The System Can’t Be Perfect
Philip Reiner and Peter Hayes with Dr. John Harvey
SUMMARY
In this podcast Dr. John Harvey asserts that the US NC3 system “must seek vastly improved senior leader conferencing capabilities to support decisions that go beyond what some of us call the Cold War’s “multiple choice test”—that is, which major attack option to execute. To support consultations among allies, partners and potentially adversaries, in addition to senior military and advisors in complex conflict scenarios involving, say, combined offense and defense, nuclear and conventional operations—that is, the “essay test”—will require global, secure, high-quality voice, video and data transmissions that are resilient in stressed nuclear environments and go well beyond what was required for the Cold War mission.”
This podcast is accompanied by Dr. John Harvey’s paper “U.S. Nuclear Command and Control for the 21st Century.”
The Fourth Leg is a series of podcasts focused on one of the most complex systems in the world today – nuclear command and control – and its increasingly complicated future. Within this series we go straight to the experts, across multiple sectors, to discuss the modernization of nuclear command and control systems.
Along with colleagues from the Nautilus Institute and the Preventive Defense Project, IST recently hosted over 50 international experts at Stanford University to anticipate technical challenges that will arise from the modernization of complex nuclear command and control systems. We aim to spotlight some of the vulnerabilities within a modernized NC3 system while furthering the conversation with this series.
Keep an eye on IST, as we will begin additional podcast series in the coming months focused on how to fix the internet, AI and global stability, and other critical tech and security issues- for now, we have so much more to talk about, so let’s get started.