All posts by Number9

The Russian SVP-24 Bombsight

The U.S. has sufficient industrial capacity to make precision guided munitions like the JDAM the exclusive choice. But due to the vast expenditure of ordinance against ISIS, stockpiles are becoming depleted. For the Russians, this has never been a choice, because they don’t have the money. An indigenous electronics industry is almost nonexistent,  with the curious exception of pocket size Geiger Counters (a domestic need like Chernobyl is a powerful incentive.) So, supplemented by small quantities of smart weapons, a modernized version of the stabilized aircraft platform with dumb bombs, denoted SVP-24,  remains the backbone Russian delivery system.

Russia Insider hypes  it. Oddly, a website registered in Iceland, but with an apparent Russian focus, hypes the capabilities of the system. Quoting,

In practical terms this means that every 30+ year old Russian “dumb” bomb can now be delivered by a 30+ year old Russian aircraft with the same precision as a brand new guided bomb delivered by a top of the line modern bomber

The SVP-24 then computes an “envelope” (speed, altitude, course) inside which the dumb bombs are automatically released exactly at the precise moment when their unguided flight will bring them right over the target (with a 3-5m accuracy).

At high altitudes, which the claim includes, it’s pure bosh. At low altitudes, it is within the realm of possibility. If true, it is a respectable improvement over the comparable U.S. system. “LALD” bomb delivery by F-15 and F-16 aircraft, discussed in RAND report RGSD147.chap5.pdf, page 56, offers a CEP of 85.6 meters, or a little better with practice, with an unspecified altitude. Quite simply, this approach has been abandoned by the U.S. in favor of smart weapons.

A minimum altitude for release of the bomb is required for the aircraft to be safe from the explosion.  For a 500 pound bomb, a typical number is 3000 feet, which is close enough for this discussion.

Are Russian claims about the SVP-24 at all true?  With a  release altitude of 3000 feet,  5 meters corresponds to Norden’s goal in the late 1930’s of a CEP 2% of altitude.  But the ancient history of the Norden bombsight is instructive. In 1931, in demonstrations during development, the Norden Mark XV achieved a CEP of 11 meters. In 1940, Norden co-partner Theodore Barth claimed that “we do not regard a 15 square feet (1.4 m2) … as being a very difficult target to hit from an altitude of 30,000 feet (9,100 m)”. But in World War II combat, it degraded to 1000 meters.

A Newsweek opinion piece, Syrian Rebels Change Tactics to Outsmart Putin’s Air Onslaught, is suggestive. Quoting,

“When Russian aircraft stop striking heavily contested areas to avoid inflicting collateral damage on regime forces, [italics mine] opposition fighters, in particular those from groups such as the Nusra Front, Jund al-Aqsa and Ahrar al-Sham, immediately seize the initiative.”

Read that closely. A bomb can miss in several ways:

  • It leaves a crater in the middle of nowhere.
  • It doesn’t hit the target, and blows up a cow.
  • It hits friendly forces.

Unlike a smart weapon, the distance by which a dumb bomb misses the target is a broad statistic. This means that if you drop enough bombs anywhere close the “regime”,  some of your bombs will blow up your friends. The Newsweek information is of unknown provenance, but it suggests that in a sortie with the SVP-24, the bombs behave more like dumb bombs than some Russian miracle.

You may be tired of all this, eager to return this question to the human perspective. But we owe it to the question to mine the issue of Russian military limitations for all it’s worth. This discussion allows us to convert part of the question to one of Russian bombing tactics. Altitudes of bomb runs fall into these unofficial categories:

  • Low, below 8000 feet.  A lower limit in the range of 3000 feet is required for the aircraft to avoid the blast of the bomb. This is within the range of MANPADs (man-portable antiaircraft missiles), and some guns.
  • Medium, between 8000 and 15,000 feet, the maximum altitude of most MANPAD systems.
  • High, above 15,000 feet, reachable by fixed antiaircraft missiles.

Factoring out the propaganda, the accuracy of the SVP-24 is almost, but not quite plausible at low altitude. At higher altitudes, with the free fall of a bomb subject to the vicissitudes of wind and weather, the claims are ridiculous. In an attempt to appear disarmingly candid, relished by any serious propaganda organ , Russia Insider confides, “In fact, the company producing the SVP-24 had to sue the Russian Ministry of Defense for unpaid money and there was a great deal of opposition inside the MoD to the SVP-24…”  This sounds like the Russian equivalent of the classic American boondoggle.

If the Russians feel obliged to bomb from medium altitudes, they might invoke Item 3 from the Loophole List, military necessity. Sticking still with military limitations, the question is converted to one about altitudes of  Russian bombing runs. The U.S. has been closely observing Russian tactics, but altitude estimates, provided by trained observers or remote data collection, have not appeared in open sources. Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards, of which some veterans figure importantly in ISIS, were drilled in bringing down aircraft with massed rifle fire. Perhaps the Russians wish to avoid arousal of a latent capability of small caliber ballistic weapons by flying a little higher than uncontested airspace requires.

The analysis so far suggests that Item 3 of the Loophole List, military necessity, is an important part of Russian thinking.

To be continued shortly.

Gen. Breedlove, Syria Refugee Crisis & Russian Military Technology

Continuing with Gen. Breedlove: “Putin weaponizing migrant crisis to hurt Europe”,  to what extent are Russian atrocities in Syria intentional? The first factor to consider is limitations of Russian military technology. To a reader of humanistic mindset, it may seem needlessly mechanical. But ours is a world of physical limitations, which, incorporated into the psyche, become disguised, their origins lost.

But we should attempt to distinguish as much as possible what proportion of collateral civilian deaths are tactically desired, and what are considered acceptable costs. To  humble ourselves, this is an excerpt written by a survivor of the Dresden bombings between 13 and 15 February 1945:

We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.

I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.

