ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Moderator) (11/11/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Tuesday, November 11, 1986 2:11PM Volume 7, Issue 57 Today's Topics: Meteorite as A-explosion First Strikes, Verifiability Launch on warning / nuclear victory metrics Eager retaliation ("prompt response", isn't that a home Launch on warning Yet more on SDI (Star Wars flawed #8-of-10) SDI Corrections on my factual uncertainties (2 msgs) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: hplabs!pyramid!utzoo!henry@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU Date: Mon, 10 Nov 86 19:42:14 pst Subject: Meteorite as A-explosion > ... Besides, the > conversion of 1 gram of anti-matter (a cube less than 1 cm on a side) > to energy would produce 9 x 10^20 ergs of energy, which is probably > enough to split the earth in two... Nothing so drastic; the erg is a pretty small unit. 1 gram of antimatter plus 1 gram of normal matter would give about a 40 kiloton explosion, as I recall. Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry ------------------------------ From: rutgers!meccts!meccsd!mvs@seismo.CSS.GOV Date: Tue, 11 Nov 86 03:36:03 EST Subject: Re: Arms-Discussion Digest V7 #51 Reply-To: meccsd!mvs@seismo.CSS.GOV (Michael V. Stein) In article <8611092151.AA18053@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> ARMS-D@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU writes: > >Subject: on the perfectability of SDI >Date: 07 Nov 86 19:45:33 EST (Fri) >From: dm@bfly-vax.bbn.com > 2) What is a likely Soviet reaction to our building SDI AND > retaining our 40,000 warheads aimed at them? The US has approximately 26,000 nuclear warheads. Of these about 13,000 could hit the Soviet Union. The Soviet arsenal is thought to consist of somewhere between 22,000 and 33,000 warheads. (Data from "Nuclear Battlefields"). >Put yourself in the shoes of a Russian leader. There is the USA, with >an SDI system that is clearly only partially effective, and will >almost undoubtedly let several hundred of your warheads through. Yet >they also have a lot of MX and Trident missiles that really look like >they're first strike weapons, plus those Pershing-2 missiles just 10 >minutes from your capital. A first strike will almost certainly involve a counter-force strike. The goal of a first strike is to eliminate the enemies ability to fight back with his military. Trident missles are simply not accurate enough for this sort of mission and shouldn't be included in this list. >...Is it cheaper >and more reliable than the options? Considering that one of the >options is a verifiable treaty reducing arms, I don't think so. Great, but name just *one* time that we have had a verifiable treaty with the Soviet Union in regards to arms control. A true verifiable treaty must imply on-site verification, something the Soviets have always rejected. They have explicitly rejected the concept in the Baruch plan, in Eisenhower's Open Sky's proposal, etc. Like just about all major US nuclear programs, SDI was started mostly because of actual or suspected Soviet work in the field. And because there is no true verification, this is the way the world works. --- Michael V. Stein Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation - Technical Services UUCP ihnp4!meccts!mvs ------------------------------ Date: Tuesday, 11 November 1986 00:32-EST From: Clifford Johnson <GA.CJJ at forsythe.stanford.edu> To: LIN Re: Launch on warning / nuclear victory metrics REPLY TO 11/10/86 19:49 FROM LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU: Re: nuclear victory metrics I suppose I would risk everything for fear that we'd get nuked out. Look, that is the problem with nukes in the first place. If you believe in deterrence, it means that that you have to be willing to promise that you will do something irrational *if* deterrence fails and war breaks out. But before any (other) first-use, deterrence hasn't failed? After first-use, I agree my case becomes weaker (though I still hold to it). But I'm adamantly opposed to operating any LOWC prior to first-use. More precisely, I see the operation of a LOWC as a form of first-use. What's your position on the first-use argument? To: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU ------------------------------ Date: 11 Nov 86 08:47:51 EST (Tuesday) From: MJackson.Wbst@Xerox.COM Subject: Eager retaliation ("prompt response", isn't that a home From Herb Lin (V7 #54): "It is precisely because. . .I judge the odds of such an occurrence to be very low that I want to be very sure that I have solid and conclusive evidence. If nuclear attack were a very likely thing, I might require less evidence." But of course the danger is that, to all appearances, at least some of the individuals most intimately involved with strategic nuclear command-and-control do *not* view a Soviet attack as a low-probability event, and that they *might* require less evidence than would otherwise be reasonable. Apropos of this whole issue, does anyone know if delayed response scenarios are "losers" in the Pentagon's strategic wargaming? (This would seem to bear on the observation made a while back by someone that LUCA [Launch Under Confirmed Attack] was promptly subsumed under simple LUA [Launch Under Attack]. This was not explained at the time; I took the comment to mean that the use of the word "confirmed" only served to emphasize the ambiguity likely to be present in a