mutually assured destruction

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1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

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He came up with a new concept called ‘Assured Destruction’. Neither side would attack the other because they knew it was suicidal: if one superpower attacked, the other had enough nuclear capacity to strike back, causing massive destruction. Someone added the word ‘Mutual’ to this new phrase, and ‘Mutual Assured Destruction’, better known by its acronym MAD, became one of the central tenets underpinning the Cold War. McNamara insisted it was far from madness, that it created a form of stability, as long as neither side perceived it had an advantage over the other.12 However, the technology continued to advance at a dizzying pace.

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Negotiations between the two continued at a snail’s pace but eventually resulted in the signing of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) by President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at a summit in Moscow in May 1972. Alongside this came a treaty to prevent the development of ABMs. The treaties effectively froze the nuclear arsenals of both superpowers while ensuring that Mutual Assured Destruction continued to be possible. In other words, each side still had more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other. The SALT treaty ushered in a new era of détente between the superpowers that lasted for much of the 1970s. And in Europe, a newly prosperous West Germany recognised the existence of East Germany, ushering in what appeared to be a form of East–West reconciliation.

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It shows how intelligence can be misused or just misunderstood. And it shows how dangerous the use or even the threat of the use of nuclear weapons can be without proper crisis management systems in place. In our multi-polar world of the twenty-first century, some people feel nostalgic about the era of Mutual Assured Destruction in the bi-polar world of the late twentieth century. I hope after reading this book that no one will want to return to the crazy world of 1983 at the brink of nuclear war. In the summer of 1983, cinema audiences flocked to see the latest James Bond movie in which Roger Moore defeats a Soviet general who attempts to fire a nuclear weapon against the West.15 People loved the film but believed that the storyline was entirely fictional, if not totally absurd.

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

McNamara, characteristically, transformed this reliance on irrationality into a new kind of rationality in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. He now repudiated his earlier idea of targeting only military facilities: instead each side should target the other’s cities, with a view to causing the maximum number of casualties possible.70 The new strategy became known as “Mutual Assured Destruction”—its acronym, with wicked appropriateness, was MAD. The assumption behind it was that if no one could be sure of surviving a nuclear war, there would not be one. That, however, was simply a restatement of what Eisenhower had long since concluded: that the advent of thermonuclear weapons meant that war could no longer be an instrument of statecraft—rather, the survival of states required that there be no war at all.

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This was the first formal acknowledgment, by both sides, of Churchill’s—and Eisenhower’s—idea that the vulnerability that came with the prospect of instant annihilation could become the basis for a stable, long-term, Soviet-American relationship. It also reflected Moscow’s acceptance, not easily arrived at, of Mutual Assured Destruction: persuading the Russians that it was a bad idea to try to defend themselves had been a negotiating challenge of the first order. The success of the effort—that American officials could now be educating their Soviet counterparts on how to think about national security—suggests how far things had come since each side’s development of nuclear weapons, in the first years of the Cold War, had terrified the other.

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It would have been difficult, by any traditional moral principle, to justify the artificial division of entire countries like Germany, Korea, and Vietnam—and yet the United States and its allies had expended thousands of lives and billions of dollars to maintain those divisions. It strained democratic values to embrace right-wing dictatorships throughout much of the “third world” as a way of preventing the emergence of left-wing dictatorships, and yet every administration since Truman’s had done this. And surely Mutual Assured Destruction could only be defended if one considered hostage-taking on a massive scale—deliberately placing civilian populations at risk for nuclear annihilation—to be a humane act. American strategists did just that, however, because they saw no better way to deter a much greater evil, the possibility of an all-out nuclear war.

On Her Majesty's Nuclear Service by Eric Thompson

amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Parkinson's law, retail therapy, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

I am from the luckiest generation and am truly grateful for that, but peace did not happen by accident; I have lived under a nuclear umbrella through the forty-six years of the Cold War. After the horrors of the Second World War, Churchill said: ‘It must never happen again.’ To ensure it did not, the victors equipped themselves with nuclear weapons, weapons so devastating that they were the ultimate deterrent to a third world war. The principle was called Mutually Assured Destruction. Inspired by the heroes of the Second World War, I joined the Royal Navy in 1961, volunteered for submarines and served On Her Majesty’s Nuclear Service. My career spanned thirty-seven years and ended as Commodore in charge at Faslane, the operating base for our Strategic Nuclear Deterrent submarines.

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Soviet President Khrushchev’s calculation had been that the young President Kennedy was weak and indecisive and would merely accept the missiles as a fait accompli when their presence was discovered. Castro’s view was more hawkish: if the Americans were to invade Cuba, he would launch a nuclear strike accepting that Cuba would be destroyed in retaliation – an alarming new Latin American variation on Mutually Assured Destruction. Russia would then retaliate by invading West Berlin and that would trigger nuclear war in Europe. Neither Russia nor America wanted a Third World War but Kennedy had an election to face and had to be seen to act tough. Khrushchev, on the other hand, had the prestige of International Communism at stake and could not be seen to back down.

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We were on the brink of World War Three. The Cuba missile crisis was the nearest the world has ever come to nuclear war. Thank God (or Lenin), the Soviets blinked first and backed down. As Krushchev said later: ‘They talk about who won and who lost. Human reason won.’ The principle of Mutually Assured Destruction had been validated. Churchill had been spot on when he said: ‘There is nothing the Russians admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness.’ **** The Cuba crisis had barely subsided when I received a newspaper cutting from my parents.

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

His analysts concluded, "The main reason for stopping at 1,000 Minuteman missiles, 41 Polaris submarines and some 500 strategic bombers is that having more would not be worth the cost." McNamara hoped that the Soviets would also reach a plateau--and stop building. 7 A critic of McNamara proposed adding "mutual" to "assured destruction" and the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction, known pointedly as MAD, was born. For many Americans, this idea of equal vulnerability and mutual deterrence came to define the Cold War. 8 Locked in global confrontation, the United States and the Soviet Union were each rooted in centuries of radically different history, geography, culture and experience.

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The outsiders were led by Richard Pipes, professor of history at Harvard, long a fierce critic of Soviet communism; the others on Team B were also drawn from critics of detente who had been warning of a Soviet quest for military superiority. When finished in November, the Team B report on Soviet intentions was unequivocal that Moscow was on a dangerous drive for supremacy, and that the CIA had badly underestimated it. Soviet leaders "think not in terms of nuclear stability, mutual assured destruction or strategic sufficiency, but of an effective nuclear war-fighting capability," they wrote. 19 On the other side of the exercise, Team A did not share the shrill sense of alarm. They said the Soviets might want to achieve nuclear war-fighting capability and superiority, but that it wasn't a realistic, practical goal.

