Bombs and rockets – Page 29 – a sibilant intake of breath

Cancer and the neutron

I think of cancer, and radiation therapy for it, as modern phenomena. It was surprising, then, to learn that radon ‘seeds’ were being used for radiation therapy of cancer in 1929 – before the neutron had even been discovered. Indeed, polonium extracted from depleted seeds from Baltimore’s Kelly Hospital provided James Chadwick with the neutron source for the experiment that confirmed their existence. Neutrons are critical for inducing the fission of atoms, whether in bombs or power plants, because they are not repelled by the electric fields around atoms.

A detailed account of the experiment is in chapter 6 of Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

Open thread: the future of Russia

After the collapse of communism, many in the West assumed that democracy and free market capitalism would triumph in the former Soviet Union. Instead, it seems the chaos in the post-communist period permitted the emergence of economically powerful oligarchs, as well as massive growth in the wealth and power of organized crime groups. Now, former members of the security services, led by Vladamir Putin, are continuing to cement their own control.

There is much about Russia that is worrisome: the suppression of the free press and murder of journalists; continued appalling conduct in Chechnya; ongoing attempts to dominate neighbouring states, including through war; the exploitation of Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels; and more.

What do readers think might happen to Russia in the next 25 or 50 years? What are the most desirable and undesirable plausible outcomes, from the perspective of the Russian people, the world as a whole, central European states, the European Union, and the United States? What effect would different potential outcomes in Russia have on Canada?

Top Secret America

Over the last couple of years, The Washington Post has undertaken a major project to document the growth of the government security apparatus in the United States. It is entitled: ‘Top Secret America.’

Three long and interesting articles are now online:

One inescapable conclusion is that none of this – the massive secret compounds, the turf wars between agencies, and the changes in how government functions – could be undone quickly or easily.

It is just a new reality for the United States.

Peak oil and climate change

Given the multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that humanity is causing the climate to change in potentially dangerous ways, climate change has to be part of medium- to long-term planning for almost everybody, and part of the policy development processes of government. At the same time, there is a plausible case that global production of oil will peak at some point in the relatively near future, with potentially important economic, political, and geopolitical effects.

How will these two phenomena interact? I can think of lots of possibilities. These are not ranked in any way, and are not equally plausible.

1) Worries about peak oil prove premature or overblown. Liquid fuels stay cheap for the foreseable future, causing more climate change than there would have been in a scenario where they became more costly.

2) Natural reserves of petroleum cannot keep pace with rising demand, initially driving liquid fuel prices through the roof. Some combination of biofuels and coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology counteracts that, also worsening climate change. (Coal-to-liquids and fuels like palm oil grown in rainforest have huge climate impact per unit of energy)

3) Peak oil proves serious, and biofuel and CTL alternatives prove very costly. This has potentially large social and economic consequences, but makes climate change mitigation easier. For many people, the world gets a whole lot smaller.

4) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments sense their increased vulnerability and abandon attempts to cooperate internationally, seeking to make themselves as robust as possible in the face of the chaos ahead.

5) Climate change occurs much more quickly than expected, perhaps because of major positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or burning rainforest. Governments finally get the picture and introduce harsh policies restricting fossil fuel production domestically. Powerful states now profoundly concerned about climate change (the US, EU, China, Japan, etc) force petrostates like Canada and Kuwait to shut down production.

6) Not only does oil production peak, but so does gas and coal production. Dealing with climate change becomes much easier politically, given that there is no longer any real alternatives to switching to renewables and nuclear as principal sources of energy.

7) Peak oil proves serious, but cellulosic and algae-based biofuels finally emerge as commercially viable alternatives.

Personally, I think peak oil is a much less serious problem than climate change. For one thing, it is just the sort of phenomenon that markets deal with relatively automatically – something gets scarce and people find ways to use less, while developing alternatives. For another, it doesn’t include the same dangerous lag times. It is quite possible that we could emit enough to cause catastrophic warming, but only see concrete proof of that decades later. Peak oil, by contrast, seems likely to unfold with fewer surprises. Finally, there aren’t really any positive natural feedbacks that would further constrain the availability of oil, as it began to get scarce (though falling energy return on investment (EROI) is an issue). By contrast, warming is likely to beget more warming as ice vanishes, forests dry out an burn, permafrost and methane clathrates melt, etc.

Surely there are many other possibilities, aside from those listed above. Please post some below, and comment on those listed above. How do the different possible scenarios effect how we ought to be hedging our bets, both climatically and in terms of energy sources?

Will war ever be carbon neutral?

Ideally, the next few decades will see all the world’s economies begin the difficult transition towards carbon neutrality, so as to stop anthropogenic climate change. Fossil fuels will represent a progressively smaller share of what drives vehicles and power plants, and complimentary measures will enhance carbon sinks.

