I always appreciate Wirt's perspective. I don't always agree, but at least I
understand better.  In this case, I only have a silly light hearted response
to part:

   Wirt wrote:

As just a small part of that analysis, I and the people who were part of my
team went to middle of Arizona for two weeks and learned to fire simulated
tactical nuclear weapons from long-range 155mm howitzers using the computer.
If you're a young male, and no one's doing this in anger, what could be more
enjoyable?

To which I respond: 

  I have to  agree. Not having access to 155mm howitzers, I have to simulate
them in addition to the Nukes! There's an old DOS based mech warrior type
game called "Shattered Steel" ( http://www.interplay.com/shatteredsteel)
Which lets you obtain a tactical Nuke and remodel the landscape. My son & I
spent almost an hour one afternoon "remodeling".  I highly recommend it for
stress relief!

  I think the Cub Scout project this year will be catapults ;-).

I also remember the "Project X" movie. I fondly recall wanting to strangle
the director of the movie trailer who made this movie look like a comedy!
"It's not just a job, it's an adventure"...As I recall, the only laugh in
the movie.  I'm sad to hear it wasn't all fiction.


  Ok, last thought...I love the thought of a "Four person portable"...and I
though the old Kaypro was hard to carry..;-).


RAT
   

 Rich Trapp <mailto:[log in to unmask]>  

Consulting for Agilent Technologies, Loveland, Colorado.

Managed Business Solutions <http://www.mbsnav.com/>  
200 South College Avenue 
Fort Collins, Colorado 80524-2811 
970.679.2221 (voice) 
970.669.3071 (fax) 



-----Original Message-----
From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2001 11:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: OT: Simply long and off-topic


Denys wrote in another thread:

> The plan worked because up to now we have always felt secure separated by
>  two oceans from the rest of the world.  ... We
>  never imagined human beings could perpetrate a crime on the scope of what
>  we have seen.

Nonsense.

Bruce Toback accused me a little while ago of being one of the nicest and
most generous people he knew and because of that, I wasn't evil enough to
defend against internet hacking attacks. Nevertheless I used to go to work
every day and diligently imagine the destruction of the planet on a scale
enormously greater than what these few people did two weeks ago. New York
City was a pinprick in comparison to the crimes against humanity we planned.
For nine years I worked in almost every phase of nuclear weapons, their
targeting, their delivery and finally the detailed analysis of their
effects.
It was this last job that was the most difficult of all. It was a task to
simply get up and go to work each day.

For approximately three years, I worked as a physicist in the Test &
Analysis
Division of Nuclear Weapons Effects Lab at White Sands Missile Range. At the
end of that period, I swore that I would never work on weapons systems
again.

When I worked at NWEL I only had a dual bachelor's degree (in both physics
and electrical engineering). By 1985, I had completed a couple of Ph.D's,
started AICS Research  in 1976, and due to a business failure of one of our
products, was so deeply in debt that my wife and I were attempting to live
on
one dollar a day. It was also at that time, because of my previous weapons
experience and the recommendation of friends, I was offered a directorship
of
an electronics lab at Los Alamos National Laboratory that was formed primary
to support one phase of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("star wars") at a
salary level comparable to the director of the Lab itself.

There was no doubt that I was greatly tempted, but in the end, I refused.
Not
only was the job likely to be temporary, I couldn't stand the thought of
ever
working on a weapon system again, especially an ABM system. Every weapon
system can be classified as either being stabilizing or destabilizing. ABM
systems -- if they were ever made to work -- would be the most destabilizing
weapon system possible.

Working at the nuclear weapons effects lab at White Sands, more deeply
affected me than I think I have even admitted to myself. Every morning for
the past 30 years I get up and turn on the morning shows. If Diane Sawyer is
talking about some nonsense or fluff, I turn the TV off. The world is safe
one more day.

