Category Archives: Energy

Energy, History, Sailing, Security

Who Caused 2018 Power Outages in Russia?

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In 2018 a very important and very large dry dock facility in Roslyakovo was in the news for a horrible tragedy.

There were about 60 people on the dock when it started to sink. Five of them did not manage to get in safety. One is reported dead and four injured, one with a serious condition.

This gave me a flash back to 1984 when Severomorsk, Russia hit the news for a horrible tragedy. A navy weapons depot caught fire and exploded, killing hundreds.

…the Central Intelligence Agency learned of the accident from travelers, then positioned satellites and electronic devices to assess the damage. Those sources said the death toll was estimated at between 200 and 300 people, many of them ordnance technicians sent into the fire caused by the explosion in a desperate by unsuccessful effort to defuse or disassemble the munitions before the exploded in a chain reaction over several hours. Officials at the State and Defense Departments, as well as diplomats and congressional officials all blamed the accident on Soviet “carelessness.”

There’s even a CIA file (with a copy of Jane’s Defense Weekly and details of a criminal trial for the Navy analyst who leaked the photos) for perspective:

…U.S. District Court Judge Josepth H. Young has already ruled that Morison’s motives were irrelevant, [Assistant U.S. Attorney] Schatzow voiced skepticism about the defense claims that Morison wanted to alert the American public through the medium of a British magazine where he was seeking a full-time job. “He didn’t send it to CBS,” Schatzow declared. “He didn’t send it to The Washington Post. He sent it to Jane’s.”

That Jane’s disclosure story from 1984 points out an ammunition dump also exploded in the Bobruysk airfield (Belarus), and at the end of the prior year ammunition exploded in the Dolon (Kazakhstan) airfield and two more ammunition depots exploded after that… by June there was a huge explosion in Schwerin. So the CIA file in fact shows Murmansk was the fifth or sixth Soviet safety disaster a row.

And that’s not to mention, or who can forget, the April 26, 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant?

Way back in 1984 there would have been “travelers” to inform intelligence agents about a disaster. In 2018 terms there instead is monitoring of social media accounts to start the discussion about the tragic sinking of a massive dock.

And from that angle the 2018 news of disaster reads at first like it should get a footnote similar to the 1984 official commentary: Russia continues to be known for operations fraud, “carelessness” and decay.

Maybe there’s nothing more to this story than just people discussing a tragedy resulting from bad safety practices:

…the dry dock has itself had repeated problems with its aging technical equipment, including the electricity system…

Reports mentioned sub-par maintenance of a huge floating platform built by Sweden in 1980, neglected since, with possible criminal charges for the private owners of the dock. Rosneft bought 2015 for its “oil operations”, which in terms of Russian oligarchical corruption means transfer of government funds to someone’s pockets by forcing major Navy repairs into private hands.

That makes the most simple explanation of disaster very believable: when a power outage hit the dock’s huge ballast tanks they failed-unsafe because of careless management. When a power outage hit that floating dock it predictably filled up with water and sank.

The subsequent lawsuits probably say something like Rosneft cut safety corners to increase profits, as one expects from an unregulated/monopolized market — the only dock big enough for the Russian navy to do repairs on its fleet.

It’s an unbelievably unfortunate operations situation coupled with a design flaw someone must have known about for a long time, especially given a history of having unstable power sources in that region.

A very predictable disaster.

Yet such a vulnerability makes it too tempting to not float the idea that this is also was fertile ground for someone hunting for easy cyber attack targets.

Again, the basic narrative since 1984 of Russian carelessness still makes sense. Yet early 2018 also saw a series of electricity “hacks” on America purported to originate from Russia.

For a little context from 2018, two years earlier the U.S. loudly warned that its “military hackers have penetrated Russia’s electric grid…for cyber attacks that could turn out the lights…”.

A month after these 2016 U.S. statements, the Russian city of Murmansk experienced a massive energy blackout. It was blamed on an intentional short circuit at the Kolenergo substation.

The acts were done near a city block in the street of Knipovich, Nikora said in an extraordinary meeting in the regional Staff of power security. It is not clear who was behind the acts, nor whether it is consider as deliberate sabotage or result of an accident.

