ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU.UUCP (07/03/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Thursday, July 3, 1986 10:51AM
Volume 6, Issue 117
Today's Topics:
Administrivia
What's New with SDI
Re: Having an influence from within the system
Re: Effect of Counterforce Strike
Re: "Let every woman"
Treaty Compliance
SDI
Eliminating the ICBM threat
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Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1986 09:39 EDT
From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: Administrivia
To: arms-d-request at BRL.ARPA
Please get rid of AI.MAYANK@MCC.COM.#Internet
To: arms-d at lll-crg.ARPA
Please handle the following:
----- Transcript of session follows -----
>>> RCPT To:<ota@s1-a>
<<< 551 User not local; please try <ota@S1-B.ARPA>
550 ota@s1-a... User unknown
Thank you.
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Date: Tue, 1 Jul 86 10:29:35 pdt
From: Steve Walton <ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu>
Subject: What's New with SDI
WHAT'S NEW, Friday, 27 June 1986 Washington, D.C.
3. STAR WARS RESEARCH WILL BE CUT far below the President's
budget request of $5.4B in versions passed by the Armed
Services Committees of both houses of Congress. The House
panel outdid the Senate, recommending only $3.4B compared to
$3.95B for the Senate. But, when the bills go to the floor
of the two chambers next month, a move is expected in the
Senate to further reduce the figure. Any difference must
then be resolved in conference.
Robert L. Park (202) 429-1946
American Physical Society
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Date: Wed, 2 Jul 86 13:18 EDT
From: Jong@HIS-BILLERICA-MULTICS.ARPA
Subject: Re: Having an influence from within the system
I seem to recall Martin Luther King scoring significant successes
by working within the system (civil disobedience) rather than
outside the system (violence).
It's a fantasy to expect all people to put their beliefs ahead of
their personal welfare, but imagine what would happen if every
engineer and scientist (and secretary and administrator and
driver and summer intern...) refused to work on Star Wars
research, citing personal belief that such a system was
unworkable and counterproductive?
In reality, there must be some level below 100% refusal at which
the research effort would break down. Whether we will ever see
such a level of "employment disobedience" is an open issue, and I
suspect a doubtful one.
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Date: Mon, 30 Jun 86 14:04:22 PDT
From: wild@SUN.COM (Will Doherty)
Subject: Re: Effect of Counterforce Strike
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 1986 17:36 EDT
From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: Inquiry / Effect of Counterforce Strike
What damage would an all-out counterforce attack on US
land-based missiles, with no accompanying countervalue attack,
do to populations and the economy?
Recall that a counterforce attack would include attacks on things
other than missiles. With that caveat, the answer to your question
is:
silo attacks alone 2.4-15 M dead
full-scale counterforce 13-34 M
on all US strategic nuclear
targets
>From International Security, Spring 86: Consequences of "Limited"
Nuclear Attacks on the US, page 35, 36
I think this response is misleading. What kind of deaths are we talking
about? Is this "immediate" deaths, or long-term deaths? What kinds of
short- and long-term effects are taken into account? It is not simply a matter
of whether the attacks have targets other than missile silos, the question
is much broader than that. No need to go through all the details of
nuclear winter again, but isn't that danger also a possibility here?
Will Doherty
sun!oscar!wild
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Date: 2 Jul 86 12:34:09 PDT (Wednesday)
From: Hoffman.es@Xerox.COM
Subject: Re: "Let every woman"
In sending Ellen Bass's poem "Let every woman," Will Doherty lamented
the lack of a feminist viewpoint in most arms control discussions,
including ARMS-D. I hope others agree with his wish to encourage more
diverse contributions.
Another perspective not often seen is an explicitly gay one. Here's one
from 'The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues' by Lorenzo W.
Milam (Mho and Mho Works, San Diego, 1984). Milam is gay and a crippled
survivor of the 1950's polio epidemic. His book is autobiographical,
and this excerpt is taken from the final few pages.
-- Rodney Hoffman
------------------------------------------------------
.... The perverts! Stalin and Nixon and de Gaulle and Heath and Dulles.
