Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!ucbvax!XX.LCS.MIT.EDU!ARMS-D-Request From: ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU.UUCP Newsgroups: mod.politics.arms-d Subject: Arms-Discussion Digest V6 #99 Message-ID: <8606050652.AA06349@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> Date: Thu, 5-Jun-86 01:00:00 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8606050652.AA06349 Posted: Thu Jun 5 01:00:00 1986 Date-Received: Thu, 5-Jun-86 20:37:55 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: ARMS-D@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 535 Approved: arms-d@xx.lcs.mit.edu Arms-Discussion Digest Thursday, June 5, 1986 1:00AM Volume 6, Issue 99 Today's Topics: Crummer's commentary Re: Arms-Discussion Digest V6 #87 survival/annihilation? A Star Wars Query Missle control? Re: Blue Cube article High-Tech vs. Persuasive Negotiation Space Shuttle Militarism Blue Cube article Are SDI Software predictions biased by old tactical software? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 30 May 86 15:49 PDT From: DonSmith.PA@Xerox.COM Subject: Crummer's commentary Charlie Crummer's commentary on the will to negotiate is one of the most thoughtful and enlightened statements on the subject that I have ever read. I hope he will publish it and also direct it to appropriate Administration and Congressional people. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 31 May 86 18:26:57 cdt From: Bryan Fugate Subject: Re: Arms-Discussion Digest V6 #87 I would be interested in seeing the videotape, if you can make copies. ------------------------------ Date: 1986 June 01 12:29:04 PST (=GMT-8hr) From: Robert Elton Maas Subject:survival/annihilation? D> Date: Fri 23 May 1986 23:48:57 EST D> From: Paul Dietz D> Subject: how to prevent human annihilation? D> If human extinction is a real possibility (it currently is not, even D> with nuclear winter) I disagree. With an all-out thermonuclear exchange (which any minor thermonuclear exchange whatsoever, or any major conventional war between USSR and any European nation, will quickly become) we will have nuclear winter and ozone depletion, as well as destruction of every urban area in the world. There may be a few million survivors from the initial attack and subsequent radiation exposure, but nuclear winter and ozone depletion (intense sunburning and crop-killing ultraviolet exposure) will reduce the population to those who are away from urban areas and simultaneously have a few years of food saved ahead of time. Those people will be very few unless your bunker plan is used, and it currently isn't being used as far as I know. The problem isn't that there will be zero survivors, but that the breeding population of survivors will be one here and one there and one over yonder, with all communication knocked out so they won't be able to find each other to mate and have children. After a few years they'll be too old to reproduce, and they'll live out their old ages wondering if they are the last of their species. Even if a few manage to mate, the gene pool will be so seriously reduced that even if they do away with their phobia about incest and indeed do interbreed brother with sister, father with daughter, they won't be able to resist an epidemic, instead of only those who aren't resistant dying, either everybody will be resistant or nobody resistant to some particular bug, so one disease will go unnoticed and another disease will exterminate this particular breeding family once and for all. Even if there are several breeding families in the world, each of them will be totally destroyed by some particular disease they are all susceptable to. In summary, I'm not sanguine like you are about "it can't happen to us, we can't go extinct". D> then I'd suggest building several hundred bunker/radiation-proof D> greenhouse/warehouse units at various points around the globe. There are more than several hundred thermonuclear weapons, in fact I seem to recall a number like 40,000 recently. USA bunkers will be prime targets for USSR warheads and vice versa. There's no way we can afford total resistance to thermonuclear warheads, so the bunkers will go with the cities and military bases and missile silos and CCC centers. D> The units would be designed to be sealed and would have mirrors to D> reflect sunlight to underground growing areas (or, they could have D> internal power). How can you harden them against warheads?? Either they are isolated from the enviornment (no mirrors, no sunlight) or they are vulnerable to attack. D> To guard against their being targeted they would be entirely D> nonmilitary and would be manned by multinational crews. Nonmilitary is worthless as protection. The whole idea of deterrance is "if you destroy us as a nation our last act will be to destroy your populace as much as we can". You're confusing counterforce first-strike with deterrence. In the former you hit only those facilities from which they may attack us back, to prevent counteattack. In latter you try to punish them as much as you possibly can in all possible ways you can devise. -- Multinational crews (I would like to say populace instead, sounds less military and more