That’s kind of important context, given how two years later rolling power outages hit the same region, sinking the largest dock in Russia and crippling their global navy operations. Even if not a cyber attack, you can’t say a fail-unsafe design makes any sense for the dock.

The most interesting run-up to the power outages in 2018 perhaps starts months earlier when the Wall Street Journal reported that Russia was trying to boast they had breached America’s power grid:

Hackers working for Russia claimed “hundreds of victims” last year in a giant and long-running campaign that put them inside the control rooms of U.S. electric utilities…

It was thus after aggressive hacking claims by Russia that it faced:

…several cases of power outage all over the [northwest] region, including in the cities of Severomorsk and Murmansk…

These power outage cases not only crippled Russia’s ability to manage its fleets by sinking their largest Naval dock, they also damaged Russia’s only aircraft carrier in the dock failure (Admiral Kuznetsov, which had been serving in Syria to infamously carry out air strikes yet losing two aircraft during routine landings).

Again, it has to be emphasized Russia earned itself a reputation for carelessness and predictable self-inflicted disasters. There may have been no cyber attacks at all and disasters still could have happened from decay or “incredibly easy” physical attacks.

Just a year after the dock sank, that same one and only aircraft carrier caught fire during repairs, blamed on a short circuit.

The Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s only aircraft carrier, caught fire today during repairs in Murmansk. While officials of the shipyard said that no shipyard workers were injured, Russia’s TASS news service reports that at least 12 people (likely Kuznetsov sailors) were injured, some critically. In addition, three people, possibly including the third-rank captain in charge of the ship’s repairs, are unaccounted for.

The Kuznetsov has had a long string of bad luck, experiencing fires at sea, oil spills, and landing deck accidents…

It’s hard to prove a cyber attack hit a country causing a power outage when that country is so bad at operations, but that’s exactly the point. The Stuxnet attack targeted a facility that already was suffering under something like a 30% failure from rust and basic operations failures.

This is why timing of the 2018 power outages in Russia shortly after its boasts about hacking can make for interesting reading. Despite the lack of any real details or news from the cities in Russia affected, I’ll be surprised if historians don’t find out more here by poking around.

Perhaps US Admiral Stavridis put it best in October 2016 when he quoted a Russian proverb: “Probe with bayonets. When you hit mush, proceed.”

Energy, History, Security

This Day in History: 1945 US Dropped Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima, Japan

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Executive summary: Soviet advances opened Japan to surrender, and NOT the atomic bomb. The best and most logical explanation relates directly to Stalin’s commitment he would enter the Pacific War three months after the surrender of Nazi Germany, as he had promised Allied leaders. The 1945 atomic bomb was a distraction, had little effect versus a reality of Stalin’s forces threatening to completely and quickly overrun Japan. Perhaps at best the bomb provoked the Soviets to get there before everything was destroyed (already 68 cites in Japan had been completely burned to the ground by months of napalm such that targets for atomic bombs had to be the somewhat unknown and insignificant cities — the only places still standing). The Soviets started to roll over Manchuria so quickly that in only a couple of weeks the thoughts of negotiated peace evaporated. Abruptly losing in a few months most of the territory they had conquered over the entire war, and facing a very real possibility of Russians walking onto Japanese mainland, Japanese peace factions rushed towards quitting the war and military leaders wilted.

Japanese cities destroyed by strategic bombing in World War II before the atomic bombs were dropped. Source: “Tokyo vs. Hiroshima,” Alex Wellerstein, September 22, 2014

Long form: The usual story told in American history classes is that dropping two atomic bombs on Japan saved American lives. This is mostly false. There was no reason for America to invade and the country had lost its air force, navy and even resources like oil to defend itself.

Military leaders like MacArthur, Nimitz, Eisenhower, even Patton opposed use of the atomic bomb so there was little to no truth to any invasion casualty concern claims. The Soviet Union in fact was quickly en route to rout Japan on land, sustaining minimal casualties with huge gains.

Studies now show the opposite kind of analysis, that the atomic bombs killed more Americans than if Japan had been invaded on land. Nearly as many Americans died from nuclear radiation and fallout during development of the bombs as the number of Japanese who died from the bombs being dropped.

Source: “Some Unintended Fallout from Defense Policy: Measuring the Effect of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing on American Mortality Patterns,” Keith Meyers, University of Arizona

One might still argue soldiers at that time had two bombs doing the hard work for them and reducing risk, even if Americans were killed at shockingly high rates for decades afterwards.

