Problems of the MAD doctrine, their consequences, and positive alternatives

[Paul D. Fernhout]

The policy of "Mutually Assured Destruction" (MAD) with strategic
nuclear weapons policy is based on decision makers being rational and
not wanting their own country destroyed (were they to use their nuclear
weapons and receive reprisals or even just spreading radiation). This
essay explores a few reasons why this MAD policy will ultimately fail
due to irrationality or other reasons for bad decisions by humans or the
bureaucracies they inhabit. This reasoning is also applicable to
understanding why any similar policies about bioweapons or drones or
nanotech and so on could also fail. Then the consequences of this are
explored, and some alternatives suggested (including sharing information
leading to healthier local communities and ultimately creating space
habitats).

=== Reasons bad decisions can be made

Here are some reasons people may make bad decisions for their own health
or the health of the people they lead:
* Selfishness (either too small or too big a scale to fit a healthy
human society, ranging from the individual to the cosmos)
* Time-scale (either too small or too big a scale to fit a healthy human
society, ranging from the next minute to eternity at either extreme)
* Mental illness & disease (infectious, genetic, nutritional, lifestyle)
* Ideology (e.g. religion, culture, morality used to justify dispensing
death in every wider circles as in, "kill everyone and let God sort it
out", or the Nazi bureaucratization of death camps)
* Cognitive dissonance (the book "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)")
* Bureaucratic inertia
* Internal power dynamics (elections, coups, alliances)
* Brinksmanship and risk taking (including about to whom the risk applies)
* Thanatos (a death wish, or even an aspect of Yin/Yang
creative/destructive complements)
* Misinformation
* Miscommunication
* Misperception (especially of intentions or risks)
* Out-of-date information (as things change)
* Technical breakdown
* Mistakes in information processing
* Economics ("war is a racket")
* Failed child rearing practices
* Socially and economically impoverished support communities
* The completely unexpected
* "Supernormal stimuli" and "The Pleasure Trap" (see related books with
those titles)

[No time right now to expand on each section.]

If we are prudent and cautious, we have to assume the MAD doctrine will
fail eventually, given so many ways it can fail, leading to global
nuclear war.

=== How the MAD doctrine will fail

Time is long for one of these failure modes to manifest itself in just
one country (whether the USA, North Korea, or elsewhere) in regards to
any one of a set of dangerous technologies (so, not just nuclear, but
biotech plagues, killer robots, computer viruses, nanotech, and so on).
Perhaps a healthy society could deal with one of these problem, like
replacing a physically sick leader. But when several issues happen at
once (like a combination of a mentally ill leader, an extreme ideology,
bureaucratic inertia, a miscommunication, and a technical breakdown,
etc.), we could get into the zone of "The Seven Factors That Make An
Accident" (to refer to an old drivers education film).

At the same time, there is also a strong irrational component in MAD
(that countries will in practice build up big stockpiles of nuclear
weapons than can't be used). So, MAD itself assumes something irrational
about human behavior, but then proceeds as if people are rational --
which is a problematical position.

In other part of society, we have courts, police forces, psychiatric
hospitals, and so on, on the assumptions that people may have
disagreements of opinion about important things, they may act harmfully
toward each other, they may act harmfully towards themselves, and so on.
Yet, then why assume that such issues will not apply to leaders? Why
assume that leaders (or the organizations that surround them) will be
healthy and rational and finely attuned to their own survival in a
changing world? Especially when history shows how often this is not the
case? It may be true 99% of the time, but that other 1%, coupled with
the awesome weapons we have produced from our technological abundance
mean that the 1% of the times can destroy the potential for the 99% of
the times when things work.

MAD also assumes that weapons of mass destruction are controlled only by
large states. But that is less and less true, as technological diffusion
leads to smaller organizations with increasing access to WMDs of all
sorts, whether nuclear or biotech.

