Hacking the Bomb: Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons
Andrew Futter. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018. 208 pp. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Lieutenant Raymond Dennis, U.S. Navy
Nuclear weapons. Few topics garner as much attention from such diverse professions as governmental advisors, military strategists, and academics. Since the inception of nuclear weapons, one issue has remained paramount: avoiding the future use of these existential threats. Today—with the rise of technology—the international community must recognize the risk posed by malicious cyber actors, thus increasing the complexity of maintaining peace in the nuclear age.
Author (and University of Leicester associate professor) Andrew Futter conveys the importance of bringing cyber into the nuclear conversation. The book introduces the potential for cyber-savvy actors to affect the nuclear balance of power without ever physically possessing an arsenal. The cyber age created an entirely new set of challenges to nuclear threat deterrence. Futter evaluates these challenges as well as the problem of postattack attribution, paying close attention to existing and emerging technologies.
Futter highlights the risk of cyber threats to nuclear weapons in four parts: “The nature of the challenge”; “What might hackers do to the nuclear systems?”; “The cyber-nuclear nexus at the strategic level”; and “Challenges for our cyber-nuclear future.” Each of the parts is presented (with extensive annotations) before Futter offers analysis by way of a conclusion. His analytical range on the topic of nuclear weapons is impressive. Before authoring Hacking the Bomb, he published several other works on nuclear weapons and security policy.
Futter’s examination goes beyond the cyber safety of nuclear weapons. Throughout, he addresses potential vulnerabilities in areas such as the nuclear arsenal, supply chain, weapon maintenance, and communications infrastructure. The topic of nuclear command, control, and communications (referred to as NC3) is a recurring topic early in the book. When logical, Futter briefly explains cyber-related terms and events beyond those with direct implications for nuclear weapons (i.e., Operation Buckshot Yankee; Stuxnet; and Shadow Brokers). This provides context and eases understanding of the book’s complex subject.
Hacking the Bomb will resonate well with those interested in nuclear weapons and cyber threats alike. For all others, the content serves as a well-researched point of reference for the intersection of these two ever-present topics in the modern security landscape.
Lieutenant Dennis is an active-duty member of the Navy’s information warfare community. He is assigned to the Navy Cyber Warfare Development Group and previously served as a Secretary of the Navy Tours with Industry Fellow with USAA.
Matt Young. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2017. 229 pp. $28.
Reviewed by Major Barret F. Bradstreet, U.S. Marine Corps
Most memoirs of the Iraq War are not worth a review in Proceedings, but Matt Young has delivered something exceptional. His book should be widely read, and it will make readers squirm and smirk at the inner life of a recovering renegade Marine. His creative nonfiction stories are vivid, uproarious, shameful, and raw. They also have the small remembered details of smells and sounds that indicate authentic, unworkshopped, and unphotoshopped memory. Young is telling stories, but these capture something true about the urges, tendencies, and attachments of young men committed to fighting units.
The author served as a mortarman with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines—a storied unit with the call sign “Darkhorse”—during an enlistment from 2005 to 2009. His memoir is distinctive, written in more than 50 micro-chapters that shift in tone and narrative point of view. Because each chapter introduces a new setting, narrator, and mood, the reader participates in the unsettled and unsettling experiences of a young man fighting in an unfamiliar place. Young reconstructs the first-person experience of dread he felt prior to deployment, the monotony of guard duty, the exhilaration of errant shots fired toward him, and the urge to rewind and undo irrevocably bad happenings. Young’s battalion has produced celebrated authors such as Eugene Sledge and Laurence Stallings. This newest author’s eloquence and originality earn him a secure spot in the Darkhorse writer’s club.
The power of Young’s book is that it captures the interior monologue of a Marine in the ranks. He is driven, proud, scared, and sometimes lost. He describes the yearning to realize a certain ideal of manhood. He does not flinch from describing his urges for sex, violence, and drunkenness. Because he can change the tone with each new chapter, he can change the interpretation or meaning of each new anecdote.
This uneven variety may be the shortcoming in a terrific book. The format allows the author to represent the disorderly life he describes, but it also makes the work seem unfinished. Also, though the author’s voice has the ring of truth, there is a mismatch between the humane and thoughtful author and the selfish isolated subject of the stories. He expresses a touching sense of collective belonging, but specific attachment to no single living person in his story. Taken together, the chapters represent a litany of misdeeds that sound like the confessions of a penitent convert. Something tells me that Private First Class Young may have been more empathetic, astute, and proficient than Matt Young was ready to admit when he sat down to write.
This cannot be the last word from Young, but this memoir might become the definitive portrait of a Marine in the Iraq conflict of the past decade. It should be read by people who aspire to join or lead Marines, and it will be appreciated by any of those who have. For the rest of the reading public, this book will convey an important lesson about the familiar motives of those who’ve chosen an unfamiliar profession, unless they grow too scandalized to read.
Major Bradstreet is serving as an exchange officer at the École Militaire in Paris, France.
Patrick K. O’Donnell. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018. 360 pp. Illus. Notes. Index. $25.
Reviewed by Ryan Wadle
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery is one of the most hallowed sites in the United States. Millions have visited the tomb and witnessed the changing of the guard ceremony on the grounds. Constructed in 1921 and based on similar monuments in France and the United Kingdom, the tomb first housed the remains of an unknown World War I soldier. Later, unidentified remains from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War joined the original soldier.
But what might remain unknown is the rationale behind the title of Patrick K. O’Donnell’s work: The Unknowns: The Untold Story of America’s Unknown Soldier and WWI’s Most Decorated Heroes Who Brought Him Home. O’Donnell devotes only a small portion of the book to the selection and transportation of the Unknown Soldier from a grave site in France to his final resting place at Arlington. Instead, the majority of O’Donnell’s work focuses on the eight men—five soldiers, two sailors, and one Marine—who survived U-boat attacks, combat on the Western Front of World War I, and even a German prisoner-of-war camp to bring the Unknown Soldier back to the United States in 1921.
