The shorter the confirmation time, the less time available for an attacker to calculate valid blocks to subvert the chain.
Nonsense. Where do people come up with this junk?
http://we.lovebitco.in/bitcoin-paper/#ch11ok you need to put that in perspective this is catchup, 51% don`t have to be in catchup. And 75% can catch up easily for 5-10 blocks over 20
In recent 51% the attacker seems to have use it in it`s favor so he try to get some block before the honest get one (as choosen block for the fork usually are when the honest chain have bad luck in the few sample I have looked at.) then make its false transaction in honest chain that he want to revert continue to race until honest is long enough for the double spend to be accepted, since he was already in front and have more power is chain is longer and then he release it invalidating 5-7 block in honest chain with a longer chain. so this can easily be automated to start when you have the advantage(fast block don't help as it should be miliseconds to have impact).
i intentionnaly remove variance and some probability to just keep average to make it easy to understand in the following explanation(simplified but still valid for around 50% chance):
Faster block means nothing in itself as difficulty to find block need to be factored to balance the real difficulty to make the catchup at 51% hash power starting 1 minutes later will take the same time in average for block every seconds the blocks every minutes. in first one he start 1 block back in seconds he start 60 block back. but difficulty to find a block in the 1 seconds is 60 times less then the one for 1 minutes. The number of block for 1 minutes should be around 50 so after 50 minutes he should catchup. for 1 seconds blocks it will be after 50*60 to catchup the 60 blocks yes the number is way bigger but the hashpower is the same the difficulty to find a block is 60 times less so still 50 minutes.
what the paper explain is that catching up 60 block for the 1 minutes will takes a lots of time 50 hours (50*60)
But faster block because hash power is high makes the attack more difficult as 51% require more hash power from the attacker. so faster then target in correct or high difficulty is a good sign. slow block the target and low difficulty means vulnerable (very slow and high diff also means vulnerable)
in fact script with less then 1Gh/s are subject to 51%, above 2Gh/s should be not a bad spot.