Korea Society policy director Jonathan Corrado coauthors report on limited nuclear attack in East Asia
Korea Societry Policy Director Jonathan Corrado co-authored a report on limited nuclear attacks in East Asia. The report was spearheaded by The Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at The Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security as part of The Tiger Project, an Atlantic Council effort to develop new insights and actionable recommendations for the United States, as well as its allies and partners, to deter and counter aggression in the Indo-Pacific.
The main authors were Markus Garlauskas with John Park and Kyoko Imai, and contributor authors were Andrew Brown and Jonathan Corrado. The report concluded that: “The risk of nuclear attacks being launched in East Asia by adversaries of the United States is likely to increase over the coming decade, yet the United States and its allies have not yet prepared sufficiently to deter and prevail in the face of such nuclear strikes.”
Corrado’s section focuses on the effects of bias on preparing and preventing limited nuclear attack. Corrado wrote: “Limited nuclear attack (LNA) is a topic uniquely vulnerable to bias. Project research trips and the tabletop exercise both revealed deep-seated organizational and cognitive biases that obstruct or distort preparation for an LNA, particularly in the North Korea case. There isn’t even an agreed-upon definition of an LNA, and there is a lack of consensus on the appropriate response to one. Biases thrive in this type of probabilistic, low-information environment where it is necessary to rely on inference and heuristics to make time-sensitive judgments under pressure. The resulting biases lead to preparations, policies, and postures that might be reassuring to the United States and its allies but are suboptimal operationally, generate risk, and could constrain options. Bias might therefore be the biggest obstacle to preparing for and responding to an LNA effectively. The following are three key effects.”
