\u201cThis could set off very serious alarm bells in Beijing and Moscow.\u201d<\/b>
Last year, North Korea\u2019s missile tests started having major problems: Tests of the Musudan, a medium-range missile, failed nearly nine times out of ten, surprising some experts. The country had pushed its nuclear program forward relatively quickly, and avoided some key errors. What had changed?
According to a detailed new report from The New York Times, creaky parts and bad engineering probably played a role\u2014but those problems may have been compounded by an American campaign of cyberattacks on the missile launches, ramped up under President Obama.
Attacking another country\u2019s military arsenal, whether by bomb or by malicious code, always comes with the potential of escalation. Targeting North Korea\u2019s nuclear program\u2014the pride and joy of the country\u2019s volatile supreme leader, Kim Jong Un\u2014is especially dicey.
For one, it could prompt North Korea to retaliate. The pariah state showed its willingness to launch cyberattacks on the U. S. when its state-sponsored hackers obtained and published private emails and information from Sony Entertainment in 2014. Leaking information from a movie studio is a far cry from a cyberattack on, say, a piece of critical infrastructure like the U. S. electrical grid\u2014a feat the U. S. military fears North Korea may one day be capable of\u2014but the Sony hack may have been something of a warning shot.
Attacking another country\u2019s nuclear arsenal risks disrupting the delicate balance of deterrence that generally keeps powerful militaries from lobbing nukes at one another. The prospect of mutually assured destruction that has thus far staved off nuclear war could be thrown into jeopardy.
If a nation expects its valuable warheads to be destroyed at any moment, it could develop a \u201cuse it or lose it\u201d mentality, said Vince Houghton, the historian and curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D. C. That could encourage an unpredictable leader like Kim to launch a working missile before it\u2019s too late and it\u2019s remotely disabled. What\u2019s more, a country that thought it had disabled an adversary\u2019s nuclear arsenal \u201cmight be more tempted to take the risk of launching a preemptive attack,\u201d wrote David Sanger and William Broad in the Times.
The last known time the U. S. military trained a cyber-weapon on another country\u2019s nuclear program was when it infected nuclear control systems in Iran with Stuxnet, a sophisticated piece of malware that was co-developed with Israeli forces, nearly a decade ago.
But that strike, which set back Iran\u2019s nuclear program by years , isn\u2019t the same as meddling in North Korea\u2019s nuclear program, Houghton said. \u201cStuxnet was an attack on a country that didn\u2019t yet have weapons, so the idea was to avoid a shooting war while still slowing down progress toward a deliverable warhead,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen you have a country that is already a nuclear power, the dynamic is somewhat different.\u201d
Launching targeted cyberattacks is just one in a host of options available to the president for disrupting North Korea\u2019s nuclear development. Houghton said China, North Korea\u2019s friendly neighbor and political benefactor, may be more willing to tolerate a cyberattack on its client state than a conventional attack. But if it\u2019s all the same to Beijing, Houghton said, a straightforward military strike could be just as effective\u2014if, of course, it were able to hit all of the sensitive targets at once, including some that may be hidden underground or in caves.
\u201cIn my opinion, if you are taking the risk of a country responding to a cyberattack with a nuclear response, why use something as touch and go as cyber?\u201d he said. \u201cJust drop a JDAM\u201d\u2014a computer-guided bomb\u2014\u201con their nuke sites, or command and control facilities. Why get cute?\u201d
A conventional attack could, of course, provoke a dangerous, immediate response from North Korea. But a cyberattack might set off dangerous longer-term consequences, said James Acton, the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
China and Russia have long been worried that the U. S. would use its cyberweapons to disrupt their nuclear arsenals, Acton said, even though the U. S. has assured the countries that it\u2019s not developing technology to undermine their nuclear deterrence. \u201cTo actually see the U. S. exercise its capability will be pretty concerning to them,\u201d Acton said. \u201cIn the longer term, this could set off very serious alarm bells in Beijing and Moscow.\u201d
The fear that the next Stuxnet could be aimed at them might prod Russia and China into taking drastic steps to protect their nuclear programs. China could decentralize its nuclear arsenal, for example, to prevent the U. S. from being able to eavesdrop on or scramble launch orders sent to commanders in the field. Or Russia could press on with risky ideas like its nuclear-armed unmanned underwater drone , which could carry out a mission with little human intervention once it\u2019s been set along its path.
It\u2019s hard to know just how successful the cyberattacks on North Korea were. Missile tests have high failure rates, and the recent ones could have just been the result of human error, a faulty batch of parts, or just bad luck. The cyberattacks could be justified if they really made a difference, Acton said. \u201cI could make an argument, in principle, that if it were effective at slowing down the program, it might be worth doing\u2014even at the risk of pissing off the Russians and the Chinese.\u201d<\/p>\n