ARMS-D-Request@MIT-MC.ARPA (Moderator) (01/06/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Sunday, January 5, 1986 6:43PM
Volume 6, Issue 10.2
Today's Topics:
See #10.1
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Date: Sat 4 Jan 86 21:52:13-PST
From: Jim McGrath <J.JPM@Epic>
Subject: The Goal of SDI
Reply-to: mcgrath%mit-oz@mit-mc.arpa
From: Herb Lin <LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
We all, including the public, would like as high an X as
possible, they would agree that losing a city or two and some
missile bases/airfields would be a lot better than losing
everything.
But that is not the goal of the SDI.
Which does not mean it should not be supported for that reason. Most
government programs have consequences (sometimes good, sometimes bad)
never conceived of in their initial purpose. That does not mean you
ignore them when evaluating the program.
I simply do not follow your logic at all. Do you want to score points
against Reagan and Company? Or do you want to discuss strategic
defense, and SDI as it is developing? I'm not interested in defending
Reagan, just developing defense and seeing that it is done the best
way possible.
Jim
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Date: Sat 4 Jan 86 22:12:56-PST
From: Jim McGrath <J.JPM@Epic>
Subject: Politicians
Reply-to: mcgrath%mit-oz@mit-mc.arpa
From: Herb Lin <LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Besides, complaints that politicians are lying do not sit well
with me. Of course they are lying. WE WANT THEM TO LIE.
Politicians who tell the truth get kicked out of office....
So you condone lying to the public as a tool of public policy?
How would you like to acknowledge that publically in a letter to
the NY Times? Don't forget to add that you support SDI, and that
truth doesn't matter when you try to justify a weapon system --
never mind what it actually does. We can say that we will spend
millions of dollars on AIDS research since that will save lives,
and spend the money instead on nerve gas, which will also help to
eliminate AIDS (by killing homosexual soldiers).
You are arguing from emotion (almost hysterically), not reason, which
I do not expect of you. I stated a fact: public officials must lie on
many (not all) issues in order to retain office. (I could have said
"evade," or just "keep quiet about" if the word "lie" hits you so hard
- I see no functional distinction.) This is one thing that everyone,
no matter what their policy perspective, agrees on (this comes from
several graduate seminars, and personal experience). I did not say
that I liked that state of affairs much. But I do not find it
reasonable to blame the politicians. Rather, the fault lies with the
voters.
Unlike many of my friends in the social sciences, I do not
concentrates on the "oughts" of the world. I focus on the empirical
evidence. Perhaps it is the scientist in me. So when I observe a
political system that punishes frank and honest talk about some issues
(usually those, like nuclear war and taxes, that are too horrible to
contemplate), I acknowledge this as a fact, and do not waste time
decrying it. My decrying it is not (to the first approximation) going
to change human nature. Thus my comment "we have to make do with what
we have."
Sorry; I believe that elected leaders have a responsibility to
tell the truth to the public, and to educate them away from fairy
tales. I would rather see precious defense dollars go to create
good anti-tank weapons; that would have some chance of improving
extended deterrence.
Come on now. Leaders can only lead where people are, ultimately,
willing to go. Just look at the nuclear freeze movement. This is the
level at which the public thinks of nuclear war when it is forced to
think.
Finally, your last sentence shows that you missed my entire point.
Congress (i.e. the people) will not budget for the necessary increases
in conventional weapons (let alone the Europeans). Ultimately it does
not matter what you or I like, it is what the people will accept. And
if they act "irrationally," then I feel we cannot just sit back and
demand that out "leaders" make them change their minds, or that the
people change their stripes. Instead we should focus on the possible
- which is, afterall, what politics is all about.
Jim
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Date: Sun, 5 Jan 86 13:18:45 EST
From: Herb Lin <LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: railroads
From: prandt!mikes at AMES-NAS.ARPA (Peter O. Mikes) at MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
The relevance also escapes me: Are you implying that NATO forces have
no capability of taking the action into the enemy territory or are you
suggesting that NATO would use air-lift rather then railroads? If you
would travel in those parts, you may find that not to be a bad choice.
Your general point is right, but note that air lift doesn't give you
large volume. For transport of many tanks, you need to go by ground.
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Date: Sun, 5 Jan 86 13:27:32 EST
From: Herb Lin <LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: Boof Review [sic]
From: ihnp4!utzoo!henry at ucbvax.berkeley.edu
> DON'T treat nuclear weapons like other weapons.
As I recall it, this is directly contradictory to Soviet military
philosophy,
which explicitly declares nuclear weapons (tactical ones, anyway) to be
just
bigger and nastier forms of artillery. The big black dividing line between
"conventional" and "nuclear" is largely a Western idea, not shared by the
Soviets much. Or so I recall; this is not an area I'm expert in. This
makes me skeptical about the book (which I have not seen yet) -- just how
aware are its authors of the differences between Western and Soviet
military thought?
