Tag: SDI guy

Russian scientist reveals the secret of H bomb, Part Two

On By gyonas5 Comments

Let’s return to the story of the Russian scientist who revealed the secret of the H bomb. In an earlier post, I explained how, in 1976, “The New York Times” reported that Soviet scientists had made a fusion breakthrough using electron beams. None of the physics of this Russian breakthrough had been revealed. The scientific community was anticipating some sort of an announcement at an upcoming conference; however, the big disclosure actually began on a beach in Santa Barbara, California three months after “The New York Times” ran the story. Lyonid Rudakov, my colleague and friend from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, and I sat on the sand in a hastily arranged, totally private and completely unexplained meeting at high noon.

Rudakov had asked me to meet him. On the way to “the secret meeting,” I wondered if this was some scene from one of those spy movies. We sat there in silence, and then Rudakov reached for a twig and drew a simple figure in the sand beginning with an empty cone, much like an ice cream cone without ice cream. Then he added a thin curved layer. He explained that the drawing was of a conical indentation in a lead plate. Then he explained that there was an outer shell composed of a thin gold layer, curved in a spherical shape. Inside of that was a thin plastic shell containing thermonuclear fuel. The outer shell was heated by the tightly-focused electron beam and when it became sufficiently hot, the inner shell was heated by radiation. The thin inner shell then imploded into the conical shape, compressing and heating the thermonuclear fuel and producing a reaction output consisting of a pulse of about 1 million fusion neutrons.  My jaw fell open. My friend, a Soviet scientist, was revealing the secret and extremely closely-held concept of radiation-driven fusion weapons.

That evening Rudakov was scheduled to give a paper describing his work, and I, representing the competing U.S. program, was to introduce him at the after-dinner meeting at the Gordon Conference. Conferences such as that were low key opportunities for scientists to share unpublished work. The conference rule was that the information shared be held until a real publication was released. Rudakov must have known that what he planned to share was certain to shock many of the attendees who were from nuclear weapon labs, and I guessed that he did not want to surprise me that evening in front of the crowd.  For some reason I never understood, Rudakov had received permission to reveal this radiation-driven concept as essential to his use of electron beams to ignite a fusion reaction. He was prepared to share his results widely during his visit to the U.S.

In the following days, Rudakov went on to visit U.S. nuclear weapon labs and deliver the same talk, but by then, the government had warned anybody involved not to repeat anything. The FBI followed up by confiscating the blackboards used in the presentations. Rudakov was rather casual about the entire episode, but he did make one serious request during his visit to the United States. He wanted me to know that I needed to help him with a desperate problem. I wondered if that scene from that imagined spy movie was about to take place. I was in for a shock.

Rudakov explained that he wanted to buy a pair of blue jeans. He could not return to Moscow without the garment that was impossible to get in Russia.  I was relieved that I was not involved in some mystery, and took him to the local shopping mall. We went to several stores, with a variety of options and different prices.  Rudakov looked confused. He asked me why there was not just one price determined by the government. He could not cope with the free market concept and went away empty-handed. He was obviously disturbed by this interaction with the American economy.

At the same time, Rudakov never seemed to realize the swirling controversy he had created in the nuclear weapons community. His disclosure was a major development in fusion research. The fact that the Russian experiment had been revealed, but not explained, caused quite a stir. Earlier, “The New York Times” had only whetted the appetite of its physics readers, but nobody knew about the use of a radiation-driven implosion. A few months later, the entire event became the talk of the physics world. One widely accepted science magazine ran the headline: “Thermonuclear Fusion: U.S. Puts Wraps on Latest Soviet Work.”

Rudakov was anxious to spread the word that they were going ahead with building a giant electron beam machine that would cost 50 million rubles and would supposedly achieve fusion ignition. Scientists who did not know the secret of the H bomb were bewildered. The reason for the secrecy was not that the U.S. government was worried about classified information leaking out to the Soviets, but that the Soviet secrets would leak out to others. One scientist commented, “The work at Sandia was classified but the same work in the Soviet Union was unclassified.” Everyone involved was faced with mind numbing contradictions.