pleasant life situation) are a possible idea. Actually I'd like to see a wholescale population exchange between USSR and USA, so any attack on cities would be killing our/their own people. Such a massive cultural exchange or whatever program would result in enhanced mutual understand and acceptance as well as a cheaper solution than bunkers. Unfortunately it wouldn't work because the weather in Moscow is terrible (not to mention Kiev recently) and not many people from California would be willing to swap habitat. D> For the near future, building such units on Earth will be much cheaper D> than building in space. But building them in space is much more effective. You can get completely out of range of ICBMs, and if better delivery systems for weapons are built you can go to a different place in the Earth's orbit to be light minutes away from Earth, it's very easy to move a colony once it's in deep space, and if you merely change phase of orbit you don't get too hot or too cold. If we had a ring of colonies in Earth's orbit around the Sun, even if weapons could get to them, it'd be hard to destroy them all. Remember that's 93,000,000 * 2 * PI = more than 580 million miles in circumference, where the Earth is only 25,000 miles in circumference, so in terms of travel distance of warheads that's more than 2000 times as far. If we make a sphere of colonies at Earth distance from Sun but randomized all three degrees (dimensions) of freedom (two dimensions for axis of orbit, and one for phase in that orbit), it'll be awfully hard to knock them all out in one war before the survivors turn on "warp drive", not faster-than-light, just emergency scatter in random directions at high acceleration to confuse targeting methods. Although space-based colonies may be more expensive than Earth-based bunkers, they are so immensely more effective in preventing simultaneous destruction that I rate them as more cost effective as a survival strategy. -- Rebuttal welcome of course. ------------------------------ Date: 2 Jun 1986 11:45:39 PDT Subject: A Star Wars Query From: Alfred Beebe A colleague has posed the following question about the SDI: There is an aspect of the SDI plan that I have never heard mentioned, that seems as though it would be a fatal flaw. It is this: The plan is to have our lasers shooting at OUR satellites, which will be safe because they are mirrors that reflect the light to THEIR missles, which won't be safe. If we assume that we can (among all our other priorities) create mirrors that render our vehicles safe, then we should assume that they can create mirror surfaces that render THEIR vehicles safe. Furthermore, their effort on this countermeasure must be much less costly than our effort on the system as a whole. So, even on its own premises, the system won't do its job. Surely I am missing something. This seems so simple and straightforward. Is this really a refutation of the plan? Can anyone dismiss this countermeasure or give it substantial affirmation? ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Jun 86 15:28:51 EDT From: Will Martin Subject: Missle control? Ran across this in USENET's net.followup: >Remember cruise & SS20 missiles can't be stopped after launching like ICBM's. And it inspires some thought -- are our ICBM's equipped with destruction packages so that they can be destroyed after launch in the case of accidental or unauthorized launches? Do we know if the Soviet missles have this capability? If they do, is it true that smaller nuclear misssles do not have such cancellation capability? And, if our missles do have such a destroy-after-launch capacity, how far does it extend? Just in boost phase, or later? Will Martin UUCP/USENET: seismo!brl-smoke!wmartin or ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 2 Jun 86 14:52:10 PDT From: wild%oscar@SUN.COM (Will Doherty) Subject: Re: Blue Cube article Herb, This is a response from Edward Hasbrouck about your comments on his Blue Cube article. Please send any comments and questions to me; I'll forward them to Edward. Will Doherty sun!oscar!wild To: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU In-Reply-To: msg of 23 May 1986 I stand by my belief that Lockheed D-5 SLBM's "provoke the USSR to adopt a policy of launch-on-warning (at best) or of preemptive first strike (at worst)". You say, "The Soviets... CAN'T pre-empt the D-5." The can preempt deployment of the D-5 (or of any other weapon they perceive would give the US first-strike capability) by striking before it is deployed. I am scarcely alone in seeing Soviet fear that the US is about to deploy first-strike weapons as one of the most likely precipitators of a Soviet first strike. Like you, I believe that "C3 is vulnerable not by choice but by foul-up". I agree that the vulnerability of C3I (like the characteristics of many military "systems") can be attributed neither to "design" nor "rationality". Ford, in the sentence I quoted and you cite, does seem to overstate his case. But the lack of concern for C3I vulnerability, even now that it is widely recognized in the "defense community", still says something about current SIOP priorities. Thanks for the feedback! Peace, Edward Hasbrouck ------------------------------ Date: 3 Jun 86 14:40 EDT From: WAnderson.wbst@Xerox.COM Re: High-Tech vs. Persuasive Negotiation, From: crummer@aerospace.ARPA I think that Charlie Crummer's comments contain much for thought. Not that we can ignore the real or imagined threats from the Soviet Union, but we certainly can examine our own basis for strength, and our own motivations for actions. Recently I had the good fortune to hear Gene Sharp, from Harvard, give a provocative talk on Nonviolent Action, a topic that he has been investigating for 30 years. His premise is that, for many situations, there are more than the two options of violent action or passive submission. Nonviolent struggle can be very effective as a deterrent to aggressive behavior. Not that it doesn't take courage -- it may take more than simply picking up a rock or a rifle. But his point is that we should elaborate the methods of nonviolent struggle, and show their strong points and weak points, with regard to common objectives of political groups. It can only help to have more options available for the resolution of conflicts. Given more options we may even be able to improve the effectiveness of nonviolent action. Currently we all buy into the fact that violence and weapons are the most powerful arbiters of dispute. We could be surprised to find out that this is not true. And then we would be more likely to avoid violence. I fear that most of the readers of this list will think this simply naive. I feel a bit of that myself. But if Dr. Sharp is correct, then we can't lose by exploring nonviolent action as a deterrent to aggression and an aid to conflict resolution. Bill Anderson WAnderson.wbst@Xerox ------------------------------ Date: Tue 3 Jun 86 20:11:02-EDT From: Richard A. Cowan Subject: Space Shuttle Militarism The following is from the 16th volume of the San Francisco magazine "Processed World," published last month. Any comments? If you'd like more info on the magazine, a quarterly, I'd be happy to oblige. -rich "Since the Russians send up Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. quest in space has always been primarily a military one. "National security" and the attempt to gain first-strike capability have underlain most satellite developments, and are at the root of the shuttle/space/SDI plans. "The US space shuttle program is portrayed not as humanity's progress or accomplishment, but that of the Best Country in the World, the United States. As such it becomes a major prop in the spectacle of patriotism and also fits into to the historical pattern of US reliance on the rhetoric of expansion across new frontiers. "But the appeal of the space program goes deeper than militarism and nationalism. The exploration of space holds a powerful fascination. Decades of science fiction literature, film and art, combined with 25 years of space shots, have fired the popular imagination. As space proponents convincingly argue, curiosity and striving to understand the universe are essential to our humanity and creativity. The problem arises when fantasies and the desire for knowledge serve to justify or obscure the contemporary reality of the space exploration. Many who support the space program close their eyes to its militarist function, proclaiming the main purpose of NASA to be the pursuit of pure knowledge -- despite the by now well-known fact that funding for the shuttle was only attained by NASA's compromises with the Pentagon, compromises not likely to be undone as long as the government remains intact. With the installation of the Navy's head of space operations at the helm of NASA, and joint appeals from NASA and the AIR Force for a replacement shuttle, the real purpose is clear. "Like the H-bomb designers of the 40's, the scientists and technicians who create the necessary technology are either unaware of, or psychologically detached from the results of their labor. While erecting the essential building blocks of global annihilation, technicians enjoy the thrill of making their toys work and comfort themselves with fantasies of utopian space colonies where the conflicts and problems of life on Earth will be left behind. "The transcendence of social problems through "escape" into space hooks remarkable numbers of people on space exploration. Establishing space colonies or homesteading on some heretofore unknown hospitable planet, would require giant leaps in scientific understanding. And yet space enthusiasts advocate moving into space as a panacea for Earth's problems of overpopulation and pollution -- a solution requiring far more sophistication than would have been needed to avoid the problems in the first place. Let the Earth and most of its inhabitants rot, and let us smart, future-looking (probably white) people move on to clean living in space! In the model colonies problems that abound on Earth miraculously disappear; families live happily with problems no more serious than the daily squabbles of Dagwood and Blondie. "Less grandiose but equally fantastic proposals include flushing our toxic and radioactive wastes into space. One hopes that the shuttle explosion has shaken our faith in such technical fixes, but it probably hasn't. Under the