Nuclear Threat Initiative VI: A New Mission for the NTI--Cybersecurity
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To check out the titles of other entries that might be of interest, see the Archive.
In 2001, Ted Turner and his newly recruited partner, former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, kicked off the Nuclear Threat Initiative. NTI took the place of retired General George Lee Butler’s Second Chance Initiative. Both had a single goal: the elimination of nuclear weapons. NTI set a deadline of ten years. Lee Butler warned that that was unrealistic.
Over the years after 2001, as elimination kept not happening, NTI took on other missions—protecting against biological and chemical weapons, for example. And defending against pandemics.
At about the time of the inauguration of Joe Biden in 2021, which happened to be NTI’s twentieth anniversary year, it added another mission to its portfolio, something called “cyber-security.”
The concern about “cyber-security” had grown out of recognizing that it wasn’t just unsecured fissile fuel and nuclear weapons themselves that posed a danger. It was the real possibility that the “command and control” of supposedly secure systems in the countries that were retaining nuclear weapons might be “hacked.”
“Hackers” are people who use computers to break into other computers and steal information, or corrupt software, send false alarms, or even take over “command and control.” The hackers could be terrorists, or people who see us as “adversaries,” or thieves, or just vandals or goof-offs living at home with their parents. All they need is a personal computer, an internet connection, and the disposition.
There is another side to “hacking.” “Hackers” can also be people hired by companies to test software for “security vulnerabilities” that need to be fixed. In fact, “hacking” has come to be used sometimes to mean being inventive, seeing things in new and better ways. That’s interesting, isn’t it? What’s bad can be flipped into something good. Or be both until it’s one or the other?
Our military had recognized the cyber-threat a while back. In 2009, during Obama’s administration, a military command designated as USCYBERCOM had been created in the Strategic Command to defend against “cyber-threats.” As time went on, it came to be thought that we should develop not just ways of defending against cyber-threats but ways of conducting such attacks ourselves. Be able to go on offense.
In August 2017, at the beginning of the Trump administration, the USCYBERCOM that had been signed off on by President Obama at the end of his administration was activated. It would be an independent unified combatant command, called “unified” because it would be overseeing cyber-commands that had been developed separately in the different armed services.
It would also be working closely with our super-secretive National Security Agency, the NSA. The joke had been that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” But it had been operating since 1945, charged to do electronic surveillance on foreign adversaries. Meaning, at the time, Communists.
We in the public learned about the existence of the NSA only in 1975 in the Church Committee hearings held in the U.S. Senate. The committee had been formed because of reports by journalists like Seymour Hersh that had emerged especially during and after the end of the Vietnam War about abuses committed by our intelligence-gathering services. Senator Frank Church of Idaho chaired the committee.
The Church Committee hearings in 1975 had uncovered serious abuses of different kinds in every security agency it investigated—the FBI, the IRS, the CIA, and the NSA. The NSA, for example, had been spying not just on foreign adversaries but on U.S. citizens. Which was clearly illegal. Our big telecommunications companies had been helping them do it.
I think every American should know about the Church Committee and its findings. I don’t think nearly enough of us do.
Agencies that are supposed to be protecting our “security” must be allowed to operate in secrecy to some extent. But there’s always a risk there, no? If you have secrecy, you will almost certainly end up with more. And there will probably also be illegal or otherwise indefensible acts being secretly done. Until the Church Committee hearings, we might have thought otherwise. After the hearings, I think we had to know to expect this.
As far as I know, we’ve had abuses of different kinds in every “security” agency we’ve ever had.
When an agency is faulted for something it did in secret, it can always claim—as our CIA, especially, has done—that it has done lots of good that we can’t be told about because that would reveal “sources and methods” and keep the agency from doing more good, providing more “security” for us. That may or may not be true. We in the public will have no way of knowing which and no way of evaluating how the good and the bad may or may not balance out. We just have to hope that some higher authority that isn’t itself compromised is checking on this.
The year after the Church Committee’s reports, the Senate did establish a permanent Select Committee on Intelligence charged to check on the operations of our “security” agencies. Somehow. Even they would have hard time finding out everything that was going on, I bet.
Of course, most of what the Committee did learn would be “classified” and kept secret from us in the public. We had to accept there would be much we did not know. And go on trust.
Sometimes, you have to go on trust.
Since February 2021, I have been posting on Substack weekly entries on nuclear weapon matters—history, technology, and “secrets,” not current events—in You Might Want to Know. To check out the titles of other entries, see the Archive.