ReadingBefore our next class on February 14, read this handout and Bruce Blair’s columns “Keeping Presidents in the Nuclear Dark” Episode 1 and Episode 2. Blair is a former Minuteman launch control officer who now heads the World Security Institute. Also, make sure you’re caught up with reading the previous handouts. I have been integrating different resources into this set of handouts and there will be some repetition as a result, for which I beg your indulgence.How likely is a full-scale nuclear war?This section focuses primarily on an all-out nuclear exchange because it is the least respected, yet potentially most destructive, nuclear risk. Because this nuclear risk is the hardest one for many people to envision, it helps to keep in mind that the initial steps to counter this risk and nuclear terrorism appear to be largely the same:1. Reduce the number of weapons: That reduces the risk of theft by terrorists. It also increases international trust and understanding, an important element in preventing misunderstandings that can lead to crises that, in turn, can lead to war.2. Raise nuclear awareness: That is a prerequisite to achieving item #1 above.3. Perform an objective, in-depth analysis of the risk posed by nuclear weapons through terrorism, proliferation and war. Such a study would also investigate coupling between these risks. For example, could a nuclear terrorist attack trigger a nuclear war?The earlier handout on risk analysis partly answered this question, but had three limitations. First, it only considered trigger mechanisms involving a Cuban crisis, and therefore purposely underestimated the risk. In engineering, this is called a lower bound on the risk. Second, because it was quantitative, people who prefer a qualitative approach may come away wanting more explanation. Third, estimating the final probabilities (crossing the nuclear threshold, and escalation from that to full-scale nuclear war) involved some subjectivity, again leading some people to prefer the qualitative approach taken in this section.As noted earlier, one of the reasons full-scale nuclear war is discounted by most people is illustrated in the righthand half of Figure 4.1 below (repeated from earlier handouts). Most of the time, the world is in one of the middle states of the The World As We Know It super-state, and there is no direct path to the catastrophic WW3 state. This leads many people to assume that World War III can never happen. That would be true if we never moved to a state closer to the nuclear threshold, but history shows such excursions occur frequently enough to create an unacceptable risk. EE 190, Prof. Hellman, Handout #4, February 8 , 2011, Page 1 of 15Figure 4.1. A state diagram illuminates the negative and positive possibilities.The following list adds some new examples of dangerous moves, as well as reminding us of those we have already seen: • In 1908 a small asteroid struck a remote area of Siberia with the power of a 10 megaton nuclear blast. Today, a similar event in a more populated area could be mistaken for an attack and trigger a nuclear war.• During the 1961 Berlin crisis American and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie, in a confrontation that the U.S. Army web site says “nearly escalated to the point of war.” Declassified documents show that President Kennedy and his military advisors considered executing a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union during that crisis.• President Kennedy estimated the odds of war1 resulting from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis as “somewhere between one out of three and even.” While Kennedy’s estimate may have been inflated by his subjective experience and interests, it also had an underestimation bias because he was unaware of two significant risk factors that did not become known until decades later: A Soviet submarine that we forced to surface had a nuclear torpedo and considered using it against the American naval force; and the Soviet troops on Cuba had battlefield nuclear weapons to deter an American invasion – an option frequently advocated throughout the crisis.• The 1967 Arab-Israeli war led Soviet Party Chairman Alexei Kosygin to awaken President Johnson with the proverbial 3 AM call2 warning that war with the United States EE 190, Prof. Hellman, Handout #4, February 8 , 2011, Page 2 of 151 Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy, Harper & Row, New York, 1965, page 705.2 This “3 AM” call was actually at 7 AM, but President Johnson was still groggy when awakened.was imminent. Johnson’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara attributed Kosygin’s call to a misunderstanding.• In 1973, when Israel encircled the Egyptian Third Army, the Soviets threatened to intervene, leading to implied nuclear threats.3• In 1979, a test tape that simulated a massive Russian attack was mistakenly fed into a NORAD computer connected to the operational missile alert system, resulting in a serious false alarm. As noted in that link, Senator Charles Percy happened to be at NORAD during that time and described a situation of absolute panic.• On September 26, 1983, a Soviet early warning satellite signaled that the U.S. had launched a missile attack. This occurred during one of the tensest periods of the Cold War, but fortunately Colonel Stanislav Petrov deviated from standard procedures (presumably at some risk to his career) and declared it a false alarm. The erroneous signal eventually was traced to the sun reflecting off the tops of clouds.• The 1983 Able Archer incident has been described by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates4 as “one of the potentially most dangerous episodes of the Cold War.” President Reagan’s statements about fighting and winning a nuclear war had created fear in the Soviet leadership that the U.S. thought it could execute a successful first strike. Able Archer was a NATO military exercise that raised the Soviet fear level to unprecedented levels. If nuclear war seems inevitable, military doctrine would dictate that they strike first – and mistakenly in this case. Both of Bruce Blair’s columns in this week’s assigned reading provide evidence of that bias.• Certain events during the 1993 Russian coup attempt that were not recognized by the general public led a number of American intelligence officers at NORAD headquarters to call their families and tell them to leave Washington out of fear that the Russians might launch a nuclear attack.5• In 1995, the Russian air