Tuesday, December 13, 2011

SAGE: "We had a lot to learn."

In the 1950's and 60's the United States was swept with hysteria as a result of the escalating arms races with the Soviet Union and China.  The "cultural" effects of this period are deep and have been chronicled elsewhere, most notably in the 1982 film The Atomic Cafe by Kevin and Pierce Rafferty and Jayne Loader.

One of the most significant technological artifacts of the period documented in the film is the SAGE, the Semi Automatic Ground Environment, that was created by the DOD to detect possible and expected hostile attacks on the homeland by (principally) Soviet armed forces.  There is a notable propaganda film in the the Internet Archive from the Prelinger Collection that is something of a period piece (it is blatant propaganda) produced by IBM. There have been many accounts of the SAGE that have been written over the last few decades, one of my favorite stories about the technology comes from the wonderful book Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust by Donald MacKenzie. I quote at length here:
On October 5, 1960, the president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., and two other business leaders were being shown round  the North American Air Defense headquarters at Colorado Springs. They were in the war room, where officers sat at their desks facing huge plastic display boards depicting Eurasia and North America. Above the map of Eurasia was an alarm level indicator directly connected to the radars and computer system of the missile early warning station at Thule, Greenland.


One of the visitors later recalled that "we were told that if No 1 flashed, it meant only routine objects in the air.  If two flashed, it meant there were a few more unidentified objects, but nothing suspicious. And so on. If five flashed, it was highly probable that objects in the air were moving toward America. In other words an attack was likely." As they watched the numbers started to rise. When they reached "4" senior officers started to run into the room. As "5" flashed the visitors were hustled out of the war room into an office. They could do nothing but wait...
The BMEWS had picked up multiple launchings of ballistic missiles from inside Siberia.  This information was relayed to U.S. and Canadian officers aboard the C-118 airborne command post that served as the nerve center for the defense system in case of nuclear attack.  After several tense moments where puzzled officers in Colorado Springs tried to understand the reasons for the seemingly dire information that was being presented by the system:
Alarm level 5 meant 99.9 percent certainty that a ballistic missile attack had been launched.  If that were true ellipses should be forming on the war room's display map of North America and should start to shrink, indicating the targets of the attack. Yet no ellipses were forming, and the "minutes to go" indicator showed nothing.
 After conversations with intelligence officials it was determined that Khruschev was in New York attending the general assembly meeting of the U.N. and that it would be very unlikely that the Soviets would launch a ballistic missile attack under these circumstances.
Later that day, those involved gradually pieced together what had happened.  What the radars in Greenland had detected was the moon rising over Norway.  Apparently, no one involved in BMEW's development had realized that its powerful radars, designed to detect objects up to 3,000 miles distant, would receive echoes from one almost a quarter of a million miles away.  The BMEWS system software, designed to track fast-rising missiles, was thoroughly foiled by the slow rising, far-distant, moon.  As radar echoes bounced back again and again, the BMEWS software interpreted them as sightings of multiple objects, not multiple sightings of the same object, and the consequent impression of a massive, continually growing missile attack was reinforced by the reflections from the moon of the radar beam's sidelobes...

The SAGE system was created as a technological response to the growing realization in the postwar world that humans were not capable of making timely decisions that weighed geopolitical and military strategies, political intentions, and actions while using all available information, particularly given the speed and destructive capacity of new weapons conceived in defense laboratories on both sides.
By 1961 all the sites [of the SAGE system] were declared "operationally ready," but even in the late 1960s the operators in some SAGE installations were to be found using "makeshift plastic overlays on the cathode-ray displays" and "the 'scope watchers were bypassing the elaborate electronics operating more or less in the same manual mode used in World War II."  Robert Everett, wo headed the division of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory responsible for the overall system design and testing of SAGE summed up the experience, "When we all began to work on SAGE we believed our own myths about software - that one can do anything with software on a general-purpose computer; that software is easy to write, test, and maintain; that it is easily replicated, doesn't wear out, and is not subject to transient errors.  We had a lot to learn."
(quoted from MacKenzie, Donald.  2001. Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust. MIT Press)

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

whether we like it or not...