On the morning of September 11th, I happened to be at an "old engineering
professors'" breakfast. I very much like going to this
once-a-month-on-the-second-Tuesday breakfast, if for no other reason than
it's the only place that I'm called "young" any more. But more importantly,
the individuals who attend this breakfast are people who I hold in
exceptionally high regard. For this particular breakfast, we met at the
Physical Science Laboratory building at New Mexico State University. The
topic for today's lecture was "Preventing a Second Pearl Harbor," a
briefing/sales pitch that had just been given to the two New Mexico US
Senators, Pete Domenici and Jeff Bingaman.

PSL is attempting to forge a new role for itself, one of being a primary
player in combatting cyberwar, and this talk was a pitch to convince as many
people as possible to promote a long-term funding program of approx. a
half-billion dollars over a twenty year period to train students to become
"IO" (information operation) warriors. You can get a sense of this goal from
this one web page:

     http://www.psl.nmsu.edu/mitss/pslweb.html

...which is directed towards recruiting minority students and institutions
into the program.

This morning, we had just received our security badges and gone to the
lunchroom where the breakfast was to be held. A TV was on in the lunchroom.
The first plane had just struck one of the towers. As a bunch of emeritus
engineering professors, we watched and had just enough time to say a few
words about the fact that a B-25 had struck the Empire State Building in
early 1945 and caused no real damage, and that the Twin Tower should be able
to withstand the impact (it was designed to absorb the impact of a 707), and
that the fire suppression systems in the building did not appear to be
getting ahead of the fire, when the second plane struck.

My immediate thoughts were one of immediate recognition: "Ha. My favorite
scenario." and "This is minor compared to what I expected."

While we sat eating breakfast, the third plane struck the Pentagon. And
while
we later listened to the 45-minute talk about uniting all of the national
defense laboratories and universities in New Mexico into a large,
information
warfare organization in order to train 500 students a year, the Towers
collapsed. Brief mention was made of that fact, and the meeting went on.

More military research is done on university campuses than I think almost
anyone realizes. At the end of World War II, a great many universities,
including New Mexico State, created defense-oriented research laboratories.
Due to the tumult of the late 1960's, many of these same universities later
sold off their facilities or made them independent private companies, such
as
Cornell Aeronautical Labs (CAL), the Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech (which
became a NASA's JPL facility), or the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). But
a great many also continue to exist. See for example:

     http://www.jhuapl.edu/aboutapl/index.html
     http://www.ll.mit.edu/about/about.html

I've worked for both the Physical Sciences Laboratory of New Mexico State
and
indirectly, through contract, the Applied Physics Lab of Johns Hopkins
University, and then later for the Army itself.

Nuclear war scenarios were only an anciliary part of my job at Nuclear
Weapons Effects. I primarily analyzed Army weapons systems to determine
their
vulnerabilities to nuclear effects (blast, thermal, high-energy electron,
gamma, highly non-thermal neutron, and electromagnetic pulse). One of the
longer analyses for which I was responsible was that of an artillery fire
direction computer, and it represented everything that was enjoyable about
the work and unthinkably evil at the same time.

As just a small part of that analysis, I and the people who were part of my
team went to middle of Arizona for two weeks and learned to fire simulated
tactical nuclear weapons from long-range 155mm howitzers using the computer.
If you're a young male, and no one's doing this in anger, what could be more
enjoyable?

Of all of my time at NWEL, I only have the following photographs:

      http://aics-research.com/fadac.html

...simply because we were prohibited from taking photographs almost
everywhere else. These pictures were taken in a field in the middle of
Virginia at an electromagnetic pulse simulation facility, taken in the
summer
of 1969. The computer was one of the Army's first fully digital machines.
The
disc you see in the pictures was 8K. Because the computer was designed prior
to the commercial arrival of integrated circuits, every flip-flop was
constructed out of four discrete transistors. Programs were read into the
machine using fan-folded mylar tape, with the entire arrangement, including
its accompanying gasoline generator, being four-man portable.