guise of ecoconsciousness, these suggestions actually represent a "logical" extension of the late-capitalist use-it-up-and-throw-it-away mentality, in this case applied to the whole planet. We may have turned the Earth into a dangerous garbage dump, but there's plenty of room out there, so let's just move on. "The problem is not that the space exploration inspires flights of fantasy or awakens the desire for knowledge, nor even that it is a waste of resources. If fewer resources were spent on devising new means of destruction, and on making wasteful, redundant commodities and packaging, there would be plenty of wealth and time available for space exploration. But not a space exploration which is a patriotic smoke-screen for a military campaign. Un-peopled space probes have already provided us with much of what we've learned about the universe -- the Voyager mission through the solar system and the probes of Venus and Mars. Many astronomers claim that manned expeditions are a terrible waste at this point, since perhaps ten robot space shots could be financed by the cost of one peopled shot. "The gnarly problems of living with humans and nature will never be solved by sending a few hundreds or thousands off in metal containers floating in the vacuum of space. In the meantime, understanding how people come so readily to see this techno-fantasy as a solution to these problems may help us to penetrate the logic of the social system that got us into this mess!" - by "Lucius Cabins/ Maxine Holz" ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1986 00:24 EDT From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU Subject: Blue Cube article From: Edward Hasbrouck They [the Soviets] can preempt deployment of the D-5 (or of any other weapon they perceive would give the US first-strike capability) by striking before it is deployed. That is not the usual meaning of the term "pre-empt". You are talking about PREVENTIVE war, such as Japan executed on the US at Pearl Harbor. I am scarcely alone in seeing Soviet fear that the US is about to deploy first-strike weapons as one of the most likely precipitators of a Soviet first strike. But you haven't made an argument to that effect. To do so, you have to argue that the Soviets would not now be deterred by the existing arsenal. But the lack of concern for C3I vulnerability, even now that it is widely recognized in the "defense community", still says something about current SIOP priorities. Why? Moreover, there is NOT a lack of concern for C3 vulnerability; C3 is indeed one of the programs that the current Administration wants to exempt from Gramm-Rudman cuts. ------------------------------ Date: Friday, 30 May 1986 14:09-EDT From: To: arms-d@xx.lcs.mit.edu, risks at sri-csl.arpa Re: Are SDI Software predictions biased by old tactical software? I'd like to offer an minority opinion about SDI software; i.e., I infer that most RISKS readers agree with the assessments that "... SDI will never be made to work..." At some personal risk, let me say at the outset that SDI, as ballyhooed in the popular press, may never work - certainly not in this decade. But I believe that our projections of the future are inextricably linked to our past. So let me share some observations on Navy tactical software as of 1979. Much of the OLDER tactical software: Was written in assembly language, or CMS-2. Powerful languages like FORTRAN and C were not used. Was implemented by people who may not have ever sailed or flown in combat. Was not well defined functionally by the end users, for lack of "rapid prototyping" tools. Was written before modern notions like "structured programming" were used. Was "shoehorned" into very old, small, slow, unsophisticated computers (no hardware floating point, no virtual memory, 4 microsecond cycle). "Froze" the modules, instead of the interfaces. Carriers ran tactical software on machines built of early 1960's technology (germanium diodes). They were remarkable computers for that era, having almost the power of an IBM 7090 in a refrigerator sized box. They severely restricted software development. If replaced, tactical software could be written in several languages, not only Ada (DoD's choice), but also FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, C, etc.; the goal is to use standard languages appropriate to the task; and to incorporate modules, and support libraries, already developed and debugged elsewehere. ------ Turning now to the more common arguments, they seem to be: (1) COMPLEXITY; i.e., there are too many logical paths through the code; (2) HISTORY; i.e., no deployed CCCI program has ever worked the first time. The complexity argument leads one to wonder HOW the human brain works. It has trillions of cells; each has a probability of failure. Some failures are obvious: we forget, we misunderstand, we misspeak; etc. But, inspite of these failures - or because of them - we SATISFICE. Even when some go bonkers, the rest of us try to maintain our sanity. Similarly, one errant SDI computer need not fail the entire network - anymore than one failing IMP need crash the entire ARPANET. The historical argument leads to an analogy. Suppose that after World War II, President