EXCLUSIVE. Revealed: Pentagon Push to Hack Nuke Missiles Before They Launch

[DonViejo]

Source: The Daily Beast




A former U.S. official calls the 2017 Pentagon policy document an ‘exercise to legally justify a potential attack on a North Korean missile on the launchpad.’

SPENCER ACKERMAN
05.22.18 4:42 AM ET

The Pentagon has embraced a controversial policy of destroying enemy nuclear missiles before they launch, an internal policy document from May 2017 shows. It’s an effort that appears to include executing cyberattacks against missile control systems or components.

The Pentagon document does not name adversaries. But experts who reviewed it for The Daily Beast considered it aimed at North Korea—and may represent a fallback option for the Trump administration should its June 12 summit with Kim Jong Un fail to result in the denuclearization President Trump desires.

Former State Department nonproliferation official Alexandra Bell called the Pentagon plan an “exercise to legally justify a potential attack on a North Korean missile on the launchpad.”

Kingston Reif of the Arms Control Association added, “Like the overall U.S. missile defense effort, the intended role and purpose is North Korea, and possibly Iran, too.”

Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/revealed-pentagon-push-to-hack-nuke-missiles-before-they-launch

[bucolic_frolic]

1. I'm not sure

adversarial nations would consider hacked disarmament legally justified

it's more a violation of sovereignty, just like hacking an election

[zipplewrath]

2. You presume they'd know

Some if not all of this might be intended to be undetected until there was an actual attempt to launch. Quite honestly the greater risk might be if the hack was intended to make the missiles malfunction after launch.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. There's a profit incentive to make conventional warfare great again

eliminating the nuclear deterrent would level the playing field to pre-WWII

[zipplewrath]

4. That ain't happening

In the sense that we won't give up our nuclear capability. We may ultimately scale it back in terms of "readiness" so that we aren't so much on a "hair trigger". Quite honestly, about the only thing that would allow us to scale back the size would be a fair amount of confidence in a cyber capability. That's probably a long way off.

We're doing pretty good on the conventional market. We have our fingers in conflicts around the world. We're selling F-35's all around the world. Those ain't cheap.