Those proto-pederasts who take our young, strip them to their cream-soft
skin, stuff them in dun-colored uniforms, put rifles in their hands, and
send them out to destroy their own.
O you perverts! Eisenhower and Molotov and Tito and Beria and that
gimpy Christian Herter. All of them so full of hate for the boy-within
that they push them out into the mud of Ypres, Inchon, Iwo, Irun: to die
there, dying in the green rot of national idiocy. Those old geezers
with their withered shanks and melon-moon bellies: so envious of the
young and the brave that they send them forth, under a frazzled banner
marked "Glory!" and turn children, the innocent babes, into Unknown
Soldiers, to moulder under marble.
The ultimate perversion is not that I have loved, or wanted to love, or
thought of loving, Salvadore and Jose and Spicer and Randall. No: the
ultimate sin is that I should feel wrong, dirty, guilty for so doing --
and thus create in all of them equal feelings of wrong, foisting off on
them my own grievous sense of guilt. All the while I am wrangling others
with my guilt, Mao and Adenauer and Franco are conspiring to destroy the
young by the brigade, by the army, by the nation. Strip them bare, and
instead of flowering their tender bodies with kisses, forcing them (gun
and bayonet) to slash and brutalize each other. !Ay, que maricones!
"What they should do," I think, "is to let us *real* queers run the
world for awhile. Enough of these fake perverts!" We would put an end
to all this killing. Would we fruitballs send the young of clear eyes
and downy cheeks into some mass murder scheme in Korea, Stalingrad,
Viet-Nam, Pakistan, Algeria? Fat chance! The only soldiers we would
permit into the field would be over forty years of age; and there would
be therein a full quota of presidents, party chairmen, senators, prime
ministers. Let them and the caudillos and the representatives and the
governors and the commissars take out their rapine on each other! Leave
us boys alone, in the golden shadows, where we belong.
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Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1986 19:40 EDT
From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: Treaty Compliance
From: DonSmith.PA at Xerox.COM
... The other side has to be confronted with the
evidence of the violations; if they refuse to comply, even when
threatened with abrogation, then the treaty is no good.
But the fear is that the US will never threaten abrogation, because
the treaty is worth keeping "on balance". I have some sympathy with
that point of view, but it begs the question: what do you do about
incremental violations? If you abrogate the treaty, you lose ALL its
benefits. If you respond "proportionately", you are also violating
the treaty.
I'm not trying to defend proportional violations. I'm just saying
that this is a major point of concern for me, and I'd like some
discussion of it.
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Date: 30 Jun 1986 15:20-EDT
From: dhm at sei.cmu.edu
To: RISKS-LIST:, risks at sri-csl.arpa, arms-d@xx.lcs.mit.edu
Re: SDI
[This message is being forwarded for Richard S. D'Ippolito (rsd@sei.cmu.edu)
whose machine does not yet have ARPAnet access; replies temporarily to
dhm@sei.cmu.edu]
The SDI should be evaluated on several, I believe, criteria. Please let me
try to be brief and state several assumptions (which not all of us may hold):
() We have a defense need (implicit function of the government).
() The perfect defense is one that is never tried.
() The Soviet Union is our strongest enemy.
Given these, we can view the SDI in several ways (sorry to condense):
() If the Soviets are against it, it must be good for us, i.e., it's a
political diversion and keeps them from spending more time on sorry ventures
like Afghanistan.
() It doesn't have to work -- it's successful if no enemy tests it.
() If it causes our enemies to spend a lot of time and resources to match
it, then the diversion of their resources from their people can de-stabilize
the government through the rise of dissent and unrest.
Now, don't we need to include issues like that in the evaluation of any
defense? I'm certainly as unhappy as anybody about wasted tax dollars, as I
pay to many of them now. Also, I would like to live in a peaceful world
(read risk-free), too, but it just isn't going to happen. I would like all
engineers (I'm one) and scientists to take the high side of the debate to
the public -- that we work our butts off to make things as risk-free as
possible and that we are willing to discuss and quantify (where possible)
the magnitude and probabilities of the risks.
In Great Britain, they talk about these things to the public all the time.