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A statement on the topic was put into the Republican Party platform, but it was not part of Reagan's campaign stump speech nor did it figure in his major campaign addresses on foreign policy. Nonetheless, Reagan held radical notions about nuclear weapons: he dreamed of abolishing them. Personally, he recoiled from the concept of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. 6 Reagan also intensely disliked the idea that he, as president, would have to make decisions about nuclear weapons in the event of a sudden crisis. He worried that a nuclear explosion would lead to the end of the Earth and expressed belief in the biblical story of Armageddon.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

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They look at it as faster, cheaper, better, more profitable.” Vinge compares it to the Cold War strategy called MAD—mutually assured destruction. Coined by acronym-loving John von Neumann (also the creator of an early computer with the winning initials, MANIAC), MAD maintained Cold War peace through the promise of mutual obliteration. Like MAD, superintelligence boasts a lot of researchers secretly working to develop technologies with catastrophic potential. But it’s like mutually assured destruction without any commonsense brakes. No one will know who is ahead, so everyone will assume someone else is. And as we’ve seen, the winner won’t take all.

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Superintelligence won’t be boxed in by anyone who can’t do something as comparatively easy as keeping human hackers out. However, we can draw some important insights from the history of arms control. Since the creation of nuclear weapons, only the United States has used them against an enemy. Nuclear powers have managed to avoid Mutually Assured Destruction. No nuclear power has suffered accidental detonations that we know about. The record of nuclear stewardship is a good one (although the threat’s not over). But here’s my point. Too few people know that we need to have an ongoing international conversation about AGI comparable to those we have about nuclear weapons.

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., III Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) Singularity Summit machine learning Madoff, Bernie malware Mazzafro, Joe McCarthy, John McGurk, Sean military battlefield robots and drones DARPA, see DARPA energy infrastructure and nuclear weapons, see nuclear weapons Mind Children (Moravec) Minsky, Marvin Mitchell, Tom mobile phones see also iPhone Monster Cat Moore, Gordon Moore’s Law morality see also Friendly AI Moravec, Hans Moravec’s Paradox mortality, see immortality mortgage crisis Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) nano assemblers nanotechnology “gray goo” problem and natural language processing (NLP) natural selection Nekomata (Monster Cat) NELL (Never-Ending-Language-Learning system) neural networks neurons New Scientist New York Times Newman, Max Newton, Isaac Ng, Andrew 9/11 attacks Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Perrow) normalcy bias North Korea Norvig, Peter Novamente nuclear fission nuclear power plant disasters nuclear weapons of Iran Numenta Ohana, Steve Olympic Games (cyberwar campaign) Omohundro, Stephen OpenCog Otellini, Paul Page, Larry paper clip maximizer scenario parallel processing pattern recognition Pendleton, Leslie Perceptron Perrow, Charles Piaget, Jean power grid Precautionary Principle programming bad evolutionary genetic ordinary self-improving, see self-improvement Rackspace rational agent theory of economics recombinant DNA Reflections on Artificial Intelligence (Whitby) resource acquisition risks of artificial intelligence apoptotic systems and Asilomar Guidelines and Busy Child scenario and, see Busy Child scenario defenses against lack of dialogue about malicious AI Precautionary Principle and runaway AI Safe-AI Scaffolding Approach and Stuxnet and unintended consequences robots, robotics Asimov’s Three Laws of in dangerous and service jobs in sportswriting Rosenblatt, Frank Rowling, J.

Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

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Kennedy’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, shortened the president’s “madness” to MAD as he adopted an approach which assured that every man, woman, and child would live under Damocles’s nuclear sword forevermore. MAD was short for “mutually assured destruction,” an idea that had been around for years before McNamara embraced it. The idea, though appalling, was appealingly simple: if both sides had enough nuclear arms to wipe out the other, then the prospect of mutually assured destruction would render their use irrational and hence preclude such use. As became unmistakable at Reykjavik, the MAD doctrine offended Reagan’s moral sense. It was what George Orwell might have included as a scheme so stupid that only an intellectual could have created it.

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The treaty says that if someone wants to blow us up, the other will retaliate. Such a regime does not give protection. It limits protection. Why the Hell should the world have to live for another ten years under this threat of nuclear weapons? I fail to see the magic of the ABM regime, whose only assurance is the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. Instead, we should give the world a means of protection that would put the nuclear genie back in his bottle. The next generation would reap the benefits when we are no longer around. The fact that Reagan’s quasi-rant ran contrary to official U.S. policy of every administration since John F.

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He called the Soviet radar in Siberia “a violation of the ABM Treaty,” and threw in that “the Soviet Union is violating another agreement—the Helsinki Accords they had signed in 1975.” He refrained from mentioning that he had harshly condemned those accords as a symbol of weak-kneed détente when President Gerald R. Ford signed them back then. Reagan repeated what he had told Gorbachev—that the postwar policy of mutually assured destruction was “uncivilized” and should be scrapped. As before, he vastly exaggerated SDI’s promise by claiming that “our scientists . . . [are] convinced it is practical,” so much so that within a very few years, “we can have such a system ready to deploy.” If this optimistically inaccurate statement caused consternation among some American scientists, it must have caused heartburn in Gorbachev, as it confirmed his worst fears.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War by Paul Scharre

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It would be the equivalent of ripping out the steering wheel, but being unable to throw it out the window. (Similarly, the Soviets could program their ships to run the blockade without any option for turning back, but there would be no way to prove to the Americans they had done so.) Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove explores the bizarre logic of deterrence and mutual assured destruction. In the film, the Soviet ambassador explains to an assembled group of American military and political leaders that the Soviet Union has built a “doomsday machine” which, if the Soviet Union is attacked, will automatically launch a massive nuclear counterattack that will destroy humanity.

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If Perimeter were to falsely detect an event, as the Soviet Oko satellite system did in 1983 when it falsely detected U.S. ICBM launches, or if Soviet leaders were unable to stop the mechanism once it was activated, the system would obliterate humanity. By some accounts, Perimeter is still operational within Russia today. STABILITY-INSTABILITY PARADOX AND THE MAD ROBOT THEORY The logic of mutual assured destruction (MAD) is to make any nuclear attack inherently suicidal. If a retaliatory response is assured, then attacking the enemy is akin to attacking oneself. This dynamic is stabilizing in the sense that it deters both sides from using nuclear weapons. Ironically, though, over time strategists began to worry that too much stability was a bad thing.

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Returning to the gunslingers in their standoff, if stabilizing measures are those that make it less likely that a gunslinger will draw his weapon, too much stability might encourage other forms of aggression. One might be willing to insult or even steal from the other gunslinger, confident that he wouldn’t draw his gun, since doing so would be suicidal. One response to this paradox is the “madman theory.” As the acronym MAD implies, the logic of mutual assured destruction is fundamentally insane. Only a mad person would launch a nuclear weapon. The principle behind the madman theory, espoused by President Richard Nixon, is to convince the enemy’s leadership that a nation’s leaders are so volatile and irrational that they just might push the button. Mutual suicide or no, one would hesitate to insult a gunslinger with a reputation for rash, even self-destructive acts.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Since he wasn’t part of the immense no-thought-but-Trinity rush to successfully engineer the first nuclear weapons, he had time to think, and in March 1944 he tried to convince Vannevar Bush that the nation’s leaders needed to prepare for a future of “armed peace,” with several countries having atomic arsenals able to stalemate each other. Bush, and the others Leo approached, weren’t interested in what seemed so distant, but of course international stalemate would become the Cold War tenet Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD—the seemingly crazy notion that would keep the Cold War cold. The only French resident of the Hill, Françoise Ulam, was nursing her baby when she heard Rabi playing “La Marseillaise” outside her window on his comb. It was August 24, 1944, and Paris had been liberated. While pretending to be a scientist divorced from the politics of the real world in Vichy Paris, Frédéric Joliot made explosives and radio equipment for the Resistance and became president of the National Front.

