greg goebel / public domain
* VECTORS is an original newsletter of fact and commentary on aerospace, technology, science, and historical topics.
* Before the US military went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, work towards modernization had focused on exploiting the latest high-tech to create a very "smart", network-enabled, digitally wired fighting force. To no surprise in hindsight, the US military's adversaries, in the form of Islamic insurgents, have proven just as interested in obtaining an edge from the same sorts of technologies. The high-tech rivalry between the US military and the insurgents has some interesting parallels to the rivalry between powerful tech companies, particularly Microsoft, and the network of rivals loosely joined together under the banner of "open-source software".
For a snapshot of what this means in practice, on 8 April 2004, US troops used a small robot, known as a "Packbot", to search for "improvised explosive devices (IEDs)" set up by insurgents. It found one, which completely wrecked the Packbot when it went off. The Packbot had actually worked as specified, since it was far preferable to lose a robot than a soldier -- but the fact remained that a gadget costing about $100,000 USD had been destroyed by an IED made with a few dollars' worth of explosives and fitted with a detonator made from a cellphone, garage-door opener, or even a remote control for a toy. Welcome to "open-source warfare".
To be sure, warfare between a large formal military organization and local insurgencies has always been "asymmetric", with the military organization equipped with weapons obtained through a bureaucratic development and acquisition process, while the insurgents make do with what they can scrape up. A formal military organization is around for the long term and may have to deal with a range of challenges; soldiers need the best weapons they can get, and such weapons have to be robust, easy to use, and standardized. Insurgents will fight with any halfway usable piece of junk they can get their hands on, and they don't worry overmuch about standards, consistency, and production quality -- if it works, that's good enough. Furthermore, insurgents only fight on their own terms, often preferring to strike at "soft" infrastructure targets in pursuit of political ends, while a formal military organization is driven to operate on a "search and destroy" basis to root out the insurgents.
The asymmetry is inevitable, but the rules of this game give the insurgent a certain edge, and given the widespread availability of cheap high-tech, some military analysts and counterterrorism experts believe that in the 21st century that edge provides insurgents with a disproportionate amount of clout. John Robb, a counterterrorism expert and author of the recent book BRAVE NEW WAR, comments: "What we are seeing is the empowerment of the individual to conduct war." Robb believes that insurgents now can obtain powerful resources through the internet or the local RadioShack. They can get satellite imagery on Google Earth, create videos for distribution on the internet, obtain hints on how to make IEDs and the like from website, and use public-domain encryption to protect their communications.
Robb is a particular believer in the reality of open-source warfare, pointing out that, like the open-source software community, insurgents tend to form loosely-knit, decentralized networks linked by internet communications. That makes them hard to pin down, hard to destroy. They are also quick to adapt, with a US Army general stating at a recent conference on IEDs: "For every move we make, the enemy makes three. The enemy changes techniques, tactics, and procedures every two to three weeks. Our biggest task is staying current and relevant."
Standard defense acquisition programs cannot come close to matching the rapid technology cycles of insurgent tech. In a typical weapons procurement cycle, a military service has to take the time to write up a careful specification for the weapon, pass it out to defense contractors for bids, run the bids through a scrupulous selection process, award a contract to the winner, run through a development program for the weapon, and then test it thoroughly before it goes into production and out into combat. To make matters worse, although the military has its share of bright people, military organizations tend to be slow-moving and bureaucratic to begin with.
Consider the US Air Force's premium fighter, the F/A-22 Raptor, which finally entered service in 2005 -- 25 years after issue of the initial specification. It is certainly an impressive weapon, a stealthy "fourth generation" jet fighter that can cruise at supersonic speeds and is fitted with awesomely sophisticated electronics. That it took so long to get out the door is not too surprising in hindsight, not merely because it is so complex, but because the requirement for which it had been originally intended, the threat of the development of comparable Soviet fourth-generation fighters, didn't materialize. The design cycles of other Western fourth-generation fighters -- the European Typhoon, the French Rafale, and the Swedish Gripen -- were about as protracted as that of the F/A-22.
The expensive F/A-22 -- with a cost currently given at about $138 million USD per aircraft -- seems like a poor match for insurgent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In its defense, it wasn't designed to fight such wars, the underlying rationale being that the Air Force didn't like the idea of finding out a high-tech adversary had a superior fighter that could clean American combat jets out of the sky. USAF brass wanted to make sure the service had leading-edge technology to prevent that from happening. That particular logic remains valid now, but having a weapon to fight a future war still leaves the question open of what weapons we need to fight a war in the here and now.
* Those who push the threat of open-source warfare like to refer to Eric S. Raymond's 1997 book, THE CATHEDRAL AND THE BAZAAR, in which Raymond documented the creation of the Linux operating system by the open-source software community. He compared the environment that created Linux to the public marketplace of the bazaar, with the programmers agreeing to observe a few simple principles while remaining free to innovate and create. Raymond contrasted that with the "cathedral" approach to software design followed by large organizations such as Microsoft, in which software was put together on a scheduled, structured plan, under tight management control. Raymond's conclusion was that the inflexible "cathedral" system was no match for the flexible "bazaar" system.
