Power Outage

The power is out on my street today. The outage was announced well in advance and the reason for the outage is clear: a Southern California Edison crew is replacing a transformer in a vault beneath the street. But even as Edison upgrades the local network's hardware, the Department of Homeland Security is again warning U.S. power companies about software vulnerabilities.

A cyberattack--as yet unattributed, although Russia is clearly the primary suspect--caused the power outage that affected 225,000 people in Ukraine on December 23, according to investigators in the United States. Hackers stole the credentials of system operators and used their access to the industrial control systems of three regional energy distribution companies to flip breakers and shut off the flow of power. A denial-of-service attack simultaneously blocked phone calls into energy distribution centers (to keep operators from knowing the extent of the outage) and malware prevented those centers from switching to backup power supplies.

The basic design of the attack on Ukraine's power grid, which involved infiltrating a network, mapping it, and gaining control of a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system, resembles the Stuxnet attack that damaged centrifuges being used in Iran's nuclear weapons program in 2010. Stuxnet is widely believed to have been the work of the U.S. and Israeli governments, although neither has acknowledged responsibility.

The warning distributed by Homeland Security's Industrial Control Systems-Cyber Emergency Response Team follows similar warnings issued by analysts in the private sector. The possibility of taking down a power grid via a cyberattack has long been theorized. Last year, a study co-produced by the University of Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies and insurance giant Lloyd's calculated that a cyberattack on the power grid in the northeastern United States could result in financial losses of a trillion dollars or more. It is worth noting, however, that the attack in Ukraine in December is the first actually to cause a power outage.

No one thinks it will be the last.

Gassed

One hundred years ago, on April 22, 1915, German troops near the village of Gravenstafel along the Ypres Salient in Belgium released 170 tons of chlorine gas in an attack against the trenches occupied by French forces including units from Morocco and Algeria. The gas was released from canisters along the German line and allowed to drift with the wind toward the French line where it settled into the trenches. Soldiers scrambling out of the trenches to escape asphyxiation were hit with a withering fusillade from the Germans.

John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919)

The French and colonial forces suffered approximately 6,000 casualties with many of the wounded being blinded and suffering serious lung damage. A four-mile wide gap in the defensive line was opened up by the attack, but the Germans were unprepared to exploit it fully.

Adam Hochschild's description of the attack in To End All Wars (pp. 140-41) is worth quoting at some length:

On April 22, 1915, near the battered city of Ypres, French soldiers and troops from French colonies in North Africa noticed a strange, greenish yellow mist billowing out of the German positions and blowing toward them in the wind. An unfamiliar smell filled the air. When the acrid cloud reached them, it was so thick that they couldn't see more than a few feet. Soldiers quickly found themselves gagging and choking, yellow mucus frothing out of their mouths. Hundreds fell to the ground in convulsions. Those who could still breathe fled, staggering into first-aid posts blue from suffocation and coughing blood, speechless but pointing desperately to their throats. In the next few days, Canadian troops fell victim as well. Whatever this mysterious cloud might be, it was heavier than air and sank into the trenches, hugging the earth and forcing soldiers to stick their heads out into a hail of bullets. "The chaps were all gasping and couldn't breathe," a sergeant remembered later. "And it was ghastly, especially for chaps that were wounded--terrible for a wounded man to lie there! The gasping, the gasping!"

The spring leaves just coming out on the trees shriveled; grass turned yellow and metal green. Birds fell from the air, and chickens, pigs, cows, and horses writhed in agony and died, their bodies rotting and bloating. The ever-fatter rats that normally swarmed through the trenches, keeping men awake by running over them in the dark on the way to feast on soldiers' corpses, themselves died by the thousands.

This was the first widespread use of poison gas--chlorine--on the Western Front. Deadly and painful as it could be, later forms of gas would be still worse. Like so much else about the war, chlorine was the product of an industrial economy, in this case made by a complex of eight large chemical firms in Germany's Ruhr region known as the IG cartel. Chlorine and its compounds had a long history in manufacturing, but its new use in warfare was an ominous landmark, seeming to open up a range of horrifying possibilities that had previously existed only in the realm of early science fiction.

