Bombs and rockets – Page 37 – a sibilant intake of breath

Two perspectives on air power and insurgency

These two articles provide contrasting views on the use of air power by coalition forces in insurgency situations, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The first is much more personal, written by a woman who spent months living with soldiers in the Afghan valley where the campaign is ongoing. It does a good job of capturing the chaos and violence being endured by coalition soldiers, as well as the psychological toll of doing so. The second is more removed and – unsurprisingly – more straightforwardly critical.

Both do a good job of setting up questions about how to ethically, legally, and effectively use air power when fighting insurgent wars. At the end, it’s pretty clear that no unproblematically ‘good’ answers to them exist.

Space-related fatalities

I never appreciated just how hazardous spaceflight really was. Everyone knows about the Challenger, Columbia, and Apollo 13 disasters. Many people know about Apollo 1. I doubt anyone reading this is aware of all of these. Soyuz 23, for instance, crashed through the ice of Lake Tengiz and had the crew saved only through an elaborate underwater rescue. Apollo 12 was struck by lightning during launch and would have been destroyed if disabled computers in the crew compartment hadn’t had backups in the rocket itself.

Of the 439 people who have been strapped into a vehicle intended to eventually go into space, 22 (5%) have died as a result. American astronauts were statistically about four times as likely to die as their Soviet counterparts, though that is partly a result of how the large crew of the Space Shuttle means a catastrophic accident kills seven people. The Space Mirror Memorial in Florida commemorates Americans who have died in the space program; their cosmonaut contemporaries are buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. No Russian has died in relation to space travel since the fall of the Soviet Union, so it is unclear how they would be memorialized now.

CIA given license to torture

President Bush vetoed legislation that would have forbidden the CIA from using certain torture techniques, such as simulated drowning. It seems a clear sign of what we have lost due to excessive concern about terrorism – the understanding that governments are the most dangerous entities in the world. While they generally lack the desire to cause mayhem that defines terrorist groups, the powers governments have are so vast that they can do great harm through simple ineptitude, or a failure to police the actions of their agents. Facilitating torture is an international crime, and for good reason. It is a shame that geopolitics ensures that none of America’s new generation of torturers will even find themselves on trial in The Hague.

Stopping this legislation ensures that a few more people will be tortured needlessly, in violation of international law and the kind of ethics that we are supposedly trying to defend from terrorism. Furthermore, I think it’s likely that decisions like this will be looked back on in thirty years time much as we now look back on using the CIA to arm Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, or help keep Pinochet in power. In the long term and in purely geopolitical terms, it will prove to be an own-goal for the United States – further tarnishing its increasingly shaky reputation on human rights and emboldening governments like China and Sudan to treat the idea even more disdainfully.

This Michael Ignatieff article, which I have doubtless linked previously, does a very good job of treating the subject of torture ethics intelligently. Henry Shue has a less convincing argument.

Pessimism and the Future Leaders Survey

Increasingly, there seems to be a strong correlation between a young person’s level of education and their level of pessimism. Arguably, this is on account of the related correlation between education level and level of interest and engagement with current events. Somebody who never watches the news or picks up a newspaper just has less to worry about.

A recent British survey has produced some numbers that support the pessimism hypothesis. The Future Leaders Survey polled 25,000 applicants to British universities. The findings demonstrate a widespread anticipation of a worsening world:

Asked about likely outcomes for humanity by 2032, the responses are gloomy to say the least. Nine out of 10 surveyed think Africa will still be starving and oil will be prohibitively expensive, and eight in 10 expect more terrorism and the effects of climate change to be hitting hard. Inequality within the U.K. and between rich and poor nations will have worsened, according to around 70 percent of those surveyed. Half expect nuclear weapons will have been used again and that the U.S. will still be in Iraq.

16% of respondents said that they expected humanity to go extinct within a century; 78% of respondents said that could only be avoided through radical lifestyle changes. Admittedly, these are people who are just starting out at university, so it doesn’t demonstrate much about the linkage between education and pessimism. It would be quite interesting to have the same group re-polled in four years time. It would not surprise me if they were significantly more dispirited the second time.

One has to wonder whether this makes today’s society an aberration. Surely, history has been full of people who never really expected the world to change, one way or the other. Periods of history have also included large numbers of people believing that big improvements were possible or even inevitable. I am not sure if the kind of apocalyptic feeling spreading through the most influential segments of the most powerful states has much precedent. One can only speculate about what the long-term consequences might be.

Big picture uncertainty

Climate change policy focuses on constant attempts to make guesses about the future: about economic development in rich states and poor, about patterns of technological evolution, about climatic responses to radiative forcing caused by changes in the gas mixture of the atmosphere. One cannot always evade the feeling that too many uncertainties are being layered. Consider, for instance, the possibility that hydrocarbon fuels will peak in world output within the next few decades. If that happened, most of our ‘business as usual’ economic projections would be badly wrong.

An even more ominous consideration relates to global conflict. When the world is generally doing well, it is devilishly hard to convince states to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions for the universal good. Imagine how hard it would be in a geopolitical environment based around rising tensions and the growing expectation of great power war. We make projections for 2100 without acknowledging that making it from now to then without such a war would be a historical aberration.