John Robb noticed that modern insurgencies, as well as organized-crime networks, are organized on open-source "bazaar" lines. Al-Qaeda is the most interesting example. It has traditional ancestors, like the Palestinian Liberation Organization, but it's not state-sponsored; it has informal means of funding, including donations and black-market commerce; and although it has influential members, it has no controlling central authority. Its members tend to be well educated, and familiar both with modern technology and media.
Iraqi insurgent groups are very internet-savvy, using websites to get their message out. They will post videos and descriptions of attacks within hours of carrying them out. Al-Qaeda produces slick video and audio productions, offering them in various formats so they can be viewed on anything from a widescreen TV to a cellphone. The number of websites known to be linked to terrorists only numbered about a dozen in 1997; in 2006, the number was estimated at over 5,000. It is true that most of these sites, just as with any category of website, are junk, but there are still about a hundred that mean business and are monitored by Western counterterrorism organizations.
The terrorist websites are not only propaganda organs, but are also useful in spreading around knowledge, resulting in the rapid learning cycles observed in Iraq. Such information includes training on how to rig car bombs, use poisons, forge documents, and so on. To be sure, once again there's a lot of worthless junk on internet websites and the terrorist sites are no exception to this rule, and some things, such as becoming proficient with a light machine gun, can only really be learned from experience. All that said, there's still plenty of information useful to terrorists floating around in cyberspace, and they are making effective use of it.
Of course, to translate information into action requires resources that can't be printed out from a website, but the internet also provides easy access to cheap, off-the-shelf materials that can be converted into weapon systems. In fact, if someone knows what to look for, such materials can often simply be picked up at an ordinary store. The liquid explosives used in the 2006 plot to attack airliners were synthesized from common chemicals.
* The Iraq insurgency is the test case for open-source war, with the weapon of choice being the IED. The insurgents started out simple, building mines from old mortar shells, and have evolved continuously to the development of shaped-charge devices that can penetrate the armor of a main battle tank. As US forces have become more expert at spotting roadside bombs, the insurgents have increasingly turned to booby-trapping houses. Says one counterterrorism expert: "Nothing they're doing is going to win any prizes from the Department of Defense for high tech, but the stuff is deadly. They're using a huge variety of cheaply available stuff." The latest gimmick is to use battery-powered wireless doorbell units as detonators. They're crude, but very difficult to jam.
The military has been lagging behind the learning curve. Early unarmored Humvee trucks were soft targets for the insurgents; armored Humvees were better but still far from satisfactory. In early 2007, the Pentagon decided to invest billions in "mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP)" vehicles, which are big armored trucks with a raised chassis and a boatlike hull to deflect mine blasts. They're not arriving fast enough, since it takes time to ramp up production, and the insurgents are determined to figure out a way to destroy them.
Military think-tanks are working hard to figure out ways to get ahead of the insurgents' learning curve. Traditional Pentagon procurement policies, with their long leadtimes, aren't really appropriate to the challenge of modern insurgent warfare. Actually, the military has long had "fast track" development offices, set up to get simple, cheap, off-the-shelf gear into service as quickly as possible. The "Army's Rapid Equipping Force (REF)" hunts around for off-the-shelf solutions to problems and is empowered to get them out to the troops directly. REF personnel can actually make small purchases, up to a few thousand dollars, using an organization credit card, with a minimum of follow-up paperwork.
One gimmick provided by the REF to soldiers in Iraq are Taiwanese green laser pens. They are used by soldiers at checkpoints to signal drivers to stop. Previously, troops had tried to use warning shots, but for good reasons Iraqis tend to assume they are in danger when somebody starts shooting and the results could be fatal mistakes. A more interesting tool, an industrial-grade leaf blower, was obtained from a firm in New York state. The leaf blower is attached to the front of a truck leading a convoy to literally "blow away" suspicious piles of trash or the like that might conceal a mine.
The Army has also set up a "Rapid Fielding Initiative (RFI)" to streamline traditional procurement, with RFI getting such useful items to the field as the improved "Advanced Combat Helmet" and a new first-aid kit tuned to the types of injuries being seen in Iraq. Weapons needed for Iraq have been put on fast-track development, for example a "thermobaric" (thermal blast) warhead developed for the Hellfire antitank missile in only 60 days.
The US military has been particularly interested in robots. The PackBot was mentioned above, but there are other types in service, with about 3,000 small ground robots deployed so far to Iraq and Afghanistan. Robot aircraft or "unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)" are also in widespread combat use. Ground troops have their own little hand-launched UAVs that they can use to figure out what the black hats around the corner are up to -- incidentally, the troops find them tremendous fun.
