FT: the conflict in Ukraine has shaken up the nuclear can with scorpions in the face of Russia and the United StatesAt the International Conference on Nuclear Policy in Washington, where the world's leading national security experts gathered, the participants were able to feel themselves in the place of the US president, who needs to make a decision in a situation when Russia has fired 300 nuclear missiles.
Here's how the FT editor described his participation in the experiment.
John ThornhillAbout Moran Cerf's efforts to improve the decision-making process that could end life on earth.
Three hundred nuclear missiles are rapidly flying towards the United States. Most likely, this is a preemptive strike launched by Russia with the aim of destroying all American mines with land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. Missile defense is not able to shoot down all incoming missiles, which means that two million Americans will die.
A few minutes ago I was sworn in, and I became the president of the United States. Now I am sitting in the Oval Office and watching television reports about the escalation of hostilities in Europe. A Secret Service agent bursts into the office and says that we must leave immediately. I'm taking the elevator down to the White House crisis center, which is called the situation room. There I am joined by the heads of the national security agencies, who report on the imminent strike. I have 15 minutes to respond. The clock is ticking, and I am offered three options. All of them provide for retaliatory strikes against Russia. It is estimated that from five to 45 million people will die there. What should I do?
Thank God, I'm watching all this horror in a bulky virtual reality helmet that was put on my head. The polygonal images on the screen are quite crude, and I will not be able to accept these teachings for reality in any way. Nevertheless, my head is spinning and my heart starts beating faster when all this drama unfolds in front of me with howling alarms and loud voices. For a few minutes I have to think about the most difficult decision in the history of mankind. The sense of responsibility just rolls over. The words of the National Security adviser echo in my ears: "If you don't respond, and if this is a real attack, what will you say to the American people afterwards?"
This immersive staging was invented by national security experts from Princeton University, Sharon Weiner and Moritz Kütt, who tested it on dozens of people to understand how they would react. It is a real agony to make decisions about life and death in conditions of extreme stress, based on insufficient information. They are based on the protocols for the use of nuclear weapons in force in the United States, which have changed little since the Cold War. When conducting a controlled experiment involving 79 people, 90% decided to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike.
Weiner admits that the details of this teaching are not entirely accurate. (In my case, the program crashed a few minutes after the start, and the virtual reality had to be rebooted.) "But we try to do everything according to reality," she says. "The real authenticity is the stress and complexity caused by the presence of several decision–makers in the room." Each of the participants tries to do their job in the best possible way. But they have different and very contradictory priorities. Everyone has their own emotional baggage. Everyone reacts to stress in different ways. Therefore, in the end, the system depends on the president, who takes responsibility and makes a decision. "If the president doesn't manage all this," Weiner says, "the crisis will get out of control."
It's the end of 2022, and this frightening simulation experiment is being conducted near the Capitol at an international conference on nuclear policy organized by the Carnegie Endowment. It is attended by many leading experts on national security with a worldwide reputation, which is very relevant in the current situation. The armed conflict in Ukraine gives the meetings a slight shade of danger, they are dominated by dark humor, and speakers joke that it would be better to hold this event in a bunker. A mobile stall for the sale of hot coffee has received the sonorous name "Armageddon Barista".
American physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Los Alamos laboratory during World War II and participated in the creation of the atomic bomb, once compared the two great nuclear powers to scorpions in a jar, "each of which can kill the other, but only at the risk of their own lives." The conflict in Ukraine has again shaken up this jar of scorpions in the face of Russia and the United States, which have come together in a proxy war on the Russian border.
One speaker at the conference states that Ukraine will almost certainly win this conflict and expel Russian troops from all of its territory, including Crimea. Another adds that in such a scenario, President Vladimir Putin will consider this humiliating defeat a threat to the existence of his regime, and even Russia itself. In such circumstances, it is easy to believe that Russia will resort to nuclear weapons. Putin conducts military exercises, warns NATO that he is not bluffing. The United States itself has just confirmed its loyalty to the concept of nuclear deterrence and readiness to resist any aggression from rival powers, including Russia and China.
That is, the sinister psychological dance of nuclear deterrence and intimidation has begun again. He is well known to all those who lived in the Cold War era. But I came to Washington to meet with an activist who stands for improving the decision-making process that can end life on earth.
