BLUF (bottle line up front)
• political problem of secrecy
• because it is a secret, you can not talk about it
• B-1 bomber program was canceled because of the breakthroughs on stealth technology.
• there was no missile gap in the 1960 election campaign.
____________________________________
____________________________________
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos., Skunk works: a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed, 1994
p.314
Zbigniew Brzezinski
(national security adviser to president carter)
When our administration canceled the B-1 bomber program, we knew we would be attacked by political opponents who were unaware of tremendously promising breakthroughs there on stealth technology.
Both developments rendered nearly obsolete everything about the B-1, and we in the administration saw that they represented the way of the future, that they were viable, and given what we knew about the state of play in stealth projects and the record of performance by the Skunk works, that they were really going to perform as advertised.
But because of national security [secrecy], we were unable to reveal to the public the existence of stealth and exploit the strategic facts about it that influenced the decision we made to cancel the B-1.
Planning had already begun on a whole new series of stealth bombers and fighters that would revolutionize aerial warfare. So we bit the bullet and just took the heat.
This was similar to a political problem faced twenty years earlier by President Eisenhower, who was unable to reveal the U-2 over flights of Russia to answer the charge of a so-called missile gap made against him in the 1960 election campaign.
(Skunk works: a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed / Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos., 1. lockheed advanced development company ─ history., 2. rich, ben r. ─ career in aeronautics., 3. aeronautics ─ research ─ united states ─ history.,
TL.565.R53 1994, 338.7'623746'0973, 338.7623 rich, 1994, )
____________________________________
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos., Skunk works: a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed, 1994
What makes this stealth airplane so revolutionary is that it will deflect radar beams like a bulletproof shield, and the missile battery will never electronically “see” it coming.
p.18
we had learned over the years how to make an airplane less observable to enemy radar; the conventional Pentagon view was that the effectiveness of enemy radar had leaped far ahead of our ability to thwart it.
p.33
He told me later that he was surprised to learn that with flat surfaces the amount of radar energy returning to the sender is independent of the target's size.
A small airplane, a bomber, an aircraft carrier, all with the same shape, will have identical radar cross sections. “By God, I never would have believed that”, he confessed. I had the feeling that maybe he still didn't.
([ according to the Law of Gravity, in a vacuum, or, a near vacuum environment like outer space on the moon, where there is no air and, no atmosphere, when two objects that are the same in mass, like a pound (lbs.) of iron balls and a pound (lbs.) of feathers, are released, they will fall at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time, barring any intervention or any other external factors that we do not know about; this is an ideal controlled experiment; ...; of course, on earth, everyone knows that an iron ball is heavier than feather])
(Skunk works: a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed / Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos., 1. lockheed advanced development company ─ history., 2. rich, ben r. ─ career in aeronautics., 3. aeronautics ─ research ─ united states ─ history.,
TL.565.R53 1994, 338.7'623746'0973, 338.7623 rich, 1994, )
____________________________________
Sharon Weinberger, The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the pentagon agency that changed the world, 2017
p.255
The air force, based on the success of the DARPA program, had started work on an operational aircraft under the code name Senior Trend, the F-117. Ironically, though the F designation would normally mean it was a fighter, it was really a ground-attack aircraft. The reason for the subterfuge, according to Lockheed's Brown, was that designating it a fighter would make it easier to recruit pilots; the prestige job in the air force was being a fighter pilot. “No self-respecting fighter pilot is going to fly an attack aircraft or God forbid a bomber”, Brown said.
p.255
After it had proven possible to build an aircraft that could evade radar, stealth was eventually incorporated into a variety of aircraft and weapons, from bombers to helicopters, including the modified Black Hawks that were used to raid Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.
p.255
One of the few people to express disappointment with the stealth aircraft was Myers, the Pentagon official whose invisible rabbit inspired the original DARPA program. Even four decades later, he felt betrayed that the small, affordable fighter he wanted ── with a reduced signature, but not invisible to radar ── was never built. “I'm still convinced that Harvey is a good idea”, he said year later. “We should try it sometime”. ([ stealth is not invisible to RADAR; stealth techniques offer reduced RADAR signature as to be nearly undetectable; the technical breakthrough has been tested; data are there; stealth is not fool proof; satellite can photograph a stealth object uncovered in broad daylight; a stealth object is not invisible; ... . ])
(The imagineers of war : the untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger., New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, united states. defense advanced research projects agency──history. | military research──united states. | military art and science──technological innovations──united states. | science and state──united states. | national security──united states──history. | united states──defenses──history., U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | U394.A75 (ebook) | 355/.040973, 2017, )
____________________________________
Anne M. Jacobsen, The pentagon's brain : an uncensored history of DARPA, America's top secret military research agency, 2015
p.49
The Soviet Union was preparing for total nuclear war.
