Author’s Note: Yesterday we commented that SECDEF Austin was working from home, or something. We wish him well an a speedy recovery. But in our comment on the DEPSECDEF, she was not informed as she went on vacation. Others not in the loop: the President, National Security Council. Congress and the Service Chiefs. The latter two bodies were only informed an hour before the public announcement. The chain of command for emergency response was broken without notification.

– Vic

We have been kicking this thing around since the edges of the pandemic. The subjecct was ‘birds of a feather’ or somethng like it. That refers to what some analysts are calliing Swans of a slightly different color. The term arose with the suspicion that things were not happening quite the way the Experts pronounced from the podium. As former military target planners, our inclination was to try to take the possibilities to heart and examine what might actually occur in a moment of heated irrationality.

Over the weekend, we dealt with a Department of Defense that seems (at least temporarily) leaderless and adrift. The other stories of conflict continued to percolate. War in Ukraine? Imagine the damp penetrating chill over soft ground in which trenches are more easily dug and tanks have trouble moving.

The Gaza troubles continue to unfold, with pro-Palestinian demonstrations around the world. That in itself is a curious thing, since the troubles started with the murder and kidnapping of Israeli (and other) civilians. We cannot, for the life of us, see how a violent schism between Shia and Sunni Islamists could cause us to worry about all those data centers sprouting up here in northern Virginia. We thought we had left “targets that count” back with our wash-khaki work clothes. But here are some of the details being worked out now, and one of the targets is us.

Here is the nature of the problem. Two atomic bombs ended the last big war, and it was a spectacular enough demonstration of destructive technology that things settled into an uneasy peace that endured from 1945 until this very morning. With only a handful of atomic powers, there were tense times along the way. The US and Soviet Union had thousands of the devices. France and the UK added some mystery to the deterrence picture, but were not regarded as likely to kick off the end of the world.

The landscape has changed in slow dramatic fashion. The digital revolution has changed things dramatically below the surface, and part of the infrastructure to change a world is not far beyond the parking lot at Big Pink.

We won’t trouble you with the planning factors in aggressive strike warfare. Our perception- the initial one, anyway, reflects the world in which the Boomers were raised. Evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, we still base our first impressions of current events on old ones that are no longer correct or relevant. Here in the Writer’s Section, home to some creaking Cold Warriors, we have adopted a practice of taking a brisk walk around the building to think through what has changed to make sense of the news.

A case study lies in the war for Ukraine. We still have a residual recollection of the expectation that the Red Army would roll direct through Kiev and up to the border with NATO. Perhaps with devastating consequences. Instead there was the onset of a multi-year bloody stalemate that challenged old assumptions. Those have a strange relation to what occurred nearly a century ago in the sodden deep trenches of the Western Front.

So, as the tempo of the assault faltered, we got dragged back into the ‘what next’ phase of reporting to see if we could stay a little bit ahead of recent developments. With stalemate, or something like it, came thoughts of how to break the log-jam. Some of them took the science fiction aspect of nuclear warfare. The Cold Warriors among us flashed back to the planning we used to do for the use of those beastly things. We took a stroll around the parking lot, contemplating the number of new players in the Atomic Age and the way they might attempt to use devices of great destruction with marginal accuracy.

Our initial perception flowed through the old binary perception that always started with what the Kremlin might do under duress. Then the fresh air cleared the outlines of something newer and quite different. The old binary equations now had to accommodate new avenues of doubt. Some of us had been out to India to discourage them from nuking their neighbor. Twenty years ago, there were no other hot conflicts in progress, and by comparison to our world today was a much more tranquil time.’

We won’t belabor the proliferation issue nor try to identify all the major and minor participants. One of the stories this morning was the desire of the Taliban in Afghanistan to purchase a tactical nuclear weapon from the wild and crazy North Koreans. That spawned two or three sidebar conversations, the dimensions of which could provoke a conflict with India. The crowd by the steps was off on another tangent about delivery systems, weapons reliability and targeting. And that is just this morning.