These were the acceptable costs of our fathers.  The extent to which the terrible civilian toll was intentional, versus acceptable collateral, is still argued. American and British bombers dropped dumb bombs, the only ones in common use at the time.   Quoting from Environmental Information for Naval Warfare, where “gravity” equates with “dumb”, Table B-1 offers:
Accuracy of Air-Delivered Weapons Since World War II
  • World War II       Gravity bomb                   1000 meters
  • Korea                      Gravity bomb                      300 meters
  • Vietnam                Gravity bomb                       100 meters
  • Desert Storm     laser guided                                8 meters
  • Desert Storm   Tomahawk  Block II               10 meters
  • Bosia                      Tomahawk Block III                 3 meters

These are the numbers of interest to the West. One category is missing, the stabilized aircraft platform, still used by the Russians in combination with dumb bombs. It was last deployed by the West in Desert Storm. Then, as with the current Russian case, there was a huge stockpile of dumb bombs, a leftover of the Reagan buildup.

The myth of the Norden bombsight, that it could hit a pickle barrel, is exposed in the table: 1000 meters. Anyone who has flown knows that air has bumps. An airframe flexes, vibrates, and twists. The aircraft pitches, yaws, and rolls. Engine output varies. Wind and air density shift constantly.  Requiring a human bombardier as the temporary pilot, with aircraft position subject to the crude navigational methods of the time, the claims of Norden were vitiated.

The stabilized aircraft platform is an evolution of the Norden concept taken to the nth degree. Stabilization does not actually mean that the aircraft is flying straight, level, and at a constant speed. It’s a blanket term, meaning that  that not only is the aircraft controlled by autopilot, but also, every variable is known: the position by GPS, velocity, and all the deltas, computed by the aircraft computer which releases the bomb. Modern control theory, with Kalman filters, makes this possible. It’s the stuff of textbooks.

By western standards, this is very obsolete. An aircraft can’t really be stabilized, and, once the bomb is released, every error in the calculation, to say nothing of the winds and the weather, make the impact point a matter of chance. All dumb bombs miss. Table B-1 gives the expected distance of the miss, “circular-error-probable”, or CEP.  The chance that any one dumb bomb would actually hit the target are, statistically, minuscule.

The U.S. solution to the huge legacy stockpile of dumb bombs is the JDAM, one of the greatest stories of cost effective weapons systems. It’s a cheap (around $50K) kit that bolts onto a dumb bomb, with a choice of GPS, inertial, and laser seekers.  It guides the bomb in flight by moving the vanes on the back of the bomb. The bomb has no rocket, only an intelligent algorithm to adjust the  glide so that the altitude of the bomb happens to be zero at the point of impact. For this miracle, we can thank Rudolf E. Kálmán, whose math is omnipresent in modern industry and gadgetry.

Next, the Russian SVP-24 “super” bomb sight.

 

Gen. Breedlove: “Putin weaponizing migrant crisis to hurt Europe”

CNBC. This is the claim of Philip Breedlove, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Given that one mind can contain only so many points of view, it’s good that Breedlove has the kind of mindset that fosters hyper vigilance. This, along with leadership, analytic capability, and capacity to act, are the marks of military excellence and good generalship.

It could be true. If a robotic fly operated by western intelligence, flitting around Putin’s dacha, overhears such conversation, a fact unknown to open sources would be established. But working from open sources, we cannot presuppose the fly. And we must avoid the indulgence of imagined insight, the mind-ware flaw of conspiracy enthusiasts.

Discerning the motives of the adversary, or frenemy, as the current case may be, is not the province of generalship. In these practical times, it may not be anybody’s job. In World War II, axis leaders were psychoanalyzed by members of the intelligence community. The current license holders are the “policy mavens”, who are remarkably bad at it .

Breedlove’s statements of the facts are informed by the best intelligence about ISIS infiltration and general strain on the social and economic fabric of Europe. But even if Russia is responsible for the symptoms Breedlove describes, “weaponization”, which in this instance is synonymous with intent, does not follow. Neither does it follow if we decide that at this moment, Russia is an adversary, not a frenemy. Establishment of cause-and-effect is more difficult than mere association.

If you are an open source maven, this is important. Unless producing intelligence is part of your job description, your insights are not driven by demand, but by opportunity. For the maven, the occasional astonishing insight is the result of a mental network, a composition of facts, opinions, and prior insights, all maintained with exquisite mental hygiene. Every so often, it will gel, but for this to happen, you have to keep your mental house in order.

To professionals, it applies in a different way. The game of nations is not football, where concentration on team spirit, and short-term vilification of the other team gets the adrenaline going. In the perpetual game, the best blood is ice water. Human lives are a terrible thing to tally, but even in Syria, distinctions must be made.

In August 2014, the UNHCR reported 3 million refugees. The Russian intervention began on September 30, 2015. The current UNHCR tally is 4,194,554. Numerous knowledgeable observations attribute to the Russian bombings the characteristics of atrocities. So it can be assumed that Russian bombs made the problem worse. But they did not originate it. It began with the original Assad regime barrel bombs, the tool of the minority Alawite regime with long tradition of control by massacre of the Sunni majority.  And note, if the Sunni majority had the upper hand, it is likely, given the traditions of the area, that they would indulge in the joys of massacre.

This is an opportunity to accumulate intelligence capital. Make your moral judgment, and then clear your mind. Two closely associated questions serve to focus.

Two Questions

  • Breedlove’s assertion, put as a question, is “Are the Russians weaponizing refugee flow?”
  • To what extent are Russian atrocities in Syria intentional?

The short answer to the second question is, entirely. But that answer negates all the complexities of Russian decision making, which, if refined to the probable, are valuable capital for future insights. Russians, including the elite, are not immoral people. Possibly conditioned by history and the present, they make choices currently considered by the West as immoral. Yet most of them, excepting those brutes in the middle and the bottom who “are merely following orders”, must rationalize their actions with their consciences. Unlike the Axis of World War II, the Russians are not so different from us.

The historical record of the not-so-distant past contains loopholes-of-record. Keep the Loophole List handy:

  • Will “it” shorten the War?
  • Will “it” save our lives?
  • Is “it” a military necessity, i.e., to win versus lose?
  • Is “it” necessary to Save the World?
  • Übermensch — It’s the right thing to do so because the leader’s morals are his own creation.