Soldiers can also get help from Predator UAVs that can loiter for hours at altitudes high enough to be out of sight, while keeping an "angel's eye view" on the battlefield. The Air Force is now fielding an improved Predator, the "Reaper", with a turboprop engine instead of a piston engine. While the Predator can carry a pair of missiles to deal with targets that might get away before a strike can be called in, it is primarily a surveillance platform. The Reaper, in contrast, is primarily a "shooter": it can carry a hefty warload and is able to loiter over the fighting for hours, dropping on call a small smart weapon where it will do the black hats the least good.
The military is trying to adopt more flexible thinking at a higher level as well. For example, the US Air Force's Space Vehicle Directorate at Kirtland Air Force Base is working on a project to design "plug and play" satellites that could be put together and launched within a week of a field request. The military does realize the need to improve compatibility and interoperability in combat gear.
At the other end of the spectrum, the level of the grunt on patrol, soldiers have always been ingenious at coming up with off-the-books fixes to problems, "garage and junkyard tech", for example cobbling together armor for Humvees. Troops in Iraq make use of the internet themselves, trading ideas just as the insurgents do, and providing their own public information -- writing blogs to keep the folks back home educated. The military has had concerns about GI blogs over security and organizational image, but also needs to encourage and assist the troops to make use of the tools available.
* Critics find all this a good thing, but don't believe enough is made of fast-track defense acquisition, and also see classic gold plate creeping into the process. A four-UAV system of Reapers, including ground systems, costs about $70 million -- cheap compared to an F/A-22 but still not pocket change. The critics worry that when this current round of fighting dies down, the US military will go back to business as usual, and will be caught even more unprepared for the next round. Given the current global social and political climate, it's a sure bet there will be a next round.
Some defense experts roll their eyes at the open-source warfare crowd, seeing them as putting a trendy technospin on things that aren't really anything new. As noted, insurgent warfare has always been asymmetric, and the cheap and dirty methods of an insurgent are generally useless for a formal military organization. With 21st-century high tech it shouldn't have been a surprise that both sides in the struggle have access to better tools. In addition, although the tools available to the insurgents are sophisticated, they are also limited, not remotely in a league with proper military hightech. It may be nice to get satellite imagery off Google Earth, but it's also coarse resolution and usually several months or even years old, not revealing the latest defenses of a targeted installation. Military special program offices to get off-the-shelf tech into the hands of the troops have been around for a long time, and the troops have always been good at improvisation themselves.
However, even these experts admit that the problem keeping up with insurgent technology is real -- that though their methods may be crude they can also be devastatingly effective. There is absolutely no disagreement on the importance of doing a better job. As US Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates put it recently: "We have to look outside the normal bureaucratic way of doing things. For every month we delay, scores of young Americans are going to die."
* PUTTING TOGETHER THE BOMB: While Niels Bohr shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic on his dead-end mission, the researchers at Los Alamos were accelerating towards the goal of building the atomic bomb. Continued analyses showed that the atomic bomb was practical and the effort was on track. It turned out that plutonium wouldn't work in the gun-type bomb: plutonium went "critical" faster than uranium-235, and there was no way to shoot the slug into the core fast enough to keep the weapon from "pre-igniting", resulting in a fizzle. Work on the plutonium bomb focused on the implosion scheme, though it was clearly a challenge.
As far as the problems with uranium enrichment went, potential salvation appeared in the form of a scheme that Philip Abelson had devised for the US Navy known as "thermal diffusion". When a mix of isotopes was placed in a thermal gradient, lighter isotopes tended to migrate towards the cooler end of the gradient, while heavier isotopes tended to migrate towards the hotter end of the gradient. Abelson came up with a thermal diffusion separation system that involved three nested pipes, stood vertically: the inner pipe was filled with hot steam, the middle pipe was filled with liquid hex, and the outer pipe carried cooling water. The arrangement set up a convection current in the hex, with enriched material being siphoned off the top.
The basic concept had actually been invented in Germany before the war, but Abelson was the first to come up with an implementation appropriate for large-scale use. It was a relatively cheap process, useful for high-volume production of enriched uranium, but it had two drawbacks: it required huge amounts of steam, and it couldn't enrich uranium enough to permit its use in a bomb. It was for precisely these reasons that the Manhattan Project had rejected the concept early on. The Navy hadn't worried much about these problems because the service was used to working with large volumes of hot steam in the turbine propulsion systems of warships, and was also mostly interested in using atomic power to drive submarines. Bomb-grade enrichment wasn't needed for a power reactor.