Even just conventional means applied to a weak spot in a large system
can lead to social craziness and making large areas of the world
uninhabitable. For example, the tragedy of 9/11/2001 lead the USA to
destroy many aspects of its own culture out of fear and to lash out in
anger and overall create more enemies for itself abroad, including by
using depleted uranium, that has unfortunately seeded other lands with a
nuclear burden that may last thousands of years (causing birth defects,
cancers, and so on). So, even when countries have an intact
command-and-control system for their military, how that military is used
can be very much affected by other actors. Likewise, in Japan, the
Fukushima disaster has been attributed to years of denialism and
collective groupthink, even though the problems and risks with those
specific reactors were repeatedly pointed out, with a consequence that
many square miles of Japan are for the foreseeable future uninhabitable.
There are many similar reactors around the globe, all dependent on the
electrical power grid for their long-term functioning (a grid which
could potentially go down for a long time due to a solar storm). Both
depleted uranium and uranium-based nuclear reactors are byproducts of
the infrastructure that creates and maintains nuclear weapons.

Thus, it is problematical to let our national security policy ultimately
rest on "MAD", whether MAD make rational sense or not. From the above,
MAD has been failing in some ways (DU and Fukushima), and it is likely
to fail in others.

One can point to the ultimate immorality or long-term craziness of many
of these MAD-related decisions (given the costs and risks to humanity as
a whole), but that has not really led to much progress on these issues
in the past. Examples of things tried and failed:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

The basic issue, which is in a sense outside of human rationality, is
that our technological capabilities have grown beyond our political
capabilities and the scale of one small Earth to absorb it all
(including our inevitable mistakes even when we have the best of
intentions).

Or, as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky said, "A planet is the cradle of mind, but
one cannot live in a cradle forever."

If we accept that accidents will happen, that mistakes will be made,
then we have to accept that humanity's technological potential has
become, or is becoming, too big for the planet. It is irrational to both
say we have these massive global problems due to humanity becoming
essentially a "geological force" (e.g. Preston Cloud), and then to say
we cannot use our geological force-level powers in positive healthy
ways. How can be be both a society than can cause global warming to
change the ecosystem of Earth but then not a society that can use
technology to change the ecosystem of Mars, the Moon, or the asteroids?

One alternative is for our society to achieve some broader phase change
to "a newer way of thinking", like discussed at the ANWOT site of Donald
Pet based on what Albert Einstein talked about when nuclear weapons were
invented:
http://anwot.org/

Another alternative discussed later is for our society to make its
infrastructure more dispersed or more resilient in various ways.

Both of these alternatives could work together.

=== Overshoot, but in what sense?

William Catton, in his book Overshoot and other writings, makes the
point that the planet Earth has a finite carrying capacity for humans;
he says we have exceeded that (the "overshoot") and thus our populations
will collapse soon (specifically, as we run out of oil). From what I
have read of his works, Catton seems to ignore that "carrying capacity"
for human life in the cosmos is also a function of how much people
cooperate, what sort of technology the invent and deploy, what lifestyle
they choose, and what resources (like asteroids in space or manganese
nodules on the sea floor) they have ready access to.

For example, the current exponential growth of cheaper solar power make
Catton's technological predictions about energy erroneous if you project
forward those solar power exponential growth trends twenty years (which
is not much of a stretch as GE says solar power may be cheaper than
fossil fuels by around 2015 in most places). The development of thorium
power or hot or cold fusion would also change things, and there is a lot
of ongoing progress in those areas, certainly enough to say in the next
hundred years those technologies will likely be workable (which is the
timescale Catton talks about).

Yet, it would be only fair to Catton to say that for humans living a
hunter-gatherer low-technology existence, humanity has passed the
carrying capacity of the Earth. Humans on Earth are dependent at this
point on conventional agriculture and mainstream medicine and
concentrated energy sources, which are heavily dependent right now on
oil and a certain level of cooperation. While we have energy
alternatives, whether we put them in place relates to political
decisions at this point (including how those political decisions then
affect economic prices).

