This is correct. (Mutually) Assured Destruction (the first word was added on by critics such as Herman Kahn who felt it was an absurd and untenable thesis) is a deterrence strategy, and once missiles have started flying it has failed by definition. Of course, with three or more players, or players without parity in some aspect, Assured Destruction is an unstable strategy as demonstrated for decades in both abstract and applied wargaming. In the film, someone poses the question of whether this is one party trying to make it seem as if another launched the missile (I think it was China making it appear that North Korea had done although I’m going by memory and it was a single throwaway line) specifically to provide the United States, which is a fundamental risk with a deterrence strategy that assumes a ‘Launch On Warning’ responsive posture.
The major procedural issue I had with the film is that there was pressure by Tracy Letts General Brady to respond immediately lest this be a precursor to a broader attack even though they didn’t have any idea who the initiating party was. This didn’t really make any sense because that weapon didn’t threaten any of the command and control or critical information systems, and they already had all three elements of the US ‘triad’––the land-based ‘Minuteman III’ ICBM wings, the Navy ‘Trident II’ Fleet Ballistic Missile, and (for what they are worth) the B-2 ‘Spirit’ strategic bomber––on alert and ready to engage in ‘strategic operations’ (i.e. operational nuclear attack) at the President’s order. Aside from political expediency there is no reason not to wait until there is more information about who initiated the attack (at least a traceback of the trajectory or any phenomenology that might come from the detonation which could identify a source), and of course the possibility that the missile was not armed with a nuclear weapon or that it could fizzle, doing relatively low damage. (Since they couldn’t identify the source or the specific weapon, any casualty estimates were speculative at best.)
But the point of the movie is the danger of having a system (the titular “house of dynamite”) that is by necessity on a hair trigger, the possibility that the people advising the decision-maker (the President) are not well-informed or focused, and that despite everyone doing their jobs correctly they were neither able to avert the attack nor identify the perpetrator resulting in a fundamentally destabilizing response in absence of knowledge (or as it is often termed, “the fog of war”) which could likely result in global catastrophe, and that without somehow improving both the system and the knowledge and interaction of the people within it, such a consequence is essentially inevitable on a long enough timeframe, and especially with continued proliferation of nuclear weapon and delivery system technology. Nor are defensive systems like the US Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system portrayed in the film ever going to be perfectly reliable or scalable to a mass attack threat.
I didn’t want to hijack the other thread so thank you for continuing the discussion.
I’m also reminded of a quote from another nuclear film, The Peacemaker: “I’m not afraid of the man who wants a thousand nuclear warheads. I’m afraid of the man who wants just one.”
MAD only works if you are ready to go all-in on nukes as soon as the first one is fired. How do you respond if it’s just the one, particularly if you are unsure of the source? And even one nuclear explosion in a major city would be one of, if not the largest disaster in human history.
This film reminded me a bit of Thirteen Days about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Yeah, similar to the show, I’ve always thought that MAD suffered from one weakness, which is that an enemy could find that Goldilocks window of damage that’s enough to inflict great harm on you, but not enough to make you retaliate. For instance, what if Russia nukes just one small city like Spokane, Tucson or Corpus Christi, and then threatens a full-out barrage of a thousand ICBMs if America retaliates in any way? That would cause massive economic and psychological harm to the USA, yet it would still be small enough that the USA would likely hesitate to retaliate.
I know this thread is more on theory, but…that ain’t gonna happen. Russia sends “thousands” of warheads here, we send 2X as many back and Russia ceases to exist in 30 minutes. You can’t play “I’m not touching you!” with nuclear weapons.
The entire thesis of Assured Destruction is that nobody will elect to launch even a small scale strategic attack because of the overwhelming response that would destroy the original attacker. It does assume certain precepts, including ‘perfect’ knowledge (ability to discriminate threats and identify origin), an effective parity of destructive power and delivery capability, an ability to effect a retaliatory launch before its forces could be destroyed or disabled, and the most questionable of all, rational actors making all decisions. It is a strategy of deterrence, and if anybody launches a nuclear weapon against the opposing nation’s strategic or socially valuable assets (even “just one small city like Spokane, Tucson or Corpus Christi”) deterrence has already failed.
