Tag: Star Wars missile defense

Will AI Make us Safer?

On By gyonas1 Comment

Imagine a computer glitch that sends a signal from the space-based missile launch warning system that an ICBM attack has begun. An automated Artificial Intelligence (AI) data analysis and decision battle management center responds in seconds. The result is the beginning of an exchange of thousands of nuclear tipped missiles that destroys life on this planet.

“If only AI
could tell us what to do…”

Do we want high-consequence decision making under time urgent confusing conditions to be made by AI without a human in the loop? Will we trust the judgment of the non-human decisionmaker if it is contrary to the subjective feelings of the humans in charge? In the sci-fi movie 2001, Hal the computer responded to an instruction with the famous response, “I’m sorry, Dave, but I can’t do that.” In the future, Hal may send the message, “I’m sorry, Dave, that I destroyed the world, but I had no choice.”

High-consequence decision making is a challenge for humans under the best of conditions, but often the situation is additionally constrained by sleep deprivation, anxiety, stress, miscommunication, misunderstandings, superstitions, irrational fear, and other demands, mean decisions might be better carried out by Hal. Maybe a decision devoid of feelings of regret would be superior to the judgments of irrational overwrought human beings.

Throughout history, humans have made mistakes with vital decisions. Significant negative outcomes have been the result. In this post I describe several instances where, in my opinion, the key decision makers would have been more successful with a real time extensive data collection and AI analysis coupled with a decision system provided by one or more high performance 20-watt computers, namely their brains. On the other hand, in some cases, humans may not always be the best qualified to make the final decisions due to their deeply held beliefs and biases.

One highly recognized important decision (that some historians describe as the decision that “saved the world”) took place in September 1983. Stanislav Petrov, the person in charge of operating the data monitoring from the Soviet’s satellite early warning system, detected signals indicating an ICBM attack. He decided it was a false alarm and did not initiate the events that could have resulted in nuclear war.

Contrast this with the 1988 incident when the USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down an Iranian passenger jet. The commander faced a mix of accurate and misleading information, resulting in a tragic error. In such a scenario, AI could potentially offer real-time analysis and reduce human error—provided it’s designed to support rather than replace human judgment.

AI has the potential to enhance decision-making, especially when combined with human expertise. There are situations where human biases, deeply ingrained beliefs, and emotional responses may cloud judgment, making AI’s objectivity an asset.

The importance of human decision making played a major role during the 1980s when I was involved in developing the battle management plans for Ronald Reagan’s proposed missile defense program, labeled in the press as Star Wars. When faced with the detection of a Soviet missile attack, Reagan decided it would be better to defend rather than to retaliate. The defense against a highly capable ICBM attack would require deciding in minutes to initiate the launch of a defensive system. AI wasn’t available then, but had it been, would we have turned to it for a data handling, analysis, and decision process to help determine if an attack was real and help plan our response? Perhaps such split-second decisions in the face of overwhelming complexity would have been better handled by a combination of AI and human judgment than by humans alone.

Another example from history illustrates how life and death decisions can be made incorrectly. The question is, would having AI assistance have made any difference in the outcome? In my role as the Strategic Defense Initiative chief scientist, I was assigned to negotiate deals to advance the SDI concept, so I met with Karl Beckurts, the research director of Siemens, one of the largest electronics companies in the world. My assignment was to persuade him to have his company join us. We had a rather fancy lunch, and our discussion was quite pleasant, but he made it clear that he, speaking for his corporate leadership, had decided that they had no interest in working with the United States on the SDI program. That lunch may have cost him his life.

On July 9, 1986, in Bonn, West Germany, Beckurts was killed. A remote-controlled bomb detonated as his limo passed by a tree on his established route to work. A seven-page letter from the Red Army Faction (RAF), undoubtedly under the direction of the KGB, was found near the location of the bombing. The letter said that he had been killed because he was preparing to support Ronald Reagan’s program to develop a space-based missile defense program called the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Car accident

The Soviet decision to take Beckurts’ life is an example of flawed human decision making based on false perceptions and misunderstandings. But, even if AI support had been available to the Soviets during the 1980s, I doubt they would have turned to it. You see, they had already made up their minds about the threat from SDI.

