In this episode, Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes are joined by nuclear weapons and conflict resolution expert, Steven E. Miller, to discuss the historical significance and evolution of nuclear communications. Hotlines have increased and improved over time, reaching well beyond the White House’s red telephone link to Moscow. Miller brings us through the history of hotlines and the role they play in conflict, de-escalation, alliances, and nuclear strategy today. Their criticality is clear — the most heavily armed nuclear rivals should be able to directly communicate in all circumstances. Tune in to find out why our CATALINK design – a radically simple and secure nuclear crisis communications hotline – is necessary for averting future war.
This episode of The Fourth Leg features Adam Wick, one of the world’s leading experts on secure operating systems design and implementation.
Wick discusses how formal methods, a precise mathematical description of a system’s function, is a crucial component to the design and implementation of CATALINK — a radically simple and secure nuclear crisis communications hotline. We take a deep dive into the substance of how formal proofs not only minimize language misunderstandings in a system as complex as NC3, they provide a rigorous executable specification on how a system such as CATALINK is supposed to run.
Eric Grosse joins Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes to detail the trade-offs of prioritizing security, reliability, and efficiency in the CATALINK system. This includes a primer on how a sender and receiver will exchange cryptographic keys to ensure they are communicating securely. The episode also discusses the reasoning for Grosse's proposed technical baseline solutions.
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In this episode of The Fourth Leg, host Philip Reiner sits down with experienced cryptographer and owner and founder of Anagram Laboratories, Dr. Tom Berson.
Dr. Berson discusses how lessons from the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) competition can aid the development of international standards and potentially serve as an example for collaborative, transparent efforts for the creation of the CATALINK system.
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This week’s episode of The Fourth Leg, "Assume Vulnerability", features the High Priest of Coreboot, Ron Minnich. We dive deep into the substance of his paper, “Hardware that is Less Untrusted: Open Source Down to the Silicon” and discuss software, firmware, and hardware vulnerabilities and the value of open source code.
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This week's episode of The Fourth Leg features the return of one of the “NC3 originals,” Paul Bracken from Yale University.
We take a deep dive into the substance of his paper, “Communication Disruption Attacks on NC3,” which argues that states must do more to delineate intentions in attacking communications systems in order to avoid inadvertent nuclear conflict. Dr. Bracken also shares insight into the beginnings of his career and how he came to work for Herman Kahn for a decade at the Hudson Institute.
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Welcome back to The Fourth Leg, a series of podcasts focused on one of the most complex systems in the world today - nuclear command and control - and its increasingly complicated future.
In season two, we will discuss the necessity for a secure, global crisis communications capability.
In the first episode of the season, we discuss the need for a better communication system between nuclear powers with Philip Reiner, Peter Hayes, Eric Grosse, Rear Admiral John Gower, and Subrata Banik.
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In this episode, Philip Reiner sits down with Dr. James Acton to understand how to evaluate the risk of inadvertent escalation arising from entanglement. In a conventional conflict, each belligerent might attack the other’s command, control, communication, and intelligence (C3I) capabilities to gain a war-fighting advantage. However, because a number of C3I assets are dual-use, such attacks would degrade the target’s nuclear command-and-control system, creating serious risks of inadvertent escalation.
Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes sit down with Dr. Ronald Schouten to discuss insider threats to nuclear command, control, and communications. The risk of insider threats is real, global, and likely to increase along with world and domestic tensions and socio-cultural changes, Schouten concludes. Combatting that risk will require a comprehensive approach that recognizes cultural and societal differences, as well as awareness that policies, procedures, and technical solutions are dependent upon acceptance of the risk and the full engagement of the nuclear work-force.
William Boothby joins The Fourth Leg's Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes for a discussion of the legal limits surrounding the use of nuclear weapons.
Article 2(4) of the UN Charter applies to nuclear weapons as it does to conventional uses of force. Likewise, an armed attack giving rise to the right to use force in self defense might take the form of a nuclear strike. But it is the scale and effects of the nuclear strike that will determine its classification as a use of force and armed attack.
In this episode of The Fourth Leg, Paul Davis joins Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes to discuss how to approach NC3 modernization. He suggests that it “should place increased emphasis on assuring control, avoiding accidents, and avoiding ill-informed or unwise employment of nuclear weapons.”
Rather than looking at the myriad of structural and technical issues associated with modernizing NC3, he instead argues that modernization should go back to the basics: what core functionality should be demanded, and how should those demands should differ from those of the Cold War?
In this episode, Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes are joined by guest Daryl Press, who focuses on the growing threats to nuclear command and control and communication (NC3) systems around the world. He emphasizes the link between vulnerable NC3 and strategic instability, due to the risky steps that nuclear weapons states may adopt to protect their arsenals during crises or wars.
In this episode of The Fourth Leg, Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes sit down with Avner Cohen to explore Israel's NC3 profile.
Israel is a unique case among the current nine nuclear weapons states. It is the sixth state—and the first and only one in the Middle East—to develop, acquire, and possess nuclear weapons. And yet, to this day, it has never openly acknowledged its nuclear weapons-state status. Nor has the outside world, friends or foes alike, pressed Israel to come clean publicly about its nuclear status. As a long-held policy, Israel neither confirms nor denies possession of nuclear weapons. Instead, ever since the mid-1960s—a time in which Israel did not yet possess nuclear weapons capability—Israel has declared, first privately and then publicly, that “it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.” This formula became the essence of Israel’s policy of nuclear opacity. In this segment Avner Cohen traces and exposes Israel’s two most fundamental principles of the Israeli NC3 thinking: first, insisting on strict physical and organizational separation between nuclear (e.g., pits) and non-nuclear assets (e.g., military delivery platform); second, creating a two- tier governance architecture at various levels.
Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes are joined by Feroz Hassan Khan for a conversation on the nuclear command, control, and communications of Pakistan.
The Pakistani command and control (C2) system evolved over a four-decade period following a national consensus that deemed the development of a nuclear deterrent a critical component of national security. Until the 1998 tests, Pakistan insisted its program was for peaceful purposes only; even two decades later, a culture of secrecy and deliberate ambiguity continues to surround the program. Pakistan political governance vacillates between a presidential system and parliamentary system under constitutional amendments, which has affected the credibility of political control over national security. Military the strongest institution in the country is the keeper of national security. The nuclear domain is the exclusive purview of the Strategic Plans Division (SPD) at the Joint Service Headquarters (JSHQ). After the passage of National Authority Act in 2010, JSHQ and SPD were bestowed with powers as the de jure and de facto authority on all nuclear matters on behalf of the Prime Minister. Providing a fresh historical perspective, Feroz Khan illustrates the unique challenges facing Pakistan’s NC3 systems. When considering the rapid pace of technological advancements, Khan concludes, “as NC3 gains sophistication, control of partial or full pre-delegation regimes would likely be refined to overcome the never/always dilemma of deployed arsenals in the field.”
The brain of a state’s nuclear force structure is its command and control architecture and systems (NC3). Much of the proliferation and strategy literature focuses on the hardware of nuclear weapons—the actual production of warheads and delivery systems, ranges, accuracy, basing modes, payloads, MIRVs, missile defenses, and so on. But the software—the NC3 architecture that is charged with managing command, control, and communication under potentially extreme circumstances—is often overlooked or simply assumed or inferred, since much of it is unobservable because states (thankfully) rarely emerge from their peacetime postures.
In this segment, Dr. Vipin Narang joins Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes to challenge the delegative/assertive binary, arguing that, while conceptually important, it has hamstrung our thinking of regional powers’ NC3 by forcing them into one bin or another when it is in fact a time-dependent spectrum: all states delegate—that is, cede the ability to use nuclear weapons, irrespective of the authority to do so—at some point. Dr. Narang concludes that: "states may not only shift from assertive to delegative postures as a crisis or conflict evolves, but may also have variable NC3 postures for different legs of its force."
In this episode, Rear Admiral John Gower joins Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes to discuss the UK nuclear weapon command, control, and communications architecture. He goes into detail on the multiple communication paths, frequencies, fall-back systems, and encryption needed to continuously enable the UK's Prime Minister to act on a nuclear launch decision.
The United Kingdom formally became a nuclear weapon state in 1952, with operational systems from 1955. The UK's strategic deterrent has evolved over the past 66 years of it being a nuclear armed state. Nuclear weapon system information, particularly the detail of national command, control and associated communications systems and protocols, are among the most tightly guarded and classified secrets of any nation. The UK is no exception to this, and until the decision to release some of the protocols and procedures as part of the Cabinet Office co-operation with a BBC Radio programme in 2008, every facet of current national arrangements was classified.
In this episode, Elsa Kania joins Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes to assess how emerging technologies--including artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fifth-generation telecommunications, and quantum communications--may affect China’s NC3. Kania concludes: “Although certain of these technologies could enhance China’s confidence in its NC3 in ways that may prove stabilizing, there are also reasons for concern that the potential introduction of such complex, untested technologies could also create new risks and exacerbate the threat of miscalculation.”
In this segment, Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes are joined by Dr. Alex Wellerstein, who sketches a framework for thinking about how concentrated nuclear use authority should be at the top. While he discusses specific U.S. proposals for reform in response to recent domestic debates, the scope of his analysis is uniquely global, and includes a comparative analysis of the approach of all nine nuclear weapons states. Global NC3 systems are historically constituted and contextualized, the result of considerable debate and experimentation over time within nuclear states. This fact points to their necessary adaptability, and to the opportunity for novel approaches going forward. Using a global perspective, the framework presented by Dr. Wellerstein within this segment could provide inspiration for alternative, perhaps less risky nuclear command and control arrangements.
In this episode, guest Fiona Cunningham joins hosts Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes to describe the origins of China’s NC3 system and its primary role in supporting China’s land-based missile force. She outlines recent developments including mobility, “informatization” and automation of parts of the NC3 system, pending deployment of nuclear missile submarines, early warning systems, evolving organizational structure, and cultural factors that shape China’s NC3 system and its orientation towards negative versus positive control.
In this segment, Nancy Leveson joins Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes to make the case that using conservative techniques and avoiding unnecessarily complex software in critical functions in NC3 systems circumvented nuclear catastrophe in the past. Today, she concludes, a new approach is needed that avoids gratuitous complexity; emphasizes less not more technology; and improves NC3 systems by developing “more powerful, socio-technical and system engineering and risk management approaches that involve paradigm changes from the approaches that are no longer working. These are only now coming into existence and will need technical advances and refinement.”