Known as “body bearers,” these eight highly decorated men included two Medal of Honor recipients. O’Donnell also prominently features Sergeant James Younger, a decorated veteran who selected the Unknown Soldier in a randomized process to prevent eventual identification of the remains, and Commander, American Expeditionary Forces, General John J. Pershing, as he selected the body bearers for the mission based on their records of heroism.
Relying on a variety of archival sources and memoirs, O’Donnell crafts compelling and clear battle narratives of how each body bearer performed under fire and demonstrated his valor. He captures the exhilaration and the horrors of war and contextualizes how the lives of these eight men fit into the larger war effort.
The book, however, suffers from two significant problems. First, the amount of coverage devoted to each of the eight men varies widely. For instance, First Sergeant Louis Razga, an artilleryman, is given scant coverage, while others, such as Gunnery Sergeant Ernest Janson—an Army deserter named Charles Hoffman who served in the Marine Corps under a false identity—and Sergeant Samuel Woodfill—a soldier who silenced three German machine gun positions almost singlehandedly—receive much more attention. O’Donnell also devotes only a brief afterword to exploring the lives of the body bearers after they had executed their duty, which exacerbates the inequities in coverage.
Second, O’Donnell’s narrative incorporates events tangential to the lives and experiences of the eight principals, such as a retelling of the saga of the Lost Battalion or the well-known wartime exploits of Lieutenant Colonel George S. Patton and Corporal Alvin York. These additions may aid in the readability of the volume, especially for those who have little or no familiarity with World War I, but they likely will distract other readers wishing to learn more about the body bearers themselves.
In spite of its flaws, O’Donnell’s The Unknowns is a compelling read of heroism and sacrifice that culminates in the establishment of one of the best-known monuments in U.S. military history.
Dr. Wadle is an associate professor of comparative military studies at the Air Command and Staff College’s School of Graduate Professional Military Education. He currently is working on a book-length manuscript titled The Fourth Dimension of Naval Tactics: The U.S. Navy and Public Relations, 1919–1939 (University of Oklahoma Press).
Armageddon and Paranoia: The Nuclear Confrontation Since 1945
Rodric Braithwaite. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 403 pp. Photos. Timeline. Notes. Sources. Index. $34.95
Reviewed by Lieutenant Commander Kristofer Tester, U.S. Navy
When once-in-a-lifetime events occur, people often are able to recall vividly where they were or what they were doing when they first learned of the event. Former British Ambassador to the Soviet Union and author Rodric Braithwaite opens with a story of a childhood train ride in August 1945 when news of Hiroshima’s devastation broke. In the time since, his curiosity about what the scientists, weapon designers, military men, and politicians thought they were doing in 1945 and the decades since led him to conduct his own research and catalog the results in Armageddon and Paranoia.
Braithwaite’s well-researched and organized approach is a comprehensive history of nuclear weapons broken into three parts. The first includes the initial development of the fission bomb during the Manhattan Project and extends through the U.S. and Soviet race to develop the hydrogen bomb. Part two delves into the strategy of the superpowers and Great Britain beginning in 1945 and extending through the collapse of the Soviet Union. The consequences of both the creation and detonation of nuclear weapons make up the final part of the book.
Mutual assured destruction (MAD) and limited nuclear war were the primary strategic stances that enveloped the Cold War. After outlining the advantages and disadvantages of each, Braithwaite uses them as an umbrella under which to illustrate how each U.S. President and Soviet General Secretary—from Truman and Stalin to Reagan and Gorbachev—approached strategic decisions, and then he provides examples of history’s assessment of their success or failure. This portion of the book is the most enlightening. Braithwaite manages to provide insight on leadership thinking with regard to nuclear warfare and does so concisely, comparing U.S. to Soviet and British thinking.
The British mind-set on nuclear war is not often thought of or studied in the United States, but a chapter of the book is devoted to it. The author offers three reasons why the British were pushed to develop nuclear arms: a desire for an independent deterrent to discourage Russian attack, the fear that the United States might be unwilling to defend Europe once the United States became vulnerable to Soviet nuclear weapons, and the belief that by developing their own weapons, they might make the United States more willing to collaborate with Britain on weapons advances. Braithwaite ends the strategic discussion aptly by surmising that “none of the strategists in any of the nuclear powers ever devised a wholly convincing theory, despite their intellect, their seriousness, their dedication, and their ingenuity.”
Over the years of strategic shifts and varying personalities at the helm of the superpowers, the brink of nuclear war was reached three times: the establishment of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the so-called second Cold War of 1983 that began with the NATO exercise Able Archer. Treaties and agreements were reached, but few had lasting effects. The fall of the Soviet Union in late 1991 was a potential turning point in the nuclear age, but the United States kept modernizing while the Russians fell technologically behind.
Each U.S. President since has vowed to seek the end of nuclear weapons, but physical changes have yet to occur. Braithwaite notes that Russia is now making a technological comeback, with the Unites States and Russia maintaining comparable stockpiles of weapons.
Braithwaite closes with a nod to Murphy’s Law—that if something can go wrong, it will—and the observation that “yet, despite the hair-trigger fragility of the nuclear confrontation, the ultimate catastrophe did not occur.” He offers several common arguments for why, and then leaves readers with the idea that perhaps we were all just lucky. After reading Armageddon and Paranoia, you might agree.
Lieutenant Commander Tester is a surface warfare officer assigned to the Surface and Mine Warfighting Development Center in San Diego as an integrated air and missile defense warfare tactics instructor.