In the time of the pandemic, there had been an increasing international discussion of what might be done with atomic weapons. Not the Hiroshima or Nagasaki version. But use of an atomic device without sleek bombers or missile submarines cruising silently below the waves.
The speculation combined minor hysteria and some of the properties of physics that permitted development of the hellish things in the first place.

With active, mostly conventional conflicts in progress around the world, the arsenals of the former great powers have been drawn down to support the fighting of those with aspirations . to replace them. talk at that time was not about what the Russians and Americans had produced in the decades of uneasy cold peace. Bigger was not necessarily more effective. Even the descriptive words had to change. ‘Strategic’ somehow morphed into ‘tactical,’ with the clear implication that someone, somewhere, was prepared to use atomic weapons on a battlefield with human soldiers.

That was enough to make us shiver, but of course there was more. One of the other properties of physics was beyond the blast and physical overpressure in the vicinity of the blast. They call one of them ‘Electromagnetic Pulse.’ The phrase was shortened by those who used it to something more manageable: EMP.

There are other terms to describe the effect outside the realm of weaponry. Transient electromagnetic disturbance (TED), is slightly less malignant term for the brief burst of energy in the spectrum that can literally fry the tiny connections in all our electronic devices. That includes your computer on the desktop back in the den along with everything else that connects us to light and food and the electric grid. We bring that up today because Rocket came into the more relaxed Sunday Writer’s Section waving a sheaf of documents.

“We talked about some of this crap last year. The North Koreans have been resentful that the rest of the wide world was paying no attention to their just demands to rule over Asia. All of Asia. They had mixed results with orbital rocketry and the idea that they could do precision targeting against American strategic targets with reliable atomic weapons struck us as a bit absurd. And that is why Rocket held the papers outlining reliable industrial shielding that would protect his hard drive and extensive collection of eclectic pop songs.

Splash was on top of the issue, since he had time as a Bombardier Navigator on the Navy’s old A-6 Intruder aircraft. “The origin of a good EMP can be natural or artificial, and can show up as an electric or magnetic field. The interference caused by an EMP can disrupt communications and damage electronic equipment. We sometimes see the phenomenon in lightning strikes to aircraft and has caused development of a branch of electrical engineering known EMC, or compatibility.”

“Yeah, but lightning strikes happen all the time and there is no problem, right?”

Splash shook his head. “To a degree, that is correct. But bigger things happen. Back in August of 1859 there was a solar storm we now call the Carrington Event. It was named after the guy who observed it best. When something like that happens again we are likely to see widespread problems with everything electrical.”

Rocket leaned back in his Adirondack chair and looked toward the sky. “Suppose the North Koreans put one of their little dirty bombs on a ballistic missile like the ones they have been using and just lobbed it around the world with a command detonation somewhere over Loudoun County here in northern Virginia?”

There was silence around the circle as the Salts considered the effects of an atomic blast at high altitude over the mid Atlantic. We had looked for a decent piece of land west of the DC urban sprawl and Loudoun was ne of those pelasant bucolic places still within an reasonable drive to the capital. But it is no longer just nice country property out there. Loudoun has become the epicenter of what the techies call “Data Center Alley.”

That swath of land anchors a collection of nearly 300 data centers, scattered across Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William counties. They handle more than a third of the world’s cyber traffic. They are talking about putting one just down the road from the farm in Culpeper, too.”

“Think of how much easier it is to put a weapon in the general vicinity of four or five counties! That would have made my Navy job a lot easier!”

“But the delivery system could be a U-Haul truck and be just as effective. Tell me the delivery of a relatively small system across an open border is hard?”

The group shivered a bit in the January chill, but it might not just have been the temperature. Many more data centers are in the planning stages or currently under construction. We came back to Arlington with the vague hope that if we have a Black Swan event it would not mean the physical destruction of our home, since the instigator might want someone left to talk to. It occurred to us that we might be getting beyond that, since the Swans, regardless of their coloration, do not like to chat.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com