The percentage of the world's scientists and engineers resident in developing countries rose from 7.6% to 10.2% between 1970 and 1980. Today it exceeds 13%.3 But a disturbing idea raises itself: do the numbers matter? Has the strength of science itself, relative to solving anew the problems faced by the scientists of the Manhattan Project, grown to a point where a comparative handful of scientists and engineers can successfully pursue tasks that once required the concerted effort of hordes of the best and brightest? The answer is yes. [Fig. 2: The Emergence from the Box, 1955.] COMPUTER NUCLEAR HYDRO- WEAPONS 1955 Many, perhaps most, of the concepts, techniques, materials, and machines that were developed de novo to enable the production of the first generation of thermonuclear devices have been reinvented, rediscovered or spontaneously spun off from and within the global plenum of civilian R&D and purely scientific endeavor. This is particularly true with regard to the impact of interdisciplinary research programs, such as astrophysics and geophysics. Let us examine some of the things that are hidden in plain sight-weaponizable information that is not labeled as such within innocent-sounding sub-disciplines that are totally unclassified and so hybridized internally as to defy any attempt to return their sensitive content to effective regimes of security and compartmentalization. A good place to start is with people who study the universe. The realm of astrophysics subsumes the whole of the intellectual underpinnings of nuclear weapons development and indeed antedates it. The basic principles of how the sun works, set forth by Bethe and von Weiszacker in the thirties, gave rise not just to the hydrogen bomb but to the epic task of harvesting fusion as a peaceable source of power. And on the more modest scale of planets, the extreme pressures common to their cores and the ignition of fusion bombs are described by one and the same 3C.f. Scientists in the Third World by Jacques Gail lard (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991). I number among my acquaintances at M.I.T.'s fusion research facilities both Syrian and Iraqi physicists each with an extended family left at home in those nations. set of equations of state-the work of Fermi and Taylor." Static pressures in excess of 3 million atmospheres, which were experimentally unthinkable in 1945, are now achieved using diamond anvil cells that fit in the palm of your hand. So today we have a robust sub-discipline of geophysics-the study of comet and asteroid impacts that utilize the liberated (or re-invented) expertise of the weapons laboratories on a daily basis. The major difference being that those who utilize such weapons-derived hydrodynamic finite-element computer codes have at their disposal vastly more computational power than Fermi or Bethe ever dreamed of. The progress made by the global scientific community not only recreates in the unclassified world knowledge that was at one time restricted to the world of nuclear weapons designers. Progress can also make viable pathways to nuclear weapons that were initially rejected by the U.S. and released into the realm of unclassified data. It is important to remember that the initial selection of the winning concepts in the inception of the first generation of fission bombs or ICBM's (or whatever) is not a process that denies the validity of the concepts that are initially declined. It is rather a reflection of the perceived state-of-the-art at a very early time in the evolution of a particular technology. The fittest idea for such a time and place gets selected on the spot on the basis of saving as much time as money can afford, but the other proffered concepts may prove fit or fitter in other times and other places. Thus, while uranium isotope separation via gaseous diffusion was the mainstay of Veiled references to phenomena relevant to thermonuclear weapons design outcrop frequently in contemporary Russians works on nuclear physics and astrophysics. Two interesting examples are to be found in the recent English translation of V. K. Ignatovitch, Physics of UltraCold Neutrons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). On pp. 14-15, a discussion of non-linear optical effects in a dense cloud arising from a compact explosion ends (and with it the chapter): "The Rest Is Silence," on p. 371, in a two-page bibliography of Ignatovitch's reports of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, several of the reports' titles have been deleted and replaced by parenthetic descriptions of their contents in whole or in part, e.g., "The Hypothesis of Secret Neutron States Is Advanced."). In the astrophysical realm, theoretical accounts of radiation pressure and electron ponderomotive forces in stars can be interspersed with discussions of such effects in channels and converging surfaces-such physical structures are artifacts-alien to stellar physics. the Manhattan Project, the then impractical technique of gas centrifuge separation went on to become practical (and perhaps principal) source of weapons-grade fissionable materials