It would take years to learn that the number York and Wiesner submitted to the Gaither Report was nothing more than a wild guess. In the summer of 1957 the Soviets had a total of four ICBMs built, in the “next few years” they would build roughly one hundred more. This was a far cry from the thousands of missiles York and Wiesner said the Soviets would be producing in the next few years.
p.49
“The estimate was quite wrong”, York conceded 30 years later. In defense of his error, York said, “The problem was simple enough. I knew only a little about the Soviet missile development program and nothing about the Soviet industry. In making his estimate, I was thus combing two dubious analytical procedures: worst-case analysis and mirror imaging.”
pp.49-50
Eisenhower disagreed with the finding of the report. He had much better intelligence, from the CIA, but it was highly classified and no one but a small group of individuals knew about it. CIA pilot Hervey Stockman had flown a classified mission over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy plane the year before, Stockman returned from his dangerous mission with thousands of photographs of Soviet Russia, the first ever (this was before the Corona satellite program), showing that the Russians were not preparing for total war. There was only one person on the Gaither panel who had the knowledge of this information, and that was CIA deputy director Richard Bissell.
Anne M. Jacobsen, The pentagon's brain : an uncensored history of DARPA, America's top secret military research agency, 2015
____________________________________
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966
Tragedy and Hope
p.1106 (pdf 1119)
The dominant fact in the whole situation was the overwhelming character of America's power and the fact that this was known both to the White House and to the Kremlin, but was largely unknown, and certainly unpublicized, to the world. Around the Soviet Union's border were 144 Polaris, 103 Atlas, 159 Thor, Jupiter, and Titan missiles;
p.1089 (pdf 1102)
This change, which took place over the period 1956-1962, is of major significance, since it meant that the Soviet Union and the United States became capable of striking directly at each other and did not have to involve third Powers in their disputes immediately. From the weapons point of view, it represented, on the American side, three changes:
(1) the shift in manned bombing planes from the long-range B-47's to the intercontinental-range B-52's and B-58's;
(2) the shift in missiles from the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM's), such as Thor or Jupiter, which had to be based in Turkey, Italy, or Britain in order to reach the Soviet Union, to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM's), such as the Minuteman or Atlas, which could hit the Soviet Union from launching sites in the United States; and
(3) the advent, about 1960, of the nuclear-propelled Polaris submarines, whose 16 nuclear-armed missiles could strikes the Soviet Union from submerged positions in the seas bordering the Eurasian land mass.
p.1089 (pdf 1102)
(2) the shift in missiles from the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM's), such as Thor or Jupiter, which had to be based in Turkey, Italy, or Britain in order to reach the Soviet Union, to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM's), such as the Minuteman or Atlas, which could hit the Soviet Union from launching sites in the United States;
p.149
land-based missile force ── the ICBMs stored in silos in Nebraska, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas [Jeffrey T. Richelson., The wizards of Langley : inside the CIA's directorate of science and technology, 2001, p.149]
pp.1089-1090 (pdf 1102-1103)
The key to the missile race rested on the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union took opposite routes in their efforts to obtain nuclear-armed rockets. One basic problem was how to combine the American A-bomb of 1945 with the German V-2 rocket. Since the A-bomb was an egg-shaped object 5 feet wide and 10 feet long, which weighed 9,000 pounds, and the V-2 could carry a warhead of only 1,700 pound 200 miles, the problem was not easy. The Soviet government sought to close the gap between rocket power and nuclear payload by working toward a more powerful rocket, while the American scientists, over the opposition of the Air Force and the aviation industry, sought to close the gap by getting smaller bombs. The result of the race was that the Soviet Union in 1957-1962 had very large boosters which gave it a lead in the race to propel objects into space or into ballistic orbits around the earth, but these were very expensive, could not be made in large numbers, and were very awkward to install or to move. The United States, on the other hand, soon found it had bombs in all sizes down to small ones capable of being used as tactical weapons by troops in ground combat and able to be moved about on jeeps.
