Purposive Drift

Asymmetric threats

I was following a quite different trail in pursuit of Vannevar Bush, when I stumbled across this article by Jef Raskin. Written six years ago it describes the record-breaking flight of the "Laima". The first un-manned flight across the Atlantic. As Raskin perceptively points out:

"The men who had built the craft were interested in meteorological research, but if they succeeded, they would also unwittingly show that Reagan?s Star Wars (now updated as the Clinton/Bush anti-missile defense against "rogue" nations) was useless. Just as the Germans easily found a way around what the French thought was an impenetrable thicket of defensive bunkers on the ground prior to World War II, the Maginot line, this small plane would barely be noticed, much less brought down, by anything the defense department has in its armamentarium."

And to show you how I got here, he ends:

" Years ago, the far-seeing Vannevar Bush had pointed out that our seaports were vulnerable to a sneak attack by means of small boats, indistinguishable from pleasure craft, carrying atomic weapons. Now, every point in the world is vulnerable. Laima has demonstrated the foolishness of trying build a Maginot line in the sky."

As I read Raskin's piece I was reminded of a curiosity I found some time ago about how at the end of the Second World War the Japanese launched a series of balloons carrying firebombs. These were carried by the slipstream across the Pacific to land on the West Coast of the USA and Canada. Like "Laima" these balloons would pass undetected by radar.

Now as I have argued before, the threats posed by terrorism, may well be overstated and a distraction from some of the more pressing problems we face - like for example my last posting on short-termism and energy illiteracy. But, what is also clear is that if we are to deal with threats from terrorism and "rogue states" we should be avoiding hi-tech distractions like the National Missile Defence programme (more popularly known as Star Wars), which look likely to go ahead whoever wins the US Presidential elections, and focus more on dealing intelligently with the creative low-tech threats, which may pose the real problem.