Jay Manifold

As the old U of C cheer goes: “We are great and we are grand; we make bombs beneath our stands!” Well, not exactly, of course, but I cannot imagine that this event will ever be surpassed at Chicago.
In last year’s anniversary post over on Arcturus I concentrated on the prospects for nuclear power, and some of the risk-management issues associated with it. There are other points of departure … far too many for one post: it was the beginning of Big Science, the beginning of the Atomic Age, the beginning of the first true weapon of mass destruction, the beginning of the end of Imperial Japan, and the beginning of the first real check on Soviet power. Were it not for Project Apollo, it would have been remembered as the greatest milestone of science and technology in the 20th century.
And in spite of Apollo, what happened in Chicago that day has led to a thus-far-inextricable association of military rockets with WMDs. We can project indiscriminate military force to any point on Earth’s surface in three-quarters of an hour. We have had this capability since before I was born, and I am well into middle age. Any use of an intercontinental missile necessarily means mass death; the development of even intermediate-range missiles by authoritarian regimes is among the greatest existing threats to civilization.
Conversely, conventional military capabilities take much longer to act on their targets. Whereas nuclear missiles can be dispatched at a moment’s notice, travel at speeds of the order of 10 km/sec, reach targets anywhere in the world in less than an hour, and involve energetic events of tens of kilotons or greater — non-nuclear weapons, by contrast, may require days to months to prepare for use, are delivered at (low) hundreds of meters per second over many hours (more than a day, in the case of B-2s flying out of Whiteman AFB to Kosovo), cannot reach some areas at all, and pack a punch of, at most, a few metric tons TNT equivalent.
The graph below is a crude representation of this duality (quadrality?). In quadrant I are the WMDs, characterized by energies of up to 10²² ergs or thereabouts, and deliverable in timeframes as short as 10³ seconds. In quadrant IV are the much less destructive devices, down to less than 1 kg TNT equivalent, deliverable only over much longer periods, up to months.

At present, quadrant II weapons do not exist. But what if it were otherwise, that is, if we could deliver non-nuclear weapons (and other military assets) onto targets with the ease and at the speed of weapons in quadrant I? What if rockets could somehow be used to apply discriminate force, to conduct the kind of precise, nonlinear operations that are the centerpiece of US military strikes?
This is not a remotely original idea. Here is a diagram from Bono & Gatland’s Frontiers of Space:

This vehicle, proposed over 30 years ago, was intended to deliver two battalions of soldiers halfway around the planet in less than an hour. A smaller version was to carry 200 troops. Other configurations were to carry heavy weaponry and materiel. But the best present-day application might be something that could deploy a squadron of these.
Just as I was drafting this post, Mike Daley earned “regular contributor” status on Arcturus by sending along Speed Kills, Military Wants More, in which we read that

Speed is becoming an increasingly crucial component of how American forces fight. In the Gulf War, it took days for the U.S. military to identify a target and put a bomb on it. In recent engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, that process was cut to as little as 20 minutes, in some cases.
But this quick response only happens when there are bombers and cruise missiles in the immediate neighborhood. If U.S. forces receive a tip that terrorists are in a part of the world where they don’t have American planes in the sky, it can take hours, or days, to act on that information.
With its proposed speed and range, the Falcon project — co-sponsored by the Air Force and Darpa, the Pentagon’s research arm — aims to make just about the whole world a dangerous place to be a bad guy.

(You can read more about Falcon here, and thumbnails of graphics are here. Perhaps the ultimate example of this sort of thing was, of course, Project Thor. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I wrote the rest of this post before reading the Wired News article.)
In general, quadrant II weapons would greatly ease the constraints of time and expense imposed by the need to have bases located within a few hundred kilometers of the target area. With an array of such vehicles in place, we need no longer spend precious days and weeks in negotiation with jittery allies, or spend billions laboriously staging the relevant weaponry just over the border from an obnoxious regime’s territory. One more reason to keep an eye on the X Prize.

What about quadrant III — slow WMDs? As originally conceived, nuclear weapons fell into this category. Obviously, they don’t now — for us. But terrorist WMDs might fit Einstein and Szilard’s description all too well: “A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.”

Evan Kirchhoff has a brilliant post that uses the example of the supermarket and its newer “discount store” competitors to show how productivity increases, and everyone becomes better off, while jobs are outsourced and eliminated. The union-shop mentality that seeks to preserve low-productivity jobs helps no one in the long run.

(Via the latest Carnival of the Capitalists)

[This post: ~1,000 words; reading time
Its links: approximate total 17,000 words; exhaustive reading time ~ 1 hour.]

This is inspired by Lexington Green’s More Than the Rest Put Together and Language matters. Borders matter. (Which reminds me — just to get it out of the way: go read this, and follow the links. Meanwhile, back on Earth …)
In part III of my review of The Substance of Style, I suggested that the secret of Anglospheric wealth, including the “aesthetic plenitude” that is the focus of much of Virginia’s book, may be due to a preference for process over principle, resulting in an open economic system rather than a closed one.
In support of this, I quoted from this book, which I received a while back as a member of the Classics of Liberty Library; a sort of bookmark-like card that came with it says:

One approach to the subject of liberty is to study and compare, across time and place, the legal systems that have governed the world’s civilizations. An investigation of the development of political and judicial systems reveals the tensions between the prerogatives of government and the human desire for individual freedom.
In the second half of the twentieth century, René David, honorary professor of law and political science at the Law School of the University of Aix-Marseilles provided, in Major Legal Systems in the World Today: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Law, a respected and succinct work to begin such a [sic] examination. The book first appeared, in French, in 1964, and saw eight editions in its first quarter century. John E.C. Brierley of the Faculty of Law, McGill University, Montreal, undertook to translate the book, and it was published in English in 1966. Our facsimile is based on the third English edition, to which Professor Brierley added a considerable amount of material.

