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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

lunarchick - 06:09pm Jun 16, 2001 EST (#5292 of 5299)
lunarchick@www.com

Raises the question, will those down the ladder appreciate the need to

BRING DOWN UNSTABLE NUCLEAR WEAPONS

rshowalter - 06:46pm Jun 16, 2001 EST (#5293 of 5299)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

They will if they're willing to check. And it seems to me that if anything requires checking, this is it.

I've been a little slow keeping my promise to gisterme to work through, in detail, how unstable the situation is -- how likely the world is to end if a single nuclear bomb goes off, for any reason, in either the US or Russia.

Partly I've been wanting to make sure I didn't distract from other things at a meeting.

I've also given some thought to a sequence I had with cookies2 a while back -- where (perhaps I was imagined it) I felt I was warned in a pretty eloquent way.

There are problems at three logical levels -- the first two largely discussed on this thread, the third much less so.

At level one, which is easiest to see, there's a risk because the systems the US and Russia have designed to assure destruction of each other are very overbuilt, and are old, and inherently unstable at the level of gross structure. At this level, Gorbachev may have said it best:

" Even an unloaded gun goes off every once in a while."

That's easy to understand. But this "gun" is NOT unloaded -- and the systems are very complex - and key patterns of checking have been impossible for fifty years. The people running the systems, these days, don't understand many of the reasons design decisions were made, in the late 1950's and 1960's -- and the world has changed. With the internet, everything that is technically complicated is more interrelated and vulnerable than it was before. That's fairly easy to understand, and I've talked about it pretty clearly on this thread --- there's a job of getting text collected and linked, but the issue is clear.

Just what's known at this level ought to make people want to check these systems very carefully-- and reasonable thought at this level should make it clear that it makes sense, just at the level of ordinary prudence, to take these weapons systems down.

rshowalter - 07:03pm Jun 16, 2001 EST (#5294 of 5299)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Level two, which I've already discussed on this thead, makes it much more terrifying in my view, and scarier the more you know about it. The assumptions about threat behavior on which these systems are based are defective - - under great stress, the systems, in human terms, are much less stable than is claimed.

That issue deals, particularly, with human response to threat. When you threaten people too much, or injure them, quite often, they fight. With any weapon at hand. It isn't a rational response -- it isn't under voluntary control -- and excessive threat is built into the system at many levels. That makes most of our arguments about the "stability" of "MAD" wrong. The issue's been discussed a good deal on this thread, and the things about it that need checking are fairly easy to check. There's a job for me to do, collecting pieces of the argument together, and linking them.

When you consider how real human beings respond to threat, and especially how soldiers trained habitually to USE nuclear weapons can be expected to react -- then it is very scary if you imagine that isolated groups of soldiers COULD fire a missile.

I think eveyone close to the missiles knows pretty well that any single silo is technically able to fire -- all the elaborate safeguards, and they are simpler and fewer than people think, can easily be over-ridden. Anyone sitting in those silos at all long has to know how. The systems were designed - predominantly using late 1950's and 1960's technology, with the primary imperative "use 'em or lose them."

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