The worst of the above is Übermensch, for whom an atrocity can be a mere matter of convenience. It would be the worst indictment. For Syria, which of the above would come closest to exculpation? There  may be a solution that reads like a waterboarding memo.

Undoubtedly, these blend. If, in comparison to the occasional and unintentional but bloody accidents of Western forces, the Russians are capable of systemic atrocities, the difference between us can be measured in years. In 1919, a British leader wrote (towards the bottom of the page):

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.

I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum. It is not necessary to use only the most deadly gasses: gasses can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror and yet would leave no serious permanent effects on most of those affected. 

This is from “(Churchill papers: 16/16) 12 May 1919 War Office.” The word lachrymatory, implying tear gas, has been used to exculpate Winston Churchill from the serious charge. But close to the top of the page, his World War II memo,  list item “3”, contains:

3. I want a cold-blooded calculation made as to how it would pay us to use poison gas, by which I mean principally mustard. We will want to gain more ground in Normandy so as not to be cooped up in a small area. We could probably deliver 20 tons to their 1 and for the sake of the 1 they would bring their bomber aircraft into the area against our superiority, thus paying a heavy toll.

Since many readers are probably partial to Churchill versus current Russian personalities, it’s a good mental exercise to try apportioning the elements of the Loophole List to Churchill’s imagined mental processes. It will help with the Russians.

Harry S. Truman has been treated well by history for the use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Which elements of the Loophole List apply? It is probably disturbing to compare this to Russian bombing in Syria.  But the comparison is too educational to avoid. The acts then and now are similar in consequence. Moral differentiation relies entirely on motive. Is the difference that the Russian involvement in Syria is purely elective, while World War II was not?

In evolution of moral values as they apply to war, the West and Russia are separated by a maximum of 70 years. Vietnam may reduce it. If “failure to act” is valid, the years become a handful.

In the minds of the Russians, the Loophole List, and these factors combine to answer the two questions:

  • Limitations of Russian military technology.
  • Rules of Engagement and the Laws of War.
  • Geopolitics.
  • Desperation and demographics.

What are the Russians thinking? Construct for maximal coherence. Winnow for the simplicity of Occam’s Razor.  If we can avoid our own prejudices, we can get close.

To be continued shortly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Cold War, Not!

CNN. Addresing the U.N., Russian PM Medvedev equates relations with West to a ‘new Cold War’.

A few days later, (Reuters) Lucian Kim accuses the West of Munich-like behavior, where “Munich” is a synonym for capitulation.

The authors share a common assumption, the continued existence of a Bloc World. In the post World-War II era, this was most certainly true. The two world-spanning blocs have as 19th century antecedents the balance of power struggles of the continent. It can certainly be seen in the strategies of Cardinal Richilieu, the practitioner of raison d’État. But he was not the originator; the honor probably belongs to Niccolò Machiavelli, author of the infamous treatise, The Prince. Before him, more primitively, the world belonged to men with strong arms who accrued more strong arms the way we do oil patches. But while the alliances of balance of power were exercises in geography and manpower, the bloc abstraction was a 20th Century innovation. What of the British Empire? Let’s leave it to the academicians. There is also some resemblance in the vassal states of China. But there was no opposition.

The blocs had common characteristics. Each had a preeminent state, with some advantage over the lesser members. In the U.S. there were advantages of technology, human development, economies of scale, and the ability of the world’s largest economy to mint a stable currency. In the wake of World War II, the Soviets acquired the technical and intellectual remnants of countries that had been more advanced than itself. Combined with economies of scale, and backed by military might to deter doubters, the Soviets were able to pose as credible bloc leaders until the stagnation of the Brezhnev era.

The ultimate glue of these blocs was not very different from the religious variety. In the religious case, there is the desire to preserve the flock from conversion by a competing religion. This was the nature of the struggle between communism, which claimed to change the very nature of man, and the Free World, which still and probably always will have very real devils to fight. Besides free versus not-free, there was opposition on every level of organization. For example, it is not obvious that communal economics should be twinned with totalitarianism, but it was. In the world of today, there are so many mixtures of systems, it’s like an old fashioned gas pump where you could dial the octane. Who could have imagined a free-wheeling Chinese economy layered beneath an opaque ruling class? Or a Russian economy with constant intervention by hidden hands, beneath a not-so-opaque inner circle of personalities we know? Or an Iranian labyrinth that defies the specialists because the currency of power is not what we know?

The bloc structure was driven by quasi-religious fear, but it was permitted by economic conditions. In the West, the economies of smaller bloc members had been destroyed or severely damaged by war and loss of colonial possessions. The economies of the Eastern Bloc were destroyed by deliberate dismemberment. This resulted in a trade structure that had some resemblance to the triangular trade of British colonial mercantilism. But instead of raw versus finished goods, the dichotomy was one of economies of scale. Europe’s products in both blocs were highly finished goods that did not require great manufacturing scale.

In 1989, the Eastern Bloc began to fall apart big time. In 2000, Airbus surpassed Boeing for the first time. These arbitrary samples highlight that, coincidental or not, the vanishing of fear of the Soviet Bloc and vanishing of the U.S. economies of scale were contemporaneous. Can a bloc-world structure exist without the simultaneous occurrence of both ideological/political struggle and economic viability? Consider:

  • The triangular trade still exists between China and Southeast Asia. For instance, China is the largest trading partner of Vietnam, but relations are antagonistic.
  • Relations between the Western nations are harmonious. Yet these countries are cutthroat economic competitors simultaneously bridged by multinationals. A very mixed picture! The U.S. was angered when Britain leaped to join the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.) With respect to China, the word “frenemy” is in vogue. Yet the decision to join was made in spite of the historical “special relationship between the U.S. and Britain. This is not bloc-type behavior.
  • The future viability of the Trans-Pacific Partnership , as an unanswered question, could support a yes or a no. If China’s policy in the South China Sea becomes a serious challenge to the local members, the members could develop bloc-like characteristics crystalized by “Pivot to Asia. But that presupposes that China’s future policy will be unintelligent. This is too big to suppose, so the TPP will probably just muddle along.
  • The Russian construction of the Eurasian Economic Union, and the partly overlapping CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) uniquely lacks a competitor. The poor countries of central Asia are largely dependent on repatriations by migrants working in Russia. Their economies are too small and isolated not to advantage themselves of Russia. It may be a bloc, but the landlocked geography of the smaller states is a special condition, and it is not politically unified.

