Miscalculation and Escalation: Gaming Out a Strike on Iran

On the radar: War game play-by-play; Clinched; Iran’s misinformation; What Obama Should Tell the UN; Faults in NAS study; Gold standard, strange bedfellows; CR and Iran resolution caught in senate stall; and the Security Council vows not to nuke Mongolia.

September 21, 2012 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke

War Game - “The scariest aspect of a U.S.-Iran war game staged this week was the way each side miscalculated the other’s responses — and moved toward war even as the players thought they were choosing restrained options,” writes David Ignatius in The Washington Post.

--”Misjudgment was the essence of this game: Each side thought it was choosing limited options, but their moves were interpreted as crossing red lines. Attacks proved more deadly than expected; signals were not understood; attempts to open channels of communication were ignored; the desire to look tough compelled actions that produced results neither side wanted.

--Ignatius gives the reader a play-by-play of a war game held at Brookings. “The lesson of the exercise,” concluded coordinator Ken Pollack, is that “small miscalculations are magnified very quickly.” http://wapo.st/SewWTh

Tweet - @Nationals: OCTOBER NATITUDE: Nats defeat Dodgers, 4-1, clinch first-ever #Postseason berth!

Tweet - @Gottemoeller: Yahoo! @Nationals clinch #MLB playoff berth. #Postseason baseball back to the nation's capital for the first time since 1933. Go #NATS!

Misinformation - “We presented false information sometimes in order to protect our nuclear position and our achievements, as there is no other choice but to mislead foreign intelligence...sometimes we present a weakness that we do not in fact really have, and sometimes we appear to have power without having it,” Iran’s nuclear chief Fereydoon Abbasi is quoted as having said in an article in Al Hayat. Rick Gladstone and Christine Hauser at The New York Times have the story. http://nyti.ms/UlwCTr

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”What Obama Should Tell the UN” - When President Obama speaks at the United Nations next Tuesday, he should remind world leaders of the progress he made on his comprehensive nuclear security agenda and chart a path forward, writes Joe Cirincione in The Huffington Post.

--Suggestions: The President should remind world leaders that the U.S. will further reduce its nuclear arsenal, urge leaders to expedite efforts to lock down vulnerable nuclear materials, and tell leaders to keep pressure on Iran and North Korea as the U.S. and its partners seek agreements to persuade them to forgo or give up nuclear weapons. http://huff.to/QrKVAx

Tweet - @Cirincione: Rep. Smith: We have 5133 nuclear warheads, and we're going to bring it down to where we still have an unbelievable number...we can go lower.

Flawed report - The recent National Academy of Science report on missile defense “contains numerous flawed assumptions, analytical oversights, and internal inconsistencies. It also contradicts basic, scientific results from other published studies that have already been independently reviewed and verified,” write George Lewis and Ted Postol in The Bulletin.

--Lewis and Postol argue that flaws in the report’s analysis leads it to underestimate the effectiveness of boost phase missile defense systems, overrate the effectiveness of midcourse systems’ radars, and downplay the problem of countermeasures. “Given these problems, this report cannot serve as a basis for formulating national policy on ballistic missile defense.” http://bit.ly/RIPWEn

See also - “Ballistic Missile Defense: Radars Proposed for Midcourse Discrimination by National Academy of Sciences Report Are Far too Small” by George Lewis at Mostly Missile Defense. http://bit.ly/UlHmBi

Report - A new report from Third Way offers four reasons why using military strikes against Iran is not in the best interests of the United States and its allies. “Iran: Keeping Our Powder Dry” by Mieke Eoyand, Aki Peritz, Lauren Oppenheimer, and Rob Walther. (pdf) http://bit.ly/QrKfv9

Gold standard - “Defining the nonproliferation conditions the United States intends to place on its civil nuclear cooperation in general is essential to protecting U.S. interests, and we believe requiring that the “Gold Standard” be met in all U.S. nuclear cooperative agreements with states that lack nuclear weapons is the necessary set of conditions to achieve that end,” write 22 members of Congress and national security experts in a letter to President Obama.

--Signers: Reps. Berman, Fortenberry, Markey, Ros-Lehtinen, Royce, Loretta Sanchez, and Sherman...Amb. John Bolton...And many security experts including Charles Ferguson, Jamie Fly, Daryl Kimball, Kingston Reif, Henry Sokolski, and Leonard Spector. http://bit.ly/REF6EN

Senate stall - Senate business sputtered to a halt yesterday as the deliberative body could not come to agreement on votes for a Continuing Resolution, the “Sportsman Act,” a bill that would restrict foreign aid, and one that would establish a sense of the Senate opposing containing Iran. Senators hope to leave town this weekend, so a deal breaking this logjam is expected today. Josh Rogin in of The Cable has the story. http://bit.ly/Qq4cVT

Nuke park loses - Legislation in the House to establish a Manhattan Project National Historical Park did not get the two-thirds majority vote it needed to be sent to the Senate. The LA Times has the story. http://lat.ms/TdvyBM

Mongolia not in nuclear crosshairs - The five permanent members of the UN Security Council reaffirmed their vow not to attack Mongolia with nuclear weapons this week. “Instead of reassuring Mongolia, the P5 should focus on reducing their own nuclear arsenals,” writes Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. http://bit.ly/SbSejn