perilously close to nuclear weapons production prohibited by the same treaty.

THE FAILURE OF THE 2003 IRAQI FREEDOM COALITION TO FIND stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and earlier strategic intelligence failures of similarly grand proportion, offer the Seventh Lesson of nuclear-age history: Intelligence cannot reliably predict when closed societies go nuclear.

The difficulty of predicting when a given country will cross the threshold of nuclear weapons capability is one of two big challenges for intelligence collection and analysis. The other is how to head off a surprise attack—especially devastating if a nuclear strike. We begin by considering the latter challenge.

THE NOW infamous U.S. Iraq intelligence disaster was actually not America’s first. That occurred in 1991, and played a key role in shaping attitudes that led to the second. But to put both of these events in context, we begin in 1932.

Strategist Andrew Krepinevich tells the story of a little-known but chilling incident—an air raid on U.S. Navy ships in Pearl Harbor exactly two months short of a decade before the famous Japanese attack. After a week of sailing north of shipping lanes, using rain squalls for visual shelter in the stormy Pacific, a fleet of carriers launched 150 planes to strike Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row and nearby Hickam Field on Sunday, February 7, 1932. Appearing over the target areas at dawn, the planes caught soldiers and sailors by complete surprise.

That day the carriers were American, under the command of Rear Admiral Harry Yarnell, and the bombs dropped into Hawaiian waters were flour bags. An army-navy war game called Grand Joint Exercise 4 was being conducted, and the air mission was Raid Plan No. 1.

Were the army and navy so alarmed at the results of the war game and Admiral Yarnell’s brilliant masterstroke that they began serious preparations to guard Pearl Harbor against possible Japanese surprise attack? Not quite.

The defenders claimed that there had been minimal damage to Hickam Field, and that they had found and sunk the carriers. Further, they complained that the attack was illegal under rules of the war game, because it had taken place on a Sunday. The postgame assessment shows how little they learned about the ability of sea-based air power to attack Pearl:

It is doubtful if air attacks can be launched against Oahu in the face of strong defensive aviation without subjecting the attacking carriers to the danger of material damage and consequent great loss in the attack[ing] air force.

The Japanese thought otherwise, and December 7, 1941, was not their day of rest, as Americans found out to their chagrin. Not only did the Japanese launch their unsporting attack on a Sunday, they did so while their diplomats were ostensibly negotiating in Washington, D.C. As Admiral Yarnell had pretended to bomb in 1932, Japan’s diplomats pretended to negotiate—while Vice Admiral Nagumo’s real fleet launched real dive bombers and torpedo bombers. A total of 2,403 Americans lost their lives that day, with 1,103 killed when a bomb struck the powder magazine of the battleship Arizona . The Japanese lost 55 airmen.

At the time, some had foresight. Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded the Pacific Fleet during World War II, said: “Nothing that happened in the Pacific was strange or unexpected.” But men of his vision were few. More typical was the attitude of the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. He had closed down the State Department’s “Black Chamber” (code-breaker) section in 1929, saying: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” America’s adversaries were unfortunately not gentlemen.

Krepinevich, from whose superb book Seven Deadly Scenarios the above account was taken, discusses two other real-life war games in which there was comparably foolish disregard for lessons logically derivable from the outcomes—another from the period between the world wars and one in the twenty-first century Persian Gulf.

Krepinevich’s interwar example is from 1937, when the German army played a massive land war game on an open plain just outside of Paris near Versailles, featuring two mock German Panzer (armored) divisions attacking conventional troops. The tank corps overwhelmed the far less mobile defenders, ending a planned seven-day exercise in four days. The results of the war game inspired Hitler’s blitzkrieg through the Ardennes forests of Belgium, which pierced a gap in France’s then-vaunted Maginot Line. The defensive fortifications did not cover the Ardennes approaches because the French thought the forest impassable by armored divisions.

Not only had the tanks already demonstrated their superiority on French soil, the plan of attack had, too. In attacking France via Belgium, Germany repeated its 1914 foot-marching offensive, although in different tactical form. The Allies obtained Prussian strategist Count Alfred von Schlieffen’s war plan shortly after its December 1905 creation. Yet the Germans surprised France in 1914 and again in 1940.

The twenty-first-century example is from the summer of 2002, when the U.S. military conducted its Millennium Challenge 02 war game in the Persian Gulf. Set five years in the future, the war game pitted the Red Team, playing Iran, against the Blue Team, playing the U.S. Thinking creatively, Red Team captain Lieutenant General Paul van Riper used motorcycle messengers to communicate between land forces and coordinated his small boats for a “swarm” attack on the U.S. fleet via morning prayer broadcasts from (fictional) minaret towers. His ships used commercially available Swedish camouflage and signaled each other via light rather than radio. Van Riper’s Red ships sank or damaged 16 warships, including an aircraft carrier.

What did the war game umpires do? They instantly refloated the Blue fleet and forced the Red Team to relocate its anti-aircraft assets out of range for taking out the attacking Blue aircraft. This time Team Blue prevailed. What had begun as an unscripted exercise became heavily scripted after the bad guys declined to play by the rules anticipated by the good guys.

In war games as well as in the real world, creative enemies can identify and exploit defensive weakness to launch a successful surprise attack. [36] History is full of examples of strategic surprises, in which enemies launch successful attacks by acting contrary to expectation: noteworthy instances in the twentieth century, besides Pearl Harbor, include Japan’s destruction of Russia’s fleet in the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, Israel’s preemptive strike on Egyptian airfields at the start of the 1967 Six-Day War, and Egypt’s attack to start the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In the run-up to the June 22, 1941, massive Nazi invasion of Russia, Stalin ignored warnings from Winston Churchill, choosing instead to trust Hitler, with whom he had made a nonaggression pact one week before Hitler started World War II. Hitler’s pivot to the Eastern Front caught Russia completely by surprise. Let us return to the case of Pearl Harbor, an attack brilliantly analyzed by Roberta Wohlstetter in her Bancroft Prize–winning study, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962). The catastrophic intelligence failure leading to what FDR called “a date that will live in infamy,” she writes, was the result of failings deeply rooted in human nature and organizational structure. First, intelligence officers were unable to separate the wheat from the chaff—in communications parlance, signals from background noise. Second, given ambiguous information susceptible of multiple good faith interpretations, the natural human impulse is to choose an interpretation consonant with one’s own instinctive preferences and values.