One thing was clear however: the Soviets were ready to race with us. I knew that their creation and advertising of a competition would help them enhance the credibility of their program help them obtain funding for further research. Of course that would not be so bad for us either.  The race really had become well-known three years before at the fusion conference in Moscow. At that 1973 meeting, Rudakov had announced they were embarking on a program to achieve fusion using electron beams to heat a BB sized spherical pellet filled with thermonuclear fuel. He neglected to mention the radiation drive. He claimed then that a few million joules would have to be deposited in the heavy metal shell of the pellet in a pulse of a few nanoseconds. The requirement was for a beam of 1000 trillion watts, and the highest power machine that they had was only 1 trillion watts. Their plan was to build a machine only in the 100 trillion watts range. Now, the use of a radiation-driven thin shell seemed to explain the contradiction. The breakthrough was the radiation-driven implosion.  It now appeared that the much lower power level would be useful using a low density, thin-walled target driven by radiation. They had neglected to mention that in 1973.

I should point out that was more to this competition than innovative physics, but in the U.S. we had the advantage of our ability to rapidly exploit modern technology that was driven by our free market economy and development of technology. Rudakov had an economics lesson trying to buy jeans, but he was not alone in learning about the economics of his competing country. The Moscow meeting was held at the giant Moscow University built in Stalinist style in the 1950s. I will never forget the giant ornate auditorium where I made my presentation. I also remember the food at the cafeteria.  I never resolved the mystery of that strange fruit-like liquid substance. I ate it, but I still wonder what it was.

I was staying at the enormous, slightly rundown Rossiya hotel overlooking Red Square, advertised as the largest hotel in the world. It was a fairly cold June and they had disconnected the heat for the summer. The hotel’s elevator operator, a nice old Russian grandmother who spoke no English, seemed rather disturbed when I complained to her in my version of broken Russian/English about the temperature in my room. I rubbed my body to demonstrate how cold I was. Apparently, she didn’t conclude I wanted an extra blanket, but rather another, more intimate, source of warmth. I tried not to feel insulted when she laughed vigorously in response.

I also had time to walk over to the giant Gum department store looking for some souvenirs to take home. I found long lines of depressed looking, shabbily dressed people and totally empty counters. I also found a nearby store for tourists that only accepted American money. The so-called Beryozka had a fantastic collection of Russian folk art including beautiful amber jewelry and the obligatory Matryoshka dolls. I discovered a fine woven tapestry that cost $73, the equivalent to 150 rubles. It hangs on my wall today and is pictured in the image accompanying this blog post. I was continually impressed with the creativity, the culture and the scientific discipline of the Soviets, but found their ability to develop commercial products and technology applications seemed to be frozen in the past, just like the architecture of Moscow University.

At the meeting in Moscow, we announced the results of our similar electron beam fusion program and claimed ignition would be possible at only 100 trillion watts based on our concept of an electromagnetically stopped relativistic electron beam. We were planning to build a machine we called the Electron Beam Fusion Accelerator or EBFA. When I told my Russian colleagues that the machine was called EBFA, they intentionally mispronounced the acronym to sound like a Russian insult that went with the Russian word for mother.

Nobody had a clue for a concept of a 1000 trillion watts electron beam accelerator, so both teams worked on other ideas for power multiplication or new ideas to reduce the theoretical power requirement. The threat of violating classification rules in effect put a break on not just implementing, but even thinking about any concepts involving radiation-driven implosions. I wondered if we had already lost the race. As it turned out, we responded with our new invention that I will explain in my next post, part 3 and the last installment of this true story.

Are you kidding?

On By gyonas4 Comments

Are you kidding … nobody would believe that. You can’t be serious!

I am writing a sci/fi novel that tries to make a coherent fictional story somewhat based on the real history of death ray inventors and their inventions.  A portion of the true story is recounted in the book “Death Rays and Delusions” about my exploits as the chief scientist for Ronald Reagan’s SDI aka Star Wars program. My soon-to-be published novel, called “The Dragon’s CLAW” draws upon a real story that will cause the reader to exclaim, “Are you kidding… nobody would believe that. You can’t be serious.”

This totally true story begins with H G Wells’ 1897 “The War of the Worlds” that includes Martian invaders using infrared beams, or “the sword of heat,” that melt the metal weapons of the earth defenders. Hard to believe, but the primary space based laser weapon developed for the SDI program in the 1980s was a real sword of heat, an infrared laser called Miracle. It was going to be deployed in space and would have required miracles to ever be feasible. There is a famous picture of Ronald Reagan standing in front of a giant mock-up of the nonexistent laser weapon. But we were not alone in inventing miracles, and the Soviet Union developed their own version of a space based laser, and went far beyond a mock up. They even tried in 1986 to deploy parts of it on the world’s largest booster, Energia.

