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The following are some broad impressions I have garnered from a fascinating interview with nuclear weapons expert Theodore Postol by Natalyie Baldwin (see also her website Natalyie’s Place: Understanding Russia) published earlier yesterday on Consortium News (Destabilizing the US-Russian Nuclear Balance). The interview is prompted mainly by Baldwin’s interest in establishing the level of threat that has been posed by “Ukrainian” (possibly but not certainly US-instigated) drone attacks on Russia’s nuclear early warning radar-based system). 

Postol explains the advantage that the US continues to enjoy over Russia in this important dimension of nuclear security. He confirms that the Russians do not at this time have satellites that can provide them with global warning and surveillance of missile launches. The United States, on the other hand, has satellites in space in geosynchronous orbit. If you’re in a geosynchronous orbit, you look down at the Earth and you are always over the same location of the Earth. But because a geosynchronous orbit has to have an altitude of around 40,000 kilometers into space, it does not have a lot of high-resolution capability by contrast to a typical reconnaissance satellite that might have only an altitude of 200-400 kilometers. (Postol does not explicitly say so, but I imagine that this in itself is a limitation in early certain detection of a ballistic missile launch). 

The American geosynchronous system (i.e., as I understsand it, the totality of views that are provided by data from a number of differently-positioned geosynchronous satellites) provides a view of the entire surface of the Earth. This would help determine if an indication of an incoming ballistic missile was or was not part of a general attack or if it was an attack at all. 

This provides more information than from the Russian radar system because the radars are limited to line of sight. If the Russians saw, let’s say, a few incoming ballistic missiles, which may or may not be a general attack, they would have no way of knowing whether this was the beginning of a very large-scale attack or something very small. 

The fact that the Russians do not have the US-style space-based early warning system is a major problem. The US has known about this since the 1990’s and it continues to be a significant difference between US and Russian systems, as confirmed by orbital data on all satellites that are published by NORAD. Russians are certainly aiming at this capability but have not yet achieved it. The evidence overwhelmingly indicates that “Russia is still limited to Earth-limb viewing technologies in their satellite systems”.

So since Russia does not have satellites that can look straight down at the earth and see ballistic missiles when their rocket motors ignite, the only way it can detect an approaching attack is when the ballistic missiles pass through the radar search fans of Russian early warning radars.

There are significant uncertainties on how fast the radars can determine the presence of incoming attacking missiles as they break through the radar search fan. Since warning times are potentially as short as seven-to-eight minutes, there is no way to reliably guarantee that a nuclear response could be ordered by top political leadership of Russia. Nonetheless, Russia has taken meaures to help ensure that retaliation would happen with a high degree of certainty, by pre-delegating launch authority to missile units in the field and dictating strict conditions under which these pre-delegated launches could occur. 

In the event of a false identification of an incoming ballistic missile, it would be very difficult to stop the uncontrolled escalation that would likely occur. 

On the question of recent, apparantly Ukrainian, drone attacks on Russian early warning radar systems, Postol considers it possible that Ukrainians, using the Starlink system, could launch such attacks without US intervention. 

Therefore the problem is not so much that the US has control over what Ukraine does but that it may not have such control. 

An Austrian military analysis has concluded thst the recent Ukrainian strikes could have been a warning by the West, since there was no military value to the attacks for Ukraine. Is it possible that the U.S. is probing Russia’s nuclear defenses and indicating that it is willing to go nuclear to save face? Postol considers this unlikely. But he is mindful of the fact that Blinken told Lavrov in January 2022 that the US reserved the “right” to put nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in Ukraine. While Postol does not think that Biden has lost his fear of nuclear war, he does consider that Biden is suffering from some form of degenerative disease like Alzheimer’s, and worries that Blinken and Sullivan “are so isolated from reality” that one cannot rule out them “inadvertently making decisions that lead to a nuclear catastrophe through escalation”.  

Postol considers that the “dangers we face of a possible nuclear war have much more to do with the frightening [domestic] social and political circumstances at the moment. If people in power have absolutely no understanding of reality, then the situation is dangerous because they have no way of knowing how to make sound choices. Unfortunately, there are many other examples of delusional leadership from history”.