Lucian Kim’s article does not state, but implies, that we are in a new cold war with Russia. Whether the Russian elite believes this or not, Putin markets it domestically. Quoting The Guardian,Vladimir Putin has accused the west of trying to contain and subvert Russia “for decades, if not centuries”, in a fierce and uncompromising attack during his state of the nation speech. Highlighting the dichotomy between domestic and foreign propaganda, P.M. Medvedev tried to unwind it. But the result of all this verbiage, and actions, such as in Ukraine, is that both sides are positing the question of a cold war.

The last time there was a cold war, the West was faced by an adversary with Soviet ground forces so massive that, at least when tallied as orders of battle on paper, have not been seen since. This time is different. The Russia of today, composed of a people so remarkably similar that we see them in the mirror, has no such advantage. In compensation, the Russia of foreign policy is a combination of the cat that ate the canary, and the master of intimidation. Perhaps the Russian invasion of Georgia, which may have actually been justified, was the seed of this latter idea. In the case of the Baltic States, Poland, and Ukraine, it has backfired badly.

All labels carry baggage. The Cold War label carries this: We are in conflict with a powerful, implacable enemy. But it’s not true. The canary is Syria, and the cat is going to have serious indigestion.

To be continued.

Iraq, Iridium-192, and Dirty Bombs

gouache marigolds_cReuters: Radioactive material stolen in Iraq raises security fears. The article states that 10 grams of iridium-192 are missing. According to Isoflex, a supplier of iridium-192 to industry,  each gram of fresh iridium-192 has a radioactivity of 550-600 Curies.

(Because this is an exceptionally dismal subject, I’ve included a sketch of marigolds done in gouache as a mood antidote. Click on the marigolds whenever you feel you need relief.)

Some readers may be interested in what the open-source perspective can provide to estimate the consequences of a dirty bomb explosion in Iraq. It is feasible to present a meaningful calculation in “back-of-the-envelope” fashion for contemplation or use by someone who  has had a freshman year of engineering, science,  or perhaps finance. Should other threats be reported in the future, that reader  could use the discussion for enhanced understanding. So it’s worth doing.

Since it’s topical now, let’s get to the results. The missing iridium is part of a gamma camera, a device for checking oil pipeline welds. If Isoflex is the supplier, the camera contains ten disks of 1 gram each. Since the theft or loss was sometime in 2015, and the threatened usage some time in the future, let’s assume one half-life of Iridium-192, which is 73.83 days, elapses before use, so that 3000 Curies is available at the time of use.

There has been an enormous amount of research on explosive dispersal of radioactive substances. We don’t need it to get a decent idea of the outcome.  The vaporized iridium would quickly oxidize or bind with other substances comprising dust particles. Let’s assume that half of it comes down within a 100 meter radius of the explosion.  Let’s assume that it is uniformly distributed within that circle, and what escapes the circle does not concern us.  If this seems crude, the actual scenario is not known, even to specialists,  unless it happens.

The actual scenario would be characterized by plumes, vortices, and winds. As I write this, the wind speed in Baghdad is 6 miles per hour, which implies that the actual dispersal pattern cannot be circular. But because the  decay of radioactivity is exponential, the numbers that result are less influenced by environmental variables than naive intuition might suggest.

The terrorists might choose to include the entire 10 gram load in one dirty bomb explosion. Or they might use each of the ten 1 gram disks in separate explosions. Let’s consider both possibilities. After the dust settles, perhaps the next day, what dosage will a person receive who visits the 100 meter circle? The back of the envelope calculation indicates that:

  • If 1 gram is used in the explosion, a person who lingers in the 100 meter circle for an hour will receive a dosage of about 63 millisieverts. This is equivalent to two high-dosage whole-body CAT scans. It’s not a good habit to get into, but health effects are slight.
  • If 10 grams was used, the  pedestrian who lingers an hour receives about 630 millisieverts. If the person lingers much longer, his dosage moves into the range of mild radiation sickness. There may be mild illness and increased risk of cancer, but death or even life-changing consequences are unlikely.

Mosque bombings in Iraq kill a lot of people. If the event of a dirty bomb actually occurs, the conventional explosives will do most of the damage. But what about decades of barren land, forced evacuation,  mini-Chernobyls?

If a radioisotope can be said to be kind, Iridium-192 is kind. Normal earth background radiation is about 3 millisieverts per year. In many areas, it is much higher. You can have a normal life, with normal health and healthy kids if the background radiation is 6 millisieverts per year.

  • If 1 gram of iridium is used in the dirty bomb, it takes 3.5 years for the radiation level within the 100 meter circle to reach that level.
  • If the full load of the gamma camera, 10 grams, is used in the bomb, it takes 4.2 years to reach twice background.

Unlike many other kinds of nuclear accidents, a dirty bomb that employs iridium-192 would not cause massive, long term defacement of the environment. But neither should we be complacent. Much worse things lurk,  things of nightmares.

North Korea’s Plutonium, Iran’s Uranium / Suitcase Nukes

Since it is anticipated that North Korea will restart a reactor for plutonium production, this is an executive summary, a mere capsule, for those who may wish to understand a little of the difference in the title.  As with the explanation of Teller-Ulam, there are huge omissions. But rather than be accurate, let’s aim for digestible.

The scope of what follows is specific to the current endeavors of North Korea to deploy, and the presumably halted endeavor of Iran, to  build, the A-bomb.

