50 years ago Herman Khan coined the term in his book “On thermonuclear war”. His ideas are still important. Now we can read what he really said online. His main ideas are that DM is feasable, that it will cost around 10-100 billion USD, it will be much cheaper in the future and there are good rational reasons to built it as ultimate mean of defence, but better not to built it, because it will lead to  DM-race between states with more and more dangerous and effective DM as outcome. And this race will not be  stable, but provoking one side to strike first. This book and especially this chapter inspired “Dr. Strangelove” movie of Kubrick.
Herman Khan. On Doomsday machine.

North Korea warns of a “fire shower of nuclear retaliation” in their latest episode of megalomania.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=7914048
[note, that site attempts to pop up new windows]

Got Lifeboat?

Jim Davies of Strike the Root writes about Galt’s Gulch and some gulch-like projects. These appeal to him because of the exponential trends in government power and abuse of power. He writes, in part,

“We have the serious opportunity in our hands right now of terminating the era of government absolutely, and so of removing from the human race the threat of ever more brutal tyranny ending only with WMD annihilation–while opening up vistas of peaceful prosperity and technological progress which even a realist like myself cannot find words to describe. ”

http://www.strike-the-root.com/91/davies/davies11.html

Avoiding those terrible events is what building our Lifeboat is all about. Got Lifeboat?

NewScientist – March 10, 2009, by A. C. Grayling

IN THIS age of super-rapid technological advance, we do well to obey the Boy Scout injunction: “Be prepared”. That requires nimbleness of mind, given that the ever accelerating power of computers is being applied across such a wide range of applications, making it hard to keep track of everything that is happening. The danger is that we only wake up to the need for forethought when in the midst of a storm created by innovations that have already overtaken us.

We are on the brink, and perhaps to some degree already over the edge, in one hugely important area: robotics. Robot sentries patrol the borders of South Korea and Israel. Remote-controlled aircraft mount missile attacks on enemy positions. Other military robots are already in service, and not just for defusing bombs or detecting landmines: a coming generation of autonomous combat robots capable of deep penetration into enemy territory raises questions about whether they will be able to discriminate between soldiers and innocent civilians. Police forces are looking to acquire miniature Taser-firing robot helicopters. In South Korea and Japan the development of robots for feeding and bathing the elderly and children is already advanced. Even in a robot-backward country like the UK, some vacuum cleaners sense their autonomous way around furniture. A driverless car has already negotiated its way through Los Angeles traffic.

In the next decades, completely autonomous robots might be involved in many military, policing, transport and even caring roles. What if they malfunction? What if a programming glitch makes them kill, electrocute, demolish, drown and explode, or fail at the crucial moment? Whose insurance will pay for damage to furniture, other traffic or the baby, when things go wrong? The software company, the manufacturer, the owner?

Most thinking about the implications of robotics tends to take sci-fi forms: robots enslave humankind, or beautifully sculpted humanoid machines have sex with their owners and then post-coitally tidy the room and make coffee. But the real concern lies in the areas to which the money already flows: the military and the police.

A confused controversy arose in early 2008 over the deployment in Iraq of three SWORDS armed robotic vehicles carrying M249 machine guns. The manufacturer of these vehicles said the robots were never used in combat and that they were involved in no “uncommanded or unexpected movements”. Rumours nevertheless abounded about the reason why funding for the SWORDS programme abruptly stopped. This case prompts one to prick up one’s ears.

Media stories about Predator drones mounting missile attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan are now commonplace, and there are at least another dozen military robot projects in development. What are the rules governing their deployment? How reliable are they? One sees their advantages: they keep friendly troops out of harm’s way, and can often fight more effectively than human combatants. But what are the limits, especially when these machines become autonomous?

The civil liberties implications of robot devices capable of surveillance involving listening and photographing, conducting searches, entering premises through chimneys or pipes, and overpowering suspects are obvious. Such devices are already on the way. Even more frighteningly obvious is the threat posed by military or police-type robots in the hands of criminals and terrorists.

There needs to be a considered debate about the rules and requirements governing all forms of robot devices, not a panic reaction when matters have gone too far. That is how bad law is made – and on this issue time is running out.

A. C. Grayling is a philosopher at Birkbeck, University of London

Proliferant (n): a country possessing nuclear weapons.

