ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Moderator) (06/17/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Monday, June 16, 1986 11:07PM
Volume 6, Issue 110
Today's Topics:
ERCS = "fail-safe" LOW?
Re: In Flight Missile Control (ERCS/MX)
Saving 5% (;-]
SDI will work by definition
Scorpions-in-the-bottle
Prisoner's Dilemma
An additional sensor problem: data fusion
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Date: Fri, 13 Jun 1986 09:17 EDT
From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: ERCS = "fail-safe" LOW?
From: Clifford Johnson <GA.CJJ at SU-Forsythe.ARPA>
Wouldn't it be reasonable to think that ERCS could receive a
single signal, so that the taped message could cancelled?
No. ERCS is meant as a last-ditch communication system, and if thigs
are that dire, you don't want to cancel.
"Some modified MINUTEMANs can
launch an Emergency Rockets Communications System (ERCS) to
provide alternative communications with the nuclear force under
*surprise attack* conditions."
This certainly would seem to imply two-way traffic.
That depends on what is attacked. If it is the C3 system that is
attacked by surprise, then ERCS can serve in its place.
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Date: Fri, 13 Jun 86 09:35:43 pdt
From: Eugene miya <eugene@ames-aurora.arpa>
Subject: Re: In Flight Missile Control (ERCS/MX)
From: Clifford Johnson <GA.CJJ@SU-Forsythe.ARPA>
> Emergency Rocket Communications Systems?
I don't know about MX (that's military space). I suspect added capabilities
in terms of EW, BMD evasion, perhaps transmitting info about the re-entry
environment prior to impact for later "stages" of an attack.
> > Again, it is the policy to neither confirm nor deny the existence
> > of destruct mechanisms.
>
> If so (do you have a reference?), it's a change in policy because
> I read congressional testimony from some years back confirming
> the points you make, and firmly stating Minuteman had no in-flight
> destruct.
I stand updated on the launch vehicle! Thanks.
--eugene miya
NASA Ames Research Center
eugene@ames-aurora.ARPA
"You trust the `reply' command with all those different mailers out there?"
{hplabs,hao,dual,ihnp4,decwrl,allegra,tektronix,menlo70}!ames!aurora!eugene
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Date: 13 Jun 86 14:53:29 EDT (Friday)
From: MJackson.Wbst@Xerox.COM
Subject: Saving 5% (;-]
In Arms-D 6.107 Robert Elton Mass writes:
"I'd like to see a brainstorm on:
(1) What alternatives to SDI could save 5% of populace, and
maybe also 5% of our way of life?. . . ."
Well, let's see. I think most Americans would agree that life in the
Soviet Union was worth at least 5% of life in the US, and I doubt that
anyone short of the extreme right-wing thinks the Soviets would
slaughter more than 19 out of 20 after a takeover.
So the answer to (1) is UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. Cheap and effective.
Easily as attractive as the President's program.
Mark
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Date: Friday, 13 June 1986 14:32-EDT
From: michael%ucbiris at BERKELEY.EDU (Tom Slone [(415)486-5954])
To: arms-d
Re: SDI will work by definition
"According to a Dec. 4, 1985 New York Times column by Flora Lewis, Star
Wars project scientists are forbidden to discuss test failures. They
are, however, free to discuss successful tests. Livermore Lab
physicist Ray Kidder was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying that
'the public is getting swindled by one side that has access to
classified information and can say whatever it wants and not go to
jail, whereas we [the skeptics] can't say whatever we want. We would
go to jail, that's the difference.'"
--Th San Francisco Bay Guardian, June 11, 1986
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Date: Friday, 13 June 1986 13:28-EDT
From: Clifford Johnson <GA.CJJ at SU-Forsythe.ARPA>
To: LIN
Re: Scorpions-in-the-bottle
> What models are you talking about?? My comments refer to what I
> thought was the Ellsberg model in "Crude Choices", and that model says
> NOTHING about the probability of escalation.
I'm talking of the RSAC system, which derives from the Ellsberg
work. The RSAC models are decision trees, embodying escalation
dynamics. They're like chess programs, with "look-aheads" for so
many moves. Ellsberg's mistake was to jump from $0 versus $100
stakes to conventional versus nuclear stakes. Besides, the balance
was vastly different in 1959, when he wrote "The Theory and Practice
of Blackmail" (RAND P-3883). The rest followed from this:
"Call it blackmail; call it deterrence; call both *coercion*: the
art of influencing the behavior of others by threats... Nuclear
weapons have one preeminent use in politics: to support threats...
my problem as a blackmailer is to ensure -- by actions that either
change your payoffs, hence your critical risk, or that increase your
expectation of punishment -- that your estimate of the actual risk
is greater than the critical risk. How to do this is, of course,
the heart of the blackmailer's art... Let us suppose, to begin,
that the numbers ... represent money payoffs. If the victim
complies, he gets $90. If he resists, he may do $10 better; he can
get $100 if I fail to carry out my threat. On the other hand, he
may do $90 worse; he will get $0 if I do carry out my threat.
