IP: Must read (especially the press) The Internet and nuclear attack

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

[I can second many of Dave's comments --  us Dave's have to  stick together 
:-)  ) djf

> Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2001 10:23:12 -0500
> To: farber () cis upenn edu, dewayne () warpspeed com
> From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
> Subject: The Internet and nuclear attack
>
> At 21:12 -0800 12/27/01, Mike Cheponis wrote:
> >    project. In the 1960's, the Pentagon sponsored research at several
> >    American universities to create a communications network that could
> >    survive nuclear attack.
> >
> > Reed knows this is not true.  Why does he repeat this canard?  -mac
>
> This Reed (me) knows that the urban myth about the Internet being designed 
> to resist nuclear attack is not true, but has a few theories about its 
> hardiness.
>
> In fact, I was interviewed for 30-40 minutes by a Business Week reporter 
> while still stuck in Seattle after 9/11, and the main reason for that 
> reporter talking to me was to try to get a quote that would say that the 
> Internet worked so well when the phones weren't working was because it was 
> designed to survive nuclear attack.  I pretty much succeeded; the 
> resulting story focused on how the new modes of communication built on the 
> Internet (such as chat, email, and live web-based news) were more useful 
> than phones and 24x7 replays of the same old plane-into-towers video.
>
> But the myth survives for several reasons:
>
> 1. It's a great story.  And people love to associate themselves with great 
> stories that should be true, even if they aren't.
>
> 2. The ARPANET *was* in part justified in DoD by the "survivable network" 
> concept - for example the original IMPs were built in "blast-hardened" 
> cabinets (I think primarily for "demo value" to the brass).
>
> 3. There are a lot of people who want to be seen as "creators of the 
> Internet" who contributed mainly to the ARPANET.  Conveniently blurring 
> away the distinction between the Internet and the ARPANET allows them to 
> disenfranchise all those who contributed other, major, non-ARPANET 
> networking ideas that were incorporated into the Internet's large umbrella 
> of idea sources.  This all-too-human bug of thinking that a great idea 
> must surely follow a single path from a single source leads to many 
> opportunities for wishful distortion.  There were indeed folks like Paul 
> Baran (and Davies?) working on survivable networks and packet 
> communications long before there was an interconnected "network of 
> networks".  But the ideas about "survivability" known and studied at the 
> time were pretty much left out of the Internet research agenda which 
> focused on resource-sharing and interoperability.
>
> 4. The Internet turns out to be pretty resilient, which one might try to 
> explain as intentional.  But that resilience is an emergent property 
> driven by architectural principles and the "social" drives of its 
> user-owner-builders, like the results of biological and cultural evolution 
> are driven by constraints of mechanism (DNA) and local interactions.  I 
> wonder if the same people who have trouble accepting that elegant, 
> efficient biological structures can emerge without an intentional designer 
> tend to be the people who need a myth to explain the Internet's hardiness 
> (e.g., its ability to "route around" attempts to control it).
>
> I suspect that the persistence of this myth represents much more than a 
> mere "error".
>
> - David
> --------------------------------------------
> WWW Page: http://www.reed.com/dpr.html

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