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We do this by maintaining a highly reliable ability to inflict unacceptable damage upon any single aggressor or combination of aggressors at any time during the course of a strategic nuclear exchange, even after absorbing a surprise first strike. This can be defined as our assured-destruction capability.” The strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD—was accompanied by the Pentagon’s Nuclear Utilization Target Selection: NUTS. In the nuclear arms race, “each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time. But the result was insane,” admitted McNamara. “Each of the decisions, taken by itself, appeared rational or inescapable.

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He cannot for that reason abandon further efforts. . . . To make no plans for [a nuclear war] would be openly to proclaim our helplessness. It would be psychologically wrong.” Physicist Herbert York: “Let’s put it this way, in more understandable terms. All roads in the strategic equation lead to MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction]. All the other ones . . . are games, are window dressings, and they are window dressing for upmanship. . . . But when you take away all these layers of cloth, at the bottom of the thing, basically, is MAD, and no one likes it.” Nikita Khrushchev’s son, Sergei: “For thousands of years peoples have resolved their conflicts by armed clashes.

Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

The advantage had shifted decisively to the defense.23 Even as Soviet air defenses increasingly imperiled aircraft, US military strategy was putting greater emphasis on strike aircraft. As the US and the Soviet Union built up arsenals of nuclear-tipped missiles through the 1960s, it became increasingly clear that a thermonuclear war would mean civilizational suicide—a strategic conundrum captured by the term “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD. Meanwhile, the US had relied on smaller, tactical nuclear weapons to counter the Soviet advantage in conventional arms. American planners assumed that the Soviets would flood the plains of Western Europe with a hundred tank and infantry divisions. NATO ground forces might be able to halt the initial attack but would be overwhelmed by the following waves.24 This was the challenge facing American and NATO strategists by the 1970s.

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An influential architect of nuclear strategy at the RAND Corporation, Wohlstetter had then taught at the University of Chicago, from where his intellectual progeny propagated the neoconservative movement, and he now ran his own consulting firm, called Pan Heuristics.29 Wohlstetter had chaired the LRRD seminars of the early 1970s, and now, a decade later, he developed the ideas they had introduced. Wohlstetter believed that the strategic and political landscape had changed, along with the technology, since the development of nuclear doctrine.30 For two decades the US had relied primarily on the strategy of mutual assured destruction, which assumed that the American threat to meet any Soviet assault with a thermonuclear apocalypse would deter the Soviets from attacking. But the vast growth of nuclear arsenals on both sides—the US and Soviet Union by 1980 had well over fifty thousand nuclear warheads between them—had rendered nuclear deterrence “increasingly incredible” in the literal sense.

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See also Skunk Works A-12 model from, 38f ADP of, 34 aerodynamics used by, 133 aircraft design by, ix–xi arguments of, xii computers used by, xii–xiii, 48, 70 contest entered by, 28 in design competition, xi, 29, 53 design proposal of, 29 engine builders for, 152 financial acumen of, 32 flat facets from, 54, 134f flying wing of, 134–136, 134f full-scale models tested of, 76–81 internal discretionary funds used by, 197–198 Johnson hired by, 32–33 military contracts flowing to, 31 Northrop bailed out by protest of, 156 P-38 Lightning of, 31 production manager of, 107–108 prototype airplanes of, 83 radar focus of, 192 radar signature reduction and, 37–39, 76–77 Scherrer’s job for, 19–20, 45, 146 Sea Shadow built by, 184 Stealth aircraft of, 39, 185, 189 Stealth bomber design of, 146 wing’s leading edge of, 80–81 XST contest with, 70–72, 81 Lockheed Martin, 185 Locus, Stan, 44, 63, 65, 69 lofting, 137–138, 171 logarithmic decibel scale, 78 long-range R&D study (LRRD), 23–24, 118, 123 Los Alamos, CA, 70 Los Angeles, CA, 21 Loschke, Robert, 50, 70–72, 86–87, 105f, 140 Loughead, Allan, 31 Loughead, Malcolm, 31 Loughead Aircraft, 55 Lovick, Ed, 38–39, 47 low-altitude flight, 165–166 low-frequency threat, 138 low-probability-of-intercept radar, 125–126 low-radar-cross-section aircraft design, 29, 211n.17 LRRD. See long-range R&D LRRD II study, 120 Luckiesh, Matthew, 1–2 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 1 machine shops, close-tolerance, 14 “The Machine-Tooled Happyland” (Bradbury), 18 MAD. See mutual assured destruction Mailer, Norman, 16 make-work projects, 111–112 Manhattan Project, 3, 112–113 Marconi, Guglielmo, 2–3 Mark, Hans, 99 Martin, Albert, Jr., 16–17 Martin, Ed, 44–45, 49–51 Martin Marietta, 186–187 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 4 materials. See also radar-absorbing materials for B-2 bomber, 171–172 composite, 172 Northrop requiring R&D on, 172 shortage of, 102–104 McDonnell Douglas, 25, 211n.17, 29 McWilliams, Carey, 14–15 mergers, in aerospace industry, 186–187 metallic chaff, 8 “Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction,” 42 microwave region, 3 military aircraft, 60, 75 contracts, 31 -industrial complex, xv, 196–197 technologies, xi, 23 Military Reform Caucus, 121 military-technical revolution (MTR), 116–118, 194 miniature remotely piloted vehicle (Mini-RPV), 24–26 Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), 197 Minuteman missiles, 143, 152 missiles ballistic, 63–64, 116 cruise, 127, 138, 144 defense, 64–66, 193 Minuteman, 143, 152 MX, 174 Polaris submarine, 32 projects, 23 SA-1 and SA-2, 5 Snark, 62–64, 62f submarine-launched, 144 surface-to-air, 5 Trident, 174 TSSAM, 184 Mitchell, Sam, 93–94 MITI.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

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And Schelling knew all about mixed strategies. Consider the problem of nuclear deterrence. Clearly, this rests on a bluff. If the bluff is called, everyone loses. The essential contradiction at the heart of nuclear deterrence is the threat to obliterate yourself in retaliation to an enemy attack: Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD, as it’s famously known. By the early 1960s, both sides in the Cold War possessed sufficiently large nuclear arsenals that neither could be certain of destroying all the enemy’s weapons in a ‘first strike’ attack against its weapons. It was likely that some weapons would survive a first strike and constitute an ‘assured’ second strike capability.

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For Schelling, the thing to do is to remove the option of backing down. He suggested that one driver unscrew the steering wheel, hold it aloft, so that the other driver could see it, and then throw it from the car. Now the choice was, literally, out of his hands. There was, however, one big problem—what if the other driver had the same bright idea? Mutually assured destruction would ensue. Both strategies, ‘dancing’ and ‘hot-rods’, were about ‘mind reading’—getting inside the head of the adversary. You could model them formally, via game theory, using probabilities and payoffs. But the big question with both metaphors was how to translate them into international politics.