The problem with this theory is these atomic bombs didn’t force surrender, thus didn’t directly replace the purpose of a land invasion.

Nonetheless a story told in America has been that dropping two bombs on Japan proved to them such a level of superiority in warfare (“assured destruction”), it somehow suddenly compelled the Japanese to immediately give up… not to mention a story also told that atomic bombs held the Soviets at bay afterwards.

All this unfortunately is false history (see “Hidden Hot Battle Lessons of Cold War“, for additional perspective).

Here is Truman’s famous June 1st, 1945 speech calling on Japan to surrender, just to set the context of what the public was hearing at the time:

Take note that the warning was after massive bombing campaigns like March 9-10, 1945 where some 330 B-29 bombers burned 40 square miles of wood-built Tokyo to the ground killing over 100,000 civilians.

Source: “A Forgotten Horror: The Great Tokyo Air Raid,” Time, March 27, 2012

However Japan didn’t fear civilian casualty loads and couldn’t have really understood at the time why this new bomb mattered in August after a long summer of entire cities being destroyed. In a chillingly ironic manner US military leaders also didn’t fear civilian casualties.

Source: “Dar-win or Lose: the Anthropology of Security Evolution,” RSA Conference 2016

Japanese leaders instead greatly feared Soviet declaration of war on them. They thought Stalin’s shift to formal enemy would very negatively alter the terms of surrender (Soviets no longer would mediate a surrender that Japan had been asking about for weeks before the bombs were dropped).

I don’t write these things to be provocative, rather to help us better educate people about the past and also to plan for the future. Perpetuating a false narrative doesn’t do America any favors. And most of what I’m writing here is old news.

In 2013 for example Foreign Policy published “The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan … Stalin Did”

Japanese historians contended it was the USSR declaring war against Japan that convinced their Emperor and gov that surrender was the only option.

In fact American propaganda dropped into Japan at that time (translated here to English) emphasized the Red Army invading, a “ring of steel” approaching with no mention of bombs at all.

Source: “Paper Bullets: a Brief Story of Psychological Warfare in World War II” Leo J. Margolin, 1946

Japan referred to atomic bombs like a “single drop of rain in the midst of a hurricane”, given that they already had seen months-long fire-bomb raids of Tokyo that left it over 50% destroyed with 300,000 burned alive and 750,000 injured.

The reason Tokyo wasn’t targeted with atomic bombs was it was too destroyed already — atomic effect wouldn’t have been measurable (125,000 were killed in atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would mean it was similar in effect or even less than a single night of the fire bomb raids hitting Tokyo for months)

Two years before the Foreign Policy piece, a 2011 article in Boston papers offered the following insightful analysis in “Why did Japan surrender?”

“Hasegawa has changed my mind,” says Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” “The Japanese decision to surrender was not driven by the two bombings.” […] “The bomb – horrific as it was – was not as special as Americans have always imagined. …more than 60 of Japan’s cities had been substantially destroyed by the time of the Hiroshima attack, according to a 2007 International Security article by Wilson, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the three weeks before Hiroshima, Wilson writes, 25 cities were heavily bombed. To us, then, Hiroshima was unique, and the move to atomic weaponry was a great leap, military and moral. But Hasegawa argues the change was incremental. “Once we had accepted strategic bombing as an acceptable weapon of war, the atomic bomb was a very small step,” he says. To Japan’s leaders, Hiroshima was yet another population center leveled, albeit in a novel way. If they didn’t surrender after Tokyo, they weren’t going to after Hiroshima.

It’s very hard to argue with these common sense points. Massive civilian casualties were mounting and having little effect. Did novelty of a bomb that was a secret suddenly change minds? Even common sense would say no, and the historical record increasingly confirms this.

Or as DW puts it in their documentary, why did American drop a second bomb on Nagasaki if that Hiroshima one supposedly could send a message to surrender?

Video F18ODD8YyuE deleted from YouTube

Or here’s the BBC “accounts of American justification” for dropping a second bomb.

