The Doomsday machine

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I didn’t know about this. Did you?

The Soviets were especially worried about the decision that an ailing leader like Leonid Brezhnev would have to make if faced with a warning of nuclear attack. He would have only minutes to decide, and the alert information might not be clear or certain. What if he hesitated? What if he made a mistake and issued a launch order based on a faulty warning?

The Soviet designers responded with an ingenious and incredible answer. They actually built a doomsday machine that would guarantee retaliation — launching all the nuclear missiles — if the leader's hand went limp. Now some details of the system have come to light in documents and interviews with officials who were involved. I have detailed the history and rationale of this doomsday machine in my new book. The system was in effect a switch that would allow the Soviet leader to delegate the decision about retaliation to someone else. An ailing general secretary could activate the system if he received a warning of attack, and thus might avoid the mistake of launching all the nuclear missiles based on a false alarm. Should the enemy missiles actually arrive and destroy the Kremlin, there would be guaranteed retaliation.

Originally, the Soviet Union devised a totally automated, computer-driven retaliatory system known as the Dead Hand. If all the leaders and all the regular command systems were destroyed, computers would memorize the early-warning and nuclear attack data, wait out the onslaught, and then order retaliation without human control. This system would, basically, turn over the fate of mankind to machines.

However, this idea was too frightening for the Soviet designers and leaders, and they did not build it. Instead, they constructed a modified system, quite elaborate, known as Perimeter. Instead of machines, Perimeter had a human firewall to make the fateful decision — a small group of duty officers buried deep underground in a concrete globe-shaped bunker. If certain conditions were met, including seismic data showing that a nuclear explosion had already detonated on Soviet soil, and if the Kremlin communications were down, these duty officers could launch a series of small command rockets in superhardened silos. Like robots, the command rockets would then fly across the country and issue the launch order to the intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Perimeter system was tested in November 1984 and put on combat duty in early 1985. But the Soviet Union kept this system a secret, and many features of it were not known to the United States until after the Cold War…

[Source]

On this day…

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… in 1924, two United States Army planes landed in Seattle, Washington, having completed the first round-the-world flight in 175 days.

Phineas Fogg would not have been impressed.

A portent of things to come?

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A petrol bomb was thrown at the Irish Ministry of Finance last night, causing a small amount of damage. It reminds one of the incident in which the RBS culprit, ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin, had all the windows in his elegant mansion broken. Are these incidents just cases of mindless vandalism, I wonder, or attempts to vent fury at the way the country’s corrupt and incompetent banks have been bailed out by the taxpayer? The disconnect political elites in Western democracies and their electorates seems particularly acute in relation to the way the banks have been rescued. Everywhere I go I see and hear evidence of simmering fury and resentment. I cannot believe that it won’t find expression eventually. The hope is that it finds expression via the ballot box. The fear is that it will also find more violent outlets.

America’s Last Counterinsurgent?

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As an armchair (well, Aeron-chair) General, I’ve long regarded the adventure in Afghanistan as futile, for reasons that anyone who knows the history of that extraordinary country will understand. What I didn’t expect was that a major US military figure would set out the problem clearly in public. Yet that is exactly what Obama’s appointee, General McChrystal, has done. Here’s a useful summary from Foreign Policy of what he told Congress:

McChrystal’s report describes what must change in Afghanistan to increase the odds of success. However, neither the U.S. military nor the rest of the government can hope to do much about these problems before the political clock runs out in the United States. The problems McChrystal discusses include:

1. The need to elect a president Afghans (and Americans) will accept as legitimate

2. Corrupt and ineffective Afghan governance at the national and local levels

3. U.S. soldiers’ lack of facility with Afghanistan’s languages,

4. The U.S. military’s inability to gain trust and credibility with the population,

5. The difficulty expanding the size and quality of Afghanistan’s security forces,

6. The requirement to significantly disrupt Taliban and al Qaeda sanctuaries in Pakistan,

7. The requirement for U.S. and NATO countries to accept higher casualty rates over the medium term as they attempt to protect Afghanistan’s population.