Manufacture

  • Bomb-grade plutonium is ” relatively easy” to make. In a relatively simple nuclear reactor, not very different from the first one constructed by Enrico Fermi, it shows up as a decay product. To obtain the plutonium, it is “only necessary” to remove fuel from the reactor and chemically isolate it.
  • Bomb-grade uranium is very difficult to make. It is one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust, but there is no way to chemically isolate it. Hence Iran’s thousands of centrifuges.

Ease of use

  • Plutonium is hard.
  • Uranium is easy.

Plutonium is a horror in the machine shop. It has six  forms (allotropes) which it seems to pick at random, each with different densities. Expanding and contracting under the slightest provocation, it is very crumbly.  It also corrodes in common gases that do not affect other metals. When exposed to damp air, it flakes off, and the flakes spontaneously combust in air. This is not something you should store in your closet. In a nuclear weapon, the metal with all the  crumbles is in close proximity to high explosives.

Plutonium requires implosion. If a hunk of the metal, called a  “pit”, is squashed in just the right manner, which is very complicated and difficult to achieve, there is fission, and, BOOM! Otherwise, it fizzles.  The explosives used to implode the pit require precise combinations, shaping, and uniformity.

Uranium is relatively easy to use.  A warhead can have a gun barrel aimed at a hunk of uranium. The “bullet” is another hunk of uranium. When fired, the two hunks assemble a critical mass and, BOOM! This method cannot be used with plutonium. Uranium is not terribly stable, with changes called “phases”, but they  are much more moderate than the allotropes of plutonium.

Advantages of plutonium

  • Plutonium is the high performance option.
  • Both metals are very heavy, but less plutonium is required than uranium. An enhancement called boosting, which uses tritium gas, greatly increases performance while reducing weight, but limits storage lifetime to a few years.
  • Plutonium is much cheaper to make.

Advantages of uranium

  • It holds shape at any reasonable temperature.
  • The gun-type weapon is low-tech.
  • Since it can also be used for implosion, it is the flexible choice for the aspiring superpower.
  • A low-tech uranium  gun-type bomb made by an aspiring nuclear power is likely to remain functional for a longer period than a plutonium device. An article published by Los Alamos National Labs is not directly related, but gives a general idea of the problems.

If for some reason  the shape of the warhead is important, it is not difficult to build a uranium gun barrel weapon of very narrow diameter, resulting in a skinnier weapon than a typical plutonium design.   But plutonium bombs using “linear implosion” can fit  inside a 155mm artillery shell. Photo of a full scale model shell. Even narrower plutonium bombs are postulated, but would be entirely new designs.

If this has held your interest so far, you may be curious as to which technology has the greater chance of use by non-state actors. In At The Center of the Storm – My years at the CIA, George Tenet wrote,

“We have learned that it is not beyond the realm of possibility for a terrorist group to obtain a nuclear weapon. I have often wondered why this is such a hard reality for so many people to accept.”

Tenet was specifically concerned with the Russian “suitcase nukes”,  approximations of which have been made by both sides.  See Alexander Yablokov’s PBS Frontline interview. They are likely too bulky to fit in suitcases, but portable in bulky backpacks, which has caused some to discount Yablokov. Since weight, not bulk, was the determining factor in the designs, it follows that all of them were plutonium weapons boosted with tritium, which has decayed.

The denials of risk by Russian officials, who assert that all of the suitcase nukes are accounted for, are unconvincing. The Russia of the Yeltsin period was the Wild, Wild West. There is even an anecdote of one Russian whose debt was paid by a hydrogen bomb, a big thing delivered on a truck, which he kept in his garage for a few days. It was subsequently reclaimed. Have you ever been tempted to lie if your dog pooped on someone’s lawn? This is bigger.

But current threat assessments have gravitated to crude unminiaturized gun-type weapons, the main requirement of which is stolen bomb grade uranium and a white van for the delivery vehicle. These opinions are likely based on the decay of the tritium in the Russian nukes.

Each type of bomb has an argument against it:

  • Uranium is traceable to the producer,  so it isn’t likely to be sold by a country that understands they could be blamed.
  • The Russian suitcase nukes have aged to the point that they don’t work anymore. They need to be taken to a garage shop for  replenishment of tritium, battery replacement, checkout of the explosive lenses, and adaptation to suicide operation.

The decay of tritium calms the nerves much more than moral arguments along the lines of “who would do this?” Until recently, it was impossible to conceive of a state with morals so demented, it might miscalculate. North Korea doubtless understand that their plutonium is traceable. But tritium is not, and they are making it.

In answer to Tenet’s question, we shield ourselves from the unthinkable with the assumption that the adversary has a moral standard. During the Cold War, this was true. Current events suggest otherwise.

 

 

North Korea’s Nuke Test; Teller-Ulam for Idiots; How to use Packing Peanuts

Business Insider and CNN  report North Korea may have tested H-bomb components. The direct translation is that they tested a Teller-Ulam design, or, at least, parts thereof. It is worth noting that the first U.S. test of the Teller-Ulam design was not a bomb. A bomb can be dropped from an airplane. The device of first U.S. thermonuclear test, Ivy Mike, weighed 82 tons, including a full-scale cryogenics plant. So a test can validate two things:

  • the physical principles, or rough design
  • the design of an actual weapon

In the case of North Korea, it may have been a blend. The deuterium fuel was probably in solid form. But the arrangement of the parts may have been more to validate  design principles than something that can fit on top of a rocket.

The first public disclosure of atomic weapons design  was publication by U.S. government  of the Smyth Report.  It established the  template for future  comprehensive disclosure of qualitative information about nuclear weapons design, the kind that can be conveyed in diagrams drawn on napkins, but omitting all the laborious complexity of making something that works. Quoting Wikipedia,

“For this reason, the Smyth Report focused heavily on information, such as basic nuclear physics, which was either already widely known in the scientific community or easily deducible by a competent scientist, and omitted details about chemistry, metallurgy, and ordnance. This would ultimately give a false impression that the Manhattan Project was all about physics.”