If all that happens in the civilian sphere, is there any chance we will see it in the military? Military vehicles are definitely fuel hogs: whether it is supersonic fighter jets or main battle tanks driven by gas turbines.

It seems plausible that armies will be the last hold-out, when it comes to achieving carbon neutrality. National security has almost always been given priority over civilian needs, especially in non-democratic states. Furthermore, if weapons that produce large amounts of greenhouse gases are more effective than those that do not, any state with current or possible future enemies will find their military strategists unwilling to abandon them. It is also plausible that climate change itself will produce a more dangerous world, in which politicians and the public are even more supportive of developing military strength than they are now.

Perhaps the armed forces are such a small share of total emissions that this isn’t really a problem. Indeed, it does seem plausible that we can cut down the level of emissions to the point where the risk of climate change is much diminished, without having to tinker with them at all. Still, the question of how to move to a carbon-neutral world entirely unthreatened by climate change will eventually involve the question of how to get generals to give up their carbon-intensive habits, perhaps after titans of business and ordinary citizens have eventually done so.

Biohazard

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ken Alibek – a formerly high ranking official within the Russian biological weapons program – defected to the United States. His 1999 book can be seen as a declassified, commercial, civilian version of what he told the American intelligence officials who he initially debriefed. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Biological Weapons Program in the World focuses on the facilities of Biopreparat: an ostensibly civilian organization that was actually the major developer and stockpiler of biological weapons. They made anthrax and smallpox by the tonne, and developed mechanisms for deploying these agents ranging from assassination-type mechanisms to delivery via intercontinental ballistic missile.

Alibek makes a number of serious allegations:

Russia developed biological weapons as far back as 1928, when work was done on weaponizing typhus;
That Russia violated the Biological Weapons Convention from the start;
That biological agents like plague and smallpox were genetically modified to be resistant to treatments and vaccines, to be more virulent, and to produce additional toxins;
That Russia continued to develop and stockpile biological weapons after the Cold War ended;
And that Russia used biological weapons, both against the Germans during WWII and against the Afghans during the Soviet invasion. In the first case, an attack on German Panzer troops ultimately ended up sickening far more Russian civilians than enemy soldiers.

Alibek’s book also provides considerable insight into the character of the Soviet system of government, including military and security matters. His perspective as an insider in the system is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, including his account of American inspections of Biopreparat facilities (and how he helped to trick them) and the Soviet inspections of US facilities like Fort Detrick that followed.

The book does have some flaws. As with any document on sensitive security matters, it is impossible to know how much of what is claimed is really accurate. Furthermore, this is the work of a defector, and Alibek goes to some length to try to highlight the good things he did. For example, he talks about trying to divert more of the production of a facility he ended up directing towards civilian medical purposes. He also omits any mention of the ‘Alibek’ strain of anthrax that he was responsible for developing. The book also jumps around chronologically in a way that can be confusing, and the chapter titles do not provide a very good sense of the content.

All told, Alibek’s book is interesting and worthwhile to read. It highlights how, alongside all the nuclear dangers of the Cold War, there was another separate type of appalling risk to civilian populations that had been created, and for which the legacy is enduring. Indeed, proliferation of biological weapons may well be a far more serious matter than proliferation of nuclear weapons. Building a working atomic bomb requires fissile material, knowledge, and engineering capability. By contrast, a biological weapon smuggled out of a lab in the pocket of an underpaid Soviet scientist can be duplicated to mass quantity in fermentors, with relatively little technological sophistication required.

That being said, it is worth nothing how biological weapons haven’t yet seemed to live up to their frightening potential. Alibek mentions the Japanese Aum cult as an example of a non-state entity that developed biological capabilities, and yet their attempts to actually employ biological agents failed to produce significant damage. That said, weapons in the hands of states like Russia that have had sophisticated weaponization and testing programs for decades are likely much more dangerous, as all the deaths from the accidental Sverdlovsk anthrax leak illustrate.

The book talks very little about delivery systems for biological agents; quite possibly, that is in response to the particular sensitivity of such information, which may not yet be in the hands of groups that do have access to dangerous strains of bacteria and viruses. Alibek explains that:

Bioweapons are not rocket launchers. They cannot be loaded and fired. The most virulent culture in a test tube is useless as an offensive weapon until it has been put through a process that gives it stability and predictability. The manufacturing technique is, in a sense, the real weapon, and it is harder to develop than individual agents. (p.97 paperback)

He goes on to explain that detailed recipes for the production and weaponization of biological agents were developed by Biopreparat, and that they were retained by the Russian government even after the collapse of communism. In a few months time, facilities re-purposed for civilian use could go back to making smallpox, anthrax, and plague by the tonne.