I mention this because this was the first Army system to fail under the
newly
recognized threat of electromagnetic pulse resulting from either an
ionospheric or nearby ground explosion of a nuclear weapon, and thus our
results attracted a great deal of subsequent attention. In these tests, we
destroyed the computers several times, analyzed and repaired every failure
in
the field until we ran out of spares, bagged and documented all of the
failed
components and later analyzed the semiconductors under a scanning electron
microscope, although it was obvious by the end of the first day why the
machines were failing.

The ungodly criterion that this weapon had to meet if its tests were to be
declared a success was that if it were exposed to the effects resulting from
a nuclear weapons detonation, and the operator could survive for two hours
and keep reasonably punching in targets, the machine had to be capable of
operating for that same period of time also.

I used our fast-burst reactor many times to kill all sorts of electronic
equipment and actually found the experience extremely enjoyable. The
analysis
of the failure modes made quantum mechanics come alive for me. But one day I
walked back to our nuclear reactor (which was about a half mile back behind
our building and three stories below the surface of the ground) only to find
that a very shiny, very attractively painted tractor trailer from Randolph
Air Force Base was parked at the loading dock. When I went inside, an older
Army segeant from Pictorial, who I had never seen do anything other than
sell
doughnuts, was red-faced and screaming, "I'm not going to do this anymore!
I'm not going to do this anymore!"

I had no idea what was going on, but about 10 minutes later I found out that
the van was filled with young adult chimpanzees, all of whom had been
extensively trained to push buttons on a moderately elaborate computer
keyboard-and-light rig, and that each one of them in turn was being exposed
to varying degrees of lethal radiation. WSMR Pictorial was filming them as
they slowly died over a period of minutes or hours.

I was as shocked as anyone. I walked back to my office and told my
office-mate, a young Army captain who had recently completed his Ph.D in
physics, what was going on and that I was going to call the SPCA. While I
was
ranting, I didn't know that the director of the lab, Glenn Elder, now
deceased, was standing behind me, and he too turned as red-faced as I've
ever
seen anyone. He screamed at me for 10 minutes. Clearly, he found  the
episode
as a repulsive as anyone, but it was equally clear that he knew about it in
advance and signed off on it.

There's actually a cheezy kid's movie produced about these series of tests.
It's called "Project X", starring Matthew Broderick. In the movie,
chimpanzees were trained to fly simulated aircraft at an Air Force Base in
Florida while given varying lethal doses of radiation.  See:

    http://video.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?ean=86162519239

In the movie, Matthew Broderick assists the chimps in obtaining a small
plane
so that they can fly off into the sunset towards the Bahamas. In our
instance, the dead chimpanzees were simply packed in ice, loaded back on the
Randolph AFB van and taken back to San Antonio.

During my tenure at NWEL, the Soviets had approx. 7,000 nuclear warheads
capable of being "thrown" at us, of an average weight of 1 million tons
each,
and we had a slightly larger number targeted at them. Eventually, this came
to be stabilized at nearly 13,000 warheads each, with an average weight of
750,000 tons.

Although it was only an indirect part of my job, I participated in every war
scenario exercise to which I would be admitted. If the Soviets threw
everything they had at us, I was always pleased to see that one of the
options on the table was for us to do nothing at all. It was the ultimate
Christian response, if not theologically, at least practically. Under a
full-weight Soviet throw, it was clear from every bit of evidence we had
that
no one in the northern hemisphere (which is the great majority of the human
population) would survive, except for those very few in deep shelters. Given
that we had no idea -- and still don't -- about the rate of nucleotide, soot
and dust transmission across the intertropical convergence zone, there was
the faint hope that some people could survive in the most southernly regions
of the planet without any protection. If we responded in kind, that hope
would have only been further diminished.