real-world situation, hence to call the concept into question. How about LUAWRRSA [Launch Under an Attack We're Really Really Sure About]?) Mark ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1986 08:49 EST From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU Subject: Launch on warning From: Clifford Johnson <GA.CJJ at forsythe.stanford.edu> I suppose I would risk everything for fear that we'd get nuked out. Look, that is the problem with nukes in the first place. If you believe in deterrence, it means that that you have to be willing to promise that you will do something irrational *if* deterrence fails and war breaks out. But before any (other) first-use, deterrence hasn't failed? After first-use, I agree my case becomes weaker (though I still hold to it). But I'm adamantly opposed to operating any LOWC prior to first-use. More precisely, I see the operation of a LOWC as a form of first-use. That's why I want to maintain an OPTION for LOW, but not a POLICY. The two ARE different; having an option means that the other guy must worry that you might, but making it not a policy means that you can avoid most of the risks. I believe deterrence to have failed when missiles are on the way to the U.S. -- and I don't want to get into the argument that sensors could be faulty. HOWEVER I make the judgment that missiles are coming, that is sufficient for the purposes of this argument. I don't see the operation of LOWC at all as a form of first use. You could argue (I would not) that it is a form of threatened first use, but that's not the same thing. ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 3 November 1986 08:06-EST From: Jane Hesketh <jane%aiva.edinburgh.ac.uk at Cs.Ucl.AC.UK> To: ARMS-D Re: Star Wars flawed #8-of-10 The Limitations of Artificial Intelligence and the Distinction between Special-Purpose and General-Purpose Systems Alan Bundy Abstract The Battle Management System (BMS) for SDI will be a huge computer program which can never be tested in a real battle but only in a simulated one. Critics have argued that it will, therefore, be inherently unreliable - reacting unpredictably to unforeseen circumstances. Can this limitation be overcome by the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, so that the BMS will react sensibly to the unforeseen? We argue that such a facility is so far beyond the capabilities of current AI technology as to be unrealisable in the development period of SDI. A Short History of AI The areas of AI that one might hope would provide techniques for coping automatically with unforeseen circumstances are the representation of knowledge and automatic reasoning with this knowledge. When it comes to automating the processes of reasoning, AI has had most success in the area of deduction, i.e. the kind of reasoning involved in proving mathematical theorems in a formal logic. Even here success has been limited to fairly straightforward theorems due to the problems of controlling the search for a proof through the explosively large space of legal steps. Forays have also been made into the areas of: uncertain reasoning, analogical reasoning, default reasoning, and a few other kinds of `plausible reasoning' - but these areas are only in their infancy. When it comes to representing knowledge, AI has had some success in the representation of properties of and relationships between simple physical objects. However, a large number of tricky areas remain, e.g. the representation of: shape, time, liquids, beliefs of others, etc, which we are only beginning to understand. In addition, there is the sheer scale of the problem. No existing AI system contains more than a minute fraction of the knowledge, especially common-sense knowledge, known to the average human. This has limited AI systems to small, self-contained domains in which fairly crude reasoning is adequate. Early AI work concentrated on `toy' domains, the most famous of which was the `blocks world' - a domain of children's bricks in which the principal action was stacking. Until the mid- 70s AI researchers were pretty depressed about this. It was felt that the initial predictions about AI progress had proved to be hyperbole, that we had only scratched the surface of the problem, and that major breakthroughs were required. This is still true. What changed the climate of opinion from depression to enthusiasm was the realisation, during the 70s, that many commercially important domains were `toy' ones in the technical sense described above. This led to the development of expert systems. For the most part, expert systems use automated reasoning techniques that were already well understood 10 to 20 years ago, and apply them to a narrow domain of specialised expertise in areas such as fault diagnosis. They are not capable of the kind of common-sense reasoning about shape and time involved in navigating a car in a busy street, nor of jumping to plausible conclusions about the intentions of an adversary, nor of using analogy to apply a wide range of previous experience to a new problem. Expert systems are special- purpose. Is Battle Management a `Toy' Domain? For an AI-based BMS to cope with unforeseen circumstances it would have to be a general-purpose system. It might have to reason about the nature, purpose and destination of previously unknown objects. It might have to reason about the intentions of an adversary, taking into account the general political situation. It might have to use analogy