Much like the Germans, both the French and British decided not to work with the United States on developing missile defense. One nation made a different decision. This country was interested in engaging in a joint program to develop a long-range missile defense system, and they were willing to share the cost with us. Their goal was not to help us, but to defend themselves. Their decision process seemed to me to be straightforward, not requiring any complex decision process. They were surrounded by enemies who posed an existential missile threat. The cooperative program was called Arrow, and we established a development program, that has been continually advanced over the years. The most advanced version, Arrow 3, a Boeing/Israel Aerospace Industries program is reported to have successfully intercepted a ballistic missile attack from Iran, and their defense system is now being upgraded. It appears that the Israeli decision paid off.

I want to close by emphasizing that I believe that human decision-making processes are the best way to deal with the ambiguity of complex issues, but in some cases, people could also benefit from technical assistance provided by AI. Ten years ago, I patented a concept for human brain cognitive enhancement. I explore this idea in my latest science fiction novel, The Dragon’s Brain, which will be released in October 2024. I am working on the final book in this series in which I consider whether our decision makers have the wisdom, perspective, and values to make the right decisions to preserve what seems to be becoming an increasingly unstable world. Today Iran is threatening to launch a retaliatory attack on Israel and President Biden is trying to persuade Netanyahu to agree to an end to the war in Gaza. By the time you read this, the decisions of people based on their own brains–without any help from computers—could impact world peace.

Heraclitus, QMU, and Laser Fusion

On By gyonas8 Comments

Heraclitus had many famous quotes, but the one I often remember is, “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” My take away from this is relevant to many of the complex problems I have worked with over my 50 odd years of dealing with various science and technology problems. Also, I can claim without contradiction that my career has never been blemished with even a single success.

For some reason, I always seemed to be interested in really challenging problems that were limited by not just engineering and physics, but also by constraints of politics, economics, and human decision making. I have written about this general class of problems that are best described as “wicked.” They are characterized as not having any closed form solution. Working on such problems provides the participants with alternating experiences of euphoria and utter depression. Maybe that is why poor Heraclitus had a problem crossing a river.

People in charge of maintaining the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile are facing a particularly wicked problem. Their job is to assure that the weapons are safe, secure, and reliable… but without the ability to fully test them by detonating any of these weapons. This approach is called Quantification of Margins and Uncertainty (QMU).  It is a process of highly diagnosed but sub critical experiments and comprehensive computer simulations to allow decision making about the risk involved in the performance and reliability of the stockpile.

An extremely important and challenging aspect of this program is the use of lasers to ignite fusion ignition in the laboratory. The recent experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) recently demonstrated fusion ignition with more energy output than delivered to the target by the lasers. This is the first time that actual “fusion ignition” has been achieved in a lab.

In my Feb.23 post “Fusion Fact or Fiction,” I explained the seemingly “miraculous” achievement involving many tradeoffs on nonlinear variables adjusted over years of complex experiments and calculations requiring continuing political support with ever-increasing budgets. I stated then (and as far as I know now) the achievement has yet to be repeated. The lab director explained recently, “We haven’t had the kind of perfect capsule that we had in December.” Perfect capsules will require a “perfect” budget.

An additional issue is the performance of the laser. Pushing the laser to its limits causes damage to the optical system that is expensive and time consuming to fix. There is also the political pressure created by the association of fusion research with the desire to develop the ultimate clean, cheap, unlimited source of energy.  

So, how can leaders deal with this wicked problem? I think the methodology that will be useful is QMU that focuses on establishing the needed margins of performance of all the components of NIF experiments that will have uncertain outcomes. Each experiment will be a different man stepping into a different river.  Heraclitus would certainly get his feet wet, but he might get swept away.

Truth versus Fiction

On By gyonas11 Comments

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more fun.