“”
p.1090 (pdf 1103)
This so-called “missile gap” was a mistaken idea, for the vast expansion of American production of nuclear materials begun in 1950, combined with the simultaneous reduction in the sizes of nuclear warheads, by 1959 was bringing the United States into a condition of “nuclear plenty” and of “overkill capacity” that posed a grim problem for the Soviet Union. It was, strangely enough, just at that time (end of 1957) that two American studies (the Gaither Report and the Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) suggested the existence of a missle gap or inferiority in missile capacity of the United States compared to the Soviet Union. This judgment, apparently based on over emphasis on the size of the Soviet rocket boosters, played a chief role in the American presidential campaign of 1960 and in the ebullient self-confidence of Khrushehev and his associates in 1957-1961.
p.1091 (pdf 1104)
Just at the time (summer 1962) that the Soviet Union was deciding to remedy its weakness in ICBM's by trying to install IRBM's in a third Power close to the United States, the latter [US] was deciding that its supply of ICBM's was increasing to rapidly that it would close down its IRBM bases in third countries close to the Soviet Union (such as Turkey). This American decision was already beginning to be carried out when the Cuban missle crisis broke in October 1962.
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966
Tragedy and Hope
____________________________________
noise in models
Some systems thinkers would be hesitant to call the error from such a
defective model "noise," for the assumption is often implicitly made that
noise is a small residue of unaccountable behavior. This definition, however,
is based on observation of the external world, not on general principles.
Naturally we find that MOST systems the noise is a relatively small
part of the regulatory models, because those systems with highly defective
models do not last very long and are not likely to be seen. But when
we build a new system, we cannot assume that it will automatically have
accurate models just because other, older, systems do.
As we know, the strategy for overcoming noise is to expend energy.
When complimented on the precision of the guidance systems in American
rockets, one of the old German rocket scientists pointed out that the
American systems had to be precise, since they had no energy to spare.
The Russians, on the other hand, had much bigger rockets. If they made
a mistake in nagivation they had a lots of thrust remaining to correct it. Of
course, without the press of international politics, systems that take more
energy to do the same job of regulation are at a disadvantage in the
competition for survival.
Still, there may be situation in which the best available strategy is
simply to overpower the noise, rather than to try to account for it.
...
If we are trying to catch a fish whose maximum strength is thought to be 50
pounds, we can be sure it won't break the line if we use a 100-pound filament.
Such overpowering, of course, is not "sporting," which is why anglers
try to take the maximum fish on the minimum line. They are not, contrary
to some belief, trying to save money on equipment. If that were the case
they would buy their fish. The fish in the market are caught by people
whose living depends on NOT giving the fish a sporting chance.
In some situations, the method of overpowering noise may not be so
simple. For example, consider the problem of adjusting the flame on a
gas stove that has a sticky valve. We try to raise the flame, but the valve
will not move until we apply so much pressure that it abruptly slips past
the intended point. Trying to move it back, we have the same trouble, for
we cannot predict the friction with sufficient precision. What we can do,
however, is to use one hand to push against the direction we are trying
to turn the valve. If we push hard enough, the frictional resistance becomes
a relatively small part of the force we must overcome to position
the knob. By working "against" our own goal, we make precise adjustment
possible in the face of an unknown, but small, amount of stickiness.
This strategy, by which the system overcomes noise through supplying
opposing actions, is essentially what is involved in the "factors having an
opposing effect" in Cannon's Polarity Principle. If a system relies on an
uncertain environment to supply the opposing factor to one of its regulatory
mechanisms, that mechanism must have a much more refined model.
By supplying its own opposing factor, it can get away with a much simpler
model of the environment.
pp. 261-262
General Principles of Systems Design
Gerald M. Weinberg
Daniela Weinberg
formerly titled On the Design of Stable Systems
May 1979
____________________________________
Soviet American technology rival
(1) what the real situation was and
(2) what prevalent public opinion believed the situation to be.
For example, in 1954-1955 the Soviet Union had a thermonuclear so called H-bomb many months before we did, when public opinion believed the opposite; again, in late 1960 there was a wide spread belief through out the world in a so called "missile gap," or American inferiority in nuclear missile weapons, when no such inferiority existed; and finally, for a period of several years, from 1967 to about 1960, the Russians were in advance of the United States and the free world generally in missile technology and in missile guidance mechanisms, although this was not reflected, then or later, in any superiority in nuclear missile weapons, because of their simultaneous inferiority in nuclear warheads for missiles, an inferiority by a wide margin both in numbers and in variety of such explosive weapons.
(Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley)
____________________________________
Jeffrey T. Richelson., The wizards of Langley : inside the CIA's directorate of science and technology, 2001
p.51
The data produced by the PALLADIUM operations, which continued for several years afterward, enabled analysts at OSI [office of scientific intelligence] and elsewhere to identify which Soviet radars had low power or maintenance problems, which performed below expectations, and where U.S. aircraft might safetly penetrate the Soviet border in wartime. OSI analysts also concluded, undoubtedly to the disappointment of the OXCART program office, that Soviet radars could detect and track an OXCART as soon as it came over the horizon.46
p.216
William “Al” Nance
He examined possible sites in China, their field of view, how far the horizon extended, and what part of a missile test could be monitored. Of particular interest were possible sites in Xinjiang province [Xinjiang Ulghur Autonomous Region in western China, James Bamford (The puzzle palace), 1982, p.201] where intercept antennae could eavesdrop through the gaps in the mountains.
pp.217-218
by the fall of 1981, if not before, the two stations at Qitai and Korla in Xinjiang province were in operation. To teach the Chinese technicians how to operate the equipment and change the rolls of magnetic tape that recorded the intercepted signals, the CIA set up a school in Beijing.109
The stations, which were code-named CHESTNUT, could monitor military communications from central Asia to the Far East, air traffic, radar signals from Soviet air defenses, KGB communications, and the alert status of Soviet nuclear forces. Of particular interest to the CIA was CHESTNUT's ability to monitor telemetry from the beginning of missile tests and space shots from Tyuratam, and to follow missiles through their flight over Siberia and the dispersion of warheads. Also in view of the eavesdropping equipment was the Sary Shagan ABM test site.110
(The wizards of Langley : inside the CIA's directorate of science and technology / Jeffrey T. Richelson., 1. united states. central intelligence agency. directorate of science and technology ── history., UB251.U5 R53 2001, )
____________________________________
• political problem of secrecy
• because it is a secret, you can not talk about it
• B-1 bomber program was canceled because of the breakthroughs on stealth technology.
• there was no missile gap in the 1960 election campaign.
____________________________________
____________________________________
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos., Skunk works: a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed, 1994
p.314
Zbigniew Brzezinski
(national security adviser to president carter)
When our administration canceled the B-1 bomber program, we knew we would be attacked by political opponents who were unaware of tremendously promising breakthroughs there on stealth technology.
Both developments rendered nearly obsolete everything about the B-1, and we in the administration saw that they represented the way of the future, that they were viable, and given what we knew about the state of play in stealth projects and the record of performance by the Skunk works, that they were really going to perform as advertised.
But because of national security [secrecy], we were unable to reveal to the public the existence of stealth and exploit the strategic facts about it that influenced the decision we made to cancel the B-1.
Planning had already begun on a whole new series of stealth bombers and fighters that would revolutionize aerial warfare. So we bit the bullet and just took the heat.
This was similar to a political problem faced twenty years earlier by President Eisenhower, who was unable to reveal the U-2 over flights of Russia to answer the charge of a so-called missile gap made against him in the 1960 election campaign.
(Skunk works: a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed / Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos., 1. lockheed advanced development company ─ history., 2. rich, ben r. ─ career in aeronautics., 3. aeronautics ─ research ─ united states ─ history.,
TL.565.R53 1994, 338.7'623746'0973, 338.7623 rich, 1994, )
____________________________________
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos., Skunk works: a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed, 1994
What makes this stealth airplane so revolutionary is that it will deflect radar beams like a bulletproof shield, and the missile battery will never electronically “see” it coming.
p.18
we had learned over the years how to make an airplane less observable to enemy radar; the conventional Pentagon view was that the effectiveness of enemy radar had leaped far ahead of our ability to thwart it.
p.33
He told me later that he was surprised to learn that with flat surfaces the amount of radar energy returning to the sender is independent of the target's size.
A small airplane, a bomber, an aircraft carrier, all with the same shape, will have identical radar cross sections. “By God, I never would have believed that”, he confessed. I had the feeling that maybe he still didn't.
