Bombs and rockets – Page 23 – a sibilant intake of breath

Don’t kill the Webb!

With the last Space Shuttle mission ongoing, people are naturally asking what the future of space exploration is going to be. It seems clear that ambitious plans like a manned mission to Mars are a non-starter in the current fiscal climate. That being said, one of the major reasons why such missions are basically off the table is because they are not very useful. It would be very difficult to get human beings to Mars and then return them alive to Earth, but it wouldn’t teach us much about the universe.

By contrast, the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to be the successor to Hubble: one of the most successful scientific instruments of all time. Much of what we know about the universe has been established, confirmed, or refined using data from that instrument. As such, it is saddening to hear rumours that the Webb telescope may be scrapped fur budgetary reasons, if NASA experiences funding cuts of a certain magnitude.

It seems to me that would be a great shame. While the Webb will cost billions of dollars, it will also actively push forward the boundary of human knowledge and give us a better sense of what the universe is like. Launching it is something that humanity ought to do, even if we are experiencing economically difficult times. Basic science is something that builds upon itself, as new data is collected and new experiments are carried out. It is impossible to know in advance what the consequences of some seemingly obscure bit of cosmology or astronomy or physics will be. For instance, who would have predicted that special relativity would one day permit the precise geographic location of inexpensive receivers, using coordinated time signals from satellites (GPS).

For the sake of the important human undertaking of understanding our universe, we should find the money for the Webb.

Ratko Mladic at the International Criminal Court

It is encouraging whenever the ICC or ad hoc international criminal tribunals manage to get their hands on someone accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Such prosecutions have the promise of producing a credible record of what took place, potentially providing some comfort to surviving victims, and perhaps somewhat improving the conduct of other political and military leaders elsewhere in the world.

Preventing accidental nuclear war

One of my biggest fears is that a nuclear war could start by accident, or as the result of a miscalculation. Some national leader could push a threat too far, an exercise could be misinterpreted, things during a conventional war could get out of control, and cities could suddenly get incinerated.

It seems quite likely that Canada’s major cities are the targets of ex-Soviet missiles spread around Russian subs and silos. We may be the targets of Chinese bombs, as well.

Two important policy objectives seem to be (a) keeping additional countries from developing nuclear weapons (b) reducing the stockpile of weapons possessed by existing nuclear weapon states and (c) building systems that reduce the chances of accidents, including permissive action links to prevent unauthorized use of bombs and delays in hair-trigger systems.

Retiring the Shuttle

This year, after 29 years in operation and two catastrophes, the American Space Shuttle program is shutting down. The Shuttle was always a hacked-together prototype vehicle, never the cheap and dependable satellite-launching workhorse that NASA seemed to promise Congress. Lots of effort and brilliance went into the thing – make no mistake – but trips to space have never been safe or routine.

The Wikipedia entry on the Shuttle details just how costly the thing was, as a way of putting objects 300 or so kilometres above the Earth:

When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost of the Space Shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch, or whopping $60,000/kg to LEO [low Earth orbit]

There are things that are worth putting into orbit at those prices – chiefly communication satellites and others designed to observe our planet and the wider universe. Human beings probably aren’t worth it, for now at least. The process of getting out of the atmosphere is perilous and costly, and there is nowhere remotely habitable to go, once you get up there.

Test for a sentient species: can you run a planet?

In the very long term, the survival of the human species depends upon developing the capability to colonize other planets. Earth is always vulnerable to major asteroid and meteor impacts, and there will come points billions of years in the future when the carbon cycle ends and when the sun becomes a red giant.

As of today, however, humanity has more pressing problems. Indeed, it is not at all clear that humanity will be able to survive the next few centuries. We continue to abuse the planet – exhausting non-renewable resources and accumulating dangerous wastes. At the same time, the world is still wired up for a Dr. Strangelove-style nuclear war, with thousands of cities incinerated with thermonuclear bombs, followed by nuclear winter.

In a way, perhaps overcoming those challenges and any others that arise in the next few centuries will be an important test for humanity. If we were to spread through the galaxy now, we would arguably be spreading as a malignancy: a species that cannot manage itself, and which brings the risk of ruin to any place it visits. If we can spend the next few centuries producing a global society that is safe and sustainable, perhaps we will have gained the maturity to carry something valuable outwards – something that better represents the potential of humanity, when compared with the messes we have produced for ourselves at this stage in history.

Commonalities in Marxist and Nazi ideology

There is an interesting passage in Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate in which he argues that the Nazi and Marxist ideologies share important ideological assumptions that partly explain why each produces large-scale human suffering:

The ideological connection between Marxist socialism and National Socialism is not fanciful. Hitler read Marx carefully while living in Munich in 1913, and may have picked up from him a fateful postulate that the two ideologies would share. It is the belief that history is a preordained succession of conflicts between groups of people and that improvement in the human condition can only come from the victory of one group over the others. For the Nazis the groups were races; for the Marxists they were classes. For the Nazis the conflict was Social Darwinism; for the Marxists, it was class struggle. For the Nazis the destined victors were the Aryans; for the Marxists, they were the proletariat. The ideologies, once implemented, led to atrocities in a few steps: struggle (often a euphemism for violence) is inevitable and beneficial; certain groups of people (the non-Aryans or the bourgeoisie) are morally inferior; improvements in human welfare depend on their subjugation or elimination. Aside from supplying a direct justification for violent conflict, the ideology of intergroup struggle ignites a nasty feature of human social psychology: the tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups and to treat the out-groups as less than human. It doesn’t matter whether the groups are thought to be defined by their biology or by their history. Psychologists have found that they can create instant intergroup hostility by sorting people on just about any pretext, including the flip of a coin.

