August 4, 2019—China: Another Cold War? Not!!!

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We [don’t] pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.” ~ Ronald Reagan

This warning seems pertinent since I am a bona fide Cold War warrior, now in my sunset years after spending most of my adult life studying and even leading some important efforts during when the United States and the Soviet Union (and their respective alliances) dominated the conflicts of that bipolar Cold War.

Today’s world is very different, and I fear that adage that old (and even new) soldiers are inclined to refight old battles rather than plan adequately to deal with today’s strategic situation that involves multiple nuclear adversaries — a multipolar rather than a bipolar world.

I worry more about China than Russia in today’s multipolar world — both led by dedicated Communists who still want to “bury us,” to recall Nikita Khrushchev’s threat from the late 1950s.

I think all should heed my favorite President’s above warning. Unless we do, I fear we will not survive current conditions within our nation as well as abroad to “tell our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Regrettably, those conditions include the mobs in the streets of our major cities, mostly founded by and led by dedicated Marxists, who were fostered by — and in some cases are products of — our educational system and institutions that we have permitted to fester and mature such threatening conditions.

Moreover, it seems we have lost our way in a world that includes multiple nations armed with nuclear weapons that pose a global truly existential threat … leading to another but very different Cold War?

On August 6^th, my generation will remember when, 75 years ago, we dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, ushering in an unprecedented era when a single weapon can devastate a major city — as demonstrated by that event and another atomic bomb dropped three days later on Nagasaki.

The “shock and awe” from those two events, which reportedly killed between 130,000 and 225,000 Japanese (and more later from radiation and other residual effects), led to Japan’s unconditional surrender a week later on August 16, 1945, ending World War II — and is credited with saving the lives of millions of American soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen had we attacked Japan by employing “conventional” invasion means to achieve that same end.

These atomic bombs were of two independent designs invented, developed and used in record time. They both involved the equivalent of somewhat less than 20,000 tons — or 20 kilotons (KT) — of high explosive, creating not only blast and shock damage but thermal effects causing major fire damage and fatalities. The Hiroshima bomb involved a Uranium “gun device” design (Little Boy) that had never been previously tested (the Manhattan Project scientists were so certain it would work) and was dropped from the “Enola Gay” B-29 bomber (now on display in the Smithsonian) and detonated at an altitude of about 1900 feet. The Nagasaki bomb involved a Plutonium implosion device (Fat Man) that had been previously demonstrated in the New Mexico Trinity test to prove it would work, and it was detonated at an attitude of about 1600 feet. It was dropped from “Boxcar,” also a B-29. Both attacks were intended to maximize blast and shock damage to buildings and critical infrastructure. See the obvious devastation illustrated by the before and after photos below. Fires were a major component of this damage, especially in Hiroshima.

Hiroshima — Before and After the August 6, 1945 Atomic Bombing

Nagasaki — Before and After the August 9, 1945 Atomic Bombing

The “shock and awe” from these two events dramatically changed the nature of warfighting strategy and associated policy, in effect ushering in the framework that embodied the Cold War dominated by two nuclear powers after the unanticipated August 29, 1949 Soviet testing of its own atomic bomb (a carbon copy of ours thanks to the early Soviet penetration of our highly secret Los Alamos development efforts), and we were off to the arms race (between the United States and our allies and the Soviet Union and its allies) that dominated world affairs until they were significantly modified during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

In between, the Soviets again surprised us when they tested Hydrogen Bombs (with explosive yields orders of magnitude greater than the earlier atomic bombs) years ahead of when our intelligence community anticipated, and we entered a major arms race of those weapons and their delivery systems.

Thanks to President Reagan’s “Peace through Strength” agenda and his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), that race went into a bit of hiatus with the signing of two verifiable arms control treaties: The 1988 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) Treaty.

I was part of those important negotiations and led SDI efforts until they were abandoned in early 1993 — ending the development of truly cost-effective ballistic missile defenses to dis-incentivize threatening ballistic missiles carrying multiple nuclear weapons, which are again appearing on the scene to threaten the less capable, more expensive defenses we did build.

And the verification standards in subsequent negotiations and agreements have been dramatically relaxed with regrettable, but should have been anticipated, effects that undermine further negotiations.

Click here for Dr. Peter Pry’s excellent Newsmax article “Beyond Hiroshima” that recounted the events of the bipolar Cold War when the existence of its nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union actually kept the peace — and the fact that our negligence has created a condition in which our nuclear capabilities have atrophied while Russia’s have advanced considerably, threatening that balance.

His list of important events is:

May 12, 1949: Peaceful end of the USSR’s illegal Berlin blockade, that threatened to become World War III, but did not, thanks to U.S. nuclear deterrence.
July 27, 1953: Armistice ending the Korean War, achieved by President Eisenhower threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons.
October 28, 1962: Peaceful end of the Cuban missile crisis, the USSR agreeing to withdraw nuclear missiles from Cuba, achieved because the U.S. had a 5-to-1 superiority in ICBMs.
November 9, 1989: Peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall, and shortly afterwards dissolution of the Warsaw Pact that for decades threatened to overrun NATO, but did not do so, deterred by U.S. nuclear weapons.
December 21, 1991: Peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, without a nuclear World War III. (I would add that SDI played a prominent role in achieving this welcome event, as many close observers have stated.)