Intended to enhance security or prestige, nuclear weapons instead make humanity less secure, and brand their possessors as dangerous – hardly the kind of prestige most people would aspire to in their personal lives. If decontructing means identifying internal contradictions, nuclear bombs are a good example. Let’s examine nuclear proliferation a little more closely.

The first country to go nuclear was the US, with a test explosion in 1945. The Soviet Union tested their first device in 1949, followed by the U.K. in 1952, France (1960), China (1964), India (1974), Israel (probable in 1979), South Africa (probable in 1979), Pakistan (1998), and North Korea (2006). Regardless of the uncertainty of a 1979 test, South Africa definitely did develop nuclear weapons which they later destroyed, and few if any dispute that Israel has them although the government will not confirm it. Thus we see development occurring 10x in 65 years as of 2010 (averaging once per 6.5 years), with intervals ranging from 0 to 19 years. Since 8 of 9 intervals are 10 years or less, as of this writing the next country to explode a nuclear device will most likely do so by 2016.

With less than a dozen members of the nuclear club so far, there is insufficient data draw accurate statistical conclusions about future proliferation based on first test explosions alone. Additional data can be obtained by integrating data on the times and intervals of test explosions of pure fission bombs, which rely on nuclear fission (splitting of heavy atoms into lighter ones), with times and intervals for other types of milestones. Some of these are first tests of fusion-boosted bombs, of the more powerful two-stage thermonuclear bombs, and of neutron bombs.

Of course, times of first test explosions are not the only useful data. Times of acquisition of other technologies used in weapon manufacture, development budgets, treaties and their associated dates, times of other social and political events, and development and deployment of monitoring technologies are other relevant times. Additional times that could be folded into a more complete analysis include accounting for countries owning weapons that they did not develop. For example, after the breakup of the Soviet Union the Ukraine was third in number of nuclear weapons, until they were sent back to Russia (reminding us that disarmament also provides relevant time points). Countries can and do also host weapons that are controlled by other countries. This is of more than only academic interest. Cuba’s status as such a country brought the world close to a second nuclear war in 1962 (hence the term “Cuban missile crisis”; the first nuclear war was of course the US attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

What can be done.

To better predict what the future holds for nuclear proliferation if historical trends continue, we need to better understand, statistically, what the historical trends really are. A metric based on integrating the data points outlined above would go a long way toward reaching that goal. We already know that by 2016 the next country to go nuclear will probably have tested a device (Though the statistics don’t say, you might like to guess what country that will be). This rough conclusion is a start, and more analysis would produce more conclusions.

Statistics is not destiny. One reason is that statistics does not uncover causes. Thus we can buck the statistics, and prevent or reduce proliferation if we get at and modify the causes. The best way to start is to identify the ‘pressure points’ of the system (yes, Virginia, you can fight the system, if you do it right). Key causes include the incentive structure that exists: desires to be able to (a) attack, (b) retaliate to attack, (c) threaten attack, (d) reduce threat of attack, (e) sell, (f) gain prestige, (g) etc. Change the incentive structure and you could eliminate the causes of proliferation.

The need to know. If knowledge is power, then better understanding of proliferation will lead to more power to control it. Former US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was once asked in a televised news conference by a concerned listener why more research was not done on the reasons for nuclear proliferation. His response: new papers were simply repeating existing papers, and what is the point of more research when it would just be redundant? The foolishness of this reply, surprising in one chosen by his country to be responsible for its safety, is clear: if progress in understanding such a vital problem is too slow, it is far better to direct more research to the question of why it is so slow than to simply throw up one’s hands and accept lack of understanding as inevitable. As Spinoza, the great classical philosopher might have said, there are reasons for everything, those reasons can be found, and no effort should be spared to find them. Whether suppressing an activity so important to the existence of the human race makes Weinberger one of Satan’s soldiers is a question left to the reader.

According to the Associated Press, Abdul Qadeer Khan is now free to “move around” and is no longer under house arrest (where he was confined since 2004).

“In January 2004, Khan confessed to having been involved in a clandestine international network of nuclear weapons technology proliferation from Pakistan to Libya, Iran and North Korea. On February 5, 2004, the President of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, announced that he had pardoned Khan, who is widely seen as a national hero.” (Source)

For more information about nuclear proliferation, see:

• Nuclear Threat Initiative
• Defusing the Nuclear Risk

See also this recent post by Michael Anissimov, the Fundraising Director of the Lifeboat Foundation.