The book is a work of some note; it is found, for example, on this list (and on this one as well). Among its most striking passages is the one I quoted in my (incredibly long and unwieldy) TSOS review, from pp 360-361:

The laws of the Romano-Germanic family are coherent but, one may say, “closed” systems in which any kind of question can, and must at least in theory, be resolved by an “interpretation” of an existing rule of law. On the other hand English law is an “open” system: it has a method that can assure the resolution of any kind of question that may arise, not substantive principles which must, in all circumstances, be applied. The technique of English law is not one of interpreting legal rules; it consists, beginning with those legal rules already enunciated, of discovering the legal rule — perhaps a new legal rule — that must be applied in the instant case. This is accomplished by paying very great attention to the facts of each case and by carefully studying the reasons that may exist for distinguishing the factual situation in the case at hand from that in a previous case. To a new fact situation there corresponds — there must correspond in the English legal mentality — a new legal rule.

I then commented:

The freedom and openness — and wealth — of the Anglosphere may well rest on its ability to develop open processes for creation and discovery, as opposed to closed definitions of a tidier but fundamentally static world. And besides — to quote an ancient principle of nonintervention — the Anglosphere has learned not to gather the weeds, lest it uproot the wheat.

Lex’s recounting of the relative wealth of English and non-English speakers reinforced my impression that the world is dividing into two camps, Anglosphere and non-Anglosphere. Or perhaps into several camps, but when one is worth more than all the others combined, a more or less bipolar world may be inevitable. And what divides them ultimately may not be ethnicity or language or religion, but realism — a willingness to work with the world and human nature as it is, rather than construct elegant theories and then shoehorn (or bludgeon) societies into an unchanging mold.
To be sure, the distinction is largely a contrast between British and French attitudes. As this Gertrude Himmelfarb essay notes, quoting Alexis de Tocqueville:

In England writers on the theory of government and those who actually governed cooperated with each other, the former setting forth their new theories, the latter amending or circumscribing these in the light of practical experience. In France, however, precept and practice were kept quite distinct and remained in the hands of two quite independent groups. One of these carried on the actual administration while the other set forth the abstract principles on which good government should, they said, be based; one took the routine measures appropriate to the needs of the moment, the other propounded general laws without a thought for their practical application; one group shaped the course of public affairs, the other that of public opinion.

I contend that America became the richest nation on Earth by being the most realistic nation on Earth; as Ralph Peters has written: “Theoretical constructs did fantastic damage to Europe in the twentieth century, and much of the rest of the world lives in a fantasy land. They do not have our ingrained, hard-learned ability to separate fact from fiction.”
And praxis wins big: graze over here, for example, and select “Top 10” under “3. Limit Search”; result: 7 out of the top 10 countries are Anglospheric. On this list, by my count, 16 of the 41 highest-rated countries — nearly two of every five — are Anglospheric. And on this list, 5 of the top 15 (by PPP) are Anglosphere nations. Considering that only about 1/16 of the world’s population speaks English as their first language, ceterus paribus, these are wildly skewed results. But ceterus ain’t paribus. The disparity can only grow; and the resentment of non-achievers wedded to their theoretical constructs can only grow with it. Is this (from an American perspective) the Crisis of 2020 in the making?

As noted on my original blog, I drove up into Wisconsin the day after the Chicago Boyz blog bash and took pictures of, among other things, Yerkes Observatory. Here’s one:

The dome in the picture is one of the smaller ones, in this case the one at the northeast extremity of the main building. Notice the gargoyle — actually a griffin in this case, I believe; the gargoyles, and decorative stonework in general, at Yerkes are even more elaborate than the stuff on the gothic buildings in Hyde Park.
I took (and decided to post) this picture partly because the dome contains the 24″ reflector that I got to look through a few times, circa 1978, as a member of the undergrad astronomy club, but mostly because that rusty old van may be the very one that the club took to this solar eclipse in Feb 79. Expect to hear a few stories about that little expedition — probably around the time of its 25th anniversary, three months from now.

As noted below, I am joining the team and tripling my blogging income thereby. Lest my reputation be unduly exposed to the influence of uninformed opinion, here are the facts:

1. I attended the University of Chicago from September 1977 to June 1979, majoring in physics.


2. As a space blogger, contra the assumption made by Lex (Luthor?) in the comments on the post linked above, my territorial ambitions need not be confined to the Solar System. For the nonce, however, I would be satisfied with direct control over several thousand asteroids, plus the atmosphere of the seventh planet (which you may learn how to pronounce properly by reading this post) as a source of ³He.


3. In my day-to-day guise as a mild-mannered project manager for a telecommunications firm, I reside with She Who Must Be Obeyed, two dogs, and an illegal number of cats in a secure, nearly-disclosed location approximately 410 miles from the University campus, bearing 244° (GCD calculator here).

Writing for Chicago Boyz will allow me some differentiation — Arcturus will focus a bit more on hard science and technology, and I’ll shift some of my economic/behavioral/political stuff over here. On the other hand, I figure Enrico Fermi’s picture isn’t up there for nothing, so you’ll get a science post now and then.