Security

Second-strike capability. The Capacity for a nuclear-armed state to strike back no matter what the enemy does by way of pre-emptive strike. Conferred by putting missiles into hardened silos or, better, by making them land - or sea-mobile. The second-strike system par excellence is the slbm.

Secret serviees. Regarded as a necessity by all great powers, and many smaller ones. Two at least are normally required; one defensive, to handle security, which may include wireless and postal interception, and the planting of agents in suspect subversive bodies; and one offensive, to get information from abroad, which will certainly handle espionage and may also cover decipher, subversion, or sabotage. Rivalry between such services is normal, often intense.

In Germany in 1944, Himmler tried to bring all the secret services under his own wing, and absorbed the armed forces’ Abwehr; but propaganda under Goebbels and two decipher staffs, one diplomatic under Goring and one naval under Donitz, eluded his grasp. UK at the same time had at least eight separate secret services: MIS for security; Radio Security Service for wireless interception; MIG for intelligence; Government Code and Cipher School for decipher; MI9 for prisoners of war; soe (Special Operations Executive) for subversion and sabotage; Political Warfare Executive for propaganda; and London Controlling Section for deception. How far these have been condensed since remains secret.

The Americans started late; the FBI goes back to 1907, but their deciphering service, started in 1915, was disbanded in 1929. The Office of War Information, founded in 1941, expanded into the oss,

1942-45. Out of this the current CIA developed in 1947. The National Security Council, also founded in 1947, was expanded by Eisenhower in 1953 to supervise the whole field of national safety.

The Russians have two basic services, a large secret police force — currently called the kgb and supposed to be over a quarter of a million strong - and the gru, responsible for collecting intelligence. MF.

Secret weapons. Intelligence and the diversity of scientific research have prevented most developments in weaponry from being truly secret. During World War I, new types of aircraft, tanks and poison gas perhaps surprised the soldier at the Front but were already known about by staff officers, scientists and designers. Rapid technological development led to an expansion in the number of “secret weapons” and in Germany during World War II their existence was flaunted to boost morale at home and to intimidate the enemy. But superior Intelligence permitted the Allies to see behind the bombast and analyse accurately many of the German developments in rocketry, jet propulsion, radar, aircraft design and atomic research. MS.

Security. A standing preoccupation for every commander: is his base secure, do his supply lines run freely, does the enemy know (or can he infer) his strength or his plans; is his own person safe against attack? A few high commanders, Stalin and Hitler in particular, lived in paranoiac fear of assassination, kept changing their arrangements, and always had armed bodyguards near them.

Busybodies who make it their business to know everything are a permanent threat to security; but in wartime can usually be barred off from dangerous knowledge by routine service precautions. Those who serve can be trained never to discuss plans, equipment or capacities outside service circles. For extra secret affairs, the “need to know” principle applies: nobody is to be told a secret if he does not need to know it in order to do his own work. Staff officers like to grade documents in ascending order of secrecy: restricted, confidential, secret, very (or most, or top) secret, ultra top secret, and so on. A safer precaution is to transmit highly secret documents only by hand of officer; or safer still, not to write anything down at all.

Messages and documents in transit are vulnerable. Nothing said by telephone, telegraph, fax or cable is in any way private. Devices for scrambling telephone conversations, invented cl940, did not become safe until the 1980s. Post can easily be intercepted, opened.

Read, re-sealed and passed on. Cipher offers a substantial degree of security, if properly handled; though no cipher is utterly unbreakable, complicated ones may take years to break. Even if missives go by hand of officer, the officer may be robbed or suborned - or may secretly have gone over to the other side: a catastrophe

Against which it is hard to devise safeguards that will always work.

Security of buildings can be achieved by locks, bars, sentries, patrols and systems of passes; none of them quite impenetrable by lucky and resolute opponents. Equipment can usually be secured by keeping it out of sight, or - if it is too big to hide — by camouflage. Camouflage, in turn, can help with schemes of deception - feints to mislead the enemy about one’s own intentions. It is a sound security precaution to train everybody to reveal only name, rank and number if captured; though enemy interrogators are certain to ask for much more.

Civil and military police can help to keep inquisitive passers-by away from service installations, fixed or temporary; again, a really resolute and determined spy, skilled in persona] camouflage and in the use of binoculars, telescope and camera, can probably outwit them. Police are of more use in detecting and arresting deserters before they can go over to the enemy.

Most powers now employ a secret service devoted to security. This can grow, like the SS under Hitler or the KGB under Brezhnev, into a state-within-the-state of significant authority. The British and Americans believe that MI5 and FBI are under adequate, if remote, control by elected persons.

Security can be overdone, as the Nazis showed in occupied Europe. If you forbid people to own wireless sets, in case they listen to propaganda of which you disaprove; if you proliferate controls on movement; if you shoot when in doubt, and start asking questions later; if you execute a dozen hostages for each of your soldiers killed in a chance brawl: then you build a degree of opposition and resistance you may later regret. That generations of hostile security measures cannot cow the spirit of a nation for ever has been repeatedly demonstrated. MF.