Foreign Policy‘s inference is that

McChrystal’s report will have unwittingly rendered a fatal blow to Western counterinsurgency doctrine. It will be hard for anyone to seriously recommend counterinsurgency elsewhere after it was abandoned in Afghanistan. McChrystal will be America’s last counterinsurgency general for a long while. The United States will still have to endure a long era of irregular warfare. It just needs a new military doctrine for this era, and fast.

At least the Americans are being relatively open about the fiasco in Afhganistan. (And there are voices there now muttering openly about a “twenty-year war”.) Over here there’s only official hypocrisy and psychological denial. What really gets my goat is the cynical nonsense spouted by British ministers as the list of British casualties lengthens almost by the day. We’re now in the kind of position that the US got into in Vietnam — fighting a war that we cannot win, yet (allegedly) cannot afford to lose.

The Holy Grail

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This morning’s Observer column.

The quest for the Holy Grail is generally regarded as a preoccupation of those of a religious or mystical bent. But in fact the community which suffers most from Holy Grail Syndrome is made up of geeks and early adopters who would never be seen within a mile of an altar.

For Christians, the Grail is the cup, plate or dish supposedly used by Jesus at the last Supper. For the computing community it is the Tablet, a slim, lightweight device which combines significant computing power with the convenience of a paper notebook. And sightings – or rumours – of the mythical device provoke the kind of delicious excitement so masterfully exploited by the novelist Dan Brown.

We had such a sighting last week…

How Twitter works in theory

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Very insightful post by Kevin Marks about why Twitter works.

It is said that an economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders whether it works in theory. Twitter clearly works in practice – and if you want practical advice, watch Laura Fitton's Tech talk at Google, or read her Twitter for Dummies. I've learned a lot from talking to her and others about this phenomenon, and I wanted to write about some theories that help me understand it…

Worth reading in full.

Post-Medium Publishing

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Paul Graham, who is a terrific essayist as well as a successful entrepreneur, has a new piece on Post-Medium Publishing which has some very perceptive things to say about what print publishers are getting wrong. He concludes it thus:

I don’t know exactly what the future will look like, but I’m not too worried about it. This sort of change tends to create as many good things as it kills. Indeed, the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.

The reason I’ve been writing about existing forms is that I don’t know what new forms will appear. But though I can’t predict specific winners, I can offer a recipe for recognizing them. When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.

Yep. That’s why Napster took off: people wanted tracks but the record industry would only sell them albums, because the economics of shipping plastic disks made that mandatory. Napster enabled users to get tracks, and boy did they like it. Of course it helped that the tracks were free. But if they had been reasonably priced from the outset, illicit file-sharing would have been containable.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis for the link.

The UN farce

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I can’t figure out which is more nauseating: the pathetic British obsession with the supposed “special relationship”; or the way the UN General Assembly provides despots with a platform for grandstanding. Witness Gadafi’s demented rant yesterday and Iran’s I’m-a-dinner-jacket today. Regarding the latter, there was a good piece by Simon Schama in the FT. Sample:

Not the least repellent aspect of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s reiteration, on the eve of the Rosh Hashanah Jewish holiday, that the Holocaust was a lie, was the muffled response to it by western media and governments. Statements were duly forthcoming in Berlin deploring the Iranian president’s speech, while in Washington it was left to Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, to do the official tut-tutting.

But it was as though the moral atrocity of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s speech was barely worthy of comment being, in the first place, nothing new, and in the second place, incidental to the practical dilemma of how to “engage” with him during his visit to the United Nations this week. Well, one way would be to send Mr Ahmadi-Nejad copies of the 2005 General Assembly resolution repudiating Holocaust deniers and instituting a day of remembrance on January 26 encouraging all member nations to educate their people in the genocide so that future acts of comparable barbarity might not recur.

But then the mere facts of the matter are unlikely to make much impression on a man and a regime lost in paranoid derangement. The pressing issue is how to contain the consequences of anti-Semitic fantasy and recover the moral credentials of a General Assembly that will have listened to someone in such flagrant contradiction of its own resolution…