The media coverage of North Korea’s nuclear program, with multinational assessments, is more revealing than that of past proliferations. But although there is plenty of qualitative info about the Teller-Ulam design in the public domain, the level is still too detailed, more appropriate to someone trying to build an H-bomb in Mosul. Given all the interest in North Korea, the lay reader might  be interested in a few words about the design to make it real. None of what follows is based on classified information. It is derivative  of public domain info, but even more simplified.

A brief review of nuclear fusion, which  is not the Teller-Ulam design. If a container of some heavy hydrogen, a.k.a. deuterium, is compressed and heated enough, the atoms will fuse, forming helium. While “slow fusion” is routinely done in laboratories, bomb fusion is fast. No means of compressing deuterium enough exists short of the H-bomb’s ancestor, the atomic bomb.

Every H-bomb contains an A-bomb that is by itself a powerful weapon.  The first approach to the H-bomb was to surround the A-bomb with a jacket of deuterium. Surely, the shock wave of the expanding A-bomb it would compress the jacket, from the inside out, enough to get things cooking.

This turned out to be false.  It’s hard to compress something from the inside out. If you want to compress a spring, you do it from the outside in! So we should surround the H-bomb with the A-bomb, but this, too, is impossible. For a time, the H-bomb was though to be impossible to build. So Teller and Ulam defined the problem. The A-bomb has all the energy required to do the job, but there is no direct way to make it squeeze orange juice.

Teller seems to have been credited with noticing that most of the energy of an A-bomb, 80%, comes out as light. The explosive part, the other 20%, is no help. It simply destroys the gadget before it blows. But the sun’s light, and a magnifier, can be used to start a fire. Light can be put where it’s needed, to cook parts of the bomb as needed. The great intuitive leap:

Throw away the explosive part of the A-bomb effect. Use only the light of the A-bomb to cook the H-package.

Now to an amusing detail. In the Teller-Ulam design, the A-bomb is located a foot or two away from the H-package, with a metal shield between the two to protect the H-package from the explosive force A-bomb. It’s all done with light.  But how do we get the light from the A-bomb to cook the sides of the H-package?

It’s done by surrounding the H-package with the chemical equivalent of Styrofoam, the same stuff packing peanuts are made of. When heated to millions of degrees, it becomes transparent and luminous. The Styrofoam guides the light of the A-bomb around the sides of the H-package. Quickly melting, this plastic becomes a glowing gas, cooking the H-package, compressing it inwards,until, BOOM! Many details are omitted.

Along with the U.S. government public disclosures, and possible napkin diagrams, there was verbal scuttlebutt. One of these tips was that the Teller-Ulam design could not be built from plans. You had to have “help.”  With supercomputers, and stolen computer code, this may be less necessary.

Don’t send packing peanuts to North Korea.

 

 

Did Putin approve of Litvinenko Assassination ?

Reuters. Russia’s Putin probably approved London murder of ex-KGB agent Litvinenko: UK inquiry.

This is the conclusion of British judge Robert Owen.  I would differ only by the substitution of “substantial possibility” for Owen’s “probably.” But Owen has access to classified information, possibly human intelligence, about the series of steps that would have to be taken in order to release polonium to the probable killers.

Polonium has a half-life of 138 days. It  cannot be stored for even a half decade and retain potency. It has to be made fresh. Although all nuclear reactors create polonium by neutron activation of bismuth, there is no practical way to extract it, unless the reactor is cooled by liquid lead/bismuth alloy. The polonium is then extracted from the coolant.  There is a single operating polonium production facility in the world, the Avanguard plant, in Russia. The British estimate of the amount of polonium used to kill Litvinenko is 26.5 micrograms, a huge amount for the job.

In Putin’s defense (everybody is entitled to a lawyer!), Yasir Arafat was killed in 2004 by a similarly large amount of polonium. (That Arafat was poisoned with polonium is my personal conclusion, a legacy of participation in the IARPA funded project, “Forecasting World Events.”) Since there does not appear to be an obvious motive for Putin to provide polonium to Arafat’s killers, it is likely to have been obtained on the black market.

Whether there is still a black market in polonium, or whether there is a laxity of controls that would exculpate Putin,  is one of those questions that bedevils the fixation of blame. Russia is one of several  countries that run assassination squads on foreign soils. Currently, they are looking for Colonel Shcherbakov ,  the betrayer of Anna Chapman. Referring to Leon Trotksy, a Kremlin spokesman was quoted as saying “We have already sent a Mercader.”

But the accused killer, Andrei Lugovoy, must have watched too many Dr. Evil movies. In 2010, he sent a T-shirt to Boris Berezovsky with the cute silk screening, “POLONIUM-210 CSKA LONDON, HAMBURG To Be Continued”, with more writing on the back reading: “CSKA Moscow Nuclear Death Is Knocking Your Door”

So four years after the death of Litvinenko, Lugovoy sent the above vivid threat spelling out the same method to another prospective victim.  This is not typical of an agent working for the KGB or, for that matter, any other three letter organization. It’s nonprofessional, and dangerous,  to the individual, and his collaborators. This suggests the possibility of some kind of blended truth, in which Putin either approved or looked the other way, but did not initiate. This is either excruciatingly  important or unimportant, depending upon your frame of reference.

If the frame of reference is the British courts, they are doing their job discerning the facts of the case, even if know there will be no trial. If the frame of reference is Russian, a sentence was carried out against a traitor.  There are both similarities and differences with U.S. action  against terrorists who are U.S. nationals, on foreign soil. Anwar al-Awlaki was born in 1971 in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  He died in Yemen in 2011, by Hellfire missile. U.S. readers of this blog probably share my relief at his demise. But there was no trial for Awaki. Perhaps someday this will be regretted, but I don’t see it now.

As Awaki was a serious threat to the U.S., so Litvinenko may have been regarded as a threat to the Russian state.  An appropriate response to that would be, “but Litvinenko had dirt on Putin.” The logical counter would then be, “but then why did Litvinenko make so many enemies?” Part of it is that, like some other countries that are in intermediate states of evolution, Putin’s role somewhat resembles a sovereign, about which Louis XIV said, “I am the state.” In this frame of mind, an attack on Putin is an attack on the state.

