Re: Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

[Steven Champeon <schampeo () hesketh com>]

on Thu, Oct 06, 2005 at 03:25:54PM -0500, John Kristoff wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Oct 2005 11:54:34 +0100
> Michael.Dillon () btradianz com wrote:
>
> > > While I realize that the "nuke survivable" thing is probably an old 
> > > wives tale, it seems ridiculous that "the Internet" can't adjust by 
> [...]
> > It's not a myth. If the Internet were running RIP instead of BGP
>
> For the Internet, I believe it was indeed a myth.  I wasn't there,
> but according to someone who was:
>
>   <http://www.postel.org/pipermail/end2end-interest/2004-April/003940.html>

I believe the mental->mythical sequence went something like:

 - some people (Paul Baran among them) were interested in ways to build
   communications networks that could survive lots of damage, and came
   up with the idea of distributed networks that could route through 
   multiple redundant nodes

 - the US was in a cold war and nuclear arms race

 - a nuclear attack could inflict lots of damage to communications
   networks

 - the Internet was eventually, to some extent, built as a distributed
   network with routing through multiple redundant nodes (if nothing
   else, the protocols that ran it were capable of such)

 - the Internet was therefore built to survive a nuclear attack

QED, HTH, HAND

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