Chastened by the experience of World War I in which even the Allied Powers eventually deployed chemicals, the international community attempted to close off the "range of horrifying possibilities." In 1925, the Geneva Protocol was adopted to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons in international conflicts. Significant gaps in the coverage of the Geneva Protocol were closed with the adoption in 1993 of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which 190 states are party. The CWC prohibits not only the use but the manufacture and stockpiling of chemical weapons.

Credible evidence indicates that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons--including chlorine gas--with devastating effects on civilians in recent attacks conducted in violation of Syria's obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and UN Security Council Resolution 2118 (2013). Acting on the basis of findings by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Security Council, on March 6, 2015, adopted Resolution 2209 threatening enforcement action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter in the event of further use of chemical weapons.

It seems unlikely that the Security Council will be able to back up its threat to punish Syria for its use of chemical weapons given the continued intransigence of Russia and China on matters related to Syria's civil war. However, both states voted for Resolution 2209. Both are also paying a diplomatic price for their grossly immoral position.

 

Gas for China

The New York Times reports today that Russia and China have signed a thirty-year agreement for the sale of natural gas to China. The deal, which had been in the works for over a decade, was signed while Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping were in Shanghai for a regional security conference.

While the New York Times story correctly notes the political impetus for the conclusion of this agreement in a setting in which Russia's relationship with Europe has been imperiled by events in Ukraine, it is also worth pointing out the significance of the agreement for China's efforts to address its environmental problems. According to the EPA, the use of natural gas for electricity production generates 1.22 pounds of carbon dioxide CO2 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity. In comparison, bituminous coal generates 2.08 pounds of CO2 per kWh, sub-bituminous coal generates 2.16 pounds of CO2 per kWh, and lignite generates 2.18 pounds of CO2 per kWh. The natural gas advantage is partially offset by the leakage of methane--the principal component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas--into the atmosphere during gas production and transportation, but, at least in the United States, studies suggest that the offsetting effects of leakage are not great enough to overcome the benefits of the ongoing transition from coal to natural gas.

Natural gas is no panacea for air pollution and climate change; energy from wind, water, and the sun remain far better options than any fossil fuel. Nevertheless, changes that can reduce China's dependence on coal--the increase in CO2 emissions from coal in China between 2002 and 2012 was roughly equal to Europe's total CO2 emissions from coal in 2011--should be welcomed even if the alternative (natural gas, in this case) is sub-optimal.

Borderline Insanity

Today's referendum in Crimea, conducted with Russian troops patrolling the streets, offers voters a choice between two options neither of which is acceptable to the government of Ukraine. In fact, pro-Ukraine voters appear to be boycotting the election, thus providing even greater assurance that the vote will show a strong preference for Crimea's reunification with Russia. The result, like the vote itself, will be rejected by the Ukrainian government and the governments of the United States and the European Union. This sets up the possibility that Russia will annex Crimea and the status of Crimea will fall into a form of legal limbo that persists for decades.

In 2008, Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. Most UN member states (including the United States) recognized Kosovo's independence; Serbia, Russia, and China did not. Later in 2008, following the Russo-Georgian War, Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states; the United States (and most UN member states) did not. Of course, each of these cases differs from the Crimean case in that new states were created. The most likely outcome of events in Crimea is that Crimea will be annexed by Russia. This means that adverse impacts--sanctions, to be more specific--will be directed at Russia rather than Crimea itself. (Kosovo, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia remain outside the United Nations--and likely will remain outside the UN as long as the U.S. and Russia have vetoes in the Security Council. This stamp of illegitimacy will not apply to Crimea if it is annexed.)