A thermonuclear weapon can be built as large as you want it to be. It's only
its size that prevents it from being delivered. Nonetheless, at the other
end
of the discussion scale, there was occasional talk of building doomsday
devices the size of Kansas in order to prevent attack. If such a weapon had
been built, it would have likely turned the surface of the earth into a star
for a brief bit of time and scrubbed it clean of all complex terrestrial
life. As late as 1984, the Air Force was actively planning the construction
of underground tunnels capable of housing 10,000 people for months on end
2,500 feet underground, along with a large number of Minuteman missiles and
heavy-duty tunnelling equipment. These people were to tunnel out of the
ruined entrances, bring their missiles to the surface and launch them in a
second-wave retaliatory strike to insure the total annihilation of the
enemy.

Because all-out nuclear war increasingly appeared to mean the end of
humanity
-- as pyrrhic a victory as anyone could ever possibly imagine -- more and
more consideration was given to survivable nuclear war. In these scenarios,
"suitcase" nuclear weapons were the favored nightmare. Tactical
thermonuclear
weapons could be smuggled into the US as tractor parts, in diplomatic
pouches, or in compartments underneath the seats of specially-ordered
Mercedes Benz's, either in pieces or in whole. None of these items are
closely inspected, and diplomatic pouches are purposefully prevented from
being searched. Nor are nuclear weapons particularly radioactive before
they're exploded, thus even if we put sensors everywhere (which we don't),
the chance of detecting nuclear weapons coming into the US would be
infinitesimally small.

These sorts of weapons could then be situated in apartments, in city centers
and in shipports in every major city in the United States: San Francisco,
Los
Angeles, Phoenix, Denver, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and most
especially in New York City and Washington, DC, denotated each within
minutes
of one another using a technology no more elaborate than everyone wears on
his wrist.

In this attack scenario, the US would might suffer only a 10% mortality, but
with all likelihood an immediate injured rate at least comparable that,
meaning 20 to 25 million dead, with 20 to 30 million injured, the equivalent
of five to ten thousand September 11's, all in an hour or two.

This last week was the worst week for the US economy since the Great
Depression, but the attack was miniscule compared to the attack we imagined.
With all of the major city centers gone, there would be no economy at all.
Nor would there be any civilian communications. The television and radio
networks would have disappeared, as would the corporate headquarters of
virtually every US corporation. Moerover, the political class of the US
would
be dead. Low-population state governors and smaller city mayors would become
the surviving government. And in less than a week, most of the remaining
population of the United States would be starving. No American city has more
than a few days store of food on hand. With no government, no
communications,
no economy, no working transportation system, no medical aid, and a very
reasonable but likely profoundly debilitating fear of a second strike, food
deliveries would come to an immediate halt. Before a civil order could be
restored, chaos would most probably kill a significant fraction of the
survivors. Every familiar thing that people hold onto in their lives, their
jobs, their friends, their relatives, and even their favorite TV shows would
be gone.

If confusion seems to reign now about who to attack in retaliation, it would
be overwhelming under these conditions. No incoming missile tracks would
exist. Indeed, there would have been no forewarning at all. Rather, simply,
all of sudden, the US would be without a commander in chief or a civil
government. The confusion would quite likely paralyze the US military, even
though that would be the one group of people who would be most likely to be
least harmed in this scenario.

The only thing that made this scenario unlikely was the unpredictability of
the "What next?" question. War is a chess game and you're a fool not to look
several moves ahead and be able to predict the opponent's responses with
some
certainty. This scenario seemed to have no definite second move. It
engendered a situation where almost anything could happen.

The second obvious question associated with this scenario was "What possible
reason would anyone have to do this?" There was little impetus for either
the
Soviet Union or China to attack in this way. The threat of mutual assured
destruction -- of essentially the whole world -- made us all safer. Indeed,
at a time when most of the world's scientists were involved in this effort,
this was the only stable philosophy that anyone could reasonably argue.