But let’s go back to the 1930s when the Serbian genius, Nikola Tesla, who probably should have, but did not receive the Nobel Prize for his electrical engineering inventions, designed a particle beam weapon that he claimed could defend the U.S. against “10000 enemy air planes at a distance of 250 miles.” It was not seriously pursued until after he died, and then after the start of WW II, the FBI seized his papers and asked MIT professor and Donald Trump’s uncle George to analyze them, but he saw nothing of value. As a footnote to this history, Donald claimed in 2020 that his uncle was a genius and “It’s in my blood. I’m smart.”

The idea of particle beam weapons, actually relativistic election beams, was resurrected in 1958 by ARPA, now called DARPA, to defend ships at sea and the entire U.S. against attacking reentry vehicles. The so called See Saw concept was to build giant electron beam accelerators that would generate beams that could bore a hole in the atmosphere and deliver a killing pulse to the attackers. The fatal flaw was that the beams whipped around like a giant high pressure fire hose, and sometimes even turned back and struck the accelerator.

The concept was dropped, but was replaced by an old Soviet idea from the 50s to use the electron beam to trap and accelerate ions to relativistic velocities. The collective forces of the electron beam would trap the ions that would reach billions of volt energies accelerated only over distances of meters. This Collective Ion Acceleration concept that we called the “CIA” would become a practical way to produce stable particle beams, and the intelligence community thought that the Soviets were up to their old tricks at an enigmatic facility at their nuclear test site in Kazakhstan.

The site was called a possible nuclear test site and its nickname was PNUTS. Satellite photos of the site became a mystery that attracted the attention of many U.S. physicists, some of whom thought it was a “CIA” facility, but most were sure that their own programs needed more funding because of what the Soviets were doing. The famous U.S. magazine “Aviation Week,” with the nickname Aviation Leak, because it often seemed to know real secrets, claimed it was a particle beam weapon facility. Indeed the head of the U.S. Air Force Intelligence organization went public in 1977 claiming the Soviets had made a breakthrough and their new weapon could neutralize our entire strategic deterrent.

The real CIA asked several accelerator physicists to stare at the somewhat blurry photos, to get help to solve the mystery, but eventually the intelligence community turned to remote viewers in a psychic phenomenon program called Stargate to visualize the goings on at this enigmatic facility. One of the viewers, who was given just the geographical coordinates, and without any help from any satellite photos, made a drawing of a giant crane that was moved on eight wheels over the facility. A friend of mine visited after the end of the Cold War, and sent me a photo of that crane.

Even though the use of PNUTS had nothing to do with beam weapons, its phony reputation allowed the Soviets to attract unknowing scientists to this god forsaken part of the world, only to be disappointed that it was only a nuclear rocket test facility. We also had such a program but canceled it because of environmental issues, but they continued for decades and just made the program invisible and a total enigma to us.

There was one very serious U.S. directed energy program and that was the development of a nuclear explosion driven X-ray laser, but we were not the first to consider such nuclear powered weapons. The Soviets claimed that a “nuclear explosion creates a stream of metallic fragments of small mass that travel at more than 10 kilometers per second, and are capable of string targets in space, including warheads, with a direct hit. One underground test showed the potential plausibility of accelerating a small mass to high speeds.”

The Soviets also claimed that we were far ahead of them in development of nuclear powered weapons, and they could catch up with us in 10 years if we were slowed by an arms control agreement, but even the early advocates of this approach became discouraged after initial experiments. One of the early strong supporters who was Reagan’s chief scientific adviser, later called the directed nuclear weapons “unadulterated lies,” but I recall Edward Teller requesting an acceleration of the test program, and claimed “the president has already promised these additional funds … and do you really want me to go back to the president and say the money is not available?”

There were other mysteries during my SDI career like the claim by the editor of the biggest Arizona newspaper that the SDI radar facility in the Pacific was really the location of the alien space craft that we were back engineering, and that I was in cahoots with the aliens based on my studies as an undergrad at Cornell University. The editor suddenly departed from the scene when it was discovered that he was a fraud and had no experience that matched his phony uniform, trophies, and medals and the story of my alleged treachery never appeared, although I have a copy.

