War by computer
Powers, Thomas
my feelings are over there, waiting for evaluation or contact. The self, seen as an object among other objects, a thing we can handle and deal with, is a bad idea. Unfortunately, the self seems...
...The fear of an accidental war runs deep, with good reason...
...Unfortunately, the self seems to be all we have, especially after faith in everything else has gone: "I feel (good or bad), therefore I am...
...As President Kennedy said during the Cuban Missile Crisis, "There's always some SOB who doesn't get the message...
...Presumably the Russians would do the same...
...Such a commander would have to be pretty determined to push through a successful launch on his own say-so, but, in theory at least, he couM do it...
...The answer is no...
...The international system, in short, is inherently no more stable than it has been at any other time in the last century or two...
...Our feelings are our contact with the self-whatever that is...
...I can't think of a single war which has begun as the result of a genuine accident...
...In the event of a major attack'-that is, in the event various sensing sYstems pick up the launch of many missiles and feed the information to SAC's computer--SIOP will go into effect...
...No one wanted war in August, 1914, unless it was a handful of Serbian nationalists, but the Great Powers went ahead anyway, when they might have gone back...
...The Air Force protested the movie on/the grounds things didn't work that way, the B-52s required a positive go order and would automatically turn back without it, but that didn't detract one whit from Failsafe's impact...
...JOHN OARVEY Of several minds: Thomas Powers WAR BY COMPUTER OOPSI I REALLY MEANT TO PUSH BUTTON B i lF YOU'LL think about it for a minute, you'll see why it makes sense to fight a nuclear war by computer...
...Since the United States and the Soviet Union can both deliver thousands of warheads, and since launch-to-target time can vary from 9 several hours down to three or four minutes, and since the results of the first half of the war logically ought to determine strategy in the second half, the job is simply too big and complicated for anything like a traditional commander...
...Of course the computer sounded the alert, jet interceptors scrambled in the United States and Canada, and the men deep underground at Minuteman control panels had an anxious few minutes wondering if the moment had arrived to turn the brass key...
...Programmers make mistakes and computers do too, sometimes of an eerie, other-worldly kind...
...Sentiments of that sort, at any rate, are not hard to find, and technical considerations necessarily reserve a certain autonomy for the men in control of submarinelaunched missiles and tactical nuclear weapons in Europe...
...That is too bad, but she felt that she should work at providing g~xl self-images...
...Reaction time is so short there is little margin for error...
...there are many safeguards against this and other possible errors and within six minutes, according to the Pentagon, the NORAD computer was pacified, Whether SAC's computer was prodded to the ready with SIOP we do not know...
...An con ago a meteorite perhaps fifty feet in diameter left a crater the best part of a mile wide in Arizona, and something devastated a large corner of Siberia back in 1907...
...Would a similar catastrophe on earth trigger a spastic nuclear reaction...
...Buddhism calls our sense of an enduring self an illusion...
...Nations often go to war against their better judgment, or with lightheaded disdain for the consequences, but that is not what we mean by accidental...
...It was described, as a "mechanical error," which suggests that somebody pushed button "A" instead of button "B...
...If there is anything unanimous in most religious traditions it is the belief that you have to dispense with the self to see the world as it is: A solid sense of self, a self-image, is (like new cinnamon-colored hair) a brittle and silly thing to walk into the world wearing, whether you feel good about it or not...
...A solid sense of self is an idol, according to the desert fathers...
...In such a situation China would hope to get us involved, and we would [tope to stay out of it...
...A religious educator told me that the children and adults she worked with suffered from poor self-images...
...what we want to be is what we are, say the est people, and the problem is finding out what we really want...
...I disagree...
...This makes sense, but it also raises questions about computer reliability...
...What if a sizable chunk of nickel-iron from deep space should land on downtown Washington some hot August night...
...Hitler was apparently no less surprised by Britain's declaration of war in defense of Poland than Britain was herself...
...Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union are conducted by traditional diplomacy...
...Both sides have been sober and cautious, for the most part, but they have found no way to deal with each other but by military gesture, political alliance and verbal warning...
...I love my new cinnamon-colored hair," she says, nearly dissolving with pleasure, "because it lets me berne...
...The United States has so far resisted a policy of launch on warning, despite its obvious military advantages, precisely because it increases the danger of accidents, as well as the danger of miscalculation...
...The fact is it has all been worked out on paper and turned into software called the Single Integrated Operating Plan, or SlOP for short...
...Strangelove...
...The word "fallsafe" refers to the rnilitar}, command and control procedures which are intended to prevent a nuclear war from starting by ac.cident...
...It was possible for Nazis to feel good about themselves--this was the feeling encouraged by The Triumph of Will...
...The crew of the lone B-52, convinced that at last push had come to shove, was determined to do its duty...
...No one seems able to think of a better approach...
...It was an awful cinematic moment, when you realized nothing could be done...
...Worry about accidental war--and we are bound to hear more of it following the recent NORAD computer mishap--is beside the point, because it does not address the real cause of wars, which is not the blind working of fate, but the myopic working of men with arms...