Oppenheimer had seen a report on Abelson's work in early 1943 and not been impressed, but in the spring of that year Oppie had a brainstorm: even if thermal diffusion couldn't enrich uranium up to bomb grade, it could be used to obtain large quantities of partly-enriched uranium that could be then put through calutrons to complete the enrichment. Oppie did some simple calculations and came to the conclusion that such a "two-stage" process would easily put an end to the enrichment bottleneck. Oppenheimer felt stupid, telling Groves: "We've made a terrible scientific blunder." Groves had already been siphoning output of the gaseous diffusion system at Oak Ridge into the calutrons as a stopgap solution. Now a two-stage solution based on thermal diffusion and the calutrons offered a real fix. In mid-June, Groves ordered the construction of a thermal-diffusion separation plant at Oak Ridge, using Abelson's design exactly as it was, there being no time to tinker with it.
* Fueling of the three breeder reactors at Hanford began in mid-September 1944, with Enrico Fermi -- now an American, he and his wife having been granted citizenship in July -- doing the honors of inserting the first aluminum-canned natural uranium slug into a reactor core. Loading went on around the clock, but the slugs came in faster than they could be inserted. They were carried in wooden blocks and the blocks had to be stacked up. Leona Marshall, one of the site managers, joked with Fermi that the stack of blocks looked like an atomic pile. Fermi gasped and went pale, but after snatching his slide rule out of his pocket and fiddling with it for a moment he relaxed, realizing that a chain reaction in the stack was comfortably well outside the bounds of theoretical limits.
The first pile went online on 26 September 1944. All went well at first, but then the pile simply bogged down gradually and turned itself off. Fermi suspected that some product of the reaction was "poisoning" it. To lend weight to this suggestion, the pile later came back on, only to shut itself off again. It seemed that the reaction produced a short-lived product that absorbed neutrons, shut down the chain reaction, and then decayed, allowing the chain reaction to begin again, producing the poison until the pile died out once more. Analysis showed the problem to be xenon-136 gas.
Fortunately, a Princeton physicist named John A. Wheeler had worried about the possibility of fission-product poisoning and had suggested changes to the pile design to compensate. Although the modifications were expensive and time-consuming the contractor, Du Pont, had implemented them. Instead of rebuilding the piles, all that had to be done was change operational procedures to exploit Wheeler's additions.
Since the slugs produced by the breeder reactors only consisted of about 250 parts per million of plutonium, that meant separation was an issue, and a really nasty issue because much of the rest of the material in the slugs was hideously radioactive. The separation facilities used to extract plutonium from the slugs were major installations in themselves. Three were built, all consisting of huge sealed rectangular thick-walled concrete structures known as "Queen Marys" for their size. The separation process had been developed by Glenn Seaborg and his team, involving dissolving the slugs in nitric acid, precipitating the useful fraction, and then using centrifugation to concentrate it. Once the process had begun, nobody could get into one of the Queen Marys and live for very long, so the process was handled by remote control -- a remarkable feat given the technology of the time.
The separation plants began to go into operation late in 1944. By February, all three Hanford piles and the separation facilities were operating at full bore. Groves was relieved that things were finally on track, telling General Marshall that the US would have as many as 18 plutonium bombs available by the second half of 1945.
Although Edward Teller had made his ideas about the "super bomb" known, to his disappointment there was no interest in pursuing the concept for the moment. Get the atomic bomb working first, the thinking went, and then worry about the "super" later. Teller chafed at what he saw as a lack of vision, and also was frustrated at the fact that he hadn't been made head of the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos -- that job went to Hans Bethe.
* LIVING AT LOS ALAMOS: Everyone at Los Alamos was putting in long hours to get the atomic bomb built, though they still had time for some entertainment, including dorm parties, poker sessions, square dances, and amateur theatre. Oppenheimer didn't have much time to participate in anything that required any real effort, but he did make showings -- surprising the audience for the play ARSENIC & OLD LACE by being dragged out as a corpse. It didn't require learning much in the way of dialogue. There was a small, low-power broadcast station on the site, specializing in classical music, drawn from the collections of many of the staff, including Oppenheimer. There were occasional live performances of piano and the like from musically-inclined researchers, who were only introduced by their first names. There was fishing and hiking -- the daily bulletin was careful to warn that bears encountered on trails were not "tame bears like those in Yellowstone Park."
In fact, some of the European-born were not at all familiar with the threats posed by local wildlife. Sometime earlier, while Niels Bohr was visiting, he went on a hike with the Fermis and ran into a curious badger-like creature with black fur and white stripes down its back. Bohr found the beast intriguing and imprudently did not back up immediately, but it seems the skunk did not regard him as a threat, sparing the Nobel prize winner the indignity of having his clothes burned while he scrubbed himself down with tomato juice.