The particle beam quest was not dead, however, and use of electrons to neutralize ion beams was supported for several years by SDI as a space weapon. That program was canceled when support for SDI energy weapons drastically declined. After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. then proposed to develop a neutral beam accelerator in a joint U.S./Russia nuclear reactor powered space NPB program for planetary geology research.  The Pentagon then decided it was really interested in starting up a new NPB space weapon program and in 2018 announced it was planning a development program leading to a test in space in 2023. Then in 2019 without a lot of notice, the Pentagon announced it was not that interested in the NPB after all because it was too far off, but lasers, the original sword of heat from 1897, was now mature enough to move forward aggressively, and real advances in solid state lasers have energized an accelerated program.

One should not discount the inventiveness of energy weapon advocates, and yet another new weapon that is being supported is based on powerful microwave generators.  Some even claim that such weapons are the cause of the “Havana Syndrome” that messes with the minds of diplomats. Now after many claims of fear of foreign attackers, the CIA says that of “2000 U.S, officials in diplomat posts worldwide” who have claimed symptoms, most are not really from foreign attackers but from some sort of a natural malady. But what about the rest? A CIA panel of “experts” concluded some “small number of the cases …a plausible explanation is a directed pulsed radio frequency energy.”

Can you believe any of this? Well, the true story goes on. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but stay tuned for the fictionalized version, coming soon.

Remembering the Russian scientist who revealed secret of H bomb

On By gyonas7 Comments

It is widely known that one promising way to create fusion in the laboratory is called inertial confinement fusion (ICF). It is based on the concept of spherically imploding, compressing and thus heating thermonuclear fuel. Indeed, the recent laser fusion breakthrough at the Livermore National Laboratories demonstrated efficient hot spot ignition and self-heating of cold fuel. There were many complex requirements in this outstanding technical achievement, but probably the most significant was spherically symmetric implosion of the fusion capsule. This was accomplished not by directing the 192 ultra high power laser beams at the target, but instead heating the inner walls of the tiny chamber containing the fusion pellet, and using the radiation trapped in the chamber to symmetrically heat the pellet. This chamber is called a hohlraum, which is a German word for a hollow volume of cavity in a structure. When I first became interested in fusion research, I had no notion of this vital ICF concept. In fact, just revealing the very idea of heating the target with indirect radiation rather than direct heating by the laser beams would have resulted in a severe penalty, or even jail time. Today, the hohlraum concept is totally unclassified.

In 1967, when I became interested in fusion, I knew that the physics worked well in the sun and in H bombs, but I knew little else about the subject. I was attracted to work for a small startup company that was pioneering work on pulsed power technology. This was a very new field of electro technology dedicated to creating machines that generated very short pulses of electric power levels of 1 trillion watts (TW).  The purpose of these machines was to create laboratory sources of pulsed radiation to test the vulnerability of reentry electronics faced with an H bomb tipped missile defense. The issue was to determine the exact vulnerability of the electronics to such a pulse. I was drawn to that company, Physics International, not because of the question of missile electronics vulnerability, but because the founders of the company had previously been H bomb development leaders at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, and they convinced me that such machines could be used to make a tiny H bomb explosion in the lab using the new pulsed power technology.

On a warm and clear day in June 1971, at the University of Wisconsin student union, I met with a well-known plasma physics theorist, Lyonid Rudakov, from the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. He and I sat there in the sun like old friends drinking coffee and chatting about the subject of creating fusion with electron beams.  We were both in our thirties, and had just met and learned that we had a common interest in using high intensity electron beams to create fusion. I knew exactly what I could and could not discuss, and I had no idea about the connections of Rudakov to any Soviet secret information. Rudakov was very outgoing and obviously comfortable with people he did not know well, and from the first I recognized that we had one thing in common. We both were in the business of marketing our ideas on fusion to get funding.

As we talked, we shared a fantasy of building giant pulsed power machines, maybe hundreds of times bigger than anything in existence, and focusing relativistic electron beams onto BB size pellets. Rudakov already had an established program at a major Soviet research laboratory, and I, with no continuing government program support, was mostly concentrating on getting funding every year for my small program dedicated to simulation of nuclear weapons effects. I knew that I would never get very far with my vision unless I established a major program in a national laboratory.

One year later, I found that there were others who shared my fantasy, and I moved to Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque. After I received my clearance, the first question I asked was about the physics of the H bomb. I learned that the highly protected secret was the use of a fission device to produce radiation and it was the radiation trapped in a hohlraum that drove an implosion and fusion ignition. I thought that electrons, if they could be focused highly enough, could be used instead of radiation. I invented an imaginative, if not realistic, program based on my published very early experimental work with electron beam focusing but still with no real quantitative knowledge of the power level that would be needed for fusion ignition.