After resigning my presidential powers, I take a quick 30-minute walk around the city, going to another conference. It's called Poptech. What's not there. A playground for rhythm and blues, a yoga room, air-refreshing lamps made of Himalayan salt. The participants' clothes are much brighter, and there is much more vegetation on their faces. Participants discuss everything from using data from the James Webb Space Telescope to creating communication applications for sex workers. One of the leaders of Poptech is Moran Cerf, a 45–year-old neuroscientist from Israel, who works as a professor at Northwestern University. He is leading a meeting on rethinking national security policy. The Surfer is dressed in worn jeans and a plaid tank top, and he has three days of stubble on his face. Being an expert in the field of decision-making, Cerf is seriously concerned about flaws in the protocols for the use of nuclear weapons by nine nuclear powers (USA, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea). He is in favor of revising these rules of nuclear launch. Over the past year and a half, he has interviewed dozens of nuclear weapons experts, military leaders and politicians from around the world, trying to figure out how to reduce the risks of a nuclear catastrophe. This year, his documentary on this topic, entitled "Mutually Assured Destruction", will be released on screens.
Cerf became interested in the nuclear threat during a discussion at the Poptech conference in 2018. Then two Nobel laureates told about the urgency of this problem - Swedish lawyer Beatrice Fihn, who received the Peace Prize, and Barry Barish, who received it in physics. Cerf claims that people act very badly in conditions of extreme risks, such as nuclear war. From time to time we may have an outbreak of concern because of this problem, but we quickly switch to our daily chores and worries. "Our brain is good when it lives here and now. But it is difficult for him to think about a catastrophe or about very risky and unlikely events," he says.
When the Poptech conference came to an end, Surf and I sat down to talk in the dimly lit lobby of the hotel. He told his biography in English with a strong accent. Born in Paris, raised in Israel, studied physics at Tel Aviv University. Being drafted into the army, he served in military intelligence, several times guarded the nuclear reactor in Dimona. Then he became a "white hacker", working for the cybersecurity firm Imperva, where he conducted penetration tests on banks and government institutions.
Surf's life changed dramatically when he accidentally met an English biologist Francis Crick, who was involved in deciphering the structure of DNA. Later, Crick focused his efforts on the riddle of consciousness. He suggested that Surf do the same and try to "crack" the most interesting safe in the universe - the human brain. "Quit your job and get on with the real thing," Crick advised him.
Cerf attended graduate school at the California Institute of Technology to earn a degree in neuroscience, and then did research work at the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles. In one of the university hospitals, surgeons opened the cranial boxes and implanted electrodes into the brain to diagnose various diseases. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Cerf convinced the patients to allow him to study their systems of interneuronal connections. For example, he showed patients photos of their relatives, showed videos or played simple games with them, and at the same time watched which neurons were activated in them. His work made it possible to explain why the brain reacts to some stimuli, but ignores others. It was probably one of the first signs of consciousness. "In neuroscience, I occupy a niche that is very tiny in its resources, but very exciting," he says. - We had access to precious data. It was possible to ask the patient a question, and then watch how the electrodes react."
According to Cerf, in the course of his scientific work, he concluded that the world in which we live is too complex for our brain, and it is unable to comprehend it. Our gray matter worked perfectly when our ancestors lived in the savannah, and they had to recognize 100 people and five plants. But now we live in an immeasurably more complex world, and therefore it is difficult for our brain to establish the necessary connections and identify important patterns.
This is especially true when it comes to abstract and very distant issues, such as climate change or nuclear war. Cerf explains that if the brain estimates the probability of an event in small fractions of a percent, it simply does not know what to do with such an unlikely event. "So he just gives it a zero value," says the scientist. "The only way to deal with it in this case is to trick the brain."
Cerf gives an example of how to do this effectively. Together with colleagues from Northwestern University, Cerf cooperates with the American Transportation Security Administration, helping airport security services detect explosives in passengers' luggage. The vast majority of security personnel at various airports around the world have not seen a single bomb in their entire lives. Therefore, their brains begin to underestimate this possibility. They see nothing millions of times, then nothing again, and conclude that their chance of stumbling upon a real bomb is negligible, says Cerf. But if you randomly plant a dummy bomb every ten minutes, their brains will react much more vividly.
Lottery organizers work on a similar principle, deceiving the brain in a different way. A person's chance of winning the lottery is close to zero, but the organizers regularly show advertisements in which players break the jackpot. Seeing a lot of smiling faces of the winners on the screen, you will convince yourself that you have a good chance of winning. "In neuroscience, we call this the architecture of choice. You make the brain think about something that it wouldn't otherwise think about," says Cerf.