in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.6 There is historically evident in the history of proliferation, a strong tendency to succumb to the temptation to believe that the central problem is to prevent the history of technology repeating itself. But very often such initially dismissed branches of technology as the calutron can take root and flourish in the shadow of their "mature" competitors. Having abandoned as hopeless the materials problems posed by both the high beam current source and product collection (target) end of the early calutrons and the strength of materials limits that rendered gas centrifuges impractical in the 1940s, the A.E.C. and its successors blithely funded a plenum of materials research for another half-century. And somehow, lacking collective memory or interdisciplinary oversight, the materials science community naively solved those problems and irremediably changed the context of separation technology. Nothing, more or less, than progress is at fault. For, in global perspective, the past of technology was a world in which none of the lesser nations existed in the same time as the technologists of the First World. In 1939, the state-of-the-art in south Asia was filing a working replica of a Lee-Enfield rifle out of bar stock. Building a Norden Bomb sight from scratch in Baghdad was as out of the question. But the near future is a time where increasingly, almost all of the history of technology past can be recapitulated in all but the most forlorn of Third World backwaters, and much of the present state-of-the-art is both intellectually and practically accessible. Teach a man to make microwave ovens and you've opened the door to radar and calutrons alike, for while COCOM can list and monitor trade in "critical" components, tools, and materials, the ubiquity of iron, copper, sand and vacuum dooms the exercise to inanity in the long run. THE DIFFUSION OF DATA This applies equally to information of military value as well as weapons of mass destruction. Witness the publication in an Indian scientific journal of satellite images of both low- and high-resolution of the gulf war despite their being withheld by the U.S. for security reasons. Those responsible for withholding them evidently overlooked India's possession of a NOAA-11 downlink, a moderate-resolution reconnaissance platform-the Indian Research Satellite, and a geosynchronous satellite to boot. This is not to suggest that the best efforts of the U.S. or NATO aerospace industries are at risk of obsolescence. India would be hard pressed to deliver a successor to the KH-11 or Pyramider reconnaissance systems. But it illustrates the already fragile nature of the assumptions that lead to the attempt to deny information to Iraq by internal control of information when that data flows unencrypted from orbit 24 hours a day. It could have been had for the asking by anyone on a computer net that has (courtesy of DARPA and a host of other federal agencies) come to span the globe in the last decade. So the new paradigm of qualifying for the orbital reconnaissance club is not the capacity to design, build, and launch a large-aperture precision-pointed satellite, but knowing someone, anywhere, in the world in possession of an Ethernet directory, a PC with a color display, a Polaroid camera and a stamp. The consequences of privatizing the component entities of the Soviet military-industrial complex, from basic metallurgical facilities to aerospace centers and nuclear R&D laboratories, may include the proliferation of ideas as well as artifacts and technologies. At one level of the game it's an intelligence windfall, but beyond the opportunities for reverse engineering comes a windfall of missing links in the web of Western military technology-the de facto declassification of Soviet military high The Soviet Union's seizure of German technical personnel after the collapse of the Third Reich led to major improvements in their nuclear program, just as the Manhattan Project benefitted from the efflux of refugees from Germany in the thirties. The Nobel laureate Gustav Hertz, who developed the gaseous diffusion progress in the 1950s, was taken into custody by Soviet forces in 1945. Cf. David Cassidy, "Gustav Herz, Hans Geiger und das Physikalische Institut der Technischen Hochschule Berlin in den Jahren 1933 bis 1945," in R. Rurup, ed., Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft, vol. 1, pp. 373-387 (Berlin: Springer, 1979). 7India is an illustrative case of a nation whose high-technology sector is sufficiently sophisticated to host an indigenous upgrading of a demonstrated nuclear capability to a thermonuclear one. Its technologists clearly have advanced beyond dependence on foreign sources of such “traditional" fission bomb components as high-speed electronic switching tubes (krytrons). They prefer a combination of fiber optics and pulsed laser diodes. 