Rudakov had the backing of the most influential Soviet scientific/political engineer but I was unknown in the scientific community. I had a vision and motivation based on my experience at my first job after I completed my Ph.D. at Caltech. I received my Ph.D. in Engineering Science and Physics in 1967 and continued on at the Jet Propulsion Lab where I had done my research on magneto fluid dynamics since 1962. The lab had failed six times to take close-up photos of the surface of the moon and was faced with a major transition. The question that they were trying to resolve was if the proposed moon lander would sink into deep dust.  Unfortunately their payload, called Ranger, either was destroyed during the launch or crash landed time after time with no data. Although the lab went on to success, they had decided its job was exploring space and not basic research. My small fluid physics group was disbanded and they gave me the opportunity to move on, and that resulted in my first job as a new Ph.D. Married, with a 1-year-old daughter, I was highly motivated to succeed.

When I got to Sandia I found out that since the U.S. had agreed with the Soviet Union to prohibit anti-ballistic missiles, funding for development of nuclear weapons and lab funding had decreased. There would be a 10% reduction in force. I was a first level manager, but my quota for the layoff was to fire one person, and I was given freedom, as my boss said, “Go out for a pass.” The misfortunate layoff had a silver lining since I had the support to do something Sandia was not too experienced with, namely lobbying the Congress for funding.

After spending a lot of time getting to know our representatives from New Mexico and prowling the halls of Congress, I managed to influence Senator Joseph Montoya, who was primarily known for his somewhat inadequate but televised questions when he served on the Senate Watergate Committee. He was not a technically educated person, but he was sympathetic and told me he always rooted for the underdog. When he learned we were competing with a powerful lab in California that already had funding for laser fusion, he agreed to try to get minimal startup funding for my program. I also had support from the fusion research organization at the AEC because they also were happy to create competition with the laser program managed by the weapons division. This caused a negative reaction from the weapons program to my dealing with the “wrong organization.” I agreed to accept weapons program funding that was far more generous as long as I had no more dealings with those “research guys.”

Our plans were not advertised publicly until the July 1973 European Conference on Controlled Fusion and Plasma Physics in Moscow. At that meeting I together with my Sandia colleagues, who were as new to the game as I was, claimed that very high current electron beams could be self magnetically stopped in a thin shell driving the implosion, and could achieve fusion breakeven with “extensions of present day technology.” Rudakov, together with a well-known Soviet mathematician from the Institute of Applied Mathematics, carried out detailed calculation of the needed power for 1000 TW and they included the vital concept of self-heating of the fuel after ignition as demonstrated last year on NIF “only” 50 years later with 1000 times more energy than they had originally calculated in 1972.

After the meeting in Moscow, Rudakov and I became technical colleagues with reciprocal visits, and we continued to share information as both of us advertised the start of major competitive programs. Sandia began construction of prototype devices at power levels of a few TW, and advertised the development of a machine in the 100 TW class, but both of us were competing with the rapidly growing programs in the U.S. and Soviet Union that had much more funding for the use of high power lasers. I knew that electron beams created with low cost and efficient pulsed electrical power would be far more energetic than lasers. I guessed that even if millions of joules would be needed for ignition, it would be a more reasonable approach than the very expensive and inefficient lasers.

The LLNL results were achieved using the NIF laser to deliver 2 million joules to heat the walls of a hohlraum containing the fuel pellet and using the symmetric flow of energy in the hohlraum to heat the outer surface of the pellet. The physics of the hohlraum is based on the fact that the heated cavity walls come into thermal equilibrium with the energy in the cavity, delivering energy symmetrically to the fuel capsule. The reason for the closely held secret in the 70s was the idea of using the radiation in a hohlraum to implode and heat a fusion capsule. This is called the Teller/Ulam principle, the secret of the H bomb.  The H bomb concept relied on a two stage process with the radiation from a fission explosion to heat and compress a fusion device, but that was very secret in the 70s.  The reason for the high level of secrecy was not because we were afraid the Soviets would get the secret, which we knew they had, but for fear others would catch on and that would lead to proliferation of hydrogen bomb technology. So both programs progressed, but Rudakov knew something he was not sharing. In 1976, he announced with no details that his lab had produced the first fusion reaction using electron beams. The March 1976 “New York Times” reported, “Russians report fusion using electron beams,” but with no details. There is more to this story, to be continued in my next blog post.