Here, only the insurance companies know. For example, in building a chemical
plant, the calculations of the magnitudes and probabilities of a life-
injuring or -destroying accident and the resulting cost (yes, they put cold
numbers on them -- your medical insurance company already has the value of
your arm listed) is factored in along with all the other costs to determine
the proper design and location of the plant in economic terms.
It is totally unrealistic for us to put infinite values on human lives (I
didn't say life) because that's when we conclude that everything must be
perfect and risk free. A perfect example of this kind of reasoning can be
seen in the FDA's treatment of hazardous substances. Have you notice that
the allowable limits of these substances always decreases to the limits of
measurability as new measuring instruments are devised, even in the absence
of direct risk at those levels which are now orders of magnitude below the
levels accepted as harmful? Where do we stop? In more concrete terms, I was
unable to attend a lecture on this subject: Is a program with a known and
predictable error rate of one wrong answer in 10,000 executions useless?,
but the subject did intrigue me.
--- Richard S. D'Ippolito (rsd@sei.cmu.edu)
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie-Mellon University
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Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1986 10:39 EDT
From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: SDI
From: dhm at sei.cmu.edu
The SDI should be evaluated on several, I believe, criteria. Please let me
try to be brief and state several assumptions.
() We have a defense need (implicit function of the government).
() The perfect defense is one that is never tried.
() The Soviet Union is our strongest enemy.
These assumptions follow from another, and in my mind, more basic
premise: we want to maintain our way of life free from external
coercion. This more basic premise can lead to your set of assumptions,
or to different sets of assumptions. For example, it could
lead to the assumption that a reduction in tensions is a sensible
thing to do, which is not mentioned in your set. Of course, I don't
think you intended your list to be complete, so I am just adding to it.
Given these, we can view the SDI in several ways (sorry to condense):
() If the Soviets are against it, it must be good for us, i.e., it's a
political diversion and keeps them from spending more time on
sorry ventures like Afghanistan.
Maybe true and maybe false. If you are my enemy, and you start
drilling a hole in your side of the boat, I'm sure going to start
complaining. I'd think you'd be well advised to listen to me under
those circumstances.
() It doesn't have to work -- it's successful if no enemy tests it.
But what keeps them from testing it? The threat of retaliation.
That's what we have now! That means you have to make an evaluation of
why SDI is a better thing to do given all of the other options if you
say SDI is the way to go.
() If it causes our enemies to spend a lot of time and resources to match
it, then the diversion of their resources from their people can
de-stabilize
the government through the rise of dissent and unrest.
Maybe this is good, and maybe this isn't. A time-honored way of
rallying the people behind you in time of internal crisis is to
provoke a war. Do you really want to push the Soviets into that kind
of corner?
...Is a program with a known and
predictable error rate of one wrong answer in 10,000 executions useless?
It depends on what you use the program for and how often you run it.
For some things, a 1/10,000 chance of failure is quite acceptable.
For others, it is quite tolerable. It depends on what depends on that
wrong answer.
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 3 Jul 1986 10:44 EDT
From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: Eliminating the ICBM threat
From: Paul Schauble <Schauble at MIT-MULTICS.ARPA>
The latter statement is a position with which all TECHNICAL analysts
agree: a perfect system is impossible. But the POLITICAL debate has
been cast in terms of "Do you want to defend yourself or not?",
"eliminating (NOT reducing) the threat of nuclear ballistic missiles"
and "the immorality of threats to kill innocent civilians".
I'd like to suggest that these two positions are not incompatable.
Consider battleships, for example. Modern air power provides a good
defense against battleships. Not perfect. If a fleet were to sail up the
Atlantic coast shelling cities, they would be sunk, but not before
inflicting considerable damage.
I'd bet that given a fleet of Soviet battleships sailing up to the
coast, the SAC could eliminate ALL of them, especially with nuclear
weapons.
As to building an SDI this good, I used to believe that it was clearly
possible. I still believe that all of the technical problems, including
software (my field) are solvable with only engineering effort and no new
theory required. I no longer believe that this system is buildable.
Then it is a question of technical feasibility. If you like, I will
amend my statement to a NEAR-perfect system is impossible. The
statement stands.
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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