Civilian suffering had never coerced Tokyo to change tactics, and these bombs also failed in that sense. Hiroshima was the 69th city in Japan destroyed by bombing and Nagasaki wasn’t even the primary target (chosen after primary target had unfavorable weather) so it was destroyed just for the sake of bombing someplace at all.

In the end, America dropped these bombs most probably to see what the effects of dropping atomic bombs would be (expressed in the now deleted DW video above as “…my mother fell apart like dry sand when I touched her foot…”) and then the US Air Force created a supporting narrative to justify continuing the program.

Historians have been trying to explain the false stories away ever since.

Energy, Security

Drone Countermeasures Against Laser Weapons

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I’ve been getting involved in a counter-drone market for many years now, including time spent in government offices with operators discussing the “latest” technology advances. Not everyone seems excited to hear about details in this area of security research.

One thing that regularly has come up is whether the venerable laser weapons are yet effective. I have to use the term venerable because the US Air Force itself will tell you they’ve been experimenting with lasers shooting down drones since the early 1970s (according to AFD-070404-025).

…1972 when technicians fired a ground­ based 100 kilowatt CO2 laser that propagated at 10.6 microns against a variety of stationary targets. The tests went so well the project elevated to firing the laser at a moving airborne target. On November 13, 1973, the laser was used against a 12 ­foot­ long Northrop MQM­33B
radio controlled aerial target, a drone, in an attempt to knock it out of the air. Indeed, the drone did drop, but not precisely as planned.

Northrop (Radioplane) OQ-19/KD2R/MQM-33 drone was produced for over four decades

In theory the laser tracks the target drone and then emits hot light to melt inexpensive plastic. Popular Mechanics has just posted a good example of this theory being turned into real-world application, called “This Is How a Laser Weapon Torches Drones Out of the Sky“.

Unfortunately the story was written around “a simple promotional video for Rafael’s Drone Dome, an anti-drone laser weapon”, making it a bit of PR extending the PR released by the manufacturer themselves.

Instead of taking the video at face value, better analysis is in order.

Here are a few thoughts on why perhaps it’s not such a bright idea (pun intended) for journalists to uncritically post a laser vendor’s demonstration.

1) Light reflection. Mirrors are a simple and logical countermeasure. As Dr. Seuss might put it, any chrome drone would bounce a drone dome. The dissipation of energy, to be fair, isn’t child’s play so the mirrors have problems to tackle. But an Office of Navy Research is definitely proving the point with their work on Counter Directed Energy Weapons. More to the point, the Air Force says the latest reflective anti-heat technology developed for energy efficient buildings (windows and roofs) is something that could be applied to all their weapons systems.

2) Dissipation of energy. In a famous case in Mexico, a liquid-cooled door greatly slowed police battering rams. The point here really is to push energy into heat sinks or disposable parts to slow absorption. Again, energy efficient buildings are developing things like phase change materials to absorb energy that easily could be applied to drones. Slowing the energy effectiveness on the drones could mean a moderately-sized swarm might easily overwhelm or avoid laser weapons.

3) Obfuscation. Both above technologies have very useful civilian applications, and thus are likely to improve faster than any expensive laser weapon can innovate. There’s also a more traditional countermeasure, which is to foul the environment a laser has to pass through. Drones could generate a synthetic cloud or fog. A swarm of drones could even create a blanket or corridor that renders laser weapons ineffective. NASA a couple years ago described a version of this working.

10 canisters about the size of a soft drink can will be deployed in the air, 6 to 12 miles away from the 670-pound main payload. The canisters will deploy between 4 and 5.5 minutes after launch forming blue-green and red artificial clouds.

Again slowing down the laser weapon is all that is needed. As one counter-counter-drone researcher put it to me “the glitter bomb is a zero cost defense”.

4) Counterattack. Lasers depend on being able to see, and be seen, so drones can fire lasers back at the source in order to blind the tracking systems or disrupt the light waves.

There are four devastating examples and more probably exist. In every one it’s economics, a matter of having inexpensive and rapidly iterating countermeasures that bypass the extremely expensive and slow-developing laser weapons.

Let me be clear, laser weapons are effective against operations that are not explicitly trying to build countermeasures to laser weapons. There is still a need for laser weapons. However, journalists do us no favors by promoting vendor PR and repeating nonsense like “100% effective”, given we have nearly 50 years of evidence how and why laser weapons fail.