Category: Bombs and rockets

Military matters and state security: the hard-edged kind of international relations

On Operation Ivy Bells

Finally the men were ready to crawl out the outer hatch. In the control room, McNish could see them walking what seemed a space walk. Only barely lit by their handheld lights, they cut a ghostly path through the murky water to the [Soviet] communications cable [in the Sea of Okhotsk]. Once there, they began using pneumatic airguns to blow debris and sand away from the wire. As soon as it was clear, the men started to attach the tap, a device about three feet long that held a recorder filled with big rolls of tape. Off the main box was a cylinder that contained a lithium-powered battery. A separate connector wrapped around the cable and would draw out the words and data that ran through. The tap worked through induction. There would be no cutting into the cable, no risk of an electrical short from seeping seawater.

…

Bradley saw the next step, and he saw it clearly. He wanted to tap as many of the lines as possible, and he wanted to plant a device that could record for several months or even a year, a device that would keep working in Okhotsk even when Halibut was docked at Mare Island. His staff contacted Bell Laboratories, whose engineers were familiar with undersea phone cables and began designing a much larger trap pod. Just like the smaller recorder Halibut carried on her first trip, this new device worked through induction, but this tap pod was huge. Nearly 20 feet long and more than 3 feet wide, it weighed about 6 tons and utilized a form of nuclear power. [Probably a radioisotope thermal generator.] It would be able to pick up electronic frequencies from dozens of lines for months at a time. Halibut could plant the tap one year, then go back and retrieve it the next.

…

When the new tap was finished, it looked like a giant tube that had been squashed some from the top and welded shut at the ends. The device was crammed with miniature electronic circuits and had the capacity to record for weeks at a time.

Sontag, Sherry and Christopher Drew. Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. PublicAffairs; New York. 1998. p. 171-2, 174-5, 175 (hardcover)

The 1979 Vela Incident

There are some historical events where it may be impossible for ordinary people to learn the truth. For example, there are situations where more than one nation state has a good reason to circulate a false history — complete with credible-seeming historical documents.

One such case may be the 1979 Vela incident, in which an American satellite may have detected a clandestine nuclear test in the Indian Ocean. Some analyses have concluded that no nuclear explosion took place and that the satellite malfunctioned. Historian Richard Rhodes, who has written a series of excellent books about the history of nuclear weapons, thinks that it was a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists recently published a long discussion of the issue.

“Sanctuary” dedication

At Massey College today a magnificent new sculpture was unveiled in the quad: a bronze cast of birch branches made by Camilla Geary-Martin.

The artwork is dedicated in part to Ursula Franklin — a remarkable Senior Fellow of the College — as well as the late Boris Stoicheff.

Out in the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been returning some exciting data, after a long flight through the solar system:

This documentary provides illuminating background on the mission: The Year of Pluto.

It is much to be hoped that the New Horizons craft will be able to observe other Kuiper belt objects.

Black Code

Written by Ron Diebert, the director of the Citizen Lab at U of T, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace contains some very interesting information, of importance to anyone concerned with the future of the internet and communication. He discusses the major discoveries made by the lab, including massive criminal malware enterprises, government surveillance and censorship, and the use of cyberweapons like Stuxnet.

The first few chapters may seem basic if you actively follow the news on IT security and surveillance, but the material in the later parts is undeniably novel and interesting. The book is a bit of a lament for the death of the idealistic open internet, and the emergence of control by governments, particularly after the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The stakes here are high: the internet is a critical tool for maintaining democracy in open societies, confronting autocratic regimes, and dealing with global threats. The network is now in real danger of being suffocated by governments fixated on terrorism or maintaining domestic control, or who see it as a promising avenue for attacking their enemies.

Diebert proposes a distributed model for both securing and protecting the internet, while repeatedly underlining how governments are now the major threat to online freedom and political participation. Governments have rebuilt the backbone of the internet in order to achieve their censorship and surveillance objectives. It’s not a problem with a technical solution, from the perspective of citizens, but rather one which requires ongoing political agitation.

Consequences of nuclear weapon proliferation

The Economist draws attention to the risk of nuclear war:

New actors with more versatile weapons have turned nuclear doctrine into guesswork. Even during the cold war, despite all that game theory and brainpower, the Soviet Union and America frequently misread what the other was up to. India and Pakistan, with little experience and less contact, have virtually nothing to guide them in a crisis but mistrust and paranoia. If weapons proliferate in the Middle East, as Iran and then Saudi Arabia and possibly Egypt join Israel in the ranks of nuclear powers, each will have to manage a bewildering four-dimensional stand-off.

Related:

STS-27/107

I fear that my list of project ideas, which I assemble out of an optimistic hope that the future will bring a long span of free time for such undertakings, includes an idea for a screenplay.

It would be a film in the style of Apollo 13 (technically and historically accurate, and developed with lots of research in collaboration with the people involved) based on the STS-27 and STS-107 Space Shuttle missions.

I have a bunch of ideas, but I definitely don’t have time to write such a script, given my work with Toronto350.org, photography, and being on strike as a TA at U of T.

Still, I think it could be a powerful story. Ultimately, it’s a sadder story than Apollo 13, which may limit its aesthetic and commercial appeal. Still, like any story about crewed spaceflight, this is a story of courage and dedication applied in the pursuit of scientific understanding. Twelve amazing people: 5 who lived and 7 who died.

I can provide a more detailed breakdown of the screenplay idea, if someone wants to try working on it a bit.

The fall of Berlin, 1945, part 13/13

“The merciless shelling had no pattern. It was aimless and incessant. Each day it seemed to increase in intensity. Mortars and the grinding howl of rocket-firing Katashkas soon added to the din. Most people now spent much of their time in cellars, air raid shelters, flak tower bunkers and subway stations. They lost all sense of time. The days blurred amid the fear, confusion and death that was all about them. Berliners who had kept meticulous diaries up to April 21 suddenly got their dates mixed. Many wrote that the Russians were in the center of the city on April 21 or 22, when the Red Army was still fighting in the suburbs. Their terror of the Russians was often intensified by a certain guilty knowledge. Some Germans, at least, knew all about the way German troops had behaved on Soviet soil, and about the terrible and secret atrocities committed by the Third Reich in concentration camps. Over Berlin, as the Russians drew closer, hung a nightmarish fear unlike that experienced by any city since the razing of Carthage.”

Ryan, Cornelius. The Last Battle. 1966. p. 420-1 (italics in original)