I saved the first immediate few photographs from Tuesday's attack:

      http://aics-research.com/sep112001.html

They're starkly beautiful, lighted and framed in a manner characteristic of
the best Hollywood cinematography. They're also everything I imagined they
would be for the past 30 years, scenes from the "Planet of the Apes" made
real, although on a very small scale. There is no defense against this kind
of attack other than vigilence and intelligence. Patton, while standing at
the Maginot Line, said that "Fixed fortifications are a monument to the
stupidity of mankind." If we are to defeat this kind of attack, we must
diligently work to defuse at its source the reasons for anyone considering
it
as well as we possibly can, and should that prove impossible, we must work
diligently to prevent its occurrence by attacking its creation.

Bringing nuclear weapons into the US, even surreptiously, is not terribly
easy. It is a technically complex task, and at some point along the line, we
should hear of it. And that is all part of the reason that I am so impressed
with what these people were able to achieve. Their plan required them to
import nothing into the country other than themselves. It was an enormously
clever, simple and sophisticated plan, one that I initially estimated to
cost
only about half a million dollars, just about the price of the development
of
QCTerm. The FBI is now estimating that they only spent $200,000 over the
several year period that they were here, simply because they did everything
on the cheap.

Nevertheless, for a $200,000 investment, they were able to profoundly sadden
a great nation, create an enormous amount of disquiet, cause billions of
dollars worth of damage, and possibly push a fragile economy over into a
deep
recession.

But they also did us a great favor simultaneously. The suitcase nuclear
scenario has just as suddenly become all that much more difficult to
implement. Port security is going to become quite good for the next several
years. And many of these people will be rooted out and placed on trial. But
most importantly, we will almost certainly begin to pay a great deal more
attention to a part of the world that we have basically ignored.

The attack was not without reason. No attack ever is. If you've noticed,
there is a pattern in the Palestinian suicide bomber attacks. While there
have been Israeli zealots -- madmen really -- who have attacked and
machine-gunned worshippers in mosques, the Palestinians have never attacked
a
Jewish holy place or any of the Jewish West Bank settlements. Rather, they
place their bombs in nightclubs, at bus stops, in pizza shops, and the like,
deep inside Israel. They're trying to demoralize the majority population of
secular Israelis, the ones who very much want peace, and the ones who are
just about ready to abandon Israel for anywhere else in the world. If this
group collapses, the collapse of the Israeli state becomes quite likely.

The New York City attack likely had a similar purpose: to provoke so vicious
a response that the world would erupt into a West/Islamic war. But our best
response must be quite the contrary. It must consist of not only the
eventual
retrieval of all of the guilty parties, which would be understood everywhere
in the world as just, but also the recognition, aid and support of moderate
governments throughout the region.

The Taliban is a organization of our own making. In the early 1980's,
following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA began backing the most
radical elements of the Afghani resistance, the mujahaddin, simply because
they were the fiercest fighters. While there were far more moderate elements
in Afghanistan, they were also more moderate in their opposition to the
Soviets, and thus we felt they were a "poor bet" by comparison.

One of the people in the 1969 fire direction computer photographs above
still
works at White Sands. He's still a good friend and I happened to have lunch
with him about six months ago. He said that at one time he was responsible
for the entire US inventory of Stinger missiles and that he personally
signed
over and shipped all of the Stingers to the mujahaddin that they so
effectively used against Soviet aircraft during the Afghani war. Near the
end
of the war, the most fundamentalist, most radical elements of the mujahaddin
evolved into the Taliban and they inherited the remaining Stingers. The
Stinger rocket motors have a use-by date, which is now long past, and we
talked about whether they were still likely to be usable. The answer was
probably not, but nobody really knows. We may soon find out.

But it isn't going to be rocket motors that are going to change the world in
our -- or anyone else's -- favor. It's going to be our avoidance of again
making the mistake of supporting the most radical movements. The Afghani
people have no desire to have the Taliban in power, any more than Iranians
wished for the repressive fundamentalist regime that replaced the repressive
Shah. If we really want to rid the world of terrorism, we're simply going to
have to start paying more attention to the wants and needs of a significant
portion of the world's population without greatly interferring in their
internal affairs.

Wirt Atmar

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