DAUL@OFFICE@sri-unix (10/25/82)
>From TIME magazine August 16, 1982
BRUTAL GAME OF SURVIVAL
A select group of 15 U.S. Army officers went to Livermore, Calif., last year
to do what on one had done since Hiroshima and Nagasaki: set off nuclear
weapons in a battlefield situation. The action took place, TRON-like,
entirely within the circuitry of a large research computer, but the officers
sitting in front of the machine's display screens were not just playing video
games. They were in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the Pentagon's
request to test the world's most powerful combat simulator. The fate of the
earth after the fallout cleared is classified information, but it is no
secret that the sophistication of the computer program that created the war
game made a big hit with the brass. Says Lieut. Colonel Robert Crissman of
the Army's Training and Doctrine Command: "It exceeded out expectations."
The five-week session was the start of a $2.45 million Army project called
Janus, after the two-faced god that guarded Rome in wartime. Beginning next
year, the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., which trains high-ranking
officers for tip command positions, will use a copy of the Janus program as a
regular part of its ten-month curriculum. "Janus," says one of its Livermore
admirers, "is light-years ahead of any Atari game."
Conventional war games date back to the late 18th century, when they were
laboriously played with wooden blocks on colorfully painted boards. Today's
high-speed computers, with their prodigious memory banks and supersmart
silicon processing chips, can paint realistic playing fields and speed the
action up to nearly "real time." While aspects of the Janus program remain
classified, it could be described as a computer-age variation of the
children's sea game, Battleship. Janus, which is played on land, pits the
U.S. against forces modeled after the Soviets'. Two teams of players divided
into separate rooms in Livermore's Combat Simulation Laboratory. Sitting at
$100,000 battle stations jammed with the latest computer hardware, they slide
plastic "pucks" across electronic graphics tablets to command the full
paraphernalia of modern war: tanks and personnel carriers, jets and
helicopters, artillery pieces, chemical munitions and an arsenal of tactical
nuclear weapons. A few typed commands to a VAX 11/780 minicomputer conjures
up rivers, mountains and cities.
Drawing on the resources of the Defense Mapping Agency, the machine can
display in full topographical detail any 15-square mile slice of the earth,
from the Straits of Hormuz to the Falkland Islands, although the game is most
often played on the West German real estate near the Iron Curtain.
A Janus computer war typically starts with a column of Soviet tanks (red
symbols on the video screen) lumbering into sight and rolling through
pastureland toward the town of Bad Hersfeld, some 120 miles east of Bonn.
The tanks skirt green-shaded woods and head for the blue line of the Fulda
River. The Livermore programmers have lavished colorful detail on their
simulation: as the action mounts, land mines explode in flashes of white, and
helicopter symbols appear over enemy outposts. Artillery fire slashes across
the screen like a laser sword. The flight time of the shells is
preprogrammed to the millisecond; even reloading is figured in. The
computer, executing 2 million programming instructions per second, takes 20
seconds to analyze the effects of a ten-kiloton blast. Towns are reduced to
rubble. Forests erupt in flames, represented by flickering red dots.
Temperature, humidity and wind speed must be reconed with; they affect the
way fallout will blow and how fast a fireball will spread. "You get a real
feeling for the dynamics and time pressures of combat." says Lieut. Colonel
Crissman.
The Defense Department believes that the Janus program can train officers to
think more clearly about the costs and benefits of battlefield strategies.
As one retired officer puts it: "You don't learn about these weapons on the
rifle range." Certainly participants learned some pointed lessons at
Livermore. One was the tendency of even veteran offices to "go nuke"
indiscriminately. "If they were caught out of position, they would try to
retrieve the battle with nuclear weapons," says Janus Director Donald
Blumenthal, a retired Army colonel working at the California weapons-research
laboratory. One offices who let his position deteriorate beyond recovery
reached into his megaton arsenal, picked the weapon and dropped it where he
guessed the Red Army had massed. The bomb detonated in a flash of orange. A
growing white circle indicated that he had destroyed his opponent's forces.
But the weapon he chose was so powerful that it also wiped out his own
troops. His only comment: a subdued "Holy smoke." Says George Smith, one of
the program's designers: "The rapidity of casualties surprised them all."
The Army argues that such lessons are best learned will in advance of
real-life combat situations. "It's a fantastic tool for training," says
Lieut. Colonel Robert Turner, a nuclear-weapons specialist at the Pentagon.
Others are not so sure. Jerome Wiesner, former president of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and sometime presidential science
adviser, suggests that no amount of computer training will enable U.S.
generals to prevent Europe from being "turned into a big lake" if there is a
nuclear war on the continent. One young computer buff who recently used
Janus found the experience extremely unsettling: "It's all so cold-blooded.
I felt like I was looking into a coffin."
Says M.I.T. Sociology Professor Sherry Turkle, an expert on the psychological
impact of computer games: "The training could go two ways. It could have a
numbing effect, making nuclear ware more thinkable, or it could heighten the
revulsion. The computer is confronting us with something we tend to repress:
the brute fact tate we are playing with the survival of the planet."
--By Phillip Faflick Reported by Dick Thompson/San Francisco
(COPIED WITHOUT PERMISSION)rusty (10/28/82)
From: rusty how soon will this program be available on unix?