8 Current Science, April 25, 1991, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore. technology puts many Western systems in jeopardy of being comprehensible to analysts denied access to their classified sub-systems. Their high technology cannot be compromised without ours falling victim, too. If living with a sick bear was a trying experience, consider that of surviving in the presence of the carcass of a flea-infested one that has died of the Plague. More than this amplifies the proliferation risks inherent in our emphasis on the classification of data rather than the protection of technology from exposure. It is edifying to attend the manufactures' displays that accompany many large technical meetings sponsored by engineering associations or the DOD. There one sees proudly displayed the first fruits of R&D-components whose exotic materials and advanced electronic, thermal, and optical performance have no parallel in the civilian sector. Very often they are put on offer before their end-use systems-the B-2 and SDI, for instance, have even been tested or publicly displayed. Be it silicon carbide laser mirrors or stealth carbon foam, it's all on offer in the West-albeit without reference to what it has been developed for. The failure of World War III to materialize has not reduced the stockpiles of materiel or the mountains of information and high technology that the superpowers accrued by decades of heavy investment. And with the devolution of the USSR, a question accordingly arises: What are the possible consequences of the uncontrolled dissemination of its high technology and technologists into a multipolar world? For as the Soviet military-industrial complex faces literal bankruptcy, we are being confronted with an enthusiastic sell-off of its assets both human and material. It is something as unanticipated as the outburst of democracy there. Throughout the former Warsaw Pact's territory we are witnessing the Yard Sale at the End of History. Its basic format seems the same from St. Petersburg to Semipalatinsk-be it naval shipyards on the Baltic or the nuclear laboratories of the Ministry of Medium Machines. Hardware, software, expertise and equipment, everything in sight, or out of it, is for sale cheap. The party is over, and as winter approaches, the rhetoric of conversion to the production of civilian goods is yielding to the reality of shortterm survival-generating a cash flow, in rubles or valuta, to keep up with the payrolls and provide the fringe benefits that Moscow no longer guarantees. The iron curtain did more than serving to isolate the citizens of the Warsaw Pact nations from the free world. It also functioned as an impermeable barrier, a containment that kept in a plenum of militarily important high technology that often rivaled the best in the West. Now that that containment has been breached, the most secretive of military powers is spilling that technology into a new and multipolar world. One where many nations with nuclear ambitions have been striving to achieve the sort of weapons capability that both the U.S. and USSR attained in the 1940s. As glasnost mutates into an unbridled high tech sell-off, with expertise (and artifacts) for sale to almost any bidder, high or low, we must affect the restructuring of our perception of the context of the control of the proliferation of the technologies of mass destruction. Only this much is certain: we are in for some interesting times-for what is on offer is not Manhattan Project surplus, but the right stuff for fighting the World War III that never was. The flow of people and data from the former Soviet Union will be rivalled by that from the former Warsaw Pact, Cuba, and North Korea. Given the aversion to nuclear weapons development intrinsic to the German constitution and the sophisticated maturity of NATO's weapons laboratories and arsenals, few nuclear scientists or engineers from the East are likely to find their customary employment close to home. How will their redundancy in Europe affect the nuclear ambitions of nations elsewhere in the world? Entities as diverse as national laboratories, military aerospace development centers, organs of the Soviet Academy, biomedical research facilities, and the City Council of St. Petersburg suddenly dispatched reams of abstracts of technical proposals by a variety of charmels, 10 ranging from individual scientists turned entrepreneurs to the Minister of Military Conversion. The fruits of literally millions of man-years of research suddenly became perceived as somewhat fungible into hard "One Soviet physicist/entrepreneur visiting an investment firm in the U.S. responded to expressions of concern about the potentially destabilizing effects of the transfer of military technologies to Middle Eastern states with the following Russian proverb: "If a man wants to keep his wife from getting drunk, he must drink her wine before she does." If we don't want it sold elsewhere, we should buy it ourselves. 10 Despite their diversity of affiliation, the individuals who have described the deterioration of financial support for their institutions and its negative effects on the quality of their colleagues' lives have spoken in a remarkably similar way, with occasional instances of verbatim phraseology, despite differences in the quality of their English. |