Armageddon May Only Be a Hack Away

I worry about nuclear war.

In fact, I’m amazed that in the 70 years or so that we’ve had the capability to blow everything to smithereens we haven’t taken advantage of the opportunity. You could take that to mean that since we haven’t done it in the last span of a human lifetime we won’t do it over the next seven decades, or maybe ever. But you could also interpret that as dumb luck. Luck that cannot hold out. In this way of thinking, time is not on our side.

I tend toward that latter view in part because I read a book this year called “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy. It is not light reading. It’s about a father and young son who walk deserted highways pushing a shopping cart with all their belongings through what is clearly — though never explicitly defined as such — nuclear winter. McCarthy never explains what caused the war or even comes right out and says there was one, though that is clearly implied. Anyway, his book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007, paints a horrifying and plausible scenario.

That’s fiction, but the real headlines provide no comfort. The world is becoming less stable. Climate change. Mass migrations. China testing the limits of its power in Hong Kong and now Taiwan. Putin launching a conventional war in Europe, while occasionally raising the specter of using nuclear weapons, and stirring the pot everywhere else he can. Israel, Hamas and the threat of a wider war in that region. And unstable, irrational and bitter authoritarians vying for power in America and too many other countries around the globe.

I bring this up now because the U.S. is spending just south of a trillion dollars modernizing the trigger mechanisms on its nuclear arsenal. Among many other things, those ICBM silos out in the Plains, many built in the 1960’s, are due for an overhaul. What’s worrisome about that is that we’re taking a system that is now virtually immune from cyber attacks and opening them up to the threat.

That’s right. The current old analogue system is built around hard wiring. It cannot be hacked without a shovel. Literally. So, why not just freshen up that system?Maybe, I don’t know, replace the wires.

By “modernizing” this whole thing we open it up to vastly increased dangers. Do you really think there’s anything that a determined hacker can’t hack? And, if you’re a terrorist, what provides a richer target than the remote control of nuclear weapons? And why risk it? Just to modernize for the sake of modernizing when the old system is much more secure?

Overall, the Internet, cyberspace and all that has not proved to be of great benefit for humankind. Or rather, it is of great benefit (it makes what you’re reading now and the easy link to the AP story about it possible), only balanced out by great harm. Among those harms is the spreading of misinformation and conspiracy theories that help fuel the hard-right populists that have taken over, or threaten to take over, in even once stable Western democracies. The very same basic technology that has powered their dark movements might also now further enable nuclear annihilation.

Worldwide political instability accompanied by a vulnerable nuclear trigger system. That’s a recipe for nuclear winter. Luckily, I live above a grocery store. Plenty of carts at my disposal.