Vint Cerf vs. Martin Hellman: How Should We Assess the Risks of Nuclear War? (thebulletin.org) 43
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a discussion between a 77-year-old "father of the internet" and a 75-year-old "father of public key cryptography".
Long before Vinton Cerf and Martin Hellman changed the world with their inventions, they were young assistant professors at Stanford University who became fast friends... More than 50 years and two technological revolutions later, the friendship between Vint and Marty — as they know each other — endures. This is despite, or perhaps because of, their sometimes different views. You see, while they do not always agree, they both enjoy a good intellectual debate, especially when the humans they sought to bring together with their inventions face existential threats.
Not long after giving the world public key cryptography, Hellman switched his focus from encryption to efforts that might avoid nuclear war. "What's the point of developing new algorithms if there's not likely to be anybody around in 50-100 years?" Hellman recalls thinking at the time... On a recent private phone call with each other, the two friends discussed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's project seeking to answer the question, "Should the U.S. use quantitative methods to assess the risks of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism?"
While both agree that the US needs to understand the risk of nuclear war, they disagree about whether a quantitative analysis is necessary.
"Quantitative estimates run either the real or perceived risk of being twisted to support whatever conclusion is desired," Cerf argues — while sharing instead an analogy he believes illustrates the risks of the 13,410 nuclear weapons currently in the world (91% divided between Russia and the U.S.)
But Hellman counters that "When the risk is highly uncertain, how do you determine who's right?" He ultimately suggests quantifying the risks would make society more fully aware of the stakes.
"I hope you will agree with either my quantitative approach or Vint's qualitative approach," Hellman concludes, "both of which conclude that the risk of a nuclear war is unacceptably high and risk reduction measures are urgently needed." But for those who accept neither approach, Hellman adds two questions:
Not long after giving the world public key cryptography, Hellman switched his focus from encryption to efforts that might avoid nuclear war. "What's the point of developing new algorithms if there's not likely to be anybody around in 50-100 years?" Hellman recalls thinking at the time... On a recent private phone call with each other, the two friends discussed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's project seeking to answer the question, "Should the U.S. use quantitative methods to assess the risks of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism?"
While both agree that the US needs to understand the risk of nuclear war, they disagree about whether a quantitative analysis is necessary.
"Quantitative estimates run either the real or perceived risk of being twisted to support whatever conclusion is desired," Cerf argues — while sharing instead an analogy he believes illustrates the risks of the 13,410 nuclear weapons currently in the world (91% divided between Russia and the U.S.)
But Hellman counters that "When the risk is highly uncertain, how do you determine who's right?" He ultimately suggests quantifying the risks would make society more fully aware of the stakes.
"I hope you will agree with either my quantitative approach or Vint's qualitative approach," Hellman concludes, "both of which conclude that the risk of a nuclear war is unacceptably high and risk reduction measures are urgently needed." But for those who accept neither approach, Hellman adds two questions:
- What evidence supports the belief that the risk of nuclear deterrence failing is currently at an acceptable level?
- Can we responsibly bet humanity's existence on a strategy for which the risk of failure is totally unknown?
If you were on the call — what would you say?
Nukes are obsolete (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: Nukes are obsolete (Score:1)
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Look at it through the eyes of the war lord and henchmen. If you have a nuke, you can tell the people with precision missiles to back the fuck off, and it just might deter them.
Re:Nukes are obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
Your model uses current constabulary wars. The lack of nation-state wars is very much thanks to nuclear weapons but they can like all wars still happen.
Tactical nukes deter large conventional invasions, the reason North Korea can do what it will. Nukes can be used on ones own territory to destroy a conventional invading force without triggering a countervalue strike, the reason China has such a small nuclear arsenal. It needs only enough to deter counterforce and countervalue strikes and obliterate a conventional force on its own territory, for example a beach head.
This horrifies the silly and ignorant, but small nuclear squabbles were proven practical by atmospheric testing. It doesn't matter if ignorant readers freak out, the adults who make military policy are well aware of what nukes can do. They also understand nukes are not practical to outlaw because power always (t)rumps words on paper.
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And make no mistake.. China's "small" nuclear arsenal is sufficient to end human civilization globally.
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Yes, but that's true for every nuclear power. One hundred nukes launched at urban targets is basically the end of civilization.
And large cities could easily take multiple nuclear hits so a half dozen nukes at 16 major cities would do it.
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Not obsolete at all, wiping out civilians, wiping out large cities is a part of war and has a long tradition going to thousands of years. We've already had one world war where that was done with nukes, we'll have some more.
