ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Moderator) (10/25/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Friday, October 24, 1986 6:30PM
Volume 7, Issue 39
Today's Topics:
Editorial on SDI
Soviet SDI
Re: Sandia National Lab Livermore
War crimes and "seeing the whites of their eyes"
SDI and Human Reliability
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: decvax!utzoo!henry@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 86 00:31:42 edt
Subject: Editorial on SDI
> ... The signatures were drawn from
> over 110 campuses in 41 states, and include 15 Nobel Laureates in Phy-
> sics and Chemistry, and 57% of the combined faculties of the top 20 Phy-
> sics departments in the country...
Hmmm. If a group of aerospace and laser engineers were to express an
opinion on, say, the mass of the neutrino, physicists would ridicule them.
But when Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry express an opinion on a
problem of engineering, well, *that's* impressive.
Nonsense.
Dave Parnas, on the other hand, actually *is* an expert on the subject he
has been expressing doubts about (the software problem). Although I'm not
sure I agree with everything he says, I give his views a *lot* more credence
than the people mentioned above.
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry
------------------------------
Date: Wednesday, 22 October 1986 22:35-EDT
From: decvax!seismo!prometheus!pmk at ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
Sender: Paul M Koloc <decvax!seismo!prometheus!pmk at ucbvax> Date: Oct 22 20:44:10 1986 (edt) Wed
To: arms-d
Re: Soviet SDI
Newsgroups: mod.politics.arms-d
In-Reply-To: <8610201856.AA00498@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Organization: Prometheus II, Ltd., College Park, MD 20740-0222
Cc:
Bcc:
In article <8610201856.AA00498@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> you write:
>------------------------------
>
>Date: Sun, 19 Oct 86 14:58:50 EDT
>From: David_S._Allan%UB-MTS%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA
>Subject: Soviet SDI--Some facts, please
>
> I have heard on numerous occasions that the Soviets are developing
>their own SDI-type system, but I have not seen any facts to back this
>claim.
The Soviet SDI program is classified, a sort of "Project Slavic Empire",
and it is spread over military research institutes throughout the
SU. Eugene Velikov wears a great number of hats and one of those
is "Shepherd for the SDI" program. His stature in Russian is
equal to the sum of Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Lowell Wood, George
Keyworth, Al Trivelpiece, and maybe a little Carl Sagan all rolled
up into one, and still he comes off looking like a truck driver from
Wisconsin. You will see him advising a traveling Gorbachev.
As a result, the Russian program is "physics technology R&D"
as opposed to "basic physics research". It tends to be very
successful, and fortunately for us they have published a lot of their
breakthroughs. Sort of like us and the Japanese: we have the
Noble Prize winners, they have the favorable balance of trade.
Pushing basic science without RAMMING technology just doesn't get
you anywhere in the real world.
Our program is run almost exclusively by the "primes" (the hogs
of the military welfare line) from Larry Labs to TRW, and it is
mostly all "show and tell". The "pros" tell what is "declassified"
and the anti's tell what is "they took an oath not to disclose --
this or that does not work". But have no fear, as long as the "primes"
are running the show, there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that
anything worth while will be done to get to an effective defense.
Russians are doing it, and the Americans are talking about it. At
K.P. (Krasnaya Pachra) they are working on a pulsed fusion device
to drive pulsed DEW devices efficiently, and since it is quite
compact and fires repeatibly it would be a dandy item for a
"space based" system. We, on the other hand, have decided to
deploy "now" (soon) and to hell with what is a few years down
stream that might really work and work cheaply. It's our "dreams
of the "60's" stuff (do it with fast rockets and nets)" that's
the ticket -- oh, and let's not forget those infrared beacons of the
skies, our very own horde of orbiting overheated fission reactors.
The "power" problem is the "big" one as far as the Russians are
concerned.
I have met and discussed some of this with Eugene Velikov and some
of the Russians involved, and I feel that there are many other similar
groups elsewhere. Since many publications are strongly connected
with such technology and emanate from military supported labs, I am
more than satisfied that it is very real and has been for some number of
years. Gerry Yonas "Titan Systems", San D. CA, and Dick Gullickson,
DEW SDIO, W DC, have both visited Russia, know Velikov and have visited
Russian Labs where some of the research is going on. It probably will
turn out that those doing research in specialized areas will tend to
know about the Soviet counterparts. Perhaps a letter to Al Mense,
Chief Scientist of the SDIO Washington D.C., would be the best single
source.