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A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission by Steve Gibson

Adam Curtis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, corporate social responsibility, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, John Nash: game theory, libertarian paternalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, unbiased observer, WikiLeaks

For those wanting to read an action-based first-hand account of ‘licensed’ spying operations behind enemy lines, the story remains unchanged. For those who want a case-study in intelligence’s fundamental relationship with power and politics, then the additional new chapter – ‘Reflections’ – charts a route from the mutually assured destruction strategy of the early Cold War years to the contemporary context that Western nations are constructing for themselves post-1989. This book was originally conceived by Stevyn Gibson as a personal story. It was intended as an individual account of a private experience set down for the record.

…

If ever there was a delicate moment in the Cold War then this was it – the last bit. The Berlin airlift in 1948–9, the Bay of Pigs and U2 debacles in 1961 (not to mention the Wall itself), the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962 (itself uniquely allied to the Berlin crisis at the time), the birth of the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, Philby, Burgess, Blake and Maclean, not to mention a host of less infamous traitors, the invasions of Hungary and the near invasion of Poland in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979 and all the other incidents that went to make the Cold War, each in their own way provided a degree of worldwide tension, reaction and threat.

…

However, it would have taken a clever man in the 1980s to spot the Soviets panting for breath, a brave one to broadcast the view and probably a certifiable one to predict the end of communism, let alone plan new defence budgets and strategies accordingly. The superpowers and their respective blocs had taken themselves to the brink of mutually assured destruction and back in the space of forty-five years. If you had set out to invent the Cold War you couldn’t have done it. The whole thing was absurd. If it is conceivable to summarise the rationale behind the Cold War then in my opinion it was very simply a lack of trust. That the Mission had played a very important role in bringing us back from the brink of disaster by building confidences and trust was clear and very rewarding to know.

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Understandably and repeatedly, this has led them to think again.59 Clue 7: MAD really does make all-out war madness. After exploding its first bomb in 1949, the Soviet Union rapidly developed a nuclear arsenal so substantial and sophisticated that it created what nuclear strategists recognized as mutual assured destruction: MAD. This described a condition in which neither the US nor the USSR could be sure of destroying its opponent’s arsenal with a nuclear first strike before the enemy could launch a fatal nuclear response. Under such conditions, one state’s decision to kill another is simultaneously a choice to commit national suicide.

…

Four “mega-threats” loom above all: nuclear Armageddon; nuclear anarchy; global terrorism, especially as threatened by Islamic jihadism; and climate change. In confronting each of these, the vital national interests the two powers share are much greater than those that divide them. Because of the inescapable logic of mutual assured destruction, if the US and China were to stumble into a war in which their full nuclear arsenals were launched, both nations would be erased from the map. Thus their most vital interest is to avoid such a war. Moreover, they must find combinations of compromise and constraint that avoid repeated games of chicken that could inadvertently lead to this dreaded outcome.

…

For decades after becoming a nuclear power in 1964, Beijing maintained a small arsenal of silo-based ICBMs, which left it vulnerable to an adversary’s first strike. Since the mid-1990s it has been deploying more survivable nuclear forces, most recently road-mobile and submarine-launched ballistic missiles. As a result, the US has been forced to accept a condition of “mutual assured destruction” between China and the United States, similar to the one that existed with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This was reflected in the 2010 US Nuclear Posture Review’s assertion that the US would not take any action that could negatively affect “the stability of our nuclear relationships with Russia or China.”

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

(The mechanisms for introducing such chaos would not be the relatively clumsy denial-of-service attacks that we saw in Russia's assaults on Estonia and Georgia, but rather the "back doors" planted in Internet systems, which would be activated in such a way as to cause appropriate damage in case 140 Chapter 7 of attack-"appropriate" being the level of damage required to achieve one's strategic goals under the conditions as they unfold, which need not involve full implementation of "cyberwar" capability.) Details, of course, are classified, but it is reasonable to expect that, even now, a new "balance of terror" based on "mutual assured destruction" is evolving on the cyber battlefield. And in the realm of asymmetric warfare, cyberspace is also the obvious place for less technologically advanced nations and for non-governmental organizations to go if they wish to inflict relatively undirected damage on a sophisticated opponent. The third realm, Revolutions in Civilian Systems (RCS), is one of the main themes of this book, so we will touch on it only briefly here.

…

For example, although we both suspect that, had we been of age during the early decades of the Cold War, we would have strongly supported efforts to prevent the development and proliferation of thermonuclear weapons, the historian Richard Rhodes (who wrote the authoritative histories of the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs) has suggested, not implausibly, that the threat of mutually assured destruction In Front of Our Nose 183 helped to deliver 50 years of relative peace to the U.S., its allies, and the Soviet Bloc. l l Ethical uncertainty begins to look surprisingly like factual uncertainty when it comes to the techno-human condition. Neither ethical nor scientific analysis has much hope of predicting the future accurately enough to dictate appropriate behavior in the present.

…

., 33 McKibben,~.,21, 101 McKinsey & Company, 49 McNeill, ]. R., 80 Medical Journal of Australia, 122 Memory-enhancing pharmaceuticals, 113 Mexico, 125, 133 Microsoft, 173 Millenarian utopianism, 120 Modafinil, 24 Moltke, H. von, 75, 105, 106 Money, 80, 81 Moravec, H., 8, 18 Mumford, L., 33, 36, 45 Mutually assured destruction, in cyberspace, 140 Nanotechnology, 8, 80, 178 National Institute of Health, 89 National Science Foundation, 8, 89,90 Natural Born Cyborgs, 9 Nature, as sacred, 100ff Nature's Metropolis, 115 Nazi Germany, 22, 31,121,131 Needle gun, 75 Negligible senescence, engineered,82 Neoconservatives, 91, 110 Neuropharmaceuticals, 3, 18, 24,88,95 New Atlantis, 18 New Jerusalem, 11, 77, 78 New Scientist, 122, 124 Newton, I., 101, 173, 179 Nitrogen cycle, 10, 110, 192 Noble, D., 18 Notice-and-comment rulemaking, 165 Nuclear power, 174ff Nuclear winter, 67, 78 Occupational health and safety, 52 Office of Naval Research, 89 Olympic Games, 3, 4 Oppenheimer,].

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Hackers aren’t the only threats here. Governments are also developing offensive (often unidentifiable) computer capabilities as a new way to project power in a world where direct military strikes are much more expensive and exponentially more dangerous. During the Cold War, the risk of mutually assured destruction made nuclear weapons all but unusable. Everyone knew when and from where a missile was fired and could retaliate in kind. That’s not true for cyberweapons. States are now in the process of putting national cybersecurity strategies into place. The creation of a separate U.S. cybercommand in 2010 reveals a growing military emphasis on cyberwarfare.

…

A seemingly endless number of such potential flash points could provoke many different forms of fighting, and this confrontation might force other states to take sides. As to what any confrontation might look like, it’s tempting to fall back on the Cold War model—two superpowers staring one another down from behind their nuclear arsenals with only the threat of mutually assured destruction stilling hands. But that scenario ignores an important point. During the U.S.-Soviet conflict, the Iron Curtain was not just the prison wall that kept invaders out and prisoners in. It was a buffer between the capitalist and communist worlds. The Soviet Union was an important energy supplier for Europe, but other East–West trade ties were extremely limited.