Martin Hellman is a professor at Stanford, one of the co-inventors of public-key cryptography, and the creator of NuclearRisks.org. He has recently published an excellent essay about the risks of failure of nuclear deterrence: Soaring, Cryptography and Nuclear Weapons. (also available on PDF) 

I highly recommend  that you read it, along with the other resources on NuclearRisks.org, and also subscribe to their newsletter (on the left on the frontpage).

There are also chapters on Nuclear War and Nuclear Terrorism in Global Catastrophic Risks (intro freely available as PDF here).

Update: Here’s a Martin Hellman quote from a piece he wrote called Work on Technology, War & Peace:

You have a right to know the risk of locating a nuclear power plant near your home and to object if you feel that risk is too high. Similarly, you should have a right to know know the risk of relying on nuclear weapons for our national security and to object if you feel that risk is too high. But almost no effort has gone into estimating that risk. To remedy that lack of information, this effort urgently calls for in-depth studies of the risk associated with nuclear deterrence.

While this new project may seem to have a much more modest goal than Beyond War, there is tremendous hidden potential: My preliminary analysis indicates that the risk from relying on nuclear weapons is thousands of times greater than is prudent. If the results of the proposed studies are anywhere near my preliminary estimate, those studies then become merely the first step in a long-term process of risk reduction. Because many later steps in that process seem impossible from our current vantage point, it is better to leave them to be discovered as the process unfolds, thereby removing objections that the effort is not rooted in reality.

I wrote an essay on the theme of the possibility of artificial initiation and fusion explosion of giants planets and other objects of Solar system. It is not a scientific article, but an atempt to collect all nesessary information about this existential risk. I conclude that it could not be ruled out as technical possibility, and could be made later as act of space war, which could clean entire Solar system.

Where are some events which are very improbable, but which consequence could be infinitely large (e.g. black holes on LHC.) Possibility of nuclear ignition of self-containing fusion reaction in giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn which could lead to the explosion of the planet, is one of them.

Inside the giant planets is thermonuclear fuel under high pressure and at high density. This density for certain substances is above (except water, perhaps) than the density of these substances on Earth. Large quantities of the substance would not have fly away from reaction zone long enough for large energy relize. This fuel has never been involved in fusion reactions, and it remained easy combustible components, namely, deuterium, helium-3 and lithium, which have burned at all in the stars. In addition, the subsoil giant planets contain fuel for reactions, which may prompt an explosive fire – namely, the tri-helium reaction (3 He 4 = C12) and for reactions to the accession of hydrogen to oxygen, which, however, required to start them much higher temperature. Substance in the bowels of the giant planets is a degenerate form of a metal sea, just as the substance of white dwarfs, which regularly takes place explosive thermonuclear burning in the form of helium flashes and the flashes of the first type of supernova.
The more opaque is environment, the greater are the chances for the reaction to it, as well as less scattering, but in the bowels of the giant planets there are many impurities and can be expected to lower transparency. Gravitational differentiation and chemical reactions can lead to the allocation of areas within the planet that is more suitable to run the reaction in its initial stages.

The stronger will be an explosion of fuse, the greater will be amount of the initial field of burning, and the more likely that the response would be self-sustaining, as the energy loss will be smaller and the number of reaction substances and reaction times greater. It can be assumed that if at sufficiently powerful fuse the reaction will became self-sustaining.

Recently Galileo spacecraft was drawn in the Jupiter. Galileo has nuclear pellets with plutonium-238 which under some assumption could undergo chain reaction and lead to nuclear explosion. It is interesting to understand if it could lead to the explosion of giant planet. Spacecraft Cassini may soon enter Saturn with unknown consequences. In the future deliberate ignition of giant planet may become a mean of space war. Such event could sterilize entire Solar system.

Scientific basis for our study could be found in the article “Necessary conditions for the initiation and propagation of nuclear detonation waves in plane atmospheras”.
Tomas Weaver and A. Wood, Physical review 20 – 1 Jule 1979,
http://www.lhcdefense.org/pdf/LHC%20-%20Sancho%20v.%20Doe%20-%20Atmosphere%20Ignition%20-%202%20-%20Wood_AtmIgnition-1.pdf

It rejected the possibility of extending the thermonuclear detonation in the Earth’s atmosphere in Earth’s oceans to balance the loss of radiation (one that does not exclude the possibility of reactions, which take little space comparing the amount of earthly matter – but it’s enough to disastrous consequences and human extinction.)

