arms-d@ucbvax.ARPA (06/25/85)
From: The Arms-D Moderator (Harold Ancell) <ARMS-D@MIT-MC.ARPA> Arms-Discussion Digest Volume 3 : Issue 50 Today's Topics: Nuclear Terrorism & Doomsday Machines Star Wars Software Terrorism Star Wars Arms Control Detecting Nukes -- Is It Possible ? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 23 Jun 85 18:30:51 pdt From: Phil Lapsley <phil%ucbarpa@Berkeley> Subject: Nuclear Terrorism A book which covers this subject, as well as many other ones relating to nuclear weapons and power, is "The Curve of Binding Energy" by John McPhee. It is a sort of biography of Ted Taylor, a theoretical physicist who worked on bombs at Los Alamos -- Taylor is quite concerned about the possibility that terrorists could build a nuclear weapon. If anyone knows what Taylor is up to these days, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Last I heard he was running his own company, IRT (something like International Research Technology), but that was about 1972 or so. IRT does nuclear safety consulting, I believe. Phil Lapsley (...!ucbvax!phil; phil@Berkeley.ARPA) ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 23 Jun 85 23:44:02 EDT From: Herb Lin <LIN@MIT-MC.ARPA> Subject: Nuclear Terrorism & Doomsday Machines From: Wayne McGuire <mdc.wayne%MIT-OZ at MIT-MC.ARPA> From _The New York Times_, 6/22/85, p. 28, by Richard Halloran: Specialists on terrorism and nuclear arms say that terrorists could obtain nuclear explosives with relative ease and that it may be only a matter of time before they do so.... In a paper prepared for a conference here on nuclear terrorism, Mr. O'Keeefe asserts that smuggling nuclear explosives is not difficult. ``A very powerful device will fit into a small trunk and, properly disguised, would be much easier to handle than a bale of marijuana, to which our borders are virtually transparent,'' he says. All of this is true. However, the problem is getting the nuclear explosive, not transporting it. Terrorists can get the bomb either by buying it, stealing it, or making it. We can't stop any nuclear power from selling one (or giving one) to someone, but I think the nuclear powers are responsible enough to refrain from this one. The purpose of Permissive Action Links is to keep a stolen bomb from going off (it gets disabled when the wrong code is punched in). Finally, bombs are damned hard to make, even if the raw material is (relatively) easy to get. Mr. O'Keefe, author of the book ``Nuclear Hostages,'' an examination of nuclear war and nuclear terror, says, ``I believe that the greatest threat to civilization today is the prospect of a terrorist-implemented nuclear explosion.'' In my view, this is just nonsense. I believe that this is the most likely possibility for a nuclear bomb to be used, but to believe that it would mark the end of civilization is absurd. It does NOT threaten civlization in the way that a 10 gigaton war does. (By the war, Nuclear Hostages is not particularly compelling. O'Keefe makes several wrong statements in it, and is not very convincing about politics, strategy, or military affairs.) Mr. O'Keefe's remark, that ``a very powerful device will fit into a small trunk and, properly disguised, would be much easier to handle than a bale of marijuana, to which our borders are virtually transparent,'' seems to undercut a comment made a few months ago on Arms-d (was it by Herb Lin?) that a small nuclear crazy state would find it difficult, if not impossible, to strike out in desperation and rage at the entire world. I don't remember making that claim, but I believe it. A small nuclear crazy state could not strike at the entire world -- only the US and the SU can. They might strike at someone, but not everyone. Perhaps we should be worrying a good deal more about the potential behavior of small crazy states and groups, especially those motivated by religious extremism and apocalyptic belief systems, and somewhat less about the plans and actions of the superpowers. One nuclear detonation will change the world, but it won't destroy all of us. I am worried about nuclear terrorism, and even believe in pre-emptive strike to eliminate it, but I repeat, the main problem is 10 gigatons and no way of crontolling them. ------------------------------ Date: 24 Jun 1985 0654-PDT From: CAULKINS@USC-ECL.ARPA Subject: Star Wars software - Jacky piece in Alantic In the June "Atlantic" there is an article titled "The 'Star Wars' Defense Won't Compute" by Jonathan Jacky, rsearch Assistant Professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Some quotes: "...DoD is now subordinating computer science to military needs as completely as nuclear physics, aeronautics, and rocketry were subordinated in the 1940s. An unprecedented flow of DoD dollars is intended, in the Pentagon's words, to 'push' and 'pull' the nation's computer scientists into working on ' carefully selected military applications' ... The Pentagon admits that 'the magnitude of this national effort could represent a very large perturbation to the university community'... DARPA's intent to delegate to computers the authority to fire missile interceptors was reiterated by Keyworth and by Robert Cooper [head of DARPA], before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April of 1984. As reported by the Seattle Times they testified that the proposed system would need to be triggered on extraordinarily short notice. 