At the end of 2022 when Lawrence Livermore Laboratory achieved a major fusion breakthrough, my novel, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. was already at the printers.  This struck me as amusing, since the book tells the story of a fictional clean energy breakthrough. In the novel, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory create a compact clean low-cost energy source using electron beams to trigger a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction that generates electromagnetic energy and then directly convert that into electricity.

Russia’s 1975 electron beam fusion reactor

The fictional breakthrough discovery is an accident that generates one thousand times more energetic output.  In addition to intended entertainment, my book’s basic messages are first that surprises happen in research when one’s imagination, creativity and enthusiasm is as important as careful well-founded analysis. My second theme is that discovery of new science is like a knife. A knife can be used to butter your bread or slit someone’s throat. Technology is a literal double-edged sword. I believe that there will always be applications of scientific achievements that are both civilian and military—that can be used for peaceful innovation or for weapons of war. I also believe that there will always be people who can invent and stimulate ideas as well as people who know how to stand in the way of progress. The path to scientific innovation often involves the sort of characters that appear in the pages of The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. 

I spent much of my career striving to achieve a breakthrough that could lead to clean, unlimited energy. Now, as an author I have created a fictional breakthrough that reaches that goal. So, naturally that begs the question—will scientists achieve that fusion goal in real life? When it comes to recent fusion breakthroughs, the rhetoric is exciting and invigorating. Examples of recent not too specific government fusion statements are “a game changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy,” and “new ways to power our homes and offices in future decades.” When I read such announcements, I cannot but help remembering Reagan’s Star Wars speech in 1983 that the goal of his missile defense program would make “nuclear weapons obsolete.” The outcome of the Reagan initiative was not technical but a strategic/political event that took place at Reykjavik Iceland in 1986 as told in my Potomac Institute article, It’s Laboratory or Goodbye.

Another famous president’s call for action was Kennedy’s 1962 challenge to “land a man on the moon” by 1970. In my first year as a grad student, after I listened to a detailed Caltech colloquium after the Kennedy speech, I was convinced that the technology was already well developed, the achievement was not that far off and a race with the Soviets would provide plenty of political support for the program. Kennedy’s words shaped public enthusiasm for the space program. Words can change the way people think about science. Words can change the way governments fund science.

This approach to imagining and planning for a very distant future suggested to me a story that begins with “it was dark and stormy night.” The story is about two cave men who sat in the cold, dark, dampness of their cave when a bolt of lightning struck and ignited for the first time in the history of human development, a pile of wet branches at the mouth of their cave. The pile of wet wood was ignited into a growing fire rather than just a thin whisk of smoke they had previously experienced.  One cave man could hardly believe that a lightning bolt could create a roaring fire in wet wood. He was astonished, warm, happy, and started to roast a small rodent on a stick, but the other, probably one of the first human engineers spoke up, “What if the lightning bolt ignited a new reaction that transformed the wood into new materials and created a way to make cheap, clean, inexhaustible energy?”

If you want to spend more time thinking about the scientific process, the quest for inexhaustible energy and the unavoidable connection between peaceful innovation and military applications, pick up a copy of The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. at your local bookstore or order online:

Fusion: fact or fiction

On By gyonas2 Comments

With the advent of the Covid lockdown in 2020, I decided to try my hand at writing science fiction, as an activity to maintain some semblance of sanity. Based on my experiences in the Pentagon, national labs, and consulting for the government, I wrote about the fictitious discovery of an unlimited, cheap, safe energy source. The result was a series of technothriller novels, called the Project Z series. The first book, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W., will be published this May.

Now, you may ask, how much of this series is based on reality? How close are scientists to creating the ultimate energy source? Recently, as my book headed to print, scientists achieved a major fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  This fusion research program exists to support the nation’s nuclear weapon program, but the breakthrough made headlines because of the potential to use fusion as an alternative energy source.

On Dec 13, 2022, Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm, announced an outstanding scientific and technical achievement. Lawrence Livermore’s device, called the National Ignition Facility (NIF), had demonstrated “fusion ignition” in a laboratory for the first time. The machine had created a nuclear reaction that generated more energy than it consumed.