One of John Wheeler's proteges, a Jewish kid from Long Island named Richard Feynmann, brilliant and an egotistical smartass, amused himself the dorms by playing bongo drums -- though in the weekends he would drive off to a New Mexico sanitarium where his young wife was slowly dying of tuberculosis. He also claimed later to have picked up the hobby of cracking safes to test security, much to annoyance of the military authorities. There were amusements between the sheets as well, resulting in a flood of pregnancies and babies, straining the outpost's facilities to the extent that Groves tried to order it stopped. He was exceeding his authority and the order was ignored, even by his trusted technical director. In December 1944, Kitty Oppenheimer gave birth to a daughter, Katherine (who would in practice be called Toni).
Not all were able to cope with the isolation of the site. Kitty Oppenheimer began to drink heavily and gradually dropped out of leadership of social activities. Along with the pressures of his job and a troublesome family situation, Oppie was also continually grilled by Army security folks, who remained suspicious of his left-leaning activities before the war. There were some among them who were convinced he was a Red spy. They were looking in the wrong place, but under pressure Oppie lied to help protect those close to him. All his answers were recorded and filed; whether he realized it or not, whether he liked it or not, he was building up a potential brief against himself.
* B-29 IN COMBAT: By the spring of 1944, the aircraft designated to be the atomic bomb's delivery system, the B-29 Superfortress, was in production. It was suffering badly from teething problems, particularly a tendency of its powerful air-cooled piston engines to catch on fire. By the summer of 1944, it was performing strikes against Japan, though the task was proving difficult. Although the B-29 had very long range, the only way to mount attacks against the Japanese home islands at that time was from American bases in China. The Superfortress bases of the USAAF 20th Bomber Command in China were supplied by airlift over the Himalayas, a cumbersome process that demanded about seven supply flights for each individual bomber sortie. The results of such strikes on Japan as could be performed on this basis were very mixed.
In late August 1944, Major General Curtis LeMay arrived to take command of the 20th. LeMay was a tough, ruthless, extremely competent officer who like to chew on a cigar and was nicknamed "Iron-Ass LeMay" for his hardnosed approach to doing things. He was also smart enough to know that the position of the 20th in China was logistically preposterous, and that the Superfortress raids from China were a ridiculous way to fight a war.
The USAAF planned to pull the plug on Superfortress operations from China. The fall of the Marianas had given the USAAF a better base from which B-29s could attack Japan, and the USAAF gradually began to shift the focus from China to the Pacific. On 24 November 1944, B-29s from Tinian in the Marianas performed their first raid on the Japanese home islands. Results of that raid and those following were mixed; the B-29 was still not living up to its promise.
Back in the USA, a specially modified B-29 had performed the first drop of a dummy atomic bomb, a model of a Little Boy, on 3 March 1944. There were some problems with the initial tests, but in August 1944, the USAAF ordered 17 B-29s with the appropriate modifications for atomic bomb delivery, and by September 1944 the 393rd Bombardment Squadron was training for the mission at Wendover, in Utah. The operation was codenamed SILVERPLATE and had the highest priority for resources.
The 393rd was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Paul W. Tibbetts, a reserved, cool, highly professional pilot with an outstanding service record. He had just finished an assignment as a test pilot for the B-29 and was very familiar with the aircraft. Tibbetts was the only person in the 393rd who had been briefed on the atomic bomb, but aircrews suspected they were going to be carrying a warload unlike any other when their training emphasized placing the Superfortress in a dive after bomb release and exiting the target area as fast as possible. They dropped "Pumpkins", which were rough facsimiles of the Fat Man bomb produced by Groves' organization, filled with concrete or high explosive.
* PUTTING TOGETHER THE BOMB / VICTORY IN EUROPE: While the USAAF was working on delivering the atomic bomb, Los Alamos pushed forward on putting it together. Although implosion looked and was difficult, progress was made on getting it to work. X-ray imaging was used to observe the detonation of small spherical assemblies of explosives in order to back up theoretical calculations. Another trick immersed a metal sphere in a magnetic field, with the changes in the field monitored as explosives imploded the sphere. John von Neumann had come up with a design for the implosion system, with George Kistiakowsky struggling to get it to work. It was not a simple thing, requiring an extremely precise and elaborate arrangement of explosives, but by March 1945 a workable implosion system was in hand.
Another issue was selection of an "initiator". Just slamming chunks of fissile material together wasn't quite enough to guarantee an explosive chain reaction; the core of the critical mass needed to contain a small amount of radioactive material, the initiator, to "kick-start" the chain reaction. Polonium was selected as the initiator and approved as an element of the production design. However, although considerable effort was expended to make sure all these pieces went together as planned, the only way to determine if they actually worked was to set off the bomb.
* Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a stroke on 12 April 1945, and Vice-President Harry Truman became president of the United States. Truman did not know about the atomic bomb, though he was quickly briefed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the details. Truman had known a few years earlier, while he was in the Senate and heading a watchdog committee, that there was major supersecret military research program in progress -- but then Stimson had told Truman that it was off-limits and should not be investigated. Truman had complied. There was a war on, after all.