...It is stupid and, given the times, inevitable...
...Earlier this year China invaded Vietnam despite stem warnings from Moscow, It is not inconceivable that Moscow might have followed its warnings with action, and that China might have found itself at war with Russia...
...in some way they are criteria for judging the importance of what we live through...
...Of course Kdbrick was pushing things farther than they are ever likely to go, but a residual popular distrust of the political sophistication of generals lingers all the same...
...An ordinary pair of binoculars will show you what meteorites have done to the moon...
...After disasters reporters stand around the grieving survivors with microphones, and the first question is always, "How did you feel...
...THOMAS POWERS Commonweal: 680...
...It is not clear, in fact, that anyone in a position of power is even trying...
...Feelings impress us as being more substantial than anything else...
...A similar catastrophic accident was at the heart of Stanley Kubrick's Dr...
...On a television commercial a woman roars toward me with an expression on her face which would be alarming in any real social circumstance...
...An ordinary crew of American boys, half cowboy and half bank clerk, determined to do and die because there would be nothing to come home to anyway...
...But that's as far as it went...
...Those rigid men with their crewcuts and knifeslash mouths and narrow-eyed suspicion of the Russkies seem frail vessels for the awful authority of the bomb...
...We presume that the self is something we can work on, polishing it into the shape we like...
...Not long ago--on the morning of Friday, November 9--a computer made a mistake at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado...
...Military commanders at sea, or in garrison on distant borders, have always exercised a great deal of local discretion, but I can't think of one who has slipped his mooring and successfully pushed his country into war...
...The Pentagon may protest all it likes that no general or admiral has any such authority, but the truth is they have something close to it, and respected civilian strategists have worded that some brigade commander in Germany, or some Naval captain in a Trident submarine off Vladivostock, might take it into his mind to stand up straight and let 'em have it, because he thought the president was caving in...
...Self, as a criterion, has a way of forcing everything else out of the picture...
...The Pentagon has thought about this a good deal--one hopes the Russians have, too--and there is very little chance of anything except a nuclear attack being perceived and iesponded to as a nuclear attack...
...The consequences of impetuosity are too great for any other approach...
...But the public is hard to reassure on this point, 7 December 1979:679and it is quick to fear that things might somehow slip out of control...
...fighter planes was sent after the B-52 over the Arctic, but they were too late, and one by one they ran out of fuel and nosed down in strange silence toward the pack ice...
...A squadron of U.S...
...There a loony Air Force general named Jack D. Ripper, convinced the Russians were poisoning the American water supply, ordered the planes aloft and Slim Pickens rode the fatal bomb out the bomb-bay door as if it were a Brahma bull...
...That's the image which sticks with me...
...As soon as the initial error was identified an order went out telling the B-52s to head for home, which they all did, with one exception...
...In the film a nuclear alert was triggered by something trivial and unexpected--a flight of geese, weird atmospheric effects over the Arctic, something of the sort--and a flight of B-52s carrying bombs was routinely started on its way to Russia...
...This fact suggests that the extravagant worry over accidental war is really only a kind of flinching...
...The apparent detonation of a nuclear device by an unknown party offthe coast of South Africa last month only emphasizes the difficulty of keeping track of something which might fit comfortably into a steamer trunk...
...Other fears of accidental war center on the strategems of terrorists or provocateurs, who might choose to trigger a war for their own purposes...
...Brezhnev is no Hitler, but neither was Kaiser Wilhelm...
...I think we are better off with a less complete scaffolding...
...Now we worry less about what we should do than about how we should feel...
...It has worked so far, but it is no different from the methods used to maintain the peace during the first half of the century...
...Mechanical error" is far from being the only possible sort...
...Genuindy deliberate wars seem to be limited to the attack on weak powers by strong powers--Japan's invasion of Manchuria, say, or Italy's of Ethiopia...
...Worrying about accidental war makes sense, but it tends to obscure the much greater likelihood of a war beginning in the traditional manner, as the result of a political crisis which no one could find a way to settle...
...Even the Second World War was backed into...
...It sounds far-fetched but it could happen...
...Generally, Great Powers go to war because they've got themselves in a pickle...
...The cause of the mistake is unclear, because the Pentagon isn't telling...
...A personality which took this too seriously would finally be insulated from anything outside itself...
...The effect, at any rate, was to feed information from a routine wargame tape into NORAD's computer in such a way that the computer thought a Russian submarine in the North Pacific had launched a handful of missiles toward the United States...
...In the event we couldn't pinpoint the source we would probably just sit tight, jittery and alert, and wait to see what happened next...
...People in the Pentagon worry about such possibilities, and over the years have developed means of establishing whether sudden local disasters are nuclear disasters, and what caused them...
...What the plan is we don't know, but it has been programmed into a computer in the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command deep underground near Omaha, Nebraska...
...In other words, I am what I want to be--that's the best way to be, and it means feeling good about myself...
...A vivid image sticks with me from a movie of the early 1960s caUedFailsafe...
...What better way to force our hand than to simulate a Russian attack on the United States...
Vol. 106 • December 1979 • No. 22