The reality in a multi-polar world is far messier, and as noted above, becomes unstable in any scenario where any party believes that they can gain the advantage by striking first or deceiving another party into believing that a different nation was responsible. All practical wargaming scenarios of realistic applications of Assured Deterrence and similar strategies become unstable in crisis, suggesting that deterrence alone is a fundamentally unstable strategy to prevent nuclear exchange. Ballistic missile defenses like those envisioned in the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its warmed-over afterbirth of the currently proposed “Golden Dome” ‘system’ will never have a single interceptor response effectiveness even approaching 100% (when the discussion came up in the film and the analyst dithered, I said to the screen “60%” just a second before the character responded that it would be 61% effective, making it clear that the technical advisors of the film looked at the same test results of the GMD system that I have and came to essentially the same statistically-grounded conclusions), and can be cheaply overwhelmed just by a mass attack and the use of decoys and countermeasures.
Also, it seemed to me that even though there are only like 50 interceptor missiles in the American arsenal in the film, it’s silly to be stingy with them if there’s only one missile. If it’s a mass attack of 100s of ICBMs and their reentry vehicles and drones, all those interceptors won’t make much of a difference with a 50% kill rate. But using a few more against one incoming missile would make the difference between WWIII or not.
That was actually the other procedural nit that I had with the film. I don’t know what the operational protocols are now but at least as of a few years ago, the plan wasn’t to fire a single salvo but to fire interceptors in phased intervals to increase composite probability of intercept, starting at the minimum release time and going all the way to last possible intercept (I’m leaving out details but definitely more that two interceptors). At that time the Ft. Greely site had 40 interceptors in-silo (there has since been a request from the Missile Defense Agency to increase that to 60 but I haven’t found any evidence that this has transpired), with 4 more at Vandenberg SFB. As you note, conserving interceptors makes little sense as the system can’t possible stop a mass attack and has only been billed as a defense against “rogue nations” (i.e. North Korea) or an accidental launch. It is possible the film reflects current doctrine that I’m not aware of but more likely a single salvo was chosen because it provided a more succinct and dramatic failing.
Here is a discussion with Noah Oppenheim (screenwriter of the film) and Erin Dumbacher (CFR Stanton Nuclear Security Senior Fellow) on some of the procedural and policy aspects of the film:
A longer discussion with Oppenheim and Jon Bateman (Senior Fellow and Co-Director, Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace):
IIRC, in the show we are told each interceptor has a 61% chance of success. Two would be 85%. Three would be a 94% chance at least one would hit. Those are not terrible odds and without the need to use a ton of missiles at once.
Sure, if you don’t mind a slightly better than 1 in 20 chance of a city being destroyed and millions of people killed (assuming a 300 kTTNTeq or greater destructive power). Of course, for a US$63B development and deployment cost (the script significantly undervalued the current investment of the system) you kind of expect more than ‘pretty decent’ or even ‘four stars despite the toilet, would stay here again if they upgrade the plumbing’. But that 61% in the script (and my ~60% estimate) is based on orchestrated tests of the system (under known conditions and target trajectory); to date, no test has incorporated a realistic threat scenario where an uncharacterized threat may be launched from unknown position, nor is such a test likely in the foreseeable future. The realistic estimate of an intercept probably is almost certainly much worse even assuming that the Sea-Based X-Band radar platform isn’t sitting in Pearl undergoing yet another multi-tens of millions of dollars refit or just because sea states in the central North Pacific are too sporty for it to operate.
The ‘failure to separate the kill vehicle’ failure of one of the GBI interceptors in the film is actually based upon a real test failure (albeit not using the operational OBV booster). The performance in Ground-Based Interceptor tests since it was prematurely deployed early in the George W Bush administration has not been impressive and the Next Generation Interceptor program has not fared well in development and was finally awarded to Lockheed Martin, a company with a long history of completely failing to deliver working combat systems anywhere near budget and schedule targets.