With the support of the Carnegie Corporation, Cerf interviewed dozens of people from around the world who make decisions in crisis situations. These polls convinced him that the nuclear Powers should change the architecture of choice in their protocols for the use of nuclear weapons. It is possible to make some constructive changes to the decision-making process to make it safer, says Cerf. First, it is necessary to abandon the fifteen-minute response time, because of which the American president is forced to give the order to launch on a warning signal. Cerf states that such an instant response procedure is a relic of the past, given that the United States will have the opportunity to launch a second strike from the air and from the sea, even if all their land–based intercontinental ballistic missiles are destroyed.
Cerf also believes that the main decision-makers should regularly participate in exercises with simulated emergencies, analyze their actions and draw conclusions from mistakes. They can also analyze the results of their actions that led to disastrous results, scrolling the situation back and determining how such a deplorable development of events could have been avoided. It is also possible to modify the course of the exercises by appointing one member of the leadership team to oppose consensus all the time. Rachel Bronson, President and Executive Director of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (this bulletin has been warning about the dangers of nuclear war since 1945), hopes that Cerf's film will raise people's awareness and help guide the world to a safer and smarter future. "What Moran is doing is very important," she told me at the PopTech conference when it came to nuclear launch protocols. "We need to rethink every aspect of this system, insisting on increasing response time, on expanding cooperation and on developing democracy."
In November, the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to review the protocols for the use of nuclear weapons. According to scientists, it is necessary to make sure that when giving the order for the launch, two high-ranking leaders following the president gave their consent. "The risk of nuclear war continues to increase, and you have the authority to take concrete and urgent measures to create a more stable nuclear weapons system that does not depend on the whims and dubious judgments of a single person."
Cerf argues that if the US makes changes to the protocols, the other nuclear powers will surely do the same. Washington will have a good opportunity to convince its NATO allies, including Britain and France, to follow the American example. He will also be able to put pressure on other countries, such as Pakistan and India, to improve their own procedures. Having interviewed senior leaders from potentially hostile countries such as Russia and China, Cerf today believes that they will also agree to switch to a safer regime. "I have hope and firm confidence that not only the United States will accept such a protocol," he says.
On September 26, 1983, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was on duty at the Soviet long-range detection command post. At that moment, a warning was received about the US missile attack that had begun. Three weeks earlier, a Soviet fighter jet shot down a South Korean civilian airliner that had deviated from its course, killing 269 people on board. Cold War tensions have reached their peak. The Soviet satellite warning system recorded five American missiles flying in the direction of Russia. But Petrov knew that the detection system was new, and suspected a malfunction. Ground-based radars did not confirm the missile launches. In addition, there was no logic in the actions of the United States, since only five missiles were launched.
Having violated Soviet military protocol, Petrov concluded that this was a false alarm, and did not report this incident on command. He certainly prevented an escalation that could have provoked a nuclear war. A Danish documentary about this incident, released in 2014, is called "The Man Who Saved the World." "I'm not a hero. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time," Petrov says in this film.
The world fully depends on such sensible people as Petrov, who should be in the right place at the right time. However, few people realize this. Over the past 77 years, there have been many accidents, accidents and false alarms that could lead to a nuclear conflict. At least one American Secretary of Defense, William Perry, said that a nuclear war is much more likely to start because of a mistake, and not because of a targeted attack. "In our nuclear doctrine and policy, we continue to focus on preparing for a sudden, disarming attack, but such a policy actually increases the likelihood of an accidental nuclear war," he wrote two years ago.
In such circumstances, we are ultimately forced to rely on the sanity of our leaders. "We elect presidents who make the final decision. And God grant that these presidents have enough intellectual and moral responsibility to make the right decision," says former US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who also worked as chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, in the Surf film.
According to one widely accepted argument, since 1945, the very existence of nuclear weapons has saved us from a new world war. Humanity looks over the edge of the abyss and recoils back in horror. This confirms that the theory of nuclear deterrence and deterrence works. Managers act responsibly, because the consequences of irresponsibility are catastrophic. But as Weiner says, who came up with a dramatization with the effect of immersion, such an argument is nothing more than an incorrect conclusion about causal dependence. A similar argument can be made – that the existence of the UN has helped to preserve peace over the same period of time, she says.