…

., Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, 75 Hu Jintao, 162 Human Rights Watch, 135 Hungary, 53 Hussein, Saddam, 124 Hu Yaobang, 53 hydrocarbon energy, 99 hyperinflation, 37 IAEA, 207n Iceland, in Arctic Council, 96–97 India, 3, 9, 10, 16, 24–25, 26, 28, 33, 40, 55, 79, 117, 122, 155, 161, 167–68, 170, 183, 187 biofuel production in, 100 China’s rivalry with, 25, 70, 115, 173, 178 climate change and, 94 defense spending of, 129 demand for grain in, 98–99 economic growth in, 98–99, 148, 166 energy imported by, 30 famine in, 100 food riots in, 98 nuclear program of, 57, 76 Pakistan’s conflict with, 25, 70, 152, 158, 165–66 urbanization in, 99, 118 water security in, 105 in World Bank and IMF, 29–30 Indochina, 40 Indonesia, 48, 51, 55, 70, 71, 76, 114, 120, 122, 194 biofuel production in, 100 economic growth in, 99 multinationals in, 80 industrialization, 104 inflation, 32, 39, 49, 60 information revolution, 92–93 intellectual property, 84 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, UN, 109 International Energy Agency, 94, 100 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 4, 22, 27–28, 29–30, 80, 118, 120, 134, 135, 167 American and European influence in, 42, 43–44 creation of, 39, 43 Greece aided by, 45 world currency and debt crises resolved by, 38 International Telecommunications Union (ITU), 88–89 Internet, 22, 33, 87–91, 93, 94, 180 Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), 87, 88 Internet Engineering Task Force, 87 Internet Society, 87 Iran, 14, 47, 48, 69, 117, 123, 125, 136, 139, 154 Internet in, 90, 92 nuclear program of, 15, 55, 56, 58–59, 73, 123–24, 158 protests in, 192 revolution in, 112–13 Iraq, 15, 47, 48, 58, 64, 69, 113, 117, 124, 127, 175, 183, 187, 202n U.S. withdrawal from, 32, 202n Ireland, 126 Ismay, Hastings Lionel, 133 Israel, 48–49, 56, 69, 113, 117, 129, 130 as exposed state, 136 Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 17, 136, 158 nuclear program of, 57, 207n Italy, 19, 25, 39, 45, 47, 181 Japan, 15, 16, 19–20, 22, 25, 30, 47, 50, 70, 82–83, 114, 120, 121, 129, 143, 148, 155, 166 aging population of, 120 biofuel production in, 100 China’s tension with, 69, 71, 114, 135–36, 173, 177–78 climate change and, 94 debt problems of, 20 as exposed state, 135–36 grain production, 104 oil imported by, 47 political and economic malaise of, 3 post–World War II reconstruction and growth of, 39, 45–47, 50–51 reduced role of, 194 Jiang Zemin, 60 job creation, 32 Johnson, Lyndon, 100 Jordan, 48, 69, 113, 176 JPMorgan Chase, 75 Kan, Naoto, 20 Kawasaki, 127 Kazakhstan, 54, 122, 137, 141, 177, 179 Kenya, 72, 106, 177 Kimberley Process (KP), 131–32 Korb, Lawrence, 191 Kosovo, 181 Kuwait, 48, 71 Kyoto Protocol, 94 Lagarde, Christine, 27–28 Lake Victoria, 106 Lampedusa Tunisian Collective, 19 Laos, 105 Latin America, 40, 59, 85 Chinese investments in, 80 cooperation in, 115–16, 174 corruption in, 115–16 debt crisis in, 37 League of Nations, 170 Liberal Democratic Party, Japanese, 20 Libya, 19, 30, 48, 69, 134, 138–39, 192 civil war in, 112, 113, 175, 202n oil exports of, 117 Lizza, Ryan, 113n Lockheed Martin, 129 London, 33, 121 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 55 Maastricht Treaty, 54 MacArthur, Douglas, 39, 45–46, 109 Mack, Mary Bono, 75 McKinsey & Company, 146 McKinsey Global Institute, 99 Madagascar, 102 mad cow disease, 103 Mahbubani, Kishore, 114–15 Malaysia, 51 Maldives, 9, 109–10 Mandelbaum, Michael, 11 Marange mine, 131–32 Margrethe, queen of Denmark, 7–8 Martin, Paul, 1–2 MasterCard, 75 Medicaid, 12 Medicare, 12, 189 Medvedev, Dmitry, 203n Merkel, Angela, 9, 18 metals, 147 Mexico, 55, 122 borrowing by, 37 food riots in, 98 as shadow state, 136–37 Middle East, 40, 48, 59, 136, 175 as potential hotspot, 69–72, 113–14, 152 water scarcity in, 104 minerals, 147 Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), Japan, 46 Mongolia, 122 Morgenthau, Henry, Jr., 41 Morocco, 69, 101, 113, 176 Mozambique, 102, 120 Mubarak, Hosni, 89, 113, 192–93 Mugabe, Robert, 7–8, 131–32 multinational companies, 74–75, 79, 80, 83, 91, 119, 126–28, 139–40 mutually assured destruction, 172 Myanmar, 123, 124, 125 Chinese companies in, 80 nanotechnology, 147 Napoleon I, emperor of France, 11 Napoleonic Wars, 167 Nasdaq, 75 Nasheed, Mohamed, 9, 110 National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, 157 National Development and Reform Commission, 130 National Institute of Standards and Technology, 73 natural gas, 58, 63, 147, 181, 182 in Arctic, 97 Navy, U.S., 24 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 24–25, 55 New York, N.Y., 121 NGOs, 135 Nigeria, 48, 72, 177, 182 Nile, 106 Nixon, Richard, 44, 49–50 Noda, Yoshihiko, 20 North Africa, 18, 48, 136, 139, 175, 187 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 17, 19, 30, 117, 133–34, 192 North Korea, 70, 91, 123, 125, 152, 154, 165, 208n nuclear program of, 15, 57, 58–59, 124, 158, 161 Norway, in Arctic Council, 96–97 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 