([ according to the Law of Gravity, in a vacuum, or, a near vacuum environment like outer space on the moon, where there is no air and, no atmosphere, when two objects that are the same in mass, like a pound (lbs.) of iron balls and a pound (lbs.) of feathers, are released, they will fall at the same rate and hit the ground at the same time, barring any intervention or any other external factors that we do not know about; this is an ideal controlled experiment; ...; of course, on earth, everyone knows that an iron ball is heavier than feather])
(Skunk works: a personal memoir of my years at Lockheed / Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos., 1. lockheed advanced development company ─ history., 2. rich, ben r. ─ career in aeronautics., 3. aeronautics ─ research ─ united states ─ history.,
TL.565.R53 1994, 338.7'623746'0973, 338.7623 rich, 1994, )
____________________________________
Sharon Weinberger, The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the pentagon agency that changed the world, 2017
p.255
The air force, based on the success of the DARPA program, had started work on an operational aircraft under the code name Senior Trend, the F-117. Ironically, though the F designation would normally mean it was a fighter, it was really a ground-attack aircraft. The reason for the subterfuge, according to Lockheed's Brown, was that designating it a fighter would make it easier to recruit pilots; the prestige job in the air force was being a fighter pilot. “No self-respecting fighter pilot is going to fly an attack aircraft or God forbid a bomber”, Brown said.
p.255
After it had proven possible to build an aircraft that could evade radar, stealth was eventually incorporated into a variety of aircraft and weapons, from bombers to helicopters, including the modified Black Hawks that were used to raid Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.
p.255
One of the few people to express disappointment with the stealth aircraft was Myers, the Pentagon official whose invisible rabbit inspired the original DARPA program. Even four decades later, he felt betrayed that the small, affordable fighter he wanted ── with a reduced signature, but not invisible to radar ── was never built. “I'm still convinced that Harvey is a good idea”, he said year later. “We should try it sometime”. ([ stealth is not invisible to RADAR; stealth techniques offer reduced RADAR signature as to be nearly undetectable; the technical breakthrough has been tested; data are there; stealth is not fool proof; satellite can photograph a stealth object uncovered in broad daylight; a stealth object is not invisible; ... . ])
(The imagineers of war : the untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger., New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, united states. defense advanced research projects agency──history. | military research──united states. | military art and science──technological innovations──united states. | science and state──united states. | national security──united states──history. | united states──defenses──history., U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | U394.A75 (ebook) | 355/.040973, 2017, )
____________________________________
Anne M. Jacobsen, The pentagon's brain : an uncensored history of DARPA, America's top secret military research agency, 2015
p.49
The Soviet Union was preparing for total nuclear war.
It would take years to learn that the number York and Wiesner submitted to the Gaither Report was nothing more than a wild guess. In the summer of 1957 the Soviets had a total of four ICBMs built, in the “next few years” they would build roughly one hundred more. This was a far cry from the thousands of missiles York and Wiesner said the Soviets would be producing in the next few years.
p.49
“The estimate was quite wrong”, York conceded 30 years later. In defense of his error, York said, “The problem was simple enough. I knew only a little about the Soviet missile development program and nothing about the Soviet industry. In making his estimate, I was thus combing two dubious analytical procedures: worst-case analysis and mirror imaging.”
pp.49-50
Eisenhower disagreed with the finding of the report. He had much better intelligence, from the CIA, but it was highly classified and no one but a small group of individuals knew about it. CIA pilot Hervey Stockman had flown a classified mission over the Soviet Union in a U-2 spy plane the year before, Stockman returned from his dangerous mission with thousands of photographs of Soviet Russia, the first ever (this was before the Corona satellite program), showing that the Russians were not preparing for total war. There was only one person on the Gaither panel who had the knowledge of this information, and that was CIA deputy director Richard Bissell.