Meanwhile, for those interested in thinking more about the mutability of borders, Wikipedia's list of post-World War I border changes is worth examining. There are many possible takeaways from the list--the role war plays in boundary changes, the potential for international judicial settlement to effect peaceful change in cases of border disputes, or the ongoing influence of the national self-determination norm as a maker of boundaries--but perhaps the most obvious and important point is simply that boundary changes are not terribly unusual in the modern international system.

Finally, NPR's Greg Myre asks, "What Are the Rules for Changing a Country's Borders?" Many of the commenters seem convinced that might makes right.

Phrases Loaded with Dynamite

Territorial integrity. Self-determination. Sovereignty. Human rights. Non-intervention. Responsibility to protect.

Each of these is an important principle in international politics. Taken together, however, they cause problems.

From Versailles after World War I, U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing expressed in his diary the angst he felt regarding Woodrow Wilson's call for "the self-determination of peoples." He wrote:

The more I think about the President's declaration as to the right of "self-determination", the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress, and create trouble in many lands. . . .

The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end, it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause! Think of the feelings of the author when he counts the dead who died because he uttered a phrase! A man, who is a leader of public thought, should beware of intemperate or undigested declarations. He is responsible for the consequences.

Lansing, one of the founders of the American Society of International Law and the author of a book on state sovereignty, clearly leaned in his views in the direction of territorial integrity. Wilson leaned toward human rights and the breakup of multinational empires. In part because Wilson insisted on throwing open the gates of "the prison of nations" (to use the phrase that Soviet propagandists, referring to Russia under the stars, had coined), there is today a Ukraine--and a Crimea intent on holding a vote on secession from Ukraine.

On Saturday, Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times about the tensions between the right of self-determination and the territorial integrity of states as the two principles are exemplified in the Crimean crisis. As Baker points out, fifteen years ago when Kosovo sought to secede from Serbia, Russia and the United States took positions opposite where they stand today. 

Ukraine: Two Realist Assessments

"'Do something' is a platitude, not a strategy." So says Sean Kay in an essay titled "America's Strategic Dilemma in Ukraine" that appeared on The Duck of Minerva on Sunday.

Kay takes to task those who are urging some sort of muscular American response to Russia's invasion of the Crimea. It is not a liberal critique, however. On the contrary, Kay's analysis is focused on the realists' traditional concern with national interests and geopolitics. It's a reminder that sometimes the realists are the ones who provide the counsel of restraint where the use of force is concerned.

In another essay worth reading, Thomas Friedman reminds us--yet again--of the many health benefits (to U.S. foreign policy) of reducing our appetite for fossil fuels. The bottom line is this: oil and natural gas exports are what allow Putin (and many other autocrats around the world) to stay in power and occasionally launch invasions of neighboring countries.

Ukraine's Cyberwar

It should come as no surprise that Russians and Ukrainians are skirmishing in cyberspace. (The term "cyberwar" is probably too strong for what seems to be happening at present, but there could easily be some exploits lurking that, if unleashed, would justify the term "cyberwar.") The Bits blog on the New York Times website reports that distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against news organizations in Ukraine have escalated.

In addition to knocking various services offline, hackers today managed for a time to replace the word "Russian" with "Nazi" on the Russia Today website. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that cell phones of Ukrainian members of parliament have been blocked. Also, Ukraine's main government website--kmu.gov.ua--went dark after Russian troops entered Crimea, but experts are unsure whether or not a cyberattack was responsible.

The Russian government has disavowed all responsibility for cyberattacks in Ukraine, just as it did in Estonia and Georgia. In those earlier episodes, officials blamed "patriotic hackers."

Cold War Lessons

In an insightful news analysis published in today's New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus suggests that the real lessons we should be drawing from the Cold War as we contemplate possible responses to Russia's violation of the Ukraine's sovereignty are lessons about restraint. "The truth is," Tanenhaus writes, "that the Cold War was less a carefully structured game between masters than a frightening high-wire act, with leaders on both sides aware that a single misstep could plunge them into the abyss."