In short, whether our investigations in the social sciences be statistical or dynamic - and they should participate in the nature of both - they can never be good to more than a very few decimal places, and, in short, can never furnish us with a quantity of verifiable, significant information which begins to compare with that which we have learned to expect in the natural sciences.  We cannot afford to neglect them; neither should we build exaggerated expectations of their possibilities.  There is much which we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the un- "scientific," narrative method of the professional historian.

Norbert Wiener, 1948

fernald (it's in ohio)



In the beginning was the word, and the word was at home in the world, a guttural, twangy, rasp of a word, a name, a place, a space, an instance.. a tense, tenuous string of coincidence, fact, rumor and dread. The days passed for the infant as moments in the early cold war nursery and they became a rhythm of daily routines, a smiling and attentive mother and her comings and goings became the ground upon which other less-frequent visitors walked. A grinning, bright-eyed and mischievous older brother was seen often, at times with another child, becoming a first friend and confidant, sharing the features of the southeastern Indiana bordertown landscape around the postwar tract home with the toddler.  Later there would be other siblings, but still the word was there, if not intelligible, seething, gurgling, then splitting, multiplying, replicating, and displacing the warm, firefly-laden air with a sodden geopolitical necessity.
A father who worked too much, curly-headed and whistling, smelling of musty yeast and malt, piggy backing, strong, college educated and confident.  Of the generation that had won World War II, he exuded a faith in science, industry, and small town, main-street republican ideals, even though raised a Roosevelt Democrat in the Depression Midwest.  This faith in science, technology, and capitalism was lived out in his work, his friendships, and a budding atheism.    His rangy gait spoke of an Indiana small town childhood, home alone or roaming the fields and creeks of Putnam County, trapping small game for good money, and now hunting rabbit, squirrel, and birds in season with a 20 gauge double-barrel, or fishing the backwaters of the Miami and Whitewater Rivers along the state line.  At work they spoke of courage and a work ethic for someone so brainy, a willingness to get dirty if it meant getting it done.  He knew the word, knew of those who knew it, and understood it as necessity and an important feature of the regional labor and professional job market.  It registered, lodging in the left temple, set itself aright, and waited in the mind of the man, waited for the moment when it would open, blossom, and split in its stinking, guttural substance, in a chain reaction of pathological semiotics.
In the beginning was the word and the word was a place, appropriate and appropriated, secure and insecure, at home among these Christian people yet alien in its ethos (or lack of same), shining with technical brilliance and bereft of sense..

I was born in a small town in southeast Indiana, near where the Miami River flows into the Ohio - we lived there till the late 1950's when we left the area.  This place was near the nuclear munitions plant known as the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center - a uranium processing plant that operated from the early 50's through the late 80's.  The plant produced enriched uranium that "fed" weapons plants in Oak Ridge, Hanford, and the Savannah River Site and was used in the production of nuclear warheads.  Between 1951 and 1989 Fernald produced over 170,000 metric tons of enriched uranium.  In 1984 the plant was found to have been releasing millions of tons of uranium dust into the air - contaminating the communities and environment around the plant. I remember there were frequent cargo planes in the area during my early childhood - my dad called them "flying boxcars" - they were C-119's likely moving processed materials in and out of the Fernald Plant.

In 1991 my father passed away after a long illness - he had been stricken by a malignant brain tumor at the age of 63.


In the beginning was the word and the word was a place, appropriate and appropriated, secure and insecure, at home among these Christian people yet alien in its ethos (or lack of same), shining with technical brilliance and bereft of sense.. and the word was Fernald.

Monday, November 21, 2011

welcome to coldwarscapes

This blog is a beginning at trying to get my head around work that I've been doing for the past twenty years in the general area of science and technology studies. What started as an attempt to understand how mapping technologies had changed over the past century has morphed (somewhat in fits and starts) into a broadened interest in reading and writing about ways that technologies coming out of the defense establishment have been transported into the wider social world.  My interest is broad and in spots deep, and my work has at time resembled a rolling snowball picking up found objects and incorporating them into my understandings of the world.  I will try to write stories here that reflect on my work and how I feel it is significant for folks like me who don't accept conventional explanations for everything we see, feel, hear, taste, smell or simply suspect.