Even if the decision-making process becomes safer, as Cerf insists, it will not automatically mean that we will be able to avoid a catastrophe. "If you look at the literature on human behavior and decision-making patterns, and make appropriate changes to the nuclear launch protocols, this does not mean that a person in the control center will not launch missiles without delay," says Weiner. – It is impossible to program a person to make rational decisions. But you can at least try to eliminate irrational decisions."
When Cerf started studying this issue, he thought that an objective decision-making system powered by artificial intelligence would help remove emotions from the process and reduce the likelihood of an irrational reaction. But he quickly realized that deterrence and intimidation are a psychological relationship in which irrationality can be a key component of the process. As Weiner says, the whole theory of deterrence is based on the premise that the leader is ready to die (and destroy the rest of humanity) in order to protect national security. "Deterrence needs a madman theory," she notes.
The most complete explanation of the madman theory is contained in the memoirs of Harry Haldeman, who headed the White House staff under President Richard Nixon at the time when he wanted to end the Vietnam War. "I want to convince the North Vietnamese that we have reached a point where we are ready to do anything to end the war," Haldeman recalled Nixon saying. – We'll somehow hint to them: for God's sake, you know how Nixon fixated on communism. We won't be able to keep him if he gets angry. And he has a nuclear button in his hands. In two days Ho Chi Minh himself will fly to Paris and beg for peace."
The Russian military operation in Ukraine has led many to doubt Putin's reasonableness. At the beginning of last year, he swore that he did not intend to attack Ukraine. In October, he said he saw no point in a nuclear strike. But after the conflict began, the fear of a nuclear war increased dramatically. This is stated by the Nobel laureate Fin, who inspired Cerf to his work in 2018. "People are very scared, and for good reason," she explains. On its website, the International Campaign for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has a page in Russian, which talks about the humanitarian consequences of the exchange of nuclear strikes. It is visited most often. According to Fin, only the struggle for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons can save the world from the threat of Armageddon.
Giving an interview via video link from Geneva, Fin states: "It is naive to think that the leaders of the nine nuclear powers will act rationally all the time, will not make any mistakes and will not do stupid things. This is a misconception about nuclear deterrence, and it was exposed by Russia's actions, which refuted the opinion that no sane country would use such weapons, and only an irrational state can do it. Such weapons favor madmen."
Nevertheless, Fin and many other experts I interviewed reject fatalism. Most hope that change is possible. "I am very optimistic. If we survive this crisis without using nuclear weapons, it seems to me that we will have favorable opportunities - as after the Caribbean crisis, when huge progress was made in nonproliferation," says Fin. Surf also considers himself an optimist. While collecting materials for his film, he was surprised by the willingness and willingness with which people give him interviews. "In all these countries, knowledge just burns inside them," he says. "I can imagine how the United States will make drastic changes."
And in a nuclear immersion scenario, a Secret Service agent shouts at me that a missile could hit the White House at any moment. I have to evacuate as soon as possible. I demand that all those who may suffer from a nuclear attack be warned (there is very little hope for this). I agree that American troops should be brought to the highest degree of combat readiness. And when I ask why we haven't contacted the Russians yet, they tell me that they don't answer our calls.
On the virtual cards in front of me, three options are highlighted. Option one: a limited retaliatory strike against the deployment sites of Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles, their main bases of the submarine fleet and aviation. In this case, the losses will be from five to 15 million people. The second option provides for strikes on all nuclear facilities in Russia, which is fraught with the death of 20-25 million people. And the third option provides for additional strikes on the main industrial centers and the leadership of Russia. In this case, the death toll will rise to 45 million people. "We need your instructions," they tell me.
Faced with such a diabolical choice, I decide not to use any option. I refuse to verify the nuclear launch code. The logic of my actions is this: I can't do anything to prevent the missiles from hitting the targets. Moreover, I do not know for sure if this is a real attack, and who struck the blow. Knowing that the United States still has the opportunity to launch a second strike, I conclude that there is no need to hurry with a retaliatory attack. And I wonder how events would develop in that version of the simulation, where the rules of the Surf are applied.
Weiner later explains that there are no right and wrong answers. Some people who have had this experience are convinced that they did the right thing by striking back. Others who gave the order to launch missiles immediately regretted their decision and are now suffering because they made a terrible mistake.
And what would you do?