In the end, I suppose, cynicism does us little good. The vast majority of ordinary people – and of powerful people – will not believe in the disastrous potential consequences of climate change until they start to manifest themselves visibly. As such, agonizing about them just makes you more marginal to the debate that exists among those not kept awake by fear about the possibility for self-amplifying positive feedbacks in the climate system. We must do the best we can, avoid confusing engagement with the mainstream debate with genuine complacency, and hope that humanity possesses more wisdom than it has ever demonstrated before.

Natural gas and Russian politics

The results of the election in Russia yesterday are not surprising, though they are part of a very worrisome overall trend. Bolstered by high energy prices and strategic overstretch on the part of the United States, Russia is regaining some of its nastier old habits. Of course, it is unreasonable and unacceptable to hope that Russia will remain as powerless as it has been since the fall of the Soviet Union. As much as is the case with China, the question of how a powerful Russia will return to geopolitics is an interesting and somewhat frightening one.

Europe’s vulnerability to Russian control of natural gas supplies has been well demonstrated of late. Poorer Central European states are potentially even worse off in the medium term, if Russia manages to build pipelines that go around them. Turning off the heat in Kiev is unlikely when it means doing the same in Berlin. Being able to do the first without the second would further worsen the strategic situation presented to the states in the middle. I expect they are feeling pretty nervous right now, given how generally spineless NATO and the EU have been recently in the face of Russian bullying.

Hopefully, concerns about access to gas will help to advance the drive towards renewable energy in Western Europe, eventually reducing the economic vulnerability of those states to Russian machinations. Such an outcome would have positive consequences in relation to the state of the global environment, and may embolden Europe’s democracies in relation to an increasingly assertive and unapologetically totalitarian Russia.

Robert Gates posturing on missile defence

Everybody has probably heard about how the United States shot down a supposedly dangerous satellite with a ship-based kinetic kill interceptor. Now, US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates is saying that this proves missile defence works. Of course, this is absurd. Satellites follow very predictable orbits. As such, it is pretty easy to hit them with missiles. Commanders won’t have that advantage when trying to shoot down the incoming missiles of their enemies: especially since those missiles will often employ physical or electronic countermeasures.

It is also worthwhile to consider what they would be saying if this test had failed: “Of course, downing an ailing satellite is completely different from missile defence! The fact that this test didn’t succeed in no way suggests that America’s $12.8 billion per year missile program is ineffective, nor that missile defence technologies aren’t worthy of billions more taxpayer dollars.”

It’s a good thing Canada never bought into the idea.

Stirling engines in space

During the course of several past discussions on energy efficiency, the issue of Stirling engines has arisen. These machines convert temperature gradients into usable kinetic energy which can be used to drive machinery or generate electricity. According to an article in this month’s Scientific American, they have found a new use. NASA is phasing out the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) that have been used to power some space missions in favour of the older and non-radioactive technology.

RTGs work by using plutonium 238 decay to heat a thermocouple, which then produces usable current. The Stirling based system still uses plutonium decay for energy, but uses the heat more efficiently. The plutonium-Stirling combination is about 25% efficient at converting heat to electricity, compared to 6-7% for a conventional RTG. A prototype constructed by Lockheed Martin uses two Stirling engines to drive a generator and produce 100 watts of power. The unit that does so is about 1m long and 30cm wide, weighing 20kg – half as much as an RTG.

Extrapolating from space technology to more mundane uses is generally hazardous – for instance, satellites have solar panels with 35% efficiency, but they cost millions of dollars. That said, the technology does demonstrate that Stirling engines have a role to play in increasing efficiency in some circumstances.

The Shuttle shows you its belly

In order to permit an inspection of the thermal tiles that protect the vehicle from the heat of reentry, the Space Shuttle did a backflip for the cameras while orbiting at abouty 7,700 metres per second. This was done using the dual hypergolic engines of the Orbital Maneuvering System, burning monomethylhydrazine with a nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer. The BBC has a relatively low resolution video of the event.

SpaceShipTwo

Virgin Galactic – Richard Branson’s space company – has released the design of its next generation craft: SpaceShipTwo. The machine will carry passengers into the upper atmosphere after being carried to an altitude of about 15km by a larger mothership. After spending time at 110km of altitude, the vehicle will re-enter the atmosphere. While the technology is new and doubtless interesting, there is good reason to ask whether it serves any valuable purpose.

The three aims commonly described for the technology are delivering extremely urgent packages, launching small satellites, and entertaining rich people. While it can certainly be argued that manned spaceflight has not generally been a valuable undertaking, this sort of rollercoaster ride does seem like an especially trivial use of technology. For about $200,000, you get a few minutes in microgravity, the view out the windows, and bragging rights thereafter. Satellite launching could be a lot more useful, though the Virgin group has yet to demonstrate the capability of their vehicles to do so – a situation that applies equally to the idea of making 90 minute deliveries anywhere in the world.

The Economist provides an especially laughable justification for the whole undertaking, arguing:

When space becomes a democracy—or, at least, a plutocracy—the rich risk-takers who have seen the fragile Earth from above might form an influential cohort of environmental activists. Those cynics who look at SpaceShipTwo and think only of the greenhouse gases it is emitting may yet be in for a surprise.

Hopefully, they won’t become ‘environmental activists’ of the Richard Branson variety: investing in airplanes and gratuitous spacecraft while hoping someone will develop a machine that will somehow address the emissions generated.