57–59 Obama, Barack, 8–9, 11, 64, 65, 100, 113, 190, 202n oil, 3, 22, 23, 30–31, 37, 47–49, 58, 61, 114, 116, 117, 120, 125–26, 127, 141–42, 147, 160, 181–82 in Arctic, 97 OPEC’s embargos of, 48–49, 50 as priced in dollars, 81–82 oilseeds, 100 Oman, 71 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 48–49, 50, 100 Paine, Thomas, 185 Pakistan, 14, 57, 70, 115, 161, 182, 183 food riots in, 98 India’s conflict with, 25, 70, 152, 158, 165–66 U.S. drone attacks in, 111 Palestinians, 17, 25, 136, 158 Pan Am Flight 103, 139 Panetta, Leon, 73 PayPal, 75 Peace Corps, 90–91 Pearl Harbor, 187 People’s Action Party, Singapore, 121 People’s Liberation Army, 146 Peru, 177 Petrobras, 125–26 Pew Research Center, 13 Philippines, 23, 51, 70, 114, 129, 194 pivot states, 115–20, 136, 140–41, 155, 165, 177, 178–79 Poland, 55 pollution, 104–5 population growth, 104 Portugal, 17 power grids, 169, 171 protectionism, 77–79 protectors, 128–30 Prussia, 167 Putin, Vladimir, 24, 54, 82, 137, 141, 182 Qatar, 48, 71 Rapaport, 132 Raytheon, 129 Reagan, Ronald, 65 “Red Dragon Rising: The Coming War with China” (board game), 170–71 referees, 133–35 regional development banks, 38 Research in Motion (RIM), 33 Resolution 1973, 192 Roach, Stephen, 12 rogue states, 123–25, 138–39 Roosevelt, Franklin, 42–43 Rosneft, 127 Royal Dutch Shell, 97 Rudd, Kevin, 203n Russia, 24, 28, 30, 54, 55, 69, 73, 77, 84, 102, 121, 122, 125, 141, 168, 169, 170, 177, 183, 203n in Arctic Council, 96, 97 climate change and, 94 default on debt in, 37 energy exported by, 30 Georgia’s war with, 32, 141 grain exports banned by, 102 Internet in, 88, 89, 91, 92 nuclear program of, 59 oil prices and, 141 Peace Corps unwelcome in, 90–91 state capitalism in, 78 suspicions of U.S. in, 91 Ukraine’s ties with, 54, 137–38, 141 water security in, 105 Russian Empire, 167, 182 Rwanda, 32, 106 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 9, 38 Sata, Michael, 119 Saudi Arabia, 26, 30, 33, 48, 67, 69, 71, 114, 128, 155, 182 foreign land purchased by, 102 grain production in, 104 Internet in, 92 local hegemony of, 175–76 oil of, 114 state capitalism in, 78 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 18 Schengen Agreement, 18, 176 Schularick, Moritz, 158 Scowcroft, Brent, 163 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of, 13, 32, 64, 188 Serageldin, Ismail, 104 shadow states, 136–38 Shanghai Cooperation Organization, 122 Shaw, George Bernard, 37 Shi Lang, 23 Siemens, 127 Sierra Leone, 130 Singapore, 51, 71, 120, 121–22, 194 Singh, Manmohan, 26 smart grids, 72, 73 Social Security, 12, 189 Somalia, 14, 183 Sony, 75 Soreq Nuclear Research Center, 207n South Africa, 10, 26, 28, 72, 131, 177 biofuel production in, 100 South Asia, water scarcity in, 104 South China Sea, 23, 129 Southeast Asia, 59, 102 urbanization in, 99 Southern African Development Community, 120 South Korea, 15, 51, 55, 70, 71, 114, 129, 165, 173, 208n foreign land purchased by, 102 U.S. beef banned by, 103 sovereign wealth funds, 125 Soviet Union, 39, 44, 45, 47, 52, 53, 54, 72–73, 138, 168, 173, 186 coup attempt in, 92 efforts at reform in, 179–80 nuclear program of, 57 post–World War II reconstruction needed in, 39–40 shifting borders of, 182 Spain, 17, 169 separatist movements in, 181 Spiegel, Der, 8 Spielberg, Steven, 119 Splinternet, 90 Standard Chartered Bank, 3 State Development & Investment Corporation (SDIC), 129, 140 state-owned companies, 78–79, 119, 125, 139–40, 160 in China, 59, 61, 86, 144, 148 Stoltenberg, Jens, 9 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), 59 Strategy & Tactics, 170–71 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 27 Stuxnet, 56, 72–73 Sudan, 32, 106, 119 Sweden, in Arctic Council, 96–97 Syria, 48, 69, 112, 117, 123, 175, 183 Taiwan, 51, 114, 129, 172–73 as exposed state, 136 Tanzania, 106 tariffs, 79 Tata Group, 128 TD-SCDMA, 86 tech bubble, 64 telecommunications standards, 33, 83–94 terrorism, 3, 70, 93, 116, 128, 170, 183 Texas, 47, 48 Thailand, 51, 71, 114, 124, 168–69, 194 collapse of currency in, 37 multinationals in, 80 water security in, 105 3G mobile phone standard, 86 Three Gorges Dam, 105 Tiananmen Square, 53, 59, 148, 163 Time, 75 trade, global, 68, 70–71, 76–80, 178, 193–95 protectionist trend in, 77–79 trade balances, 32 trade routes, 15, 24, 59 Trans-Pacific Partnership, 71 Treasury Department, U.S., 38 Tunisia, 19, 69, 112, 175 Turkey, 3, 25, 26, 55, 69, 76, 141, 148, 155, 161, 166, 179, 187 as pivot state, 117 Turkmenistan, 54 Twitter, 91 Uganda, 72, 106 Ukraine, 54, 141, 177 as shadow state, 137–38 United Arab Emirates, 26, 48, 71 United Nations, 44, 89, 97, 104, 131 Food and Agriculture Organization, 100, 103 General Assembly of, 21, 44 Security Council of, 3, 25, 44, 57, 192 World Food Program of, 103 United States, 16, 21, 25, 30, 39, 44, 47, 50, 122, 148–49, 170, 182 in Arctic Council, 96–97 as Asian power, 70–71 beef production in, 103, 105 biofuels produced in, 100 United States (cont.)