Old US doctrine (~1955) said that conventional and nuclear weapons
were the same too. Recent Soviet military writing does distinguish
between C and N weapons. One of the contributors to the book is Steve
Meyer, recognized as the nation's leading expert on Sov military
thought -- his chapter on Sov nuclear policy is superb; on the other
hand, many reviewers have panned the book as a whole (but praising his
chapter).
------------------------------
Date: 5 Jan 86 13:30:33 EST
From: Hank.Walker@UNH.CS.CMU.EDU
Subject: Man in SDI Loop
Dave Parnas pointed out that we can't write expert systems to do things like
target discrimination, because we don't have any human experts in this area
(given the available sensor input). Humans can't watch everything (try
playing Defender at 10X normal speed), and so must depend on the computer
indicating when there's a problem, which brings us nearly all the way back
to square one.
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Date: Sun, 5 Jan 86 15:39:11 EST
From: Herb Lin <LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Subject: [GA.CJJ: Limited Nuclear War]
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 86 11:15:47 PST
From: Clifford Johnson <GA.CJJ at Forsythe>
To: LIN at MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
Re: Limited Nuclear War
REPLY TO 01/04/86 19:39 FROM LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU: Rejoinders
CORRECTION: The quote on "protracted nuclear conflict" was from
a 1979 Presidential Directive NSC-53; Reagan's Pentagon went
further in FY 1984-1988 Defense Guidelines (March 1982), which
outlined a comprehensive strategy for fighting a nuclear war,
and reportedly stated US nuclear capabilities "must prevail even
under the condition of a prolonged war" (NY Times, Jun.21, 1982).
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
*****************************ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Moderator) (06/09/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Monday, June 9, 1986 3:30PM
Volume 6, Issue 102
Today's Topics:
Re: A Star Wars Query
"A Star Wars Query - Alfred Beebe <BEEBE@USC-ISIB.ARPA>"
SDI countermeasures
Basis for SDI Assumptions?
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Date: Thu, 5 Jun 86 22:45 EDT
From: "J. Spencer Love" <JSLove@MIT-MULTICS.ARPA>
Re: A Star Wars Query
The mirrors on our satellites might work because they are larger, or
several satallites simultaneously focus on a single target. (The former
seems likely; the latter unreasonably complex.)
Ground based lasers that can shoot down satellites have to be in phased
arrays. Sufficient energy density (in Watts per square meter, or joules
per second per meter squared) can overcome any mirror that could protect
a warhead, but such high energy densities can turn the atmosphere to
plasma, blocking the beam, or destroy the lasers that are generating the
beam. The trick is to put lots of units in parallel, and point them all
at the same target.
A laser farm tens of meters square could focus on an orbiting mirror
several meters in diameter, and if the aiming system is good enough,
focus on a small area, perhaps a square centimeter, on the actual
target. If the mirror is to do significant aiming, perhaps it also
would be an array in the manner of the fresnel lens: a large grid of
aimable mirrors, or some more esoteric technology such as the special
reflectors discussed in Scientific American recently which can unscatter
light, and which might be steerable by electric fields in a manner
similar to liquid crystals. (If anyone actually knows about this
technology and can talk about it, please do.)
The massively cooled mirror approach can't tell the whole story because
power densities sufficient to disable the warhead in a small fraction of
a second may be needed to prevent the warhead from being able to take
evasive action (an obvious countermeasure improvement to warheads, with
all kinds of interesting ramifications). Energy densities high enough
to cause a part of a possibly mirror-coated surface to explode and kill
the warhead with the shock wave are not going to be impressed by fancy
colling systems.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1986 01:57 EDT
From: LIN@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU
Subject: "A Star Wars Query - Alfred Beebe <BEEBE@USC-ISIB.ARPA>"
From: DonSmith.PA at Xerox.COM
... there are so many weaknesses of this sort in the SDI systems proposed
thus far... that one can't help
but wonder what are the real motives and goals of the promoters of SDI.
In my view, the real goal of SDI promoters is the achievement of a
leak-proof defense against arms control.
------------------------------
Date: Friday, 6 June 1986 00:29-EDT
From: decwrl!sun!peregrine!falk at ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Ed Falk)
To: ucbvax!XX.LCS.MIT.EDU!ARMS-D-Request at ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
re: SDI Countermeasures
>
> There is an aspect of the SDI plan that I have never heard
> mentioned, that seems as though it would be a fatal flaw.
... 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.
>
No, you're not missing anything.
Dr. Robert Bowman is an alumnus of my alma mater (RPI) and
was at one time the director of "star wars" research back in the days when
it was a reasonably-priced research project. When Reagan latched onto the
idea, and started pouring billions (or is it trillions?) into the project,
Dr. Bowman quit in disgust and now tours the country lecturing AGAINST
SDI. He came to RPI about a year ago and gave a talk on the subject.
This is the gist of what I can remember.
Some think-tank or another came up with a very cheap, reliable system of
stopping russians missiles before they reach the U.S.: What you do is deploy
a soldier with a machine gun next to each Russian missile silo. When the
soldiers see missiles being launched, they empty their machine guns into
the boosters, causing them to explode.
The problems with this scheme are obvious. You can only deploy it if
the Russians let you, and they can take it out any time they want to.