Anne M. Jacobsen, The pentagon's brain : an uncensored history of DARPA, America's top secret military research agency, 2015
____________________________________
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966
Tragedy and Hope
p.1106 (pdf 1119)
The dominant fact in the whole situation was the overwhelming character of America's power and the fact that this was known both to the White House and to the Kremlin, but was largely unknown, and certainly unpublicized, to the world. Around the Soviet Union's border were 144 Polaris, 103 Atlas, 159 Thor, Jupiter, and Titan missiles;
p.1089 (pdf 1102)
This change, which took place over the period 1956-1962, is of major significance, since it meant that the Soviet Union and the United States became capable of striking directly at each other and did not have to involve third Powers in their disputes immediately. From the weapons point of view, it represented, on the American side, three changes:
(1) the shift in manned bombing planes from the long-range B-47's to the intercontinental-range B-52's and B-58's;
(2) the shift in missiles from the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM's), such as Thor or Jupiter, which had to be based in Turkey, Italy, or Britain in order to reach the Soviet Union, to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM's), such as the Minuteman or Atlas, which could hit the Soviet Union from launching sites in the United States; and
(3) the advent, about 1960, of the nuclear-propelled Polaris submarines, whose 16 nuclear-armed missiles could strikes the Soviet Union from submerged positions in the seas bordering the Eurasian land mass.
p.1089 (pdf 1102)
(2) the shift in missiles from the intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM's), such as Thor or Jupiter, which had to be based in Turkey, Italy, or Britain in order to reach the Soviet Union, to intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM's), such as the Minuteman or Atlas, which could hit the Soviet Union from launching sites in the United States;
p.149
land-based missile force ── the ICBMs stored in silos in Nebraska, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas [Jeffrey T. Richelson., The wizards of Langley : inside the CIA's directorate of science and technology, 2001, p.149]
pp.1089-1090 (pdf 1102-1103)
The key to the missile race rested on the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union took opposite routes in their efforts to obtain nuclear-armed rockets. One basic problem was how to combine the American A-bomb of 1945 with the German V-2 rocket. Since the A-bomb was an egg-shaped object 5 feet wide and 10 feet long, which weighed 9,000 pounds, and the V-2 could carry a warhead of only 1,700 pound 200 miles, the problem was not easy. The Soviet government sought to close the gap between rocket power and nuclear payload by working toward a more powerful rocket, while the American scientists, over the opposition of the Air Force and the aviation industry, sought to close the gap by getting smaller bombs. The result of the race was that the Soviet Union in 1957-1962 had very large boosters which gave it a lead in the race to propel objects into space or into ballistic orbits around the earth, but these were very expensive, could not be made in large numbers, and were very awkward to install or to move. The United States, on the other hand, soon found it had bombs in all sizes down to small ones capable of being used as tactical weapons by troops in ground combat and able to be moved about on jeeps.
“”
p.1090 (pdf 1103)
This so-called “missile gap” was a mistaken idea, for the vast expansion of American production of nuclear materials begun in 1950, combined with the simultaneous reduction in the sizes of nuclear warheads, by 1959 was bringing the United States into a condition of “nuclear plenty” and of “overkill capacity” that posed a grim problem for the Soviet Union. It was, strangely enough, just at that time (end of 1957) that two American studies (the Gaither Report and the Special Studies Project of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund) suggested the existence of a missle gap or inferiority in missile capacity of the United States compared to the Soviet Union. This judgment, apparently based on over emphasis on the size of the Soviet rocket boosters, played a chief role in the American presidential campaign of 1960 and in the ebullient self-confidence of Khrushehev and his associates in 1957-1961.
p.1091 (pdf 1104)
Just at the time (summer 1962) that the Soviet Union was deciding to remedy its weakness in ICBM's by trying to install IRBM's in a third Power close to the United States, the latter [US] was deciding that its supply of ICBM's was increasing to rapidly that it would close down its IRBM bases in third countries close to the Soviet Union (such as Turkey). This American decision was already beginning to be carried out when the Cuban missle crisis broke in October 1962.
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966
Tragedy and Hope
____________________________________
noise in models
Some systems thinkers would be hesitant to call the error from such a
defective model "noise," for the assumption is often implicitly made that
noise is a small residue of unaccountable behavior. This definition, however,
is based on observation of the external world, not on general principles.
Naturally we find that MOST systems the noise is a relatively small
part of the regulatory models, because those systems with highly defective
models do not last very long and are not likely to be seen. But when
we build a new system, we cannot assume that it will automatically have
accurate models just because other, older, systems do.
As we know, the strategy for overcoming noise is to expend energy.
When complimented on the precision of the guidance systems in American
rockets, one of the old German rocket scientists pointed out that the
American systems had to be precise, since they had no energy to spare.
The Russians, on the other hand, had much bigger rockets. If they made
a mistake in nagivation they had a lots of thrust remaining to correct it. Of
course, without the press of international politics, systems that take more
energy to do the same job of regulation are at a disadvantage in the
competition for survival.