The ideology of group-against-group struggle explains the similar outcomes of Marxist and Nazism. (p.157 paperback, emphasis mine)

To me, the key corrective to the excesses of any ideology that tries to build utopias is to recognize that human thinking and planning are flawed, and that we must respect the welfare and rights of individuals. We should not become so convinced in the rightness of our cause that we become willing to utterly trample others in order to achieve it. Even when confronted with hostile ideologies which we cannot tolerate, we should not be ruthless toward our opponents. Rather, we should consider the extent to which the aims we are seeking to achieve justify the means through which we are seeking to achieve them. We should also bear in mind the possibility that we are wrong or misled, and design systems of government to limit how much harm governments themselves can do.

Fostering cooperation

Coordination of technical standards is probably the most routine sort of international relations. Everyone can agree that it is useful when phone calls and letters can successfully operate across international borders, and that it is useful when roads, rail lines, electrical connections, and other linkages are available and standardized.

The practicality of these tasks aside, it does seem probable that they would help to foster good relations between countries. When engineers from Country X see that engineers from Country Y are a lot like them, it is plausible that they generalize that feeling into a certain sense of general commonality.

It would be interesting to see some data and analysis on the role technical cooperation has played in fostering good relations. Routine work like communication interlinkages could be one topic of study. The same could be true for more exotic undertakings, like joint space missions.

As discussed before, it is also possible that the existing level of cooperation between states could break down if the world became sufficiently unstable.

Open thread: explicitly ethnic states

It can be argued that it is fundamentally inappropriate for any state to try to have a single ethnic or religious character. It can be argued that all states should be secular and pluralist when it comes to race (however you choose to define it) or religion.

At the same time, it seems possible that a state could try to have an ethnic character without being unjust as a result. If two groups live in a region – the As and Bs – is it always better for them to both live in the secular state of Plural-Land – or might it be better to have an A-land and a B-land? Can this question be answered from first principles, or only with reference to particular historical examples?

What really matters may be the effect of the system of government on people both inside and outside the state. Thoughts?

F-35s and UAVs

A recent letter in The Ottawa Citizen makes an interesting point:

Our CF-18s don’t need to be replaced. Lockheed-Martin needs to sell F-35s right now. The window is closing because UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) technology is advancing by leaps and bounds. The F-35 is like the last word in cavalry horses in 1914. By the time we actually need CF-18 replacements, that fleet won’t have cockpits.

Is there a role for which piloted combat aircraft will always be best? Perhaps air show demonstrations. Apart from that, the wide range of UAV sensors will always trump eyeballs in the cockpit. The executive decisions of a team of controllers on the ground will always trump the snap judgments of the over-tasked pilot in the air. And finally, the performance of an aircraft that isn’t bound by human limits will always be able to trump the Top Gun solution. The only ingredient missing from UAVs is testosterone.

Perhaps this is the wrong time to be buying manned fighter aircraft, even from a purely military perspective (ignoring the question of whether the money could be better spent on non-military purposes).

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a classic spy novel, written for those who enjoy the suggestion of authenticity. Rather than indulging in the over-the-top pyrotechnics found in some spy thrillers, Le Carré’s characters are cautious and meticulous. In particular, the protagonist George Smiley is a kind of antithesis to the James Bond stereotype: fat, clad in fogged spectacles, burdened with an unfaithful wife, but nonetheless at the top of the game when it comes to counterintelligence operations in the United Kingdom.

The setting – Britain during the Cold War – permeates the book. I will admit that it is a bit amusing to read about the high drama of spies speeding along obscure motorways connecting small British cities, rather than jetting around between glamorous national capitals. At the same time, Le Carré does capture what I would expect to be the key geopolitical dynamics of the time: the superpower competition between Russia and America, with the United Kingdom in the middle in a diminished post-imperial role. Le Carré talks about how British agents were: “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.” It makes you wonder who will be elevated and who will be lowered, forty years from now.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy includes some observations that border on the philosophical. Le Carré raises the question of oversight, and the difficulty of trusting spies (p. 74 paperback) ; he explains how the wily opponent seeks not perfection, but advantage from his actions (194) ; the ways in which the false identities a person maintains actually express the person they conceal (213); how intelligence services have an incentive to puff up the competence of their opponents, to get more support for themselves (316); how “survival” is “an infinite capacity for suspicion” (337); how the essence of betrayal is to “overtly pursue… one aim and secretly achieve its opposite” (354); how a state’s secret services provide a measure of its political health (365); and how treason becomes “a matter of habit” once initial motivations become fuzzy and continuing on the same course seems the simplest option (377). The comment about enemy capabilities is especially relevant today, as gigantic state security bureaucracies justify themselves on the basis of the threat from a few dangerous malcontents hanging around in caves and radical discussion forums online.

Le Carré’s writing is full of examples of clever observation, which both appeals to the reader’s curiosity and makes the characters themselves seem more interesting and authentic. The book is also peppered with authentic-seeming espionage tradecraft, in areas like following people, transmitting information securely, sending coded signals, and handling in-person meetings. Probably technology has changed some of that since 1974, but perhaps not all that much. The paranoid world of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, in which it is unclear which of the authorities can be trusted, has many parallels with the world today.