Roosevelt's death was a shock to the nation. It was a particular shock to Leo Szilard, who had been chafing over the way his concerns about the future of the atomic bomb were being ignored in the high offices of the US government, as if there was "soundproof wall" around Washington DC where such concerns remained both unheard and unanswered. Szilard had gone back to his old friend Einstein and got a letter of introduction to the president, and also lined up a preliminary meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady, for May.
Franklin Roosevelt's death forced a reset of Szilard's plans. The physicist did manage to arrange a meeting with James Byrnes, Truman's chief foreign policy advisor, who would become secretary of state in July. Accompanied by Harold Urey and Walter Bartkey, a dean of the University of Chicago, Szilard spoke to Byrnes in his South Carolina home. Szilard pointed out that the atomic bomb was a threat to the United States, since it gave smaller powers a weapon that could counter American material superiority, and that such a powerful weapon required a different mindset from any other weapon ever built. Byrnes was unimpressed, believing that the United States would be able to obtain a clear advantage from the atomic bomb, telling Szilard: "General Groves tells me there is no uranium in Russia."
Szilard was appalled, since he knew uranium is a surprisingly common element -- it was just a question of the quality of the ores and the amount of effort needed to get fissionable material out of it, availability not being an issue at all. Szilard was particularly shocked at Byrnes' belief that the atomic bomb could be used to intimidate the Soviets, realizing very correctly that the end result of such an exercise would be to push the Soviets to develop their own atomic bomb at all costs. Szilard and his companions left empty-handed.
* On 30 April, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. On 8 May, the Germans surrendered: the war in Europe was over. Late that April, Boris Pash's ALSOS group had discovered a German heavy-water atomic pile at Haigerloch, in the Black Forest region of southwestern Germany, and also rounded up the German nuclear scientists, including Werner Heisenberg. The German researchers had not been able to produce a sustained chain reaction, but they had been working their way up and didn't think they were too far away.
In other words, they weren't even up to the level the American Met Lab program had reached in late 1942. Pash was relieved to finally make sure that the Germans didn't have a working atomic bomb program. In fact, when the Los Alamos crew found out the specifics, they were astounded that the Germans had accomplished so little. Pash was also relieved to get his hands on the researchers before the Soviets did. The British locked up the researchers in a country manor in the UK, where there they concocted among themselves a tale that they had deliberately "dragged their feet" to prevent the Nazi leadership from getting the atomic bomb. Unknown to the prisoners, the house was wired with listening devices and the fiction didn't fly. Later on Hans Bethe would sarcastically say of Heisenberg: "Dragged his feet? He didn't have feet to drag!"
TO BE CONTINUED
* THE EVOLUTION OF ALTRUISM: While Kimura was working towards his neutral theory, in 1964 a British graduate student named William D. Hamilton (1936:2000) published a significant paper titled "The Genetical Evolution Of Social Behavior" that advanced the work of Ronald Fisher, Hamilton's hero, to explain the origins of altruism.
The concept of self-sacrifice had never made much sense in traditional Darwinism, but it was perfectly evident in the conduct of both humans and animals. The stinger a bee is generally torn out when used against an enemy of the hive, sacrificing its life for the protection of the hive. Anyone who wanders past a prairie-dog town will hear sharp "barks" (actually they sound like chirps) as individual prairie dogs stand up and give warning of an intruder to the other members of the community -- even though the barks draw unwanted attention from potential predators.
A general idea arose that altruism was a product of "group selection". Consider, say, sets of prairie dog colonies in competition with each other. Suppose, at some time in the past, prairie dogs didn't bark to alert each other of the approach of predators. If the members of one colony acquired an inclination to give warning to other members of the group, the colony would obtain a selective advantage that would allow it to grow faster than competing colonies, even if it meant sacrificing a few individuals among the colony. That colony would then become dominant over others.
The problem with the idea of group selection was that, while it sounded very plausible in a "big picture" sort of way, it didn't make sense in terms of the mechanisms of natural selection as they were understood. Individual prairie dogs are not merely in competition with predators and rival species; they are in competition with other individual prairie dogs. In fact, the other prairie dogs are the closest rival competitors, inhabiting the same environment, eating the same foods, and after the same mates. In Darwinian terms, it would seem that a prairie dog should have no reason to encourage the advancement of its fellows at any expense to itself.
If prairie dogs with a genetic inclination to give warning were more vulnerable to predators, even if only slightly, then over time natural selection would gradually eliminate them, leaving behind prairie dogs with no genetic inclination to give warning. Why, then, did altruism persist? If nice guys finish last in the Darwinian race, they should have been weeded out. How could literally mindless natural selection accommodate a concept such as altruism that seemed to involve the ability to see a "big picture"?
Darwin was aware of this difficulty and had speculated on the issue, but he had never been able to accommodate it in his theory in a very clean way. There was a frustrating gap between the notion of group selection, which seemed so obvious on the surface, and the detailed machinery of how things were supposed to work. Hamilton's solution was to propose that natural selection was not between organisms, but between genes.