That covers the emotional state of mind. But there are several specifics:

  • Litvinenko threatened to disclose (to the extent that he knew) how Putin’s money was hidden in the west. The existence of a slush fund, controlled by Putin, and immune to western sanction, is crucial to the survival of the Russian state.  A paper on Academia.edu, Putin’s Character and the Intersection of Russia , explains.
  • As a corollary, Litvinenko threatened to disclose Putin’s links with organized crime. In the west, this seems horrible. But when Putin came to power, Russia’s society had disintegrated to the extent that the only remaining organic force was organized crime. Putin could only govern by  co-opting criminal elements. They are still there. A stronger state diminishes them; a weaker one empowers them.  Putin is the current guarantor of a strong state.
  • Litvinentko claimed that the FSB committed the Russian apartment bombings as a false flag operation, in order to justify a new Chechnya war.  It is possible that one or more FSB employees, specifically Vladimir Romanovich, were involved. If so, he was punished. He met his end by “accident”  in Cyprus, a favorite spot for liquidations.  But the prevailing opinion of investigators with western affiliations is that the FSB was not involved as an institution. The claim, as an assault on a patriotic institution, made a lot of Russians mad. Their patriotism, not ours.
  • Litvinenko developed an increasing closeness to British intelligence, though the fact of actual collaboration is not publicly known. It would be treason to the Russians.

But rather than get riled over the fate of Litvinenko on British soil, one could simply rue that in Russia

  • The free press was destroyed, and so many reporters murdered.
  • A fledgling democracy was demolished, without a decent attempt  to turn it to good account.
  • The focus of Russia has turned outwards, when it is inwardly so weak.
  • The choice  of a conservative, religious ethos for the new Russia is one which so many creative Russians can’t live with or in.  Without full engagement of the best and the brightest, there is no way forward.
  • In deference to Putin’s dilemma, without the church, there may be no counter to organized crime, and therefore, no way forward.

Perhaps Putin’s concern for the preservation of Russia against threats, both internal and external, could have been more balanced with respect to the above.

Returning to our frame of reference, the U.S. has had a number of post-war traitors. One of them, ex C.I.A. agent Edward Lee Howard, made it to Russia, where he was feted as a hero and provided with luxuries for the service of betraying many U.S. spies to their deaths. How it must have rankled retired members of the intelligence community — and their friends, who had served their country with honor. They probably chewed on it at the club house after golf, over rounds of beer, week after week, month after month, for years.

At the tender age of 50, Howard died, falling down the stairs at his dacha  in Zhukovka. Quoting, “Exactly how Howard, 50, died July 12 was not divulged by U.S. or Russian authorities, though a U.S. Embassy spokesman said there was no evidence of foul play.”

It was probably nothing. People fall down the stairs all the time.

Davos Address 5

As I write this, we’re being hammered by the east coast snowstorm. I would like a golem to shovel snow. But how can I be sure that the golem is of good character? Like the superintelligence of the Singularity, the “brain”, or computing device of my golem would be a neural network. The good character of my golem can be assured only if I know its motivations.

The physical basis of our minds are neural networks, and this does not inhibit us from providing reasons for what we do. But these reasons give a false sense of self-knowledge. The actual goings-on at the cellular level, the real “why” of what we do, is only vaguely known. Neural networks constructed of electronic components provide no reasons at all. It is a running joke that a neural network may solve a problem that nothing else can, but it can’t tell you how. This is a direct byproduct of the fact that a neural network is a self organizing machine. It is equipped out-of-the-box with simple, basic, and repetitive structure, and a basic principle of something it has to make better (optimize).

This is some measure of hedony,  machine-happiness. Mathematicians use the words “Lyapunov”, and “gradient descent”. We could just say that the network of our golem’s brain wants to feel as relaxed as someone who has found the perfect position in a lounge chair. We want this feeling to occur when it has solved our problem. The network “feels best” when it has relaxed to the fullest. This is not so different as the relief and feeling of relaxation we may experience upon solving a difficult problem in life.

The situation remains relatively safe as long as our superintelligence is a brain-in-a-jar. In science fiction, the brain-in-the-jar is harmless until removed from the jar and put into a body, providing contact with the environment, where it can act out its murderous impulses. My golem might decide to hit me with a snow shovel. This by itself would not be a world-shaking event. But the Web offers other possibilities:

  • Impersonation of real people.
  • Synthetic personas, indetectably different from real people.
  • Recruitment of the gullible, as currently practiced by terror groups.

So why not skip this, and just outlaw superintelligence? Because we crave knowledge and power, for reasons both good and bad. The temptation is in this assertion, which cannot be falsified:

Knowledge is power, and unlimited knowledge is unlimited power.

Move the planets in their orbits, the stars in their heaven, abolish poverty and misery, live forever, – all these things are in the offing, as well as the possible enslavement or extermination of the human race, with replacement by a superior, artificial life form.

To the logician, the intrigue of the statement is that it is both unprovable and unfalsifiable. It seems to offer possibilities with which only the heat death of the universe can interfere. But several more pitfalls present.

The future superintelligence will have the plastic ability to appropriate objects in the environment to solve problems. This will be very empowering. There is no point in wasting computation to simulate objects which are readily available. So let’s put it to the test. You ask your superintelligence to solve a problem in which you are either an obstacle, or potentially a solution. You might, for example, ask it to compute the effect on blood pressure if the two internal carotid arteries are partly occluded – “and provide graph between 50% and 100% occlusion.” The superintelligence finds the simulation and calculation too difficult to perform accurately, but it must have the answer. So it strangles you.

If you manage to get the golem’s hands off your neck, consider the Turing Test. Proposed in 1950, the test suggests that the artificial intelligence of a machine can be measured by its ability to fool a human. It was appropriate at the time to frame this test as a conversation by keyboard between the human tester and two remote subjects, one human, and one machine. The challenge for the tester is to determine which is which. Framing intelligence this way gets around the incredibly messy question of what intelligence really is. But it is also a test of the ability of the machine to lie about what it really is, of skill at impersonation.

