Indefensible, 2001/08/02:13:35
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The idea of strategic missile defense is about as clever as making money using strip-mined coal to smelt iron ore. For about ten years I've been not talking about this, but as all my worst fears have now come true, I may as well. The only thing that makes me happy is that I've done as little as possible to help make them come true. The story goes like this. In the mid-80's Donald Kingsbury published The Moon Goddess and the Sun. A sub-plot has some MIT students build a cruise-missile from an old Cessna and fly it into the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa (details may be wrong here--it's been easily 15 years since I read the book.) This was an interesting idea, but it didn't really seem to open up the world to new vistas of warfare. Fast forward to 1992. I'm sitting in a medical imaging conference, listening to a talk about cross-correlation for real-time image registration, thinking, "There's gotta be a better way than that to figure out how to line one image up with another." A few sketches on a bit of hotel note-paper later, and pseudo-correlation was born, which is an algorithm for image registration using Monte Carlo techniques to evaluate a generalized cross-correlation integral. Back in the lab a few days later, I had one of those lovely moments when you try a wild idea out and it works very nearly perfectly the first time. The cool features of the algorithm are that it's extremely robust, it lets you calculate an absolute probability of good registration, and is dead fast. It let me do on a crappy 386 what the other guys were doing on a high-end Sun with custom hardware. I moved on to better, or at least different, things six or eight months later, although not before publishing the algorithm. But it gave me pause when I remembered Kingsbury's novel, because what I'd invented was something that would let you build a cheap terminal-phase guidance system for a cruise missile. To the best of my knowledge, no one has used my work to that end, although the demand for off-prints of that paper outstripped that for all my other work combined. In the ensuing years the two or three other ideas I've had for obviously lethal inventions I've worked out in private and then let moulder in a back drawer--there are plenty of clever people working out new ways to kill people; they don't need my help. Recent work, both military and scientific, with long-range drones has shown that with regard to home-built cruise missiles the future has arrived. The U.S. military have flown a drone across the Pacific, and at least one scientific drone has flown across the narrow bit of the North Atlantic. Combine a long-range drone with a GPS or equivalent, plus a fast CPU and some clever image processing for the last few hundred meters of flight, and you can blow up pretty much anything or anyone you want to. You don't even need nuclear weapons to do it--at a range of a few meters a couple of hundred pounds of chemical explosives can do a remarkable amount of damage. Vehicles like this will see use as weapons of terror and assasination, as well as more conventional warfare. They will probably also be used by organizations wanting to smuggle things. Even if they were only 50% successful and had a cargo capacity of ten or so kilograms, I imagine a fleet of drones programmed to fly from Columbia to Arizona, say, would prove to be a cost-effective way of moving high-markup merchandise like designer running shoes, and possibly other things as well. So building an ABM shield is a typical military move: they are still planning to fight the last war (the one that thankfully never happened!) even while simultaneously contributing to the development of technology that will make their own defenses obsolete. In the '80's, the Strategic Defense Initiative had a purpose--to help bankrupt the Russian Empire. Today, the war is over, and we should be thinking about doing more constructive things with our "surplus" tax dollars. Like paying off past debts, or even leaving them in taxpayer's pockets. |