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It's this kind of thinking that got the US into the Afghanistan quagmire. From the cowboy school of statecraft. Take out a “war lord” and the entire opposition would collapse. When in reality it's the US military
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The centimeter accuracy assumes the existence of GPS satellites.
GPS could be taken out by either anti-sat missiles or an EMP.
Re: Nukes are obsolete (Score:2)
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Now it is drone wars, why the hell would anyone be stupid enough to use nukes any more utterly pointless, if you want to actually win anything. Nukes are just to lose, lose everything.
Warlords, the modern way. Suppress anti-aircraft capabilities if they are a war lord they will have no long range anti craft capability, only close range (unless people are talking about resistant to imperialism countries, that is different).
So actually war lords, clusters of terrorists. Too easy in the drone era. Simply equi
Re: Nukes are obsolete (Score:2)
" Think about it, you can always mass produce more kamikaze drones, far quicker and cheaper then they can produce terrorists"
Don't count on it. There are plenty of kids the terrorists can kidnap, torture, and sexually abuse into submission to be the disposable rooks in geurilla/terror warfare.
The best option is to cut off the head and a bit lower of the snake.
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Nukes made sense when a missile had an accuracy measured in kilometers. Today, with centimeter precision, small missiles are far more effective. If you only need to take out a war lord and two or three of his henchman, there is no need to destroy a whole city.
Indeed. But a lot of people are earning a lot of money keeping this suicide option for the whole human race active. If something else does not do it, having this possibility is so damning for the human race, it is staggering. It shows we do not deserve survival.
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The best kind of debate is one you have with someone engaging in good faith, something you can generally count on with this kind of friend.
Ah, you mean like, on the Internet, right?
Very slow news day (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering no one reading this will be making policy.
Bubba and LaQueefa do not care about conventional wars in progress (unless they're participants) let alone take interest in the obscure subject of nuclear war which extremely few understand in the first place.
What's most useful is determining most likely war scenarios and understanding LIMITED nuclear war with tactical-sized warheads by small states is practical and not a threat to civilization therefore much more likely than rational actors deciding to trade their own nation to destroy opponents.
Atmospheric testing was the equivalent of a modest nuclear war and its losses were highly dispersed and so sustainable they were barely noticed. Yes, war = bad but WWII proved the losses from all conventional + nuclear bombardment sustainable. That's why the Communists and the West trained seriously to fight on the tactical NBC battlefield.
Human life is cheap because we evolved to be individually expendable and our suffering is irrelevant to survival of the species so long as we successfully reproduce. (Evolution is never for the benefit of the individual vs. the species.) Someone will eventually touch off a nuke or several, appropriate levels of horror will be expressed then the species will move on until its eventual extinction in distant or near future. In a cosmic sense it doesn't "matter", "mattering" being purely a human construct.
Biological warfare is potentially far more deadly but we neglected it in favor of military threats. Unlike nukes, the average citizen can help mitigate effects of biological agents and reduce chemical pollution. Those are far more dangerous to humanity than a few stray nukes which only destroy a city per warhead on a good day, but humans prioritize exotic ways to die.
The parent was posted because nukes are exotic and scary but mundane death is not and we don't want to consider likely mundane ways to die. We were ready for all sorts of war but not for COVID.
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Errr, there is no 'LIMITED' in nuclear war. One country sets off a nuke in anger at another country, and every other leader will go full potato with their arsenal.
Not even remotely true. The red phone on the desk at the White House and its mate on the desk at the Kremlin exist for the express purpose of preventing exactly that scenario. It was foreseen 50 years ago, and a means to prevent it established.
India and Pakistan are just itching for that 'excuse' to happen.
India and Pakistan are one of the two most likely places to have a minor nuclear exchange, with the other being Iran and Israel. Those places would be the start of your little scenario, not the continuation of it.
Personally I think there will be a nuclear exchange
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Hmm, Nazi Germany doesn't seem to have been run by "religious hardliners".
Likewise China.
And yet, those two places seem to be number 1 & 2 for atrocities in the past century. At least, if you count bodies to grade "atrocities"....
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Hmm, Nazi Germany doesn't seem to have been run by "religious hardliners".
Yeah, secular Utopian ideologies seem to be more effective at generating atrocities. Both those and religious hardliners assume that large swathes of the population are expendable, the former because the Utopia will be so much better for everyone and will last forever, so breaking some eggs is acceptable and the latter because physical life is fleeting anyway and people with wrong ideas are actually better off in the afterlife. But the Utopians tend to be more organized and efficient, and to have fewer pesk
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First off, you misunderstand evolution. At it's core, evolution is NOT driven by population-level considerations. It's the sum of thousands or millions or billions of individual choices, nearly all of them made in the selfish, self-centered interest of the individual making each choice. The population dynamics is simply the result. Dog wags tail, not the other way around.