Still, there may be situation in which the best available strategy is
simply to overpower the noise, rather than to try to account for it.
...
If we are trying to catch a fish whose maximum strength is thought to be 50
pounds, we can be sure it won't break the line if we use a 100-pound filament.
Such overpowering, of course, is not "sporting," which is why anglers
try to take the maximum fish on the minimum line. They are not, contrary
to some belief, trying to save money on equipment. If that were the case
they would buy their fish. The fish in the market are caught by people
whose living depends on NOT giving the fish a sporting chance.
In some situations, the method of overpowering noise may not be so
simple. For example, consider the problem of adjusting the flame on a
gas stove that has a sticky valve. We try to raise the flame, but the valve
will not move until we apply so much pressure that it abruptly slips past
the intended point. Trying to move it back, we have the same trouble, for
we cannot predict the friction with sufficient precision. What we can do,
however, is to use one hand to push against the direction we are trying
to turn the valve. If we push hard enough, the frictional resistance becomes
a relatively small part of the force we must overcome to position
the knob. By working "against" our own goal, we make precise adjustment
possible in the face of an unknown, but small, amount of stickiness.
This strategy, by which the system overcomes noise through supplying
opposing actions, is essentially what is involved in the "factors having an
opposing effect" in Cannon's Polarity Principle. If a system relies on an
uncertain environment to supply the opposing factor to one of its regulatory
mechanisms, that mechanism must have a much more refined model.
By supplying its own opposing factor, it can get away with a much simpler
model of the environment.
pp. 261-262
General Principles of Systems Design
Gerald M. Weinberg
Daniela Weinberg
formerly titled On the Design of Stable Systems
May 1979
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Soviet American technology rival
(1) what the real situation was and
(2) what prevalent public opinion believed the situation to be.
For example, in 1954-1955 the Soviet Union had a thermonuclear so called H-bomb many months before we did, when public opinion believed the opposite; again, in late 1960 there was a wide spread belief through out the world in a so called "missile gap," or American inferiority in nuclear missile weapons, when no such inferiority existed; and finally, for a period of several years, from 1967 to about 1960, the Russians were in advance of the United States and the free world generally in missile technology and in missile guidance mechanisms, although this was not reflected, then or later, in any superiority in nuclear missile weapons, because of their simultaneous inferiority in nuclear warheads for missiles, an inferiority by a wide margin both in numbers and in variety of such explosive weapons.
(Tragedy and Hope, by Carroll Quigley)
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Jeffrey T. Richelson., The wizards of Langley : inside the CIA's directorate of science and technology, 2001
p.51
The data produced by the PALLADIUM operations, which continued for several years afterward, enabled analysts at OSI [office of scientific intelligence] and elsewhere to identify which Soviet radars had low power or maintenance problems, which performed below expectations, and where U.S. aircraft might safetly penetrate the Soviet border in wartime. OSI analysts also concluded, undoubtedly to the disappointment of the OXCART program office, that Soviet radars could detect and track an OXCART as soon as it came over the horizon.46
p.216
William “Al” Nance
He examined possible sites in China, their field of view, how far the horizon extended, and what part of a missile test could be monitored. Of particular interest were possible sites in Xinjiang province [Xinjiang Ulghur Autonomous Region in western China, James Bamford (The puzzle palace), 1982, p.201] where intercept antennae could eavesdrop through the gaps in the mountains.
pp.217-218
by the fall of 1981, if not before, the two stations at Qitai and Korla in Xinjiang province were in operation. To teach the Chinese technicians how to operate the equipment and change the rolls of magnetic tape that recorded the intercepted signals, the CIA set up a school in Beijing.109
The stations, which were code-named CHESTNUT, could monitor military communications from central Asia to the Far East, air traffic, radar signals from Soviet air defenses, KGB communications, and the alert status of Soviet nuclear forces. Of particular interest to the CIA was CHESTNUT's ability to monitor telemetry from the beginning of missile tests and space shots from Tyuratam, and to follow missiles through their flight over Siberia and the dispersion of warheads. Also in view of the eavesdropping equipment was the Sary Shagan ABM test site.110
(The wizards of Langley : inside the CIA's directorate of science and technology / Jeffrey T. Richelson., 1. united states. central intelligence agency. directorate of science and technology ── history., UB251.U5 R53 2001, )
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