to cope with an unforeseen situation by adapting an existing plan. Thus battle management is not the sort of `toy' domain that lends itself to expert systems technology. This is not to say that a rule-based BMS could not be built - it could, but it would be a special purpose system not able to cope with unforeseen circumstances. One could regard the problem of detecting and reacting to a missile attack as one of fault diagnosis and correction and adapt an existing expert system shell to the task. But the resulting BMS would be subject to precisely the same criticisms about its reliability as a conventional BMS - in fact, more so. The behaviour of an expert system is inherently less predictable than that of a conventional program. Because the rules can be combined in many different ways by the inference mechanism according to the circumstances, the order of rule firing may be different from any anticipated by the programmer. This unpredictability is increased if certainty factors are used to influence the search strategy (as they usually are). There is some hope that by using logic-based rules and checking the meaning of each rule, that the program would behave correctly whatever order its rules were fired in. Such a program would serve as its own formal specification. But it would be no easier to get this specification correct than it would to correctly specify a conventional program. In fact, it would be harder, since this specification has the additional constraint of simultaneously serving as a (logic) program. Could a General-Purpose BMS Ever be Built? The objections raised above are based on current AI technology. What are the chances that new developments in AI will overcome them and make it possible to develop a general-purpose BMS? It is an article of faith among most AI workers that it is possible to understand general-purpose, common-sense, human reasoning to the extent that it can be automated, although some critics of AI (e.g. Dreyfus) argue that that can never be done. What is universally agreed is that there are some major theoretical breakthroughs required in the development of knowledge representation and plausible reasoning techniques before it can be achieved. AI Researchers have been striving to make these breakthroughs since the 50s. Progress has been made, but it is slow and piecemeal. The situation is not analogous to VLSI (say), where the basic theory is understood and hence rapid and steady improvements in size and speed can be reliably predicted, provided sufficient money is made available. New theory is required and it is impossible to guarantee results by pouring in money (*) or by any other means. Even were the breakthroughs to occur and the AI-based BMS to be built, how could we be sure that it would respond `correctly' to unforeseen circumstances? Thompson has pointed out that before we empower humans (e.g. a judge) to take decisions which affect other people we subject them to tests not only of technical expertise but also of basic humanity. The latter is usually implicit and largely assumed on the basis of a shared human experience of upbringing and emotion. That is, we tend to assume that the candidate shares a common morality, responsibility, humanity, etc, unless this is undermined by his or her actions. No such assumption would be reasonable in a computer program which did not share human experience. How could we test for it? ____________________ (*) Money is necessary, of course, but it is not suffi- cient. Conclusion Under these circumstances it would be folly to predicate the success of a multi-billion dollar programme on the timely occurrence of several major breakthroughs in AI. Information about the author Dr Alan Bundy is a Reader in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He has been a researcher in artificial intelligence since 1971 and has a major international reputation in the field. He is currently the Chair of the Board of Trustees of IJCAI Inc, the body which organises the major AI conference. He is Conference Chair of the next such conference, IJCAI-87. He is also a member of the SERC Computer Science Sub-Committee, which reviews SERC research grants in AI, and is on the editorial board of the foremost AI Journal. He has published many research papers and books in AI, including papers on its nature and methodology. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 Nov 1986 10:45 EST From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU Subject: SDI From: cfccs at HAWAII-EMH The arguements against SDI seem to want the funding cut. They want a nice slow progress that will assure no quantum jumps in technology. One that will leave plenty of money for the projects they can't seem to get funds for. By what criterion would you decide what is the proper level of funding? If you aren't against SDI R&D (notice the D stands for developme), what are you arguing about? I AM arguing against SDI D, to the extent that it violates the ABM treaty. I am arguing that SDI R should not be conducted at the level that it currently enjoys. If your real concern is that money will be wasted on elaborate shows of outdated technology, then argue that! It is not only that, though it is that. It isn't "outdated" technology, but rather meaningless demonstrations of technological fluff -- i.e., technology that isn't meaningful but that looks good to TV cameras. ------------------------------ Subject: Corrections on my factual uncertainties