750
8 Modern Weapons: Possibilities and Limitations
of atomic warfare increased whenever “equality” was lessened, and therefore the
rational thing would seem to have been to preserve that equality under multinational supervision, the antagonists did not reach an agreement despite repeated
negotiations.
There were many reasons for that. The main reason includes traditional thinking
skills in national politics. Tradition has determined that one should call for peace
but prepare for war, upsetting the existing balance until the upper hand is gained.
The second group included the factors that did not depend on the people’s way of
thinking in the political or any other field. We are talking about the trends in the
development of the main technologies used in the warfare.
Each new possibility of technological improvement in weaponry became a reality,
on the principle: “If we don’t do it, they will.” Meanwhile, the doctrine of nuclear
warfare went through changes. At one time it advocated a limited exchange of nuclear
strikes (though no one knew exactly what the guarantee of the limitation would be);
at another, its goal was the total annihilation of the enemy (all of whose population
became “hostages” of a sort); at still another, it gave first priority to destroying the
enemy’s military-industrial potential.
The ancient law of “sword and shield” still held sway in the evolution of weaponry.
The shield took the form of hardening the silos that housed the missiles, while
the sword to pierce the shield involved making the missiles increasingly accurate
and, later, providing them with self -guidance systems and self -maneuverability. For
atomic submarines the shield was the ocean; improved methods for their underwater
detection constituted the sword. Technological progress in defense sent electronic
“eyes” into orbit, creating a high frontier of global reconnaissance able to spot
missiles at the moment of launch. This was the shield that the new type of sword—
the “killer satellite”—was to break. The satellite was supposed to use a laser to
blind the defending “eyes,” or destroy the missiles themselves during their flight.
But the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in building these higher and higher
levels of conflict failed, ultimately, to produce any definite, and therefore valuable,
strategic advantage—and for two very different, almost unrelated reasons.
In the first place, all these improvements and innovations, instead of increasing
strategic security, offensive or defensive, only reduced it. Security was reduced
because the global system of each superpower grew more and more complex,
composed of an increasing number of different subsystems on land, sea, and air and in
space. Military success required infallible communications to guarantee the optimum
synchronization of operations. But all systems that are highly complex, whether
they be industrial or military, biological or technological, whether they process
information or raw material, are prone to breakdown, to a degree mathematically
proportional to the number of elements that make up the system.
According to Lem, progress in military technology carried with it a unique
paradox: the more sophisticated the weapon it produced, the greater was the role of
chance (which could not be calculated) in the weapon’s successful use.
To counteract malfunctions in such systems, engineers introduced redundancy:
power reserves, for example, or—as with the first American space shuttles (like the
Columbia)—the doubling, even quadrupling of parallel, onboard computers. Total
8 Modern Weapons: Possibilities and Limitations
of atomic warfare increased whenever “equality” was lessened, and therefore the
rational thing would seem to have been to preserve that equality under multinational supervision, the antagonists did not reach an agreement despite repeated
negotiations.
There were many reasons for that. The main reason includes traditional thinking
skills in national politics. Tradition has determined that one should call for peace
but prepare for war, upsetting the existing balance until the upper hand is gained.
The second group included the factors that did not depend on the people’s way of
thinking in the political or any other field. We are talking about the trends in the
development of the main technologies used in the warfare.
Each new possibility of technological improvement in weaponry became a reality,
on the principle: “If we don’t do it, they will.” Meanwhile, the doctrine of nuclear
warfare went through changes. At one time it advocated a limited exchange of nuclear
strikes (though no one knew exactly what the guarantee of the limitation would be);
at another, its goal was the total annihilation of the enemy (all of whose population
became “hostages” of a sort); at still another, it gave first priority to destroying the
enemy’s military-industrial potential.
The ancient law of “sword and shield” still held sway in the evolution of weaponry.
The shield took the form of hardening the silos that housed the missiles, while
the sword to pierce the shield involved making the missiles increasingly accurate
and, later, providing them with self -guidance systems and self -maneuverability. For
atomic submarines the shield was the ocean; improved methods for their underwater
detection constituted the sword. Technological progress in defense sent electronic
“eyes” into orbit, creating a high frontier of global reconnaissance able to spot
missiles at the moment of launch. This was the shield that the new type of sword—
the “killer satellite”—was to break. The satellite was supposed to use a laser to
blind the defending “eyes,” or destroy the missiles themselves during their flight.
But the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in building these higher and higher
levels of conflict failed, ultimately, to produce any definite, and therefore valuable,
strategic advantage—and for two very different, almost unrelated reasons.
In the first place, all these improvements and innovations, instead of increasing
strategic security, offensive or defensive, only reduced it. Security was reduced
because the global system of each superpower grew more and more complex,
composed of an increasing number of different subsystems on land, sea, and air and in
space. Military success required infallible communications to guarantee the optimum
synchronization of operations. But all systems that are highly complex, whether
they be industrial or military, biological or technological, whether they process
information or raw material, are prone to breakdown, to a degree mathematically
proportional to the number of elements that make up the system.
According to Lem, progress in military technology carried with it a unique
paradox: the more sophisticated the weapon it produced, the greater was the role of
chance (which could not be calculated) in the weapon’s successful use.
To counteract malfunctions in such systems, engineers introduced redundancy:
power reserves, for example, or—as with the first American space shuttles (like the
Columbia)—the doubling, even quadrupling of parallel, onboard computers. Total