The notion that evolution is only really about genes sounds silly, along the lines of the notion of "a hen is an egg's way of making another egg." Hamilton himself worried that maybe he was a crank. However, as he pointed out, if natural selection is all about the competition between sets of genes to propagate, then altruism is perfectly logical: the sacrifice of a few organisms to protect others carrying the same genes would ensure the propagation of genes that programmed an inclination towards altruism.
Suppose that prairie dogs could reproduce asexually, and an individual prairie dog colony consisted of females who gave birth to females who were perfect clones. In that case, then the sacrifice of a few individuals would aid the propagation of the rest of the colony with exactly the same genetic inclination towards altruism. Of course this is a far-fetched scenario, asexual reproduction never having been reliably observed in mammals, but it can be easily adjusted to reality by realizing the obvious fact that organisms share part of their genomes with kin.
Identical twins are clones and share their entire variable genetic complement; other siblings, on the average, share half; half-siblings, a quarter; cousins, an eighth; and so on. Notice the important use of the term "variable complement": the majority of genes are identical among members of a species -- in fact, there is a more or less common subset of genes among all living creatures -- but in terms of intraspecies competition it's only the genes that are variable among the members of the species, the alelles of "polymorphic" genes, that are important.
Hamilton put together a model to show how this worked: "In the world of our model organisms, we expect to find that no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for a single person but everyone will sacrifice it when he can thereby save more than two brothers, or four half brothers, or eight first cousins." In all three cases that Hamilton cited, the odds were that the sacrifice would propagate the particular set of genes. Similar concepts were put forward in much more detail by an American evolutionist, George C. Williams (born 1926), in his 1966 book ADAPTATION & NATURAL SELECTION. A contemporary British evolutionary biologist, John Maynard Smith (1920:2004), came up with the concept of "kin selection" as a less preposterous-sounding alternative to gene selection.
* DAWKINS' SELFISH GENE: Not everyone was enthusiastic about the notion that natural selection operated at the level of the gene, and in fact Ernst Mayr would denounce the idea to the end of his considerable number of days. Part of the reason for the lack of general acceptance was that neither Hamilton nor Williams were particularly sparkling in their ability to communicate their ideas. However, the concept of gene selection acquired a disciple, a Kenya-born Britons named Richard Dawkins (born 1941), who had studied under well-known animal behaviorist and Nobelist Niko Tinbergen (1907:1988) at Oxford. Dawkins, an excellent writer, absorbed Williams' ADAPTATION & NATURAL SELECTION and made it accessible to a popular audience through his 1976 book THE SELFISH GENE.
THE SELFISH GENE elaborated in detail on the notion of selection operating at the level of the gene. The title was somewhat sensationalistic, and Dawkins later admitted that it was also something of a mistake. Critics eager to find bricks to throw at Darwinism glanced at the title, ignored what Dawkins called the mere "footnote of the book itself", and concluded that Dawkins was promoting some sort of Social Darwinist concept that said selfishness was okay. The truth was, as Dawkins put it, the book devoted "more attention to altruism." He conceded that THE CO-OPERATIVE GENE would have been more appropriate, if not as catchy.
As Dawkins described it, the notion of gene selection was a logical outgrowth of neo-Darwinism. Darwinism had always seen the emergence of species as due to random changes in replicating entities, engaged in a competition for survival. But what were the actual replicating entities, or "replicators" as Dawkins put it? The obvious answer was that it was organisms that replicated. However, if replication is defined as "making a copy of oneself", then strictly speaking the organism itself doesn't replicate. If an animal loses an eye or leg, its offspring will still be born with a full set of eyes and legs. If true copies were being made, for example with some sort of sci-fi "matter replicator", they would all look the same, still missing a leg or an eye. The notion of the organism being the replicator had basically fallen to ruin along with Lamarckism.
In reproduction, what happened was that an organism created a copy of its genome, which then constructed a new organism. From this point of view, the organism was just a "survival vehicle" for the genome. Even this idea was questionable in that the evolution of a replicating entity implied a specific identifiable entity -- while a genome, at least in normal sexual reproduction, was completely scrambled through recombination from generation to generation. The actual entities were the genes that made up the genome, with each genome amounting to a "team" of genes directing the construction and operation of an organism, a survival machine. Genes did not serve the organism; the organism served the genes.
The notion sounds sci-fi, but makes more sense if the sterile drone workers and warriors of hive insects are considered. The drones don't reproduce and have no future, but they serve as survival machines to propagate the gene line of the hive as carried in the hive queen. They can be thought of as "drones", in the military sense of expendable remote units.