"Resist" thus has the character of an "all-or-none" bet. He will
resist if he is certain that I won't carry out my threat; but he
will comply if he assigns more than some particular, roughly defined
probability to my carrying out the threat... But blackmailers too
can calculate risks -- and take them. They too can go to the verge
of war; and this fact has an important bearing on the risks of
deterrence... In the next lecture, we shall hear the *sound* of
blackmail; the words that Adolph Hitler spoke, and their echoes,
that won him half of Europe before the firing of a shot. There is
the artist to study, to learn what *can* be hoped for, what can be
done with the threat of violence."
(Emphasis in original.)
> ... it is the introduction
> of *probabilities of relatively astronomical damages* that trips up
> the models, or rather, that trips up those who would apply them
> to justify first-use.
>
> You may be able to say that certain scenarios are more or less likely,
> but lacking any empirical evidence one way or another, you can't
> assign real values to those probabilities in any meaningful way.
I think the probabilities can be argued adequately for their
"management." By adequate, I mean into legally cognizable ranges,
such as zero, negligible, nonnegligible, remote, low, substantial,
high, almost certain, and certain. On this scale, the conditional
probability of annihilation-size damages given a first-use of
nuclear weapons by one superpower against the other is substantial.
See, e.g., Desmond Ball's Can Nuclear War Be Controlled? (Adelphi
paper #169). The models might put it as low as one in ten, but
multiplying even such a low estimate by the kind of damages we're
talking about, which is then added into the utility of a first-use,
makes that utility lower than the utility of a non-first-use
decision.
> I have never seen a statement from this Administration to the effect
> that deaths of 70 M were acceptable; moreover, I don't believe it. If
> you have, please provide a citation.
My whole point is that this statement is *implicit* in the fudged
utilities. *And consciously so.*
> Utility functions *should* reflect this
> belief of ours, which is little more than a translation of "all
> men are equal."
>
> I was not clear. "Unacceptable" must be always be qualified to
> "unacceptable to whom?"
Unacceptable to that natural principle of republican government that
asserts the equality of all men, which implies that 200 million
men are worth twenty times ten million men. It is contrary to this
cardinal principle that the administration, in its models, in effect
counts 200 million men as worth twice one million men.
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Date: Fri, 13 Jun 86 17:51:35 pdt
From: weemba@brahms.berkeley.edu (Matthew P. Wiener)
re: Prisoner's Dilemma
Hmmm, I thought I had put a little bit more in my recent article than
that which actually showed up.
>Fourthly, the actual strategies and their expected value are usually
>computed in terms of actual numeric values for payoffs A-D. It should
>be obvious that the evaluation of such is not objective, nor can one
>expect them to be constant over time.
It is also highly dubious to
even use a numeric scale in the first place.
Fifthly, just long-run PD/Ch as an abstract game is subject to endless
debate among intelligent people as to what is and what is not rational
play. See, for example, the various articles in [2].
--
ucbvax!brahms!weemba Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
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Date: Fri, 13 Jun 86 19:12:17 PDT
From: Clifford Johnson <GA.CJJ@SU-Forsythe.ARPA>
Subject: An additional sensor problem: data fusion
The SDI depends on fusing information from multiple sensors into a
coherent track file. Strategic defense also depends on fusing
reports from different sensors also (e.g. as in "dual
phenomenology"). The best, indeed the only, technical description
of sensor identification and reporting that I have seen is an
article on "Data Fusion" in the 1986 Defense Electronics C3I
Handbook.
Sensors generate either track files or relatively vague "reports."
These can either be firm "sensor declarations," or probabilistic
warnings. Confirmation that sensors agree is by chi-squared test of
equality of "vectors" assuming normal, independent distributions
from each sensor, when this is possible. However, and here there
seems grave dangers of false warnings, most of the mathematics is
maximum likelihood driven. That is to say, the computers will pick
the set of track files that best fits the given data streams, which
presumes that such track files exist. This seems a "ropey"
technique to me.
The article is well worth reading, and has good diagrams. Any other
sources that treat the mathematics of sensor "declaration" and
fusion processes would be of interest to me.
To: ARMS-D@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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