Dr. Bowman says that SDI has the same disadvantages -- you can only deploy
it if the Russians let you, and they can take it out any time they want to.
The main difference is in expense.
Dr. Bowman then went on for an hour and a half explaining how the Russians
can stop SDI and how hard it is to implement in the first place.
For SDI to work, you can hit a Russian missile while it's being boosted,
while it's in flight and while it re-enters. Boost-phase intercept is the
most desireable, as the rocket is most visible at that point and you get
the warheads before they mirv -- one target instead of ten. The problem with
boost-phase intercept is that you need to penetrate the atmosphere where
the boost takes place. You need to keep a steady laser beam on the booster
for long enough to burn through the side of the rocket and ignite the
propellant. It costs billions to build a laser that can do this. It is
far cheaper for the Russians to build the boosters out of some shiny material
which will reflect the laser and/or rotate the booster as it flies so that
the heat is dispersed around its perimeter instead of being concentrated in one
spot.
SDI space mirrors must be optically perfect in order to keep a beam focused
properly. They must be on the order of 99.9% reflective so that the laser
will not destroy them. Making a booster shiny enough to not be destroyed
is a much easier task. Also, space mirrors are extremely easy to destroy.
A handfull of sand or a thimble-full of sewing machine oil put into a
retrograde orbit with the mirror will destroy it's reflective properties
enough so that the laser will destroy the mirror instead of bouncing off.
Another thing Dr. Bowman pointed out was that although SDI weapons will
be marginally effective against enemy rockets, they are very effective
against enemy SDI systems. This means that if the Russians have an SDI
of their own, they could take ours out at a moment's notice. Reagan is
either confused or lying when he says he'll share the technolog with
the Russians.
Dr. Bowman also feels that SDI is destabilizing in that it will encourage
the Russians to launch a preemptive strike if they think we are about to
deploy a working SDI system, and a violation of the ABM treaty. He also
feels that even if it is installed, it will actually INCREASE the damage
done in a nuke war. He reasons thus: Assume that a "best case" SDI system
can get 50% of the incoming missiles. For the Russians, this is a
"worst case", and military planners always try to allow for the worst case.
Thus, the Russians will double the number of missiles shot at the U.S. in
order to maintain the same damage. If we stop less than 50% (likely case),
then we wind up worse than before.
I won't take up space by discussing the rest of what Dr. Bowman said, as much
of it has already been discussed here.
--
-ed falk, sun microsystems
------------------------------
Date: Tuesday, 3 June 1986 10:56-EDT
From: bcsaic!douglas at uw-june <Doug Schuler at uw-june>
To: arms-d, RISKS@sri-csl
Re: Basis for SDI Assumptions?
I have to question two statements that were made by Bob Estell in
relation to SDI software. The first one, "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" is oft-heard. The phrase "worth having"
could be applied to a number of things that aren't being had by many
people (things like food, shelter, medical care, or safer cars). The
question of whether something is "worth having" irrespective of costs,
as if one could snap his fingers and have that thing is fine for idle
conversation but of little use realistically. The question of what is
worth pursuing and to what degree must be taken up by society at
large. The magnitude of SDI costs as well as admitted technical
dubiousness must be compared with alternatives. We can't have
everything that anybody says is "worth having."
The second quote, "That shield might save 75% of the population in a
terrorist attack, launched by an irresponsible source" deserves some
comment. The "terrorist" argument is used fairly often also to garner
support for SDI, as terrorism is a popular topic on television, etc. I am
prompted to ask from what quarter this terrorist attack would arise.
England? France? Also, I would expect that SDI would fail miserably in the
event of anything less than the full-scale attack that it was billed as
deflecting.
How does this apply to Risks? The rationale and the requirements are
the basis for a system. If these are invalid, the system will probably
be invalid. As Herb Lin said, "Politics are just requirements at the
top level."
POSTING NUMBER 2:
[Re Bob Estell's posting]
I am not sure of the facts on this but I think it is pertinent to RISKS.
What is the story on the software for the Sargent York gun? Was a "high
level" language used. If so, and the complexity still defeated the project,
it bodes ill for SDI which consists of [the logical equivalent of?]
thousands (hundreds?) of Sargent York guns launched into space. If a
high-level language was used, there is still life in the "historical"
argument described by Bob Estell.
** MY VIEWS MAY NOT BE IDENTICAL TO THOSE OF THE BOEING COMPANY **
Doug Schuler (206) 865-3228
{allegra,ihnp4,decvax}uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!douglas
bcsaic!douglas@uw-june.arpa
[The use of a high-level programming language is only part of the
problem. In many cases, deep flaws exist in the design, and
the implementation makes things only a little bit worse. In those
rare cases where the design is actually sound, the programming
language -- whether high-level or low-level -- introduces the
possibility of additional flaws, such as loss of encapsulation,
lack of strong typing, lack of consistent exception handling,
improper sequencing or atomic actions particularly in distributed
systems, lack of adequate control transfers and domain changes,
and so on. But such problems exist in ALL of the commonly used
programming languages. PGN]
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End of Arms-Discussion Digest
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