IP: LA Times: A Moral Project for 21st Century: Stop Creating Better Weapons

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

[ For all the new IPers, I would like to point out again that I DO NOT necessarily agree with material I put out on IP. 
I try to present a balance of things and views and welcome responsible  views in opposition to notes I send. Sometimes 
I label my opinions and sometimes I don't. However I try to raise interesting issues djf   ]


University of Texas at Austin.

Friends,

Below is my Los Angeles Times column for this morning, January 18, 
1999. My contribution to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  Hope you enjoy 
the holiday, those of you in the U.S.

As always, please feel free to pass this around, but please retain 
the copyright notice.

Best,

-- Gary


Monday, January 18, 1999

DIGITAL NATION

A Moral Project for 21st Century: Stop Creating Better Weapons

By Gary Chapman

Copyright 1999, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved

As we approach a new millennium, there will undoubtedly be a wave of 
general public introspection about the state of the human race -- 
where we've been and where we're headed.

If we look back on the last few centuries, it's clear that each one 
has been defined by singular and historic moral projects that 
affected the world's entire population.

The 18th century introduced the modern concepts of democracy and the 
social contract. The 19th century saw the end of slavery in most of 
the world and its condemnation as an immoral human relationship. In 
the 20th century, the universal moral project has been expanding 
civil and human rights and ending racism.

What will be the moral project of the 21st century?

This is difficult to predict, obviously, and it will depend on what 
seizes the imaginations of millions of people, and on leaders who can 
move people to action. But here's a worthy candidate for 
consideration: severing the relationship between 
scientific-technological progress and the means of war.

The "technological imperative" of improving weaponry has lodged 
itself in our minds as an inescapable part of the human condition 
ever since our primitive ancestors first improved the club. But if we 
take away any lesson from this century, it should be that continual 
improvement in weapons threatens the long-term survival and welfare 
of the human race.

If the 20th century is remembered for anything, it will certainly be 
for the introduction of vast advances in the ways we kill one another 
-- for nuclear weapons, mass-produced biological and chemical 
weapons, "smart" weapons, bombers, tanks, machine guns, ad infinitum. 
This is the historical blight that must be corrected, and this will 
require jettisoning the stubbornly held idea that people and nations 
will always seek better and more deadly weapons.

It may seem naive or utopian to suggest that science and technology 
be decoupled from weaponry in the next century. But we should 
remember that people once believed that kings, slavery and the notion 
of racial superiority would be with us forever too.

What steps can we take toward such a goal? Fortunately, we have a 
number of opportunities before us right now, but we need leadership 
to take advantage of them.

First, the end of the Cold War is a unique historic opportunity, one 
that we have yet to recognize fully. No other nation in the world is 
now a military threat to the United States the way the Soviet Union 
once was. Because of this, we should regard the military spending of 
the Cold War as an anomaly in U.S. history that can be corrected in a 
time of peace.

This correction could lead to a significantly lower defense budget 
than we have even now, nearly a decade after the demise of the Soviet 
Union. We could take steps to dismantle the remnants of the "national 
security state," end our war-posture nuclear weapons alert status and 
shut down the laboratories that continue to work on nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, President Clinton recently announced a large increase 
in defense spending, the largest since the huge military buildup of 
the Reagan years. He wants $100 billion more for defense over six 
years, and Republican leaders in the Congress want even more than 
that -- as much as $150 billion.

Chris Hellman, senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, 
a Washington-based organization founded and led by retired senior 
military officers, calls this proposed increase "an unnecessary waste 
of American tax dollars." Hellman thinks we can cut $20 billion to 
$30 billion from a $270-billion annual defense budget without hurting 
national security. He notes that the U.S. still spends $25 billion 
per year in preparation for a nuclear war and is still "continuing to 
improve and enhance the performance of nuclear weapons."

The year 2000 software bug may, interestingly, pose another 
opportunity for rethinking defense policy. Defense experts are 
concerned about the sensitivity of the highly interdependent 
"hair-trigger" nuclear command and control systems in both the U.S. 
and Russia -- especially in Russia, because the Russians haven't 
begun to address the Y2K problem and have no hope of fixing it in 
time. Last November, the Pentagon's Defense Special Weapons Agency 
was caught lying about its own Y2K preparations involving U.S. 
nuclear command and control systems: The agency reported the systems 
had been fixed when they hadn't even been tested.

Because of this, public interest groups such as the British American 
Security Information Council have called for a year-end shutdown of 
all nuclear weapons systems around the world to prevent problems 
caused by the software bug. This seems prudent, given the risk. But 
if we shut these systems down, why would we need or want them to be 
turned on again? Coming to grips with this question may be one of the 
few benefits of the Y2K problem.

Another opportunity is provided by the Internet, launched and funded 
for many years by the Defense Department. Now that the Net is a 
nearly ubiquitous global communications medium, the world is tied 
together as never before. That makes the prospect of war that might 
disrupt this interdependency increasingly unlikely. As the Internet 
grows and becomes more and more embedded in world commerce, the need 
for globe-spanning military resources should diminish, not increase.

High-tech-industry leaders should grasp the present contradiction 
between the impact of the Internet and rising defense budgets.

Congressman George Brown (D-San Bernardino), the ranking Democrat on 
the House Science Committee, told me, "We're too interconnected now 
to have sane national leaders contemplate war as a viable national 
option for solving problems."

Brown believes that in 20 years, U.S. military 
research-and-development spending could be half its current level of 
about $32 billion per year, and decline further after that. "We 
cannot continue to sustain the illusion that we're going to fight a 
war with nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction," he 
said.

To cut the ties between technological progress and war, to shut down 
the indefensible and obscene international arms trade and reorient 
hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers around the world to 
peaceful and sustainable work, we'll need courageous and determined 
moral leaders. And those people will almost certainly come from the 
common citizenry -- no social change of this magnitude has ever been 
sparked or led by political officials.

Those leaders may be living among us already.

Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the 
University of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is 
gary.chapman () mail utexas edu.