+---------------------------------------------------------+--------+
| Paul M. Koloc, President: (301) 445-1075 | FUSION |
| Prometheus II, Ltd.; College Park, MD 20740-0222 | this |
| {umcp-cs | seismo}!prometheus!pmk; pmk@prometheus.UUCP | decade |
+---------------------------------------------------------+--------+
------------------------------
Date: 24 Oct 86 9:25-EST
From: sam mccracken <oth104%BOSTONU.bitnet@WISCVM.arpa>
Subject: Re: Sandia National Lab Livermore
-----
Aha! I still think there are weapons stored near Sandia-Albuquerque, which
is the issue that got us into this trivial pursuit.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 86 08:56:58 pdt
From: Gary Chapman <chapman@russell.stanford.edu>
Subject: War crimes and "seeing the whites of their eyes"
Sam Wilson wrote that it seemed to him that the development of weapons
has been such that people have become increasingly distant from their
targets. He said that at one time soldiers had to hack each other to
death (by the way, it was common in battles involving only swords and
shields to have little or no casualties), and now we have progressed
to the point where we can send ICBMs around the world or drop bombs
from 50,000 feet.
Interestingly enough, the application of standards of war crime in
recent times has tended to go in the opposite direction. That is,
almost no one is prosecuted or even accused of war crime for aerial
bombardment or artillery barrages on noncombatants, and so on. But
there have been prosecutions of infantrymen-- most famously Lieutenant
Calley in Vietnam. (Technically Calley was not charged with "war
crime" but with murder; but this is the way the American Army prose-
cutes war crimes that are covered by the Uniform Code of Military
Justice--same crime, different name.) Oddly enough, there has been
some appeal by the prose- cutors in such cases to consider the case
against the accused *stronger* because "he could see the whites of
their eyes." Presumably that would mean that a B-52 pilot who might
be accused of war crimes (though it's never happened) would have a
*weaker* case because he couldn't see who he was killing.
Some have pointed out that there is something of a class bias in this
trend, since the delivery of weapons by aircraft or missile is almost
always done by officers, and of course the infantry is made up
overwhelmingly of enlisted men (and in the case of Vietnam, the last
war in which we prosecuted "war crimes," the infantry was
overwhelmingly young, uneducated, lower class and had a very high
percentage of blacks). Still others have pointed out that with the
tactics that are imposed on the infantry in counterinsurgency wars
like Vietnam--as the captain puts it in the movie Apocalypse Now--"a
charge of murder in this place is like handing ut speeding tickets at
the Indy 500."
My contention is that the deployment of autonomous weapons puts the
entire basis of war crime law in jeopardy. I imagine some jaded
people would scoff at this, believing there are no "rules in war" that
make any sense anyway. But I don't believe that. There is a
difference between war and slaughter, and the use of autonomous
weapons is the latter, no matter how accurate and how discriminating
they are. War has been for all of human history a contest of wills
supposedly backed by political conviction (although I would admit that
manwho participate in war lack that political conviction--but the
potential is always there for rebellion and desertion and mutiny,
which would not be the case with autonomous weapons). Autonomous
weapons turn what has been an ultimate contest of political resolve
into nothing more than a shooting gallery. Therefore the whole basis
of war crime law is threatened. That would seem to me to be a leap
into a tremendous abyss.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 86 17:49:02 EDT
From: reiter@harvard.HARVARD.EDU (Ehud Reiter)
Subject: SDI and Human Reliability
I was recently trying to explain the SDI computer software reliability
debate to a friend, and he asked me why I was worrying so much about
the reliability of the programs, and not at all about the reliability
of the programmers.
This seems to me to be a good point, which I've never heard mentioned
in any SDI discussion. There certainly have been cases of disgruntled
employees leaving "sleeper" bugs in programs (usually when they're
expecting to get fired), and I think in most cases the bugs weren't
found until they were triggered. SDI would seem to me to be extremely
vulnerable to this kind of "sabotage" from enemy agents who were
working as SDI programmers. The agent would certainly be able to
cause his module to self-destruct (and how much good is a laser battle
station which, say, loses its software protocol support for
communicating with sensor platforms?), and at worst he would be able
to crash the entire system.
In fact, an enemy agent almost anywhere in the development process
could cause severe problems. A compiler writer could cause his
compiler to automatically insert "sleeper bugs", a tester could
sign-off software he knew was faulty, etc.
I do think this is an important point, because all the program
development methods I've heard of assume the programmers are trying to
find the bugs, not hide the bugs, and you really would need new
"paranoid" develoment techniques.
Any comments?
Ehud Reiter
reiter@harvard.ARPA
seismo!harvard!reiter.UUCP
reiter@harvunxh.BITNET
------------------------------
End of Arms-Discussion Digest
*****************************