There it is said: “We, therefore, conclude that thermonuclear-detonation waves cannot propagate in the terrestrial ocean by any mechanism by an astronomically large margin.

It is worth noting, in conclusion, that the susceptability to thermonuclear detonation of a large body of hydrogenous material is an ex¬ceedingly sensitive function of its isotopic com¬position, and, specifically, to the deuterium atom fraction, as is implicit in the discussion just preceding. If, for instance, the terrestrial oceans contained deuterium at any atom fraction greater than 1:300 (instead of the actual value of 1: 6000), the ocean could propagate an equilibrium thermonuclear-detonation wave at a temperature £2 keV (although a fantastic 10**30 ergs—2 x 10**7 MT, or the total amount of solar energy incident on the Earth for a two-week period—would be required to initiate such a detonation at a deuter¬*ium concentration of 1: 300). Now a non-neg-ligible fraction of the matter in our own galaxy exists at temperatures much less than 300 °K, i.e., the gas-giant planets of our stellar system, nebulas, etc. Furthermore, it is well known that thermodynamically-governed isotopic fractionation ever more strongly favors higher relative concentration of deuterium as the temperature decreases, e.g., the D:H concentration ratio in the ~10**2 К Great Nebula in Orion is about 1:200.45 Finally, orbital velocities of matter about the galactic center of mass are of the order of 3 x 10**7 cm /sec at our distance from the galactic core.

It is thus quite conceivable that hydrogenous matter (e.go, CH4, NH3, H2O, or just H2) relatively rich in deuterium (1 at. %) could accumulate at its normal, zero-pressure density in substantial thicknesses or planetary surfaces, and such layering might even be a fairly common feature of the colder, gas-giant planets. If thereby highly enriched in deuterium (£10 at. %), thermonuclear detonation of such layers could be initiated artificially with attainable nuclear explosives. Even with deuterium atom fractions approaching 0.3 at. % (less than that observed over multiparsec scales in Orion), however, such layers might be initiated into propagating thermonuclear detonation by the impact of large (diam 10**2 m), ultra-high velocity (^Зх 10**7 cm/sec) meteors or comets originating from nearer the galactic center. Such events, though exceedingly rare, would be spectacularly visible on distance scales of many parsecs.”

Full text of my essay is here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/8299748/Giant-planets-ignition

November 14, 2008
Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/eventinfo/ieet20081114/

Organized by: Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology and the Lifeboat Foundation

A day-long seminar on threats to the future of humanity, natural and man-made, and the pro-active steps we can take to reduce these risks and build a more resilient civilization. Seminar participants are strongly encouraged to pre-order and review the Global Catastrophic Risks volume edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic, and contributed to by some of the faculty for this seminar.

This seminar will precede the futurist mega-gathering Convergence 08, November 15-16 at the same venue, which is co-sponsored by the IEET, Humanity Plus (World Transhumanist Association), the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Immortality Institute, the Foresight Institute, the Long Now Foundation, the Methuselah Foundation, the Millenium Project, Reason Foundation and the Accelerating Studies Foundation.

SEMINAR FACULTY

• Nick Bostrom Ph.D., Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University
• Jamais Cascio, research affiliate, Institute for the Future
• James J. Hughes Ph.D., Exec. Director, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
• Mike Treder, Executive Director, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
• Eliezer Yudkowsky, Research Associate. Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
• William Potter Ph.D., Director, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies

REGISTRATION:
Before Nov 1: $100
After Nov 1 and at the door: $150

Perhaps most technological races eventually develop high-energy atom smashers, estimate their existential risks as negligible, and end up destroying themselves with a black hole created by the atom smasher. That would be one explanation (of many) for the so-far nonproductive SETI project. Although the Drake equation suggests extraterrestrial civilizations should be out there, none have yet been found. There may be the rare civilization that ascribes to something like the precautionary principle and, thus, would not fall for a cosmic ruse like the temptation to develop high-energy particle accelerators. But such civilizations would also cloak themselves from detection by SETI projects. Not worried? Then maybe you are not a member of such a civilization.