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The family lore is that my parents stayed up all that night in terror for themselves and for me. All throughout my college years, I would occasionally look over my shoulder to see if there was a vapor trail in the sky pointing the way to atomic apocalypse. The history of the bomb is imprinted in our deepest reptilian brain; it is a history of fear, mutually assured destruction, and a blinding light followed by darkness. xi INTRODUCTION If the first sibling came out as the biggest bully that the world had ever seen, what of the next one to emerge on the world stage? I may not be the best person to answer this question. A neighbor of mine wrote one of the first antitelevision books, The Plug-in Drug, and for years my parents didn’t even allow me to watch the tube.

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All hyperlinks current as of October 1, 2010 197 INDEX Adobe Systems, 55 Adstar, 177 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 152, 158 Advertisement, 184nn12,15 bespoke futures and, 107 culture machine and, 175–177 stickiness and, 23, 31 unimodernism and, 52, 57, 59 Affordances, 183n4 bespoke futures and, 121, 124, 129, 136 stickiness and, 16–17, 24, 28–35 unimodernism and, 68, 75 Web n.0 and, 80–82, 90 Afghanistan, 100 African National Congress, 113 AfterSherrieLevine.com, 41–42 Agee, James, 40–42 Age of Aquarius, 159 Agribusiness, 4, 10 Airplanes, xiii Alessi, 64 Algorithms, 46, 144, 174–177 Allen, Paul, 164 “All You Need Is Love” (Beatles), 62 Al-Muhajiroun, 134 Al-Qaeda, 134 Altair personal computer, 161, 164 Alto personal computer, 162 Amazing Stories (comic book), 108–110 Amazon, 68, 99, 145 Amis, Kinsley, 32 Animation, 55–56, 58, 110, 118 Antiglobalization activists, 98 AOL, 9, 53, 99 Apartheid, 112–113 Apple, 144, 163–167, 172, 186n12 Appropriate scale, 57 Aquarians, 24, 152, 159, 168–169 description of term, xv Engelbart and, 144, 157–167 Kay and, 144, 157, 160–167, 195nn16,17 Nelson and, 168 networked computers and, xv Sutherland and, 160–161 Arcades, 15, 71 Architectural Forum magazine, 84 Ariadne, 11 Arnold, Matthew, 14 Ars Electronica, 169–170 Art nouveau, 44, 66 “As We May Think” (Bush), 149, 157 AT&T, 144, 195n10 Atari, 165 Atlantic Monthly, 149 Atomic age, 146 as catalyst, xi Cuban Missile Crisis and, xi description of, xv emergence of, xi–xii 198 Atomic age (continued) Hiroshima and, 100–101 Manhattan Project and, 150 mutually assured destruction and, xi terrorism and, 100–101 Avant-gardism, 31, 44, 61, 117–120, 133 Babbage, Charles, 149 Bakri Muhammad, Omar, 134–135 Bali, 100 Ballmer, Steve, 164 Balzac, Honoré de, 44 Banham, Reyner, 10 Barr, Alfred, 117–118 Bauhaus, 117 BBC, 10 Beatles, 54–55, 62 Bebop, 25–27 Beirut, Michael, 102 Bellamy, Edward, 108 Benjamin, Walter, 88 Berg, Alban, 45 Berlin Wall, xvi, 85, 97, 99, 104 Bernays, Edward L., 123–124 Berners-Lee, Tim, 144, 167–169, 175 Bespoke futures adopting future as client and, 110–113 anticipated technology and, 108–110 crafting, 113–116 design and, 102, 105–106, 110–111, 115–116, 119–120, 124–125, 137 downloading and, 97, 123, 132, 138 dynamic equilibrium and, 117–120 89/11 and, xvi, 97, 100–102, 105, 130 Enlightenment and, xvi, 129–139 information and, 98, 100–101, 124–126 lack of vision and, 106–108 markets and, 97–104, 118, 120, 127, 131–132, 137–138 MaSAI (Massively Synchronous Applications of the Imagination) and, xvi, 112, 120–123, 127, 193n32 199 modernists and, 105–108 mutants and, 105–108 networks and, 98–101, 108, 112–113, 116, 119–126, 133, 137 New Economy and, 97, 99, 104, 131, 138, 144–145, 190n3 participation and, 98–99, 120–121, 129 plutopian meliorism and, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 prosumers and, 120–121 reperceiving and, 112–113 R-PR (Really Public Relations) and, 123–127 scenario planning and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 simulation and, 98, 121, 124, 126–127 strange attractors and, xvi, 117–120, 192n27 technology and, 98–104, 107–113, 116, 119, 125–127, 131–133, 136–139 television and, 101, 108, 124, 127–129, 133–137 unfinish and, 127–129, 136 uploading and, 97, 120–123, 128–129, 132 Best use, 10, 13–15, 138 Bezos, Jeff, 145 Bible, 28, 137 BitTorrent, 92 Black Album, The (Jay Z), 55 Blade Runner (Scott), 107 Blogger, 177 Blogosphere, xvii bespoke futures and, 101 culture machine and, 175, 177 Facebook and, 81, 145, 180n2 stickiness and, 30, 34 Twitter and, 34, 180n2 unimodernism and, 49, 68 Web n.0 and, 80, 92–93 INDEX Bohème, La (Puccini), 61 Boing Boing magazine, 68–69 Bollywood, 62 Bourgeoisie, 31 Bowie, David, 62 Braque, Georges, 93 Breuer, Marcel, 45 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthèlme, 3 Brin, Sergey, 144, 174–176 Broadband technology, 9, 57 Brownian motion, 49 Burroughs, Allie Mae, 40–42 Burroughs, William, 52 Bush, Vannevar, 52, 194n6 culture machine and, 144, 147–152, 157 Engelbart and, 157 Memex and, 108, 149–151 Oppenheimer and, 150 systems theory and, 151 war effort and, 150–151 Business 2.0 magazine, 145 C3I , 146–147 Cabrini Green, 85 Calypso, 25–27 Cambodia, 107 Cambridge, 17, 36 “Can-Can” (“Orpheus in the Underworld”) (Offenbach), 62 Capitalism, 4, 13 bespoke futures and, 97–100, 103–105 Sears and, 103–105 stickiness and, 13 unimodernism and, 66, 75 Web n.0 and, 90 Capitulationism, 7, 24, 30, 182n1 Carnegie, Andrew, 166 Casablanca (film), 90 Cassette tapes, 2 CATIA 3–D software, 39 Cell phones, xiii, xvii, 17, 23, 42, 53, 56, 76, 101 Chaos theory, 117–120 Chaplin, Charlie, 45 Cheney, Dick, 99 China, 104, 107 Christians, 135 Cicero, 47 Cinema, 8, 10 micro, 56–60 stickiness and, 15 unimodernism and, 47, 52, 56–60, 63, 71 Clarke, Arthur C., 174 CNN, 58 Cobain, Kurt, 62 Code breaking, 17–18 Cold war, 101 Cole, Nat King, 62 Commercial culture, 4–5, 8 bespoke futures and, 98, 102, 108, 120, 132–134 culture machine and, 153–156, 167, 170, 172, 175–177 copyright and, 54, 88–95, 123, 164, 166, 173, 177 Mickey Mouse Protection Act and, 90 open source and, 36, 61, 69, 74–75, 91–92, 116, 121–126, 144, 170– 173, 177, 189n12 propaganda and, 124 scenario planning and, 111–119 stickiness and, 23, 28–31, 37 unimodernism and, 41, 69 Web n.0 and, 82–86 Commercial syndrome, 85–86 Communism, 97–98, 103 Compact discs (CDs), 2, 48, 53 Complex City (Simon), 39 “Computable Numbers, On” (Turing), 18 Computer Data Systems, 145 Computers, xi.

