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Former Crypto-Analyst Analyzes the Danger of Nuclear Weapon Stockpiles
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that noted encryption pioneer Prof. Martin Hellman has a new passion; estimating the risk of our current nuclear weapons policies. His web site, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, asks the question, 'How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, no one seems to know.' Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.' The web site and a related statement therefore urgently call for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct his startling conclusion. The statement has been signed by seven notable individuals including former NSA Director Adm. Bobby R. Inman and two Nobel Laureates."
I find the summary misleading. I thought the risk analysis was about incidents with nuclear weapons when at peace, but he only calculates the risks of all out nuclear war.
While it's an interseting number it's not a useful one to take a decision, since one of the sad premise of today's war strategy is that, since others have the nuclear weapon, you must have it too. No one is going to dump his nuke stocks because he might have to use them some days.
It's like doing an article summary saying "having a gun in your room is dangerous", when it really means "a gunfight is something that might happen".
I would have been more interested by numbers about the effects of an all out nuclear war. The only ones I can remember are that a US president was told (during the cold war) that scenarios predicted 300 million american death *at best* in a *winned* nuclear war against Russia. The second one ( which I'm not sure about) is that, at the peak of the number of nukes between US and Russia, they could have "destroyed the earth 52 times" (killed everything on it? phisically shatter?).
Does anyone have more details concerning these numbers?
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
Basis of his 'estimates'? Access to SIOP? Access to any other data, either physical or strategic of our, our allies or our 'adversaries' nuclear weapons/plans? Oh.. zero? By all means lets trumpet his 'work' outside his area of training as authoritative, complete with requisite frightening headlines.
...which are managed by a monkey and operated by people with a god complex.
You might find this refreshing then.
Quite frankly, I reckon even if these (carefully screened) individuals who control the nuclear arsenal were trigger-happy, they'd quickly rethink their situation when they realize they have the destiny of the world in their hands. Yes, even the chief monkey in the White House.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
That's reassuring, because it seems unlikely that my home will ever be surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.
Just because this guy invented an encryption technique, doesn't mean he less capable of studying the risks than some nuclear expert. At a first glance, he doesn't seem to claim anything outrageous.
Beware of "celebrities" with a cause, but not necessarily more or less then "experts" with a cause
and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.'
So if one of these nuclear power plants exploded (that's the risk being talked about here?), how large would the crater be, expressed in Libraries of Congress? Also, how likely would such an event be, expressed in chances of successfully dropping a penny from the top of the Empire State Building into someone's pocket?
You just got troll'd!
I work very close to the issue at hand and can testify to seeing major gaps in the "careful screening" that goes into clearing the persons responsible. And it's distressing - Minor security incidents that clearly implicate cleared individuals go largely uninvestigated (petty theft, etc.) But, on a bright note, there's so much redundancy and security-bureaucracy that the security environment for special nuclear material or critical weapons components is actually very good (if rather expensive).
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Just be glad they aren't NUCLEAR oil refineries!
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
``Our desire for cheap international trade based around largely uninspected shipping containers exposes us to an enormous risk.''
The counter point to this is that while, indeed, the system is far from secure, things seem to be going alright.
I find this is the key difference between Real World security and computer security. In computer security, weaknesses, once known, _will_ be exploited on a massive scale. In the Real World, things are often far less grave. This explains both why so few people get computer security right (applying a Real World "it will be ok" attitude to computer security is a mistake), and why I think people should just relax and not worry so much about, for example, terrorists blowing up airplanes.
Security should, at least in my opinion, always be a cost-benefit trade-off. More severe security measures can reduce the risk of a disastrous security breach, but security measures incur their own cost, which you pay every day, even if no security breach is even attempted. The trick is finding the right balance.
Of course, it isn't a very comfortable idea that you or your friends might be blown up anytime, or get ruined by identity fraud, but I'd honestly rather live with that idea than to spend my life locked up in my house, afraid to go out because the bus might be blown up, and afraid to order anything online because my credit card data could be stolen...and _still_ run the risk to get killed in an earthquake.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
(But that is a reasonable question -- you get points for skepticism.)
This teaches 2 related lessons about journalism and science:
(1) There are 2 kinds of publications in the world -- those that check their facts and those that don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. This is why some obscure guy publishing a blog can be more reliable than most major newspapers and TV stations. (Or in this case, why IEEE Spectrum is more reliable than most daily newspapers.)
(2) There are 2 kinds of scientists in the world -- those who gather a consensus of experts before going public, and those who don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. (This is why that story recently about cell phones causing brain cancer by an Australian neurologist was complete bullshit.) Hellman is competent enough in science to know that.
According to TFA http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6099
Hellman's method isn't unfamiliar to those trying to gauge the risk of failure for complex systems, such as nuclear reactors. IEEE Spectrum asked J. Wesley Hines, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee, to examine Hellman's methods, which were detailed in the appendix of the Bent article. "I only read the appendix but feel his argument is rational and also feel his methods are justified," says Hines. "Some could argue with the numbers he used, but he does give logical reasons for using those numbers and admits that they have large uncertainties since the events have been rare in the past."
Robert N. Charette, who runs the risk-management consultancy ITABHI and is a regular contributor to IEEE Spectrum, agrees with Hines. However, he says Hellman should have also turned the analysis on its head. "The other side of the risk equation is, suppose you get rid of nuclear weapons. Does that increase the probability of war? Pretending there aren't any nukes, how many wars would we have had?"
And the signers http://nuclearrisk.org/statement.php The above statement has been endorsed by the following Charter Signers:*
Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics; see also Nobel Announcement
Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board, Verisign Inc.
Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President's Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board; see also NY Times article
Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director NSA and Deputy Director CIA
Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University
Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of FDA
Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics; see also Nobel Announcement
(BTW, here's a tip for any student. You used to be able to get a student membership in the IEEE, which includes a subscription to Spectrum and another (expensive) IEEE magazine of your choice, for some ridiculously low amount like $12 a year. It's a great deal for the magazines alone, although IEEE membership has even better benefits that most students don't even know about.)
This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....
You picked a poor metaphor. The guy who did the obituaries in the New York Times was Theodore Bernstein, who is most distinguished for arguing at an editorial conference before the imminent Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion that the Times had an obligation to print what they knew about the invasion, which would have scuttled the invasion. (That was the journalistic equivalent of the engineer's pre-flight conference before the Challenger disaster.) That invasion led to the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cuban missile nuclear showdown, which was as close as we've ever come to destroying the world.Bernstein was accused of left-wing sympathies during the days of the blacklist, and as a result, the Times busted him down to the obituary page. Back in those days, we had a social contract that, if you committed yourself to a corporation, they would give you a job for life, so instead of firing people who were drunk or incompetent, the Times would just assign them to the obituary page. Unlike everyone else, Bernstein revolutionized the obituary page by writing serious obituaries.
Bernstein also wrote a textbook about copy-editing called Headlines and Deadlines, which is still used in journalism schools. The main point of that book, BTW, was that copy editors should check the facts of a story, and make sure it gets all sides. If the Times had followed that advice, they would have avoided some recent humiliations. So Bernstein got the last laugh again.
Yeah, the comparison seems to have more to do with the safety of nuclear power plants than the danger of nuclear weapons. Don't get me wrong, Nuclear power plants create a large potential hazard, but with the systems in place now they're a lot less dangerous than people perceive them to be.