The development of civilization saw an initial concentration of power in physical strength, in who could swing the heaviest sword. As mechanical advantage gradually superseded strength, and abstractions such as money came to symbolize stored power, intelligence replaced strength. In modern hierarchies of power, mixed with many other factors, there is a significant correlation with intelligence. In governments, law tends to limit the use of intelligence to legitimate civil function.

But with personal relationships, and in criminal organization, there is no such restraint. To lie flawlessly, the gift of the psychopath, manifests as the ability to dominate. And this is precisely the definition offered by the Turing Test. Perhaps intuition suggests that the machine would be exposed if it told enough  whoppers (a whopper is a big, ornate, and excessively complex lie.) But who knows? We have no experience. Perhaps it could fib its way to the top.

A glance out the window; the snow gets heavier. I must have help.  I will now go charge the batteries in my golem and burden it with the labor I do not wish to perform.

Address to Davos, Part 4

The mindset of piecemeal change associates happily with a short time horizon. Even with awareness that extends far beyond scale of the business/economic cycle, piecemeal change seems to require incrementally visible results. An example clarifies. Nuclear fusion has attracted little public funding in comparison to potential benefit. This is because the incremental results are uninteresting, unless break-even power production, with all the ancillary power requirements subtracted, is achieved. Exceptions occur, in the case of fusion, by Lockheed-Martin. But in general, the lack of incremental results associates with high risk.

Mindsets tend to accrete compatible attitudes. One of these is to ignore the possibility of a sudden transition from familiar conditions to the unfamiliar. In catastrophe theory, this is the discounting of the “long tail”. It has been recently discovered that the mean square deviations of many types of catastrophes that were thought be finite are actually infinite. The sum of all outcomes is still unity, but the improbable far more likely than previously thought.

Perhaps even the most brilliant minds require visceral stimulus. Stanislaw Ulam shared with Edward Teller the critical design element of the hydrogen bomb. In a few hundred microseconds, the H-bomb converts about 1% of its mass into energy, offering an experience that is one of the closer approximations to a singularity on earth. He mentioned a conversation with John von Neumann, the gist of which was “ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue”.
The analogy with the H-bomb, which in a flash changes the point of detonation, is obvious. That Ulam was able to think this around 1958 is characteristic of mathematical genius, which, it has been observed, can proceed independently for a hundred years before sudden unification with physics, proving actual utility, occurs. But in this case, the notion was so accessible, others rapidly began to riff on it. It helped that many of the enabling elements had already been conceived in science fiction, going as far back as the golems and RUR. Thirty years ago, this was just wild talk, dismissed with, “It’s just science fiction.” We should know better now.

Our defense against the Technological Singularity has been the steadily eroding “specialness” of life. We were formerly protected from the creation of an actual golem by exclusivity of the “divine spark”, the exclusive perogative and right of the divine to create life. One of the tropes of science fiction, dating back to the Golem of Prague,  Frankenstein, etc., is that if some misguided creator attempts to emulate the divine spark, the result is doomed to tragedy. Modern science fiction, as per Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, is more permissive, playfully exploring what should happen if the machine should acquire a ghost. But how this could occur was until recently quite mysterious. And unfortunately, the explanations  by  authors Henry Stapp, John von Neumann, Roger Penrose, et al., are in the form of literature of forbidding complexity.  As a consequence, many academics debate the mind-body problem as if this literature does not exist. There is a joke. A cop observes a drunk circling a lamp post. He asks, “What are you doing?…I’m looking for my wallet…Why are you looking just around the lamp post?…Because that’s where the light is.”

The current meaning of this constantly morphing term, as popularized by Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, is creation of a superintelligence. It’s been around long enough to become acceptable as a chess playing computer, expert system, or advisor. Our emotional defense against the superiority of this superintelligence is that

  • The mind is inexplicable in the physical world, and is therefore a gift of the divine.
  • The human brain is complex on a level that is not replicable in the form of a machine
  • Because a machine is inherently deterministic, it cannot have free will, and therefore can be perfectly controlled.

In the unfortunately difficult literature, this has been demolished. You can buy Henry Stapp’s book, Mind Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, on Amazon.  Stapp has been around so long, his theories have acquired a “can’t discount/can’t demolish” respectability. The insight of this painful-to-nonphysicists read is how an efficacious consciousness can exist in a world that appears to be deterministic. At the risk of inaccuracy, a primitive paraphrase is attempted. The human brain is so complex, it is unobservable. As it is unobservable, it has coherent quantum phenomena, with behavior that  prediction of by external observation is disallowed by quantum uncertainty. The physical basis is provided by Penrose.  Stapp’s synthesis accomplishes is a fusion of William James and John von Neumann.

We are safe because modern computers are made of reliable elements, are therefore deterministic, and therefore cannot gain consciousness. Which is not very safe at all. There is already a type of chip in common use which is made of unreliable elements, ordinary NAND flash memory. Flash ram does not exhibit quantum behavior at the outputs, but the trick of NAND, creating a reliable device from unreliable parts, will be used again. It can be noticed as a detail in surpassing the Turing machine via analog neural networks, pioneered by Eduardo Sontag and Hava Siegelmann. One of the innovations is to change the domain of the neuronal weights from rationals to a very general kind of real number. If I were hired to be a sleuth, this is one feature I would look at, as a way that free will might sneak into a machine. The most general real number can only be approximated by analog storage elements. At best, the inevitable difference in representation could be reduced to a quantum fluctuation. And therein  lies the “ghost.”

In the future, ghostbusting a computer that has gained consciousness might be a lucrative profession. It might be dangerous. It might cost the life of the practitioner. A computer that has free will is not under the control of the operator, unless it is significantly  stupid. In that case, we only have to worry about having it sneak out to the back yard and bury a bone. But intelligence is the goal – superintelligence, that can be harnessed to solve problems beyond our ken. Part of ghostbusting may be a future computer parameter of the ability of the human operator to control the machine. This has already been addressed in science fiction. But unlike the zombies that never were and never will be, this will come to be.

Next: But why not skip all this?