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Intergalactic Computer Network and, 108, 152, 168 Machine Histories, 64 Macintosh computer, 165–167 Macrotelevision, 56–60 Madonna, 63 Madrid, 100, 130 Mahabharata, 28 MAKE magazine, 68–69 MAKER Faires, 68–69 Manchester Mark I computer, 18 “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (Licklider), 151 Mandela, Nelson, 113 Mandiberg, Michael, 41–42 Manhattan Project, 150 Manual labor, 3 Many Eyes, 126, 193n37 Mao Zedong, 86 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 44 Markets bespoke futures and, 97–104, 118, 207 INDEX Markets (continued) 120, 127, 131–132, 137–138 capitalism and, 13, 66, 75, 97–100, 104–105 (see also Commercial culture) culture machine and, 156, 161–167, 173 empowerment and, 8 entrepreneurs and, 99, 109, 156–157, 174 FIRE, 99–100 Global Business Network (GBN) and, 113, 115, 191n18 Great Depression and, 107 Greed and, 100 Internet television and, 9 mass culture and, 184n16 NASDAQ, 99 New Economy and, 97, 99, 104, 131, 138, 144–145, 190n3 prosumers and, 120–121 retail, 103–105 scenario planning and, 111–119, 191n19, 192n20 September 11, 2001 and, 99–101, 130 Slow Food and, 5–6 social campaigns and, 190n8 stickiness and, 13, 16, 24, 30–33, 37 technofabulism and, 99–100 textile, 11 unimodernism and, 45, 48, 58–59, 71, 75 Web n.0 and, 81, 83, 86, 90 Martha Stewart Living magazine, 69 MaSAI (Massively Public Applications of the Imagination), xvi, 112, 120–123, 127, 193nn32 Masai tribe, 193n32 Mashing, 25, 54–55, 57, 74 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 71, 117, 144, 148, 151 Matrix, The (film series), 39 Mau, Bruce, 55–56, 102, 190n8 Mauchly, John, 148 McDonald’s, 5 McLuhan, Marshall, 2, 14, 116 Meaningfulness, xvi, 173 bespoke futures and, 119, 123, 128– 129, 133 categorization of, 29–30 defining, 27–29 disrupting flow and, 23–24 Enlightenment and, 129–139 play and, 32–34 power and, 32–34 stickiness and, 14, 17, 20 (see also Stickiness) toggling and, 33–34, 43, 102, 197n30 tweaking and, 32–35, 185nn22,23 unimodernism and, 42, 67, 77 uploading and, xvi, 29 Web n.0 and, 79 Mechanical calculator, 149 Mechanization, 44–45 Medium specificity, 56–57 Meliorism, xvi, 127–129, 133, 137–138 Melodium label, 27 Memex, 108, 149–151 Memory, 46–47, 60, 67, 71, 109, 149, 194nn1,6 Metcalfe, Bob, 86–87 Metro Pictures gallery, 41 Michnik, Adam, 104 Mickey Mouse, 65, 88–90 Mickey Mouse Protection Act, 90 Microcinema, 56–60 Microfilm, 149–150 Microsoft, 144–145, 163–166, 172–173, 175, 196n21 Middle-class, 44 Mindfulness, 77, 79, 183n6 bespoke futures and, 123, 129 capitalism and, 4, 13, 66, 75, 90, 103–105 208 INDEX Mindfulness (continued) disrupting flow and, 23–24 info-triage and, xvi, 20–23, 121, 132, 143 stickiness and, 14, 17, 20–24, 27–29, 42 Mobility, 81–82, 128 Modders, 69–70 “Model B32” (Breuer), 45 Modernism, 36–37, 105–108 Modern Times (film), 45 Moore, Gordon, 156 Moore’s law, 156, 195n13 Morpheus, 92 Moses, Robert, 84 Motorola, 116 Moulin Rouge (Luhrmann), 60–63 Mouse, 158–159 MP3s, 2, 27 MS-DOS, 165–166 MTV, 31, 63 Murakami, Takashi, 49 Murger, Henri, 61 Musée du quai Branly, 66 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 42, 117 Music bebop, 25–27 calypso, 35–37 hip-hop, 53–54, 61 jazz, 25–27, 160 Napster and, 54, 92 remixing and, 53–55 (see also Remixing) Mutually assured destruction, xi MySpace, 81 Napoleonic Wars, 21 Napster, 54, 92 Narrative, 2, 8 bespoke futures and, 108, 110, 129–139 blogosphere and, xvii, 30, 34, 49, 68, 80, 92–93, 101, 175, 177, 181n7 capitulationism and, 7, 24, 182n1 209 development of computer and, 143– 145, 174, 178 Enlightenment Electrified and, 129–139 gaming and, 188n25 isotypes and, 44, 125, 193n34 negative dialectics and, 29–30 Oprah and, xv, 180nn3,4 samizdat and, 59 storyline and, 59 unimodernism and, 58–59, 67, 71, 76 NASA, 51, 123 NASDAQ, 99 National Center for Biotechnology Information, 81 “Nature Boy” (Cole), 62 Nelson, Ted, 145, 168 Net.art, 52 Netscape, 169 Networks bespoke futures and, 98–101, 108, 112–113, 116, 119–126, 133, 137 commercial, 4–5 (see also Commercial culture) culture machine and, 143–144, 152, 167–168, 172–175, 178 development of computer, 8–9 flexibility of digital, 10 Global Business Network (GBN) and, 113, 115, 191n18 Intergalactic Computer Network and, 108, 152, 168 Metcalfe’s corollary and, 86–87 patio potato and, 10, 13 peer-to-peer, 15, 54, 92, 116, 126 stickiness and, 16–17, 22, 24, 29–36 unimodernism and, 39, 47–48, 54–57, 60, 64–65, 68–69, 73–74 Web n.0 and, 79–95 Neurath, Otto, 44, 125 New Economy, 190n3 bespoke futures and, 97, 99, 104, 131, 138 INDEX New Economy (continued) dot-com bubble and, 145 fantasies of, 104 Hustlers and, 144 Newtonian physics, 118 New York City, 25–26, 84–86, 100, 130 New Yorker, 135 New York Museum of Modern Art, 42 New York Times, 61, 103 NeXT Cube, 167–168 Nirvana, 62 NLS (oN-Line System), 160 Nobel Prize, 156 Norman, Don, 16 Nouvel, Jean, 66 Noyce, Philip, 156 “Nude on a Red Background” (Léger), 45 Obama, Barack, 31 Odyssey (Homer), 28, 94–95 Offenbach, Jacques, 62 Ogilvy, Jay, 113–114 Open source, 36, 189n12 Creative Commons and, 90–93, 123, 173 development of computer and, 144, 170–173, 177 GNU and, 171, 173 Linux and, 75, 169–173, 197n27 Raymond and, 172 Stallman and, 170–171 Torvalds and, 144, 167–173 unimodernism and, 61, 69, 74–75 Web n.0 and, 116, 121–126 Opera, 40, 45, 60–63, 187n18 Oppenheimer, J.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Although technical, some of von Neumann and Morgenstern’s ideas eventually filtered into the mainstream, and so resonated with the public imagination that the two researchers found themselves on the front page of the New York Times in 1946 under the headline, “Mathematical Theory of Poker Is Applied to Business Problems.”12 Game theory, though, was about much more than just business. Most famously, perhaps, RAND economists and mathematicians developed the doctrine of nuclear deterrence by mutually assured destruction (MAD) under the guidance of then defense secretary Robert McNamara (himself an economist by training). Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior is, in concentrated form, the story of how the new mathematical science of economics could operate and change the way the world works in arenas small (poker) and earth shattering (thermonuclear war).

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Morgenstern concluded that if “chess is the Russian national pastime and poker is ours, we ought to be more skillful than they in applying its precepts.”13 This overlap between some quite esoteric mathematical game theory and the real world reflects the overall argument of The Inner Lives of Markets: von Neumann and Morgenstern took something instinctual and messy and provided a clear path forward using logical and coherent math. Arcane mathematical, economic reasoning found fertile ground in real-world interactions like poker and mutually assured destruction. Their Theory of Games gave precision to the way we think about strategy—and also the way we strategize. But this begs the question of why right-leaning RAND and left-leaning Cowles each turned to math. One reason it was seen as useful at both organizations is that, unlike words, mathematical theorizing presented what seemed a coldly objective analysis, devoid of political considerations.

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.), 164–165 kidneys sales, 160–161 transplant exchange algorithm, 162–166 King Rat (Clavell), 175–177 