In light of the increasing authoritarianism of the Russian government, this book makes especially worrisome reading. Back in the Soviet era, the government blamed the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak on ‘contaminated meat.’ Black market vendors were even punished for their supposed role in causing the disaster. For a span after the fall of communism, the reality that it arose from a leak in a bioweapon production plant was acknowledged. More recently, the government has gone back to the old contaminated meat deception.

Nixon and Gorbachev

Here’s a bit of Cold War role reversal for you:

Which US president cancelled America’s offensive biological weapons program? Richard Nixon, in 1969, three years before the Biological Weapons Convention.

Which Soviet premier ordered Biopreparat, the Soviet bioweapon program, to weaponize smallpox? Mikhail Gorbachev, in the Five Year Plan launched in December 1987. He also ordered the production of mobile production centres for biological weapons, to try to retain such offensive capabilities despite inspections of suspected bioweapon facilities.

For me, at least, this sits awkwardly with my general perceptions of the two men: Nixon the amoral schemer and Gorbachev the unintending architect of the end of the Communist system.

Cold War weapons and perceptions of risk

It seems a natural human intuition to think the world is going down the tubes. We look back across our lives and identify what seems more worrisome now than when we were born. We then worry about what sort of world future generations will inhabit. Written accounts demonstrate that such concerns go back at least to the classical world.

There is certainly some validity to that perspective, especially when it comes to cumulative threats like climate change. That said, there do seem to be many cases in which anxieties proved unjustified – such as when wave after wave of immigrants ended up successfully integrated into North American and Western European cultures, despite fears that they would create all manner of entrenched problems.

I started thinking about all this earlier today, reading Ken Alibek’s account of the Soviet biological weapons program. Until I was nine years old, the Russians were still doing open air testing of biological weapons on Vozrozhdeniya Island. That reminded me of two probable cognitive failures. Firstly, we are less aware of the dangers that existed in previous times, which reduces the validity of our apprehensions about a future that is worse. Secondly, there can be real improvements in the state of the world. While there are certainly still risks associated with Cold War era weapons, at least the spectre of their intentional use is less haunting now than it was in previous decades.

Sustainability as an intergenerational project

I think this quotation from Richard Feynman is rather wonderful:

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

It would be a splendid thing for humanity to have tens of thousands more years of history. In order to accomplish that, however, we need to find ways to keep from snuffing ourselves out, or pushing ourselves back down below the level of ‘civilization.’

Accomplishing that seems to require a process similar to the one Feynman outlines for scientific advancement. We must learn what we can about truly sustainable human societies, implement that knowledge, and then pass along that combination of learning and physical achievements to be carried forward by those who will come after.

I can’t help feeling that if Feynman was still alive, our societal discussion about climate change would be a bit more sophisticated and productive.

How useful are spies?

Malcolm Gladwell recently wrote a very interesting piece for The New Yorker about the extreme difficulty of interpreting information from spies properly. You can never really know whether a promising nugget information is actually that, or whether it was cleverly planted by an enemy. In the end, both intelligence agencies and those who rely on them must remain simultaneously aware of the possibility that actionable intelligence is genuine and accurate, and of the possibility that it is intentionally erroneous. As Gladwell concludes: “the proper function of spies is to remind those who rely on spies that the kinds of thing found out by spies can’t be trusted.”

The funniest bit of the story describes the plot of Peter Ustinov’s 1956 play, “Romanoff and Juliet:’

a crafty general is the head of a tiny European country being squabbled over by the United States and the Soviet Union, and is determined to play one off against the other. He tells the U.S. Ambassador that the Soviets have broken the Americans’ secret code. “We know they know our code,” the Ambassador, Moulsworth, replies, beaming. “We only give them things we want them to know.” The general pauses, during which, the play’s stage directions say, “he tries to make head or tail of this intelligence.” Then he crosses the street to the Russian Embassy, where he tells the Soviet Ambassador, Romanoff, “They know you know their code.” Romanoff is unfazed: “We have known for some time that they knew we knew their code. We have acted accordingly—by pretending to be duped.” The general returns to the American Embassy and confronts Moulsworth: “They know you know they know you know.” Moulsworth (genuinely alarmed): “What? Are you sure?”

This reminds me of a short story I once read, but which I cannot remember the name of. It concerned an American spy who was undercover in the Soviet Union. He was preparing for retirement, and genuinely addled about which side he had really been working for. Each had reason to suspect he was a spy, and so each had reason to feed him misleading information for the other side (or accurate information that they wouldn’t trust, given what they thought about him). He was left in the state of being unable to remember whether his proper retirement rewards was a gold Rolex from the CIA or a dacha from the KGB.