Second, unless there's something about the interaction between nukes and the atmosphere of our planet that we don't understan
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90% of the population is dead after the first month. Transportation is mostly out, most power and water is gone, nearly all advanced manufacturing and medicine is dead. Within 10 years, 99% of the population is dead, and that's probably the favorable scenario.
Not really. The large arsenals are all in the northern hemisphere, and the way global air circulation works, very little fallout crosses the equator. The rather huge populations of South America and Africa would survive largely intact since they're neither directly targeted nor at risk of fallout, and can take steps to deal with longer term affects such as global cooling with mostly intact infrastructure. All out nuclear war is likely to kill less than 50% of humanity in 10 years.
Why should I listen to either guy on this topic? (Score:2)
I'm not saying I agree or disagree with either of their positions. But I'm unclear why I should care specifically about their opinions on this topic as opposed to anyone else's.
Just because they;re both tech celebrities and friends, I guess.
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I guess because they're both so unequivocally unqualified for the discussion that they can't be refuted, so everybody can just pile behind one or the other, and there is lots of room for additional unqualified nonsense.
The reality of the issue is that actual missile defense capabilities are not publicly known, and so nobody is going to have any idea how to assess the actual risks.
Unqualified opinions. (Score:2)
Argue what you want but neither of these people are qualified to speak on this topic.
Of course they aren't (Score:2)
Worse, most current Slashdotters haven't any idea WHY they're not qualified including the editor who posted the piece!
we live in an empirical age (Score:2)
...everyone seems to believe that EVERYTHING must be, or if it isn't, it SHOULD be, quantifiable.
That's abundantly, provably, not true.
There are many important things that are utterly unquantifiable, and insofar as any model is a clumsy representation of reality, shoving the round peg of a qualitative issue through a square hole of empiricism almost guarantees misleading results.
My point is that insisting on quantifying something that is inherently one of those items is non productive.
How would I answer? Russian Roulette (Score:4, Interesting)
I would answer with a question: "I will put a revolver with 1 bullet in it to your head. I'm going to pull the trigger once a day, every day, until you die one way or another. How many chambers do you consider an acceptably large number for the revolver to have?". Because that's exactly what gambling on the risk of nuclear war involves, and IMO it makes the stakes blindingly obvious (especially if punctuated by you taking out an actual revolver, loading a bullet and spinning the cylinder).
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Hold it to your own head, you creep.
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That is the same type of risk you take every day just living. Every thing you do involves a small element of risk - and many of them are far more likely than a nuclear war.
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Every thing you do involves a small element of risk - and many of them are far more likely than a nuclear war.
Historically speaking, all of them.
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Yes, and we manage them the same way: by deciding whether the number of chambers is acceptably large. When it's made concrete like that, though, we start to think about the cumulative probability over our lifetime instead of the instantaneous probability of it happening any given moment. Eg., the chances of being hit by a meteorite vs. the chances of being hit by a car if we step out onto a residential street without looking first. The first we ignore the risk, the second any rational person avoids doing be
Globalism made it a moot point (Score:3)
I suppose it's overall a good thing, though It's not like we've got peace (plenty of smaller wars and bush fires). I'd rather just not have a ruling class.
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...They're not going to let anyone blow their stuff up again. For the same reason there'll never be another World War...The people who start wars aren't going to let them happen because that wouldn't benefit them.
I like to think that, too. But...that's what Europe thought before WWI. That with all the trade and political networks back then, war would be "insane". I guess war is when politics goes insane.
Lurking Entitlement (Score:1)
'Can we responsibly bet humanity's existence on a strategy for which the risk of failure is totally unknown?'
There's a distinct arrogance underlying that question. The risk of nuclear war - and all of its unknowns - is not any different than all the other risks of just existing in the universe. It's the arrogance of those who take for granted all the benefits of the traditions and accomplishments of the modern world. It's an arrogance mindset that the universe exists for th
Numerical...but with a timestamp (Score:2)
The problem is that the thing you're figuring isn't a constant value, it keeps changing. Any numerical value will be out of date about as soon as you calculate it, even though you know at the time that it has very large error-bars.
OTOH, "The danger is too fucking high!" isn't a evaluation that goes stale rapidly.
MAD, nuclear winter (Score:2)
That's why the ICBMs were never fired in a conflict.
Todays "great threat" is terrorism, which has eclipsed global warfare by manyfold.
The Twin Towers were brought down by terrorists with box cutters, not nukes.