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PREVIEW: Radio War Nerd EP #44 — Nukes (Patreon)

Published:
2016-07-30 18:40:54
Edited:
2016-08-08 05:23:55
Imported:
2026-06

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Guest: Physicist Dr Sunil Sainis

For non-subscribers, here is a 20+ minute preview of Radio War Nerd episode 44 (total length 2:09:35) on nukes and nuclear proliferation, with our guest Dr Sunil Sainis, who blogs at Maverick's World. It's a great interview, in which an actual expert who grew up around the world of nuclear weapons research, patiently answers the curious questions of two completely ignorant war nerds. After the interview, an east European physicist heaps scorn on Nuclear Winter Theory, and we travel the week in warfare, a busy week indeed.

Would you like to know more? Subscribe to Radio War Nerd here on our patreon page, to listen to the entire episode 44 and all previous locked episodes. Depending on your pledge, you can also get our downloadable RSS feed for your podcast app, the Radio War Nerd Newsletter, Show Notes and more...

Join the Radio War Nerd Legion. Before it's too late...

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Comments

Arkady Wrocławskie

All society changing technology was originally funded because of military research. Space exploration, computers, cameras, internet, your buddies at Tor!

Sunil S

Hi Arkady - There are many parts of the world where holocaust awareness is poor and denial is common. I was trying to speak to that. Sorry if that came out sounding stupid.

Eva Lacy

Just on the subject of hacking. It’s important to make the distinction between state sponsored hacking, criminal syndicates and lone wolves as there are many security measures that like conventional attacks can make them more complex and expensive to attempt. This means that when a complex attack occurs, the number of suspects can be limited to those who have the capability. It should also help you to establish a motive, a lone wolf may act for irrational reasons, but large complex hacks come from organisations carrying out their raison d'être. In the case of the DNC attack, if a complex method was used then it must mean that it limits the suspects to those who would profit from the resulting fallout. It’s also important to note that there has been a pretty serious ramping up of the security standards used by computer software, encryption being the strongest example. You can imagine it like secret information being passed by newspaper ads vs armed couriers. These days even social networks use military grade encryption to prevent your data from being intercepted. As long as you have security professionals auditing your system it should be extremely difficult to hack into but it is still possible to circumvent even the most stringent of security. A zero day is a hacking method for which there exists no patch. These can be sold for huge money to criminal syndicates and governments who use them to spread malware. Stuxnet is the best known state sponsored malware, written by Israel and the US, to slow the Iranian nuclear programme. The malware targeted computers used to diagnose Iranian centrifuges and when connected to a centrifuge would silently screw up the timings leaving the scientists baffled until the breach was discovered. This malware was extremely expensive to create, it included intimate knowledge of the Iranian nuclear programme, multiple zero days, security certificates from multiple authorities and a team of developers with expertise in developing cutting edge malware. The fact that there are actors with these resources means that for some critical systems it can be sometimes necessary to airgap a computer, meaning don’t connect it to another network. Sorry if this went overlong but it’s worth getting this stuff right given it’s an important part of the future of warfare. Also the psychology of lone wolf hackers is probably something that could do with more analysis, I imagine any research done will suffer from the selection bias of those who got caught. Although I do find it interesting there hasn’t been any cyber terror attacks. Perhaps the profiles don’t overlap.

Shad Narcher

Hi Eva, I appreciate your point about the complexity of attacks limiting the pool of potential perpetrators. My sense is that the DNC hacks were not particularly complex and therefore could have been run by anyone from a state actor to a teenager in her basement. I have a couple of actual adult friends who were pretty pissed at Russia for the DNC hack, and I remain astonished that otherwise reasonable people could have been so credulous. It seemed to me like such an obvious ploy to flip the news cycle from the sins of the DNC to the presumed sins of our greatest all-time enemy Russia. Just to get a little more in the weeds, it's my understanding that many of the Iranian systems WERE airgapped. The malware was likely transferred into the facility via USB drive. Whether it was an unwitting carrier that was targeted and compromised outside of the lab or a malicious insider is unknown to me.