A major reason we may not develop those energy alternatives is precisely
an obsession with thinking they will not work because our cosmos has an
inherent scarcity of energy and matter and so on. That is plainly false
from what astrophysics tells us. The sun will provide vast amounts of
energy for a billion years, and the solar system is full of matter.
Theoretical zero-point-energy-tapping quantum physics technology may
produce even more energy and mass. But, our society and politics remains
dominated by a scarcity paradigm (an issue raised by James P. Hogan in
"Voyage from Yesteryear").

Also, again to be fair to Catton, we could also define carrying capacity
as a capacity to absorb mistakes in the use of technology. He refers to
pollution, but I here am referring to the side effects of warfare. In
that sense, I would have to agree that humanity has passed some sort of
carrying capacity for the planet Earth if a nuclear war or global
designer plague or spread of killer robotics could wipe out all or most
human life on the planet.

=== Why we can't just walk away on the Earth, like in the past

Daniel Quinn in "Beyond Civilization" points out that civilizations
similar to ours (defined as where "all food is under lock-and-key") have
collapsed time and time again over the past thousands of years. Other
people have made similar points:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse

Civilizations face new problems they were unable to deal with. These
could be drought, exhaustion of a local resource they are dependent on
like trees, climate change, exceeding the local carrying capacity for
their technology and organization, corrupt leadership, war, disease, and
so on. These problems can include changes in the society itself (as
incremental costs of doing anything internally rise from social issues
and bureaucracy). At some point, it can begin to make sense for more and
more people to just walk away and vanish into the surrounding forest,
jungle, plains, or whatever, because they either see what is coming or
their lives have become so horrible under the old regime.

But, being able to walk away from "civilization" assumes there is an
alternative to go to that is better. When we have a global civilization,
where all land is also under "lock-and-key" in terms of "property
rights", it becomes problematical where to go. A dying culture may still
have more than enough power to destroy those who would try to use some
of its resources to create alternatives somewhere. Also, walking away
assumes people have skills needed to survive in a different environment
than the civilization they have been living in and which, through
collective action, may still be efficiently producing many goods and
services in the short term (even as externalities, risks, and internal
costs may be mounting up).

Also, while in the past, civilization failures may have been local, a
nuclear war, biowar, or technological war could be global. The entire
Earth could become very difficult to inhabit for humans from high
radiation levels, air-spread plagues, or ever present killer robots of
various scales (even just nasty computer viruses beyond Stuxnet). Few
people in industrialized society today would have the skills to live off
the land, and even then, there would be way to many people around to do
so. The wild animals like deer would be rapidly killed off, the local
trees burned up for fires, the fruit bushes overharvested, the already
depleted fish stocks overfished, and so on. Without cooperation and
communications, life would be very hard for any survivors of the failure
of MAD, especially with limited technology and resources, because the
Earth's carrying capacity indeed would be much lower than when a healthy
global civilization is functioning.

So here is the ultimate problem. Our global civilization depends on the
"MAD" doctrine for "deterrence". As I suggest above, "MAD" will almost
certainly fail eventually because it depends on rationality and perfect
operations of military equipment (neither of which is a reasonable
assumption). So, our current MAD approach, in the absence of other
trends, would mean most or all human life on the planet is doomed. The
more countries or organizations that get access to WMDs, the more likely
something will go wrong. Yet, trying to stop countries or organizations
from getting WMDs can also increase the risk of war or unintentional
disaster (like the recent saber rattling by the USA against Iran, which
also ignores that Iran may have bioweapons already).

=== Alternative

So where does that leave us?

One possibility is that we need to create alternatives to our mainstream
global civilization somehow. Some of that is happening as people move
into "cyberspace", although I don't know how that will end (because
cyberspace is still very dependent on our current civilization, even
though at some point cyberspace may be able to change its infrastructure).

We can move into real space and build self-replicating space habitats
out of material in the asteroids (perhaps through groups like the newly
forming "Planetary Resources").