Date: 11 Nov 86 12:26:42 EST (Tue) From: dm@bfly-vax.bbn.com Hank Walker (Hank.Walker@gauss.ece.cmu.edu) has kindly corrected some of my factual errors in my recent postings on ``waiting a while'' and the imperfectability of SDI. First, on waiting a while. Someone had said that taking as long as 24 hours to confirm that the Soviets had attacked would be absurd, that it would be the equivalent of unilateral disarmament on our part, since the Soviets would be able to use that 24 hours to completely destroy our forces, including tracking down and eliminating all of our nulcear submarine force. I pointed out that missing just ONE of our Trident submarines would leave ~400 warheads for retaliation, and that I presumed Pentagon planners had taken that thought into account and had provided for it. Hank sent me a message correcting my numbers (in my defense, I made it clear that I was uncertain about the numbers in my original posting -- I'm not a professional at this, I just do it as a hobby): A Trident submarine carries 24 Trident I C4 missiles, each probably carrying 8 warheads. The Trident II D5 missile under development would carry 10 warheads over a longer range. A Poseidon submarine carries 16 missiles. These missiles are either Poseidon missiles, which can carry up to 14 warheads, but probably carry only 10 warheads, or C4 missiles with 8 warheads. Poseidon missiles are gradually being replaced by C4 missiles on some fraction of the fleet. ...a Trident carries 24 missiles, currently with 8 warheads each, 10 in the future. I believe these are Mark 12A warheads with 300 kilotons, same as the Minuteman III and MX. If they aren't on the C4 missile, they will be on the D5 missile. The Poseidon missile carries 10 warheads of about 80 kilotons each. The US is allowed a total of 656 SLBMs, or 656*8 = 5248 warheads. The plan is for 20 Trident and 11 Poseidon subs, out of the total of 41 allowed subs. The D5 missiles have the added advantage that their range is sufficient to hit targets from almost anywhere in the northern hemisphere or Indian Ocean, so the subs will be essentially invulnerable. I once read that the routine was that if a sub didn't hear the Moffet Field VLF stay-alive signal for three days, it would sample the air for radioactivity, and then launch against its target list for that situation. This is the US's ultimate dead-man switch. Of course all submarines have the capability of launching their missiles whenever the crew feels like doing it. There is of course the issue of civil defense evacuation by the Soviets, but if nuclear winter is true, it won't matter anyway since their first strike would probably be sufficient to cause it. So, Tridents only carry 190-240 warheads, Poseidons about the same number (hmm, I thought one of the arguments against the Trident was that, under SALT-II limits, because the Trident carried more warheads it meant we were limited to fewer platforms, meaning fewer subs for the Soviets to hunt down. I guess I was wrong. Of course, if you could put Poseidon missiles with their 14 warheads into a Trident submarine, you'd get 320 warheads on a Trident...). Nevertheless, I stand by my original assertion that missing just one submarine would result in unacceptable (even to the inventors of the Gulag) damage to the Soviet Union (read: the end of the Soviet Way of Life). After all, once upon a time (mid-Sixties, before MIRV) Robert MacNamara estimated that we'd only need a couple-hundred warheads, period. All this goes to argue that the notion of holding back our retaliation for a few days is a perfectly ``reasonable'' course of action. The second correction Hank sent regarded the Pershing II missile, which I had described as a threat to the Russian capital: Everything I have read indicates that the Pershing II missile does not have the range to hit Moscow from Germany. It can reach into the western part of Russia or the Ukraine. Oh well, so drop the Pershings as a first-strike threat. That still leaves us with the MX missile and the Trident missile, neither of which would I want aimed at three quarters of my nuclear forces and my command and control centers. Particularly if the other side has an SDI capable of mopping up what the Tridents and MXs missed. ------------------------------ Date: Tue 11 Nov 86 13:03:31-EST From: Herb Lin <LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU> Subject: Re: Corrections on my factual uncertainties From: <dm@bfly-vax.bbn.com> Of course, if you could put Poseidon missiles with their 14 warheads into a Trident submarine, you'd get 320 warheads on a Trident...). My understanding is that you can load 14 warheads onto a Trident I or a Trident II, but that we have chosen not to do so. The second correction Hank sent regarded the Pershing II missile, which I had described as a threat to the Russian capital: Everything I have read indicates that the Pershing II missile does not have the range to hit Moscow from Germany. It can reach into the western part of Russia or the Ukraine. Oh well, so drop the Pershings as a first-strike threat. Maybe. The *Soviets* claim that the Pershing II *can* strike Moscow. Maybe true, and maybe false, and maybe both. I have heard that one U.S. missile carried ballast to shorten its range in order to not count against some range limit. Besides, there are ICBM launch control centers in the Western S.U. ------------------------------ End of Arms-Discussion Digest *****************************