Liars, Truth Tellers and Bullshit Artists

On By gyonas7 Comments

Telling false stories has become a subject of increasing media in the past couple of years. “The Washington Post” has made a full-time job of keeping track of Donald Trump’s communications and they reported that he had “accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency, averaging 21 erroneous claims a day.” I never tried to count the falsehoods, but I do recall that he said Obama was born in a foreign country, that Mexico would pay for the wall, and that drinking a little bleach would counter Covid. I have to admit that my previous blog posts were rather naive and simplistic about lying, and I quoted George Constanza of the “Seinfeld” TV series as the expert when he claimed,” it is not a lie if you believe it,” but I realize that is a simplistic evaluation of a very complex subject that needs more thought. 

Now the stories about lies and liars have reached such a crescendo that we hear about the “the big lie” constantly from both the left and right. The Trump believers, who are a majority of Republicans, say that people who claim Biden won the election are lying. Similarly people who voted for Biden say the Republican leadership consists of liars. Liz Cheney, however, a senior Republican member of the House of Representatives, says that the people in her own party who claim the election was stolen from Trump, are spreading The Big Lie and are “poisoning the democratic system.” The Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said Trump was “preaching the gospel of the Fuhrer” and the implication is that Trump is using the big lie to convince his followers to support his claims. He also described today’s political chaos as the “Reichstag moment.” 

The terminology of “The Big Lie” is a historically significant application of this specific descriptive language, and has been used to describe the writings not just of Hitler, but also other evil world figures. These comments lead me to see what one might learn from the past, and I recalled an old book, “The Mind of Hitler.” This 1973 book was the first publication of an OSS secret intelligence report written by Walter Langer, an American psychiatrist in 1943. The goal of the report was to understand enough about Hitler’s psychology to predict what he would do as his empire collapsed. I reread this old book looking for hints not about the mind of a recognized evil personality, but why he had so many loyal followers.

I have no education in these subjects, but what he wrote was really disturbing. One quote from his report seemed to tell a vitally important story. “People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.” But I wondered why there were so many followers ready to go along with the big lie. I guessed that there had to be more to the loyalty than to just the consequences of accepting and even really believing the lie, and I learned from Langer’s analysis that there was something else a lot deeper and a lot more troubling than just a charismatic leader telling a good story to a gullible population.

Langer’s analysis of the “unconscious tendencies of the German people” is worth considering, and he claims that “they had lost control of their individual mental processes.” Now that is a truly frightening possibility that, as Langer claims, “a peculiar bond that exists … beyond the control of any purely rational, logical or intellectual appeal.” While I have never studied group “mental processes,” I always wondered what brought the German people to go along with the big lie and its consequences for the world, and I found no explanation. 

But then I looked a lot deeper into the subject and found a more persuasive analysis from the writings of Harry G. Frankfurt, a well-known Princeton philosophy professor. His 2005 book “On Bullshit” provided me with a different point of view that is worth considering. He described truth tellers, liars and bullshit artists. He says that both the truth teller and the liar “responds to the facts as he understands them” but the bullshit artist does “not reject the authority of the truth as the liar does…he pays no attention to it at all.” So my initial quote from Constanza is misguided, and should have been, “It is a lie if you believe it, and it is bullshit if you don’t care about your beliefs; you just want to persuade somebody to go along with your arguments.”

Frankfurt wrote that the bullshitter makes assertions “without paying attention, to anything except what it suits one to say.” He goes on to say that bullshit is “unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Now that came across to me as a very good description of many of the talking heads that are interviewed on the so called news shows every day, and indicates to me that we need to come to grips with the bullshit that seems to be spread around. Stinking bullshit spread uniformly in a thin pervasive layer around today’s public communications is a more frightening image than fighting for truth.  

Many analysts have recently written that “bullshit is more dangerous than lies, since it erodes even the possibility of truth existing and being found.” I found this hypothesis to be the most serious challenge of modern mass communication since that there are so many communication tools available to practically everybody, as Frankfurt says “whether or not you know what you are talking about.” 

So, in my view, the job of the media is to expose the bullshit artist rather than engage in arguments and endless counter arguments about debatable facts. But how to do that is not at all clear without knowing what the communicator really believes.  Frankfurt ends his brilliant essay with a conundrum to determine if the communicator is sincere, and to determine if the communicator is being “true to his own nature,” and he concludes that “our nature… is less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things… and sincerity itself is bullshit.”