'Who's going to make that decision ?' said [Senator Paul] Tsongas. 'We don't know,' said Keyworth. 'By the year 1990, it may be done automatically.' Later, according to an Associated Press account, 'Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del, pressed the issue over whether an error might provoke the Soviets to launch a real attack. 'Let's assume the president himself were to make a mistake...,' he said. 'Why ?' interrupted Cooper. 'We might have the technology so he couldn't make a mistake.' ' The underlying assumption seems here seems to be that with refinements and elaborations the computers within warning-and-launch systems could replace human observers and decision-makers - whose judgements do not now depend completely on the correctness and reliability of those computers. Experience suggests that this is a fundemental misconception, potentially a mortally dangerous one. ... DoD is proposing the most difficult programming efforts yet attempted. According tp the department's own estimates, the Star Wars programs alone will comprise about ten million lines of code. DoD ... promises that the programs will 'operate reliably, safely, and predictably.' In fact nobody knows how to develop such programs. As programs grow, it becomes disproportionately more difficult to ensure that they are correct. A ten-thousand-line program is much more difficult to debug as a one-thousand-line program, because the pieces may interact in subtle ways. Further, when more programmers must be put to work for a longer time, there are additional opportunities for misunderstandings. As Alan Borning explains about today's large programs, 'Usually there is NOBODY who understands the entire system completely.' ... however conscientious and thorough the testers [of the programs] may be, they cannot test a program's performance in contingencies that they cannot foresee. As a result, [start italics in original] all large programs contain undiscovered errors and omissions that come to light only after prolonged experience in actual use. [end italics] ... it is impossible to find all the bugs by analysis alone - the program must be tested under actual conditions. ... As for missile defense, Ira Kalet, a University of Washington researcher in medical applications for AI, asks, 'Do we understand and have experience with nuclear warfare ? Do we want to gain this experience ? ' " ------------------------------ Date: 24 Jun 85 12:10:22 EDT From: Hank.Walker@CMU-CS-UNH Subject: WSJ article on SDI The real problem with the Wall Street Journal article is that it focusses exclusively on lasers, particle beams, etc. Computers aren't even mentioned. This isn't surprising since most of the debaters are physicists. I have yet to meet a computer scientist who has the faintest idea of how to write 10M lines of reliable real-time code. In a nine page article in the June Physics Today, the SDI chief scientist gave battle management only one paragraph, and simply stated that much of the software would have to be written and debugged by machine, and exhaustively tested. This is probably true if we want a reliable system, but no one knows how to do it. The software problem seems like the weakest part of SDI. The physicists at least have demonstration systems of lasers, etc. The article also stated that a "go, no go" decision would be made in the early 1990s. Given the rate of improvement in software engineering, I doubt that we'll be able to say anything more about the software then than today, even with things like the Software Engineering Institute. Apart from political issues, why waste tens of billions on development when decades of basic research lie ahead? ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Jun 85 13:43:21 EDT From: The Moderator, Harold Ancell <HGA@MIT-MC.ARPA> Subject: Quanity of Code Does anyone have any idea what DARPA is planning on doing with 10 million lines of code? That strikes me as a completely excessive quanity; perhaps some dreamers really are planning on taking men completely out of the loop, something I really doubt we'll ever do. One thing to remember when considering the undoubtly large quanity of code to be written: while it is clear that the battle management code can't be given a real test (which is a strong argument for having men in the loop to correct problems in real time) the code for specific weapons can be fully tested ahead of time. If you doubt this can work, remember that the space shuttle didn't blow up. And please don't bring up the initial syncronization problems they had. A SDI system won't be \that/ closely coupled; I would think they'd do something like "ZapSat 57, take out all the missles rising from rocket field FOO, and tell 58 if you have any left over. ZapSat 58, get those from ...." ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Jun 85 13:43:21 EDT From: Jeff Miller AMSTE-TOI 4675 <jmiller@apg-1> Subject: Terrorism Reply to Mr McGuire: I can agree with the contention that more needs to be understood by the American public concerning the Near East- but that has nothing to do with the question of what comprises uncivilised behavior. I believe you take cultural relativism perhaps a bit too far. You bridle at my description of Nabih Berri as a thug and a terrorist, and you repeatedly refer to him as a moderate. Yes he is a moderate, insofar as the Amal goes. I suppose any Shiite terrorist who threatens the lives of innocent hostages only after somebody else does the dirty work of siezing them can be considered a moderate. When it comes to terrorism I dont give a damn how moderate, conservative, or whatever a thug is within his own cultural context. If the nations of the world can't decide what constitutes civilised behavior in absolute terms we might as well hang it all up. - By the way, concerning the use of the word "thug"; I consider terrorists the lowest of all human beings- I would love to express my true descriptive feelings about this man, but decorum on a public medium prevents me. As far as I'm concerned, the only people anywhere with a legitimate complaint at my use of the term to describe Berri are- thugs. I sincerely doubt that the government officials you cited are as convinced of Berri's honorableness as you seem to think. What has been said is that the U.S. holds him *responsible* for the lives of the hostages. My reading of this is; "We know you and some other hard to manage murderers are holding our citizens. You decided to milk this incident for whatever vicarious esteem you thought you could get out of it, so our sights are on you. If anything happens to our people you'd best change your name to Cohen and find a deep, dark hole." At this stage of the game I don't advocate the use of force against the terrorists- this situation seems to have the hallmarks of being solvable. But lets not kid ourselves. This man Berri might be educated, articulate, and disarmingly concerned about our people's safety. But no matter how wonderful he is, he is holding the hostages under threat of death. That is terrorism, period. Terrorism is not justified under any excuse- save me the alligator tears about the terrible conditions and injustices which prompted Berri to become the leader of a terrorist army. If we start excusing such behavior due to real and perceived injustices where are we left? With all of the problems involved in trying to build a counter-terrorist policy, balancing the need to save hostages against future security, and other hard questions, the last thing needed is for the public, inspired by the media, to make romantic heroes out of thugs. --Since everyone from the KKK to TASS likes to take a shot at the Israelis, I'll put in my $.002. Yes, the Israelis invaded Lebanon, and the results were disastrous for them. They should never have stayed. Should they have invaded? I believe so. While we sit on our pampered American butts, the Israelis are at war. A large scale invasion into a neighboring geographic entity with no coherent government to counter terrorist groups the size of conventional brigades and divisions is reasonable to me. Should they have taken those Shiite men prisoner while withdrawing? No, I don't believe so. But to compare their intentions, to release the prisoners gradually ( I challenge you to show me a report by even the most irresponsible of journalists that the Israelis ever threatened to kill these men if demands weren't met.) to the intentions of the poor, wronged Amal terrorists, still hot and tired from the hard labor of massacring their Palistinian brothers- No sir, your cries of "foul" in comparison are exceedingly weak. Is Ariel Sharon the mad-dog war criminal you make him out to be? He is a hawk. He is insufferably obnoxious. He made a tactical blunder which led to the massacre of Palistinians by Lebanese Christians. Is he a terrorist? Would he kill innocent people in cold blood to prove a political point? Berri would. Maybe if Sharon would you'd be sympathetic to him too? J.MILLER ------------------------------ Date: 24 Jun 1985 0651-PDT From: CAULKINS@USC-ECL.ARPA Subject: Star Wars arms control Senator Gore* recently proposed a scheme for bringing Star Wars into the arms control process. It's clear that research into Star Wars technology cannot be adequately verified; what can be verified is testing in space. Both the US and USSR maintain extensive detection and tracking systems for keeping track of objects outside the earth's atmosphere; any attempt to position and test Star Wars type things (mirrors, lasers, rail guns, etc.) should be fairly easy to detect. It should not be hard to write extensions to the existing ABM treaty controlling Star Wars component testing in space; such treaty propvisions would go a long way toward preventing the arms race in space toward which we now seem to be heading. * - Gore proposed it in a recent Op Ed piece in the New York Times; I can't put my hands on it right now. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 24 Jun 85 08:38 CDT From: Mike_Linnig <linnig%ti-eg.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> Subject: Detecting Nukes -- Is it possible ? Folks have talked about the danger of nuclear weapons being smuggled into the country as easily as drugs are. It seems that I have heard of devices that the U.S. Government has that can detect the inherent radiation that these devices generate. I think it was in the "we've placed a nuke somewhere in NY City" type scenerio. The device would be flown over the city and could confirm that there was a bomb down there somewhere (perhaps even locate it). Can anyone confirm that such detectors are possible, or that they exist Could we not ring our border with them, to prevent the smuggling of nukes into our country ? -- Mike Linnig ------------------------------ [End of ARMS-D Digest]