The scenario posited in the film—that a threat of even a single weapon could get past defensive systems—is entirely plausible even if more effort was made to intercept, notwithstanding deliberate efforts to disable the GMD or deploy countermeasures to defeat intercepts.
I think that’s really the point of the movie. MAD worked when you had five nuclear nations split up into two antagonistic blocks and one solo actor (China). In that situation, the US and USSR could reasonably assume that any missiles launched at them, especially over the poles were from the other, and would launch on warning.
But… it falls apart when there are multiple potential actors/vectors that the missiles could be coming from. It doesn’t make sense for the US to go full MAD-style launch on warning at Russia, if the missile could be coming from North Korea or Pakistan. Or worse, from a rogue faction in either country that doesn’t represent the actual government.
So the movie dramatizes what the government might do in that situation.
I mostly enjoyed the film, but was disappointed we didn’t get to see Chicago turned into glass. Not that kind of movie, I know. But it seemed like a lot of buildup without a release.
It is exactly like the video game Balance of Power: if you end up in a nuclear war, you are not going to be rewarded with orgasmic images of mushroom clouds. This is a deliberate choice made by the author.
Whether MAD (the deterrence theory of Assured Deterrence) ‘worked’ or not to prevent nuclear exchange is subject to debate in the nuclear arms control community. There are several instances of near-misses that weren’t prevented into escalation by some consideration of consequences but rather the expertise and judgement of individuals who recognized that indications of an attack were false or misleading, the Petrov incident is the most well-known today due to numerous books and articles but there were several others that have come to light or are at least suggested even though the full details are not publicly available. Anti-ballistic missile defense, fractional orbital bombardment systems (FOBS), deployment or use of ‘battlefield’ tactical nuclear weapons, and ‘stealth’ aircraft and cruise missile technology that could allow deep penetration strikes with little notice were all potential or proposed developments that threatened to upset the essential assumptions underpinning Assured Deterrence.
Even aside from these capabilities, the way our ‘deterrence’ system of ‘Launch On Warning’ (of an apparent attack) functions works against stability in a crisis, prompting a rapid response before details of an attack are verified. While the Soviet Union never avowed a ‘Launch On Warning’ response strategy, they did institute (and at one point may have activated) the Perimetr quasi-autonomous nuclear launch system (also known as the “Dead Hand” system) which would initiate launch operations if indications of a nuclear attack were detected, which was supposed to deter a preemptive attack except that the Soviet authorities never formally informed American leadership about the system.. If that sounds familiar, it is because it is literally the Russian “Doomsday Device” out of Stanley Kubrick’s satirical doomsday film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and unless you are really into living in underground mineshafts that didn’t well.
Or worse yet, it incentivizes a Sum of All Fears scenario whereby some 3rd entity (i.e., terrorists) that hate both the USA and Russia (or USA and China) could try to trigger MAD between the two.
Regardless of whether MAD worked or not, the point is that in a world where MAD is the default assumption and there is one antagonist, the decision making is relatively simple.
In a multipolar world where there are many potential nuclear antagonists, then the decision making becomes devlishly complicated in a very short time frame, especially if it’s unclear where the weapon came from. Meaning that if it obviously came from Russia/China/Iran, then the decision making is a lot easier than if it comes from somewhere in the Pacific.
That’s the biggest benefit of ballistic-missile submarines that can survive a first strike. They make it so that you don’t have to launch a retaliation strike immediately. You can take days, weeks or months to make up your mind and investigate thoroughly first.
I did like that the first 2 chapters made the unseen POTUS sound elderly and confused (playing up concerns raised about the last 2 Presidents) but then we actually see him in chapter 3 he’s middle aged and as with it as anyone would be given the circumstances. Now imagine how it could play out in real life with the current players.