In the Darwinian competition, a gene was driven to make copies of itself. That was essentially its "purpose in life", and it's obvious as to why. Anticapitalists sometimes complain about the fact that businesses have the profit motive as a top priority, but that is necessarily so, since if they don't make a profit they go out of business and become extinct. Similarly, a gene must successfully keep on making copies of itself, or it dies out -- the logic is so simple that it almost sounds like circular reasoning.
Dawkins elaborated on this notion to show how the "selfish gene" led to the emergence of altruism in organisms, the survival machines built by teams of genes, for the purpose of ensuring the replication of genes. He leaned heavily on the concept of an "evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS)", devised by Maynard Smith. An ESS is a way to describe behaviors. including altruistic behavior, that ensure gene line propagation. An ESS can be thought of as a prudent business strategy that ensures a payoff for the gene line over the long run; a prairie dog's inclination to give warning is an ESS.
The objection has been raised that a prairie dog has no way of calculating the balance between its altruistic risk and the degree of relatedness of other prairie dogs being warned, but like so much else in Darwinian evolution it doesn't need to be that precise: a prairie dog is a member of an immediate family group and the colony is an extended family group, and it's not hard to see where the prairie dog's loyalties lie. Of course, under this model adoption is not an ESS, since it involves an organisms investing effort in offspring that don't share their genes, and amounts to a "misfiring" of the evolutionary altruistic instinct -- but adoption's so infrequent in the animal world that it doesn't have a real impact on selection.
Dawkins elaborated on the theme of the ESS in detail in THE SELFISH GENE, showing how such strategies arose in sexual competition, child-bearing, social structures, parasitism, symbiosis, and so on. The variations could become thoroughly baroque and sometimes hard to thread out. Even on close examination, the notion of gene selection seemed a bit strange, but as Dawkins showed, it was only gene selection that made it possible to make sense of things like altruism in the framework of Darwinian evolution.
* Criticisms were raised against the "selfish gene" concept in that individual genes can't really accomplish much on their own. The observable features of organisms typically are produced by the interactive effects of a set of genes, and it's such expressed features that determine how well the organism stacks up in Darwinian competition. Dawkins found such criticisms annoying because he recognized this issue from the start, insisting that it was the "teams" of genes making up the genome that determined Darwinian success -- but the scrambling of the genome during sexual reproduction meant that the "team" couldn't be thought of as a fundamental unit. Gene selection was all about teamwork, with "star player" genes advancing their propagation by contributing to the success of the various "teams" they would be assigned to in the course of sexual recombination through generations. The "loser" genes would on the other side of the same coin gradually fade out of the gene pool.
There is an interesting example of genes being bad "team players" that actually ends up demonstrating the rule. In chromosomal crossing-over, the genes on paired chromosomes are mixed in the process of producing a haploid chromosome for a gamete. This ensures that the odds of one or another allele of the same gene being used in the gamete are about 50:50. In other words, crossing-over ensures "fairness" in gene propagation. However, if Darwinian evolution is at the gene level, then a particular gene would seem to obtain an advantage by acquiring means to "cheat" and encourage its own propagation at the expense of its alelle.
In fact, sometimes genes do cheat, stumbling onto mechanisms that encourage their propagation at the expensive of an alelle. The phenomenon, known as "meiotic drive", was first observed in some Drosophila fruitflies in the 1950s. But since the "selfish gene" theory says genes have a built-in predisposition to promote their own propagation, then why isn't it the norm? If the gene cheats, it will propagate rapidly through a population and it would seem likely to take over completely.
The catch is that, by eliminating its alelle, the cheating gene has undermined genetic diversity in the population of hosts, in effect forcing inbreeding, which is by the odds not likely to be healthy for the hosts. In other words, a gene that is likely to cheat does not have an ESS, since it tends to drive its hosts to extinction and itself along with it. As is characteristic of Darwinian evolution, meiotic drive continues to arise, over and over again, as mutations give specific genes the ability to cheat -- but the cheaters will be always be trimmed back, sooner or later, by the Grim Reaper and will never get the upper hand. Chromosomal crossing-over is not a product of some ideal of "fairness", it exists because the "team" in which one of the "players" becomes a prima donna is the losing "team" and selection pressures force it out of business. As Dawkins put it: nice guys finish first.
Incidentally, genes that promote their own propagation at the expense of their alelles were traditionally known as "selfish genes", with other genes being implicitly "unselfish". Dawkins' use of the term "selfish gene" in a more general sense was a break with tradition, and there was some annoyance with his expanded interpretation of the concept.
TO BE CONTINUED
* Website additions for the month include:
Updated documents include:
New reviews include:
This last month's online blog entries include items on: train bridge & tunnel infrastructure, Florida road trip, Danone bacterial biotech for yogurt, FBI DCSNet wiretap system, danger moose, geoweb technology, USA red tape, Chinese clone manufacture, improved oil platforms, warning schemes for nuclear depositories, wind-based power networking, India's railroads, Chinese military buildup, and Alex the genius African grey parrot.
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