Truman had asked Congress for an R&D program in medicine, to treat many of the physical wounds of the war. Doctors would have pointed out that lost limbs and organs were lost, period. But the progress in the last 25 years changed that. Microsurgery, new drugs, artificial joints, computer assists, including one system that bridged a damaged spinal cord, reinterpreting nerve signals so that a paraplegic could walk again. The "complexity" and "historical" arguments even interact. Peter Denning observed years ago that the difficulty of understanding a program is a function of size (among other things). He speculated that difficulty is proportional to the SQUARE of the number of "units of under- standing" (about 100 lines of code). Old tactical software, in assembly language, tends to run into the hundreds of thousands of lines of code; e.g., a 500,000 line program has 5000 units of understanding, with a diffi- culty index of 25 million. That same program, written in FORTRAN, might shrink to 100,000 lines thus only 1000 units of understanding, thence a difficulty index of one million. That's worth doing! The medical analogy uncovers another tacit assumption in the SDI argument; neither pro-SDI nor anti-SDI debaters have dealt with it well. It is the "perfection" argument. A missile defense is worth having if it is good enough to save only 5% of the USA population in an all-out nuclear attack. That shield might save 75% of the population in a terrorist attack, launched by an irresponsible source; this is far more likely than a saturation attack by a well armed power like the USSR. As bleak as this prospect is, the facts are that if an all-out attack were launched today, whether by malice, madness or mistake, by either side; and the other side retalliated in full force, the human race would be doomed by fallout, and by nuclear winter. ----- I am NOT saying that we have the answers within our reach, much less our grasp. I am NOT saying that SDI "as advertised" will be made to work ever, certainly NOT in this decade; I am saying that if we don't try, we won't progress. We know at the outset that SDI will be flawed, though perhaps someday acceptable. That's the status of most of today's high technology; e.g., air traffic control systems, hospitals, electronic banking, telephone systems, mainframe operating systems, ARPANET, ad infinitum. But my point is that we must not shun the challenge to TRY to improve the software in the field, and the tools used to design and build and test it. That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater! Nor can we extrapolate the successes of the 1990's from the common practices of the 1970's. Rather than deplore the past, we must deploy the technology now developed in Bell Labs, MIT, IBM, Livermore, and other leading computing centers. When I worked in tactical software ('68 - '79), we were about a decade behind the state of the art; e.g., we got high level programming languages, symbolic debuggers, well stocked function libraries, and interactive tools for writing and compiling, in the late '70's; we patterned them on systems at MIT and Berkeley of the late '60's [MULTICS and GENIE]. I wonder just how much of the mid '80's technology is available to tactical developers? Are any tactical computers now offering the architecture and performance of say a CONVEX C-1? Is Prolog available to tactical program- mers? Has the "Ada environment" developed the full set of Programmer's Workbench tools that UNIX [tm] offers? and it is widely available? ----- The disparity between what scientists know MIGHT be done, and what poli- ticians are claiming is a dilemma; how can we pass through its horns? Tell the SDI proponents in DoD and Congress that: (1) A perfect shield is a vain wish; and (2) much progress CAN be made, if RDT&E is done reasonably; and that (3) the real threat is from terrorists, not Russians. I think it very likely that we cannot deter SDI, at least not before '89; and even then, Americans will insist on "adequate defense" - even as they complain bitterly about the cost of it. So I suggest that we not try to block SDI, but rather that we refocus its energies and emphases. With luck, we can build a system that will work marginally. It will cost billions; weigh several tons; and consume megawatts of power. In other words, it will be confined to land sites only - not ships, and certainly not space. Thus, it will be fit ONLY for defense. It will be impossible to attack with it. It will become a sort of "Maginot Bubble." Then we could sell the plans to our NATO allies, and to members of the Security Council, including the USSR and China. They won't be able to attack us with them. Perhaps such a demonstration of goodwill would cool the arms race. The longterm economic benefits to the USA are attractive; we could sell systems to nations that wanted them, but couldn't build their own. Some of the revenue could be plowed back into R&D in a many fields, not just defense. The software engineering progress made in behalf of SDI probably would apply immediately to many other computerized systems. Think about it. Bob ------------------------------ End of Arms-Discussion Digest *****************************