We can create more self-contained (and potentially self-replicating)
communities on Earth. These could be underground, under the Antarctic
ice, in the oceans, or just in somewhat remote locations. They could
even be hosted in small somewhat diverse somewhat remote college towns
like Ames, IA or Ithaca, NY in the USA, or their equivalents elsewhere.
These alternative communities could be places that might become locally
physically self-sufficient even as they may network with other places to
exchange people, ideas, and information).

Hundreds of years in the past, the typical large farm or feudal estate
was mostly self-sufficient (even though they lacked many things we might
consider essential today). To date, a modern level of material
prosperity has depended on trade in goods. But modern technology is more
and more supporting a gift exchange of information used to produce
things locally using flexible manufacturing systems involving robotics
and 3D printing. So, new possibilities are opening up that are way
beyond what the relative isolated people participating in the "back to
the land" movements of the 1970s and earlier could consider.

To be clear, I feel any attempt to survive individually is doomed to
failure though. It takes a community to survive. Individuals are also
easy pickings for larger bands of marauders. Any attempt to create an
individual shelter is almost certainly going to be unproductive in a
real global ongoing disaster that lasts decades (though it might be fine
for dealing with a couple months of local disaster). For people to move
forward on any kind of preparedness, they really have to be looking at
actions on at least the small community level, and are oriented towards
indefinite existence and maintenance and regeneration and expansion (so,
not based around stockpiling manufactured goods). And anything involving
community then implies all sorts of other things (cooperation, working
out differences, issues of equity, and so on).

So, alternatives are possible (even beyond the previously mentioned "A
Newer Way Of Thinking", as important as that is). The physical
alternatives just are a lot of hard work and a lot of expense (and still
with no complete guarantees) to get started (at least until we have more
general purpose robotics to do much of the work, but they are coming, as
with Willow Garage, even as such robots will also lead to socioeconomic
upheavals of other sorts). As long as trade in goods makes better
economic sense, these local alternatives may seem expensive, because
they reduce one sort of global risk but at a cost of more local
activity. They are an expensive "hedge" in that sense. Yet, even trade
in goods itself is becoming problematical (like from global financial
instabilities from a concentration of ration unit tokens like dollars in
the hands of a few with an increasing rich/poor divide). Because some
more comprehensive alternatives deal with a small "risk" our society
will implode, they will seem like complete foolishness (like the Noah's
Ark story) up until the point we actually need them, at which point it
will be too late to suddenly create them. Only the expenses will be seen
until the time when the risks materialize (if ever). Here are some
failed attempts by me to organize related information as starting points
for others (but there are many other worthwhile efforts in that area):
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

I guess we could add OpenVirgle to that list, too, so far. :-) Although
the Open Manufacturing and Maker movements have really taken up that
torch and are carrying it farther and farther, illuminating lives
everywhere. So, that in a sense, is a big success.

The good news is that with the recent trends to open source cooperation
through the internet, we can advance both our local communities and a
space habitat or alternative community agenda. Almost any free and open
source resource we create that could be useful for Earthly
sustainability and Earthly conflict resolution could be used to help
create space habitats. This is true for all sorts of additions to our
collective understanding, whether they are better open consolidation of
knowledge of physics or chemistry or material science, any increase in
understanding about human psychology, any improvement to reliable
operating systems, any improved tool for simulation and communications,
any new energy source, and so on. And those understandings are often
best refined in conjunction with practice, with actually building useful
things and documenting what worked and what did not.

It's true that for alternative communities to be created, people need to
make them. But a lot of positive contributions can be made to making
such communities more possible (on Earth or in space) by improving where
we are in various ways. It is possible that local incremental
improvements may help make the world safer or healthier (like mentioned
in the book "BlueZones"). But an even bigger payoff is the increase in
collective knowledge that lets us then design even some better
communities that may survive and prosper even with the almost certain
eventual failure of leadership relative to MAD doctrine. In that sense,
rather than "Think globally, act locally, plan modestly", we can share
information globally, print in 3D locally, and plan ambitiously for an
expansion into space. :-)

(Wish I had more time to refine this, but other stuff to get to...)

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.