Peter argued that the fact of these unprecedented events, in which such ideologically hostile military superpowers refrained from a great war, was due to nuclear deterrence; and that Washington seems to have forgotten this crucial lesson of the Cold War’s peaceful victory — and instead has allowed the atrophy of a balance or parity in numbers, modernity, technological quality and capabilities (including, I would emphasize, the survivability effective defenses would bring) to assure that potential adversaries gain no significant advantages in the nuclear balance.

He noted Russia’s at least 3-to-1 current advantage in overall numbers of nuclear weapons (strategic and tactical), and its significant advantages in modernity, technological quality and capabilities. He also observed that China’s number of nuclear weapons is unknown — but possibly more than the United States; and that even North Korea has Super-EMP weapons, while the U.S. has none.

And while he did not mention Iran, I know Peter is also concerned that North Korea’s ally Iran may have nuclear weapons. And all — Russia, China, North Korea and Iran — include electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks to play a major role in their military doctrine. And all are our adversaries.

I want to extend these observations a bit to consider the question of another “Cold War,” now involving the current multilateral world of hostile (possibly allied) nuclear adversaries — rather than the past bilateral one.

In particular, consider China — historically allied with the Soviet Union and now Russia. China’s Communist Party (CCP) is led by Xi Jinping, the head of a totalitarian state. Michael Pillsbury, senior fellow and director for Chinese strategy at the Hudson Institute, is a former senior government official and author of numerous books and reports on China, including his authoritative Hundred Year Marathon. He explains that CCP Chairman Xi and China’s military leaders plan to make China the dominant global power by the middle of the 21^st century.

Personally, I am more concerned about China than Russia because China’s leaders are not only dedicated to this objective, but they have made major advances toward it in economic and military terms.

Those military terms include advances from our SDI era (1983-93) that we have ignored. And specially during the past 30 years — and in my opinion aided by naïve U.S. policies, China has become a major U.S. trading partner that now holds a major portion of our worrisome and growing national debt.

Thanks to our unwise openness to the access of our high technology, including research at our top universities by Chinese graduate students who return to China to apply what they have learned to help China compete with — in some cases excel — the U.S. best and brightest; e.g., in advancing cutting-edge 5G technology critical to electronic advances soon, if not already, to gain strategically important competitive advantages.

Not the least of the associated concerns is the potential threat of cyber attacks on our critical infrastructure as well as our military systems that could be posed by these Chinese advances. Such a threat could take advantage of embedded components and malware in the circuits of our critical infrastructure.

For example, our electric power companies have purchased more than 200 very large transformers that are vital to successful operations of our bulk power grid, which provides electricity to support important U.S. military and civil operations — and, to my knowledge, we have not evaluated that threat with any serious testing.

And we know that China has embedded suspicious electronics in some of these transformers and other key infrastructure. Click here for an excellent webpage/blog that regularly covers these concerns, with postings by Joe Weiss, an international authority on cybersecurity, control systems and system security.

Even when one considers the current COVID-19 crisis, it is troubling that this coronavirus originated in China and China’s policies clearly took advantage of their knowledge of that release without warning the rest of the world about what they knew of the threat. In fact, it remains to be determined whether a Biological Warfare organization in Wuhan released the coronavirus deliberately or accidentally, but China’s leaders clearly did not warn the rest of the world about what they knew.

And the reported number of American fatalities due to Covid-19 have already reached a number comparable to the deaths from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago. And that number continues to grow.

In any case, China now poses at least the threatening status that Russia has played for the past 75 years — and I believe is an even greater threat because of its greater economic power. This is why I am a charter member of the Committee on the Present Danger China — click here for its informative webpage.

At a minimum, understand that we no longer have the bipolar world of the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union (and their respective alliances) dominated the global dynamics. And any related study today should include other threatening and potential nuclear powers — like North Korea and Iran.

I believe that this condition, which might be described as a multipolar Cold War, is likely to be much more dangerous and less stable, by any measure, than what governed the bipolar Cold War or yesteryear.

I recall that the Heritage Foundation conducted a series of tabletop exercises a couple of decades ago that also arrived at that conclusion — then a potential future condition, and now an all too real reality.

Those Heritage Foundation studies also suggested an associated potential stabilizing role for effective defenses, contrary to many in the arms control community who were (and many who still are) wedded to the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) stability arguments of the bipolar Cold War. It would be worth dusting off those associated reports, sharing them more widely and updating them.

Bottom Lines

We have a multipolar world with multiple adversarial nuclear powers — sometimes allied against the national interests of the United States.

The concepts of stability of the bipolar Cold War world do not apply to this current situation — and our attitudes about stability should be reevaluated. When that is done, I believe effective missile defenses should have an important stabilizing role.

Thirty years ago, we learned that space-based defenses are the most cost-effective global defenses — and that they can be built quickly if private sector approaches are applied, instead of the usual Pentagon approach that costs too much and takes too long.

It is long past time for President Trump to direct his Space Force and our best engineers to return to the agenda pursued by President Ronald Reagan and his Strategic Defense Initiative.

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

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