Construction on NIF began in 1997 and the device started operating more than 10 years ago. The machine takes energy from a giant capacitor bank, as large as an apartment building, and transforms that energy into 192 pulsed laser beams focused onto a very complex, tiny fusion capsule.  The facility is as long as three football fields and 10 stories tall, but the final energy output comes from a tiny sphere you can barely see in the palm of your hand. Does this sound like another of those government exaggerations, maybe similar to Reagan’s “Star Wars” program he announced in 1983? Indeed, achieving fusion ignition is an incredible achievement. Let’s take a look at what happen on that fateful day at NIF.

To begin with, there was an incredible amount of stored energy in the capacitors, namely two million joules in each of 192 capacitor banks, to excite the lasers. Next the laser energy entered a 1 centimeter-long cylinder through holes on the ends and heated the inner surface of the tiny cylinder. One of the first technical challenges was that the laser pulse had to be tailored to the right shape over time. The laser light had to be precisely injected into small holes on the ends of the cylinder, and the energy had to be directed and precisely absorbed in a predetermined pattern on the inner wall of the cylinder. Both of these goals were achieved. That exquisitely tailored and perfectly focused energy was absorbed and a fraction of that energy was converted into a hot ionized gas, called a radiating plasma, expanding from the heated cylindrical target’s inner wall.

Inside the cylinder sat a tiny sphere, only 2 millimeters in diameter. Using a microscopic tube, the hollow, flawless, gold-plated diamond shell had been filled with fusion fuel. When the lasers hit the cylinder creating the hot ionized gas, radiation flowed around the sphere and heated its outer surface. This made the outer wall of the sphere explode, causing a violent implosion. A small fraction of that implosion energy compressed to heat a tiny, high density, high-temperature spot at the center of the fuel. This triggers the fusion reaction. The energy released by the fusion reaction heated a fraction of the surrounding compressed fusion fuel releasing more energy.

This was the miraculous achievement of creating a burning fusion fuel using NIF. The compression and heating of the fuel was not the really significant result, the true breakthrough was creating a small hot spot that ignited adjacent cold material. Hot spot ignition is the event that may open the way to the future. There were many tradeoffs of nonlinear variables that had to be adjusted after years of very complex experiments and calculations. And repeating the achievement is still yet to come.

Frankly, before NIF was approved by congress, I had my doubts that such a complex process based on hot spot ignition would ever work, and my skepticism did not please my friends on the NIF team. It is still very hard for me to comprehend the entirety of what happened. The sustained investment of so much money and many years of total dedication in the face of repeated failures is remarkable. The complexity of the concept, and brilliance of the scientific and engineering team, as well as the enormous difficulty of the achievement contributed to this historic event, but it is natural to question the result.

However, based on an extensive array of diagnostic sensors backed up by modeling and simulation of the complex physics, we know it really happened. There were so many incredibly challenging engineering requirements, and so many interdependent very nonlinear physical phenomena that could only be modeled on giant computers. I was skeptical at first, and I am now totally impressed that the NIF team accomplished this remarkable result.  Although the phenomenon may be rather hard to duplicate, it happened once, and that makes all of the difference in the long and arduous journey of fusion research. It is just one more of those miracles of engineering and physics!

But what about my attempt at inventing a fictional engineering and science breakthrough in my soon to be published novel, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W.  I imagined my story and began writing it several years before this real miracle occurred. In my futuristic technical mystery novel, a low energy nuclear reaction is triggered by an intense relativistic electron beam. The beam triggers a transmutation of the target material into rare earth elements, and the energy output in the form of an electromagnetic pulse is thousands of times greater than the input. No question. This is pure fiction physics, but it draws on some real research I conducted during my career. In 1972 I initiated a fusion program at Sandia National Labs, even applied for and was awarded a patent on an e-beam fusion reactor concept with construction of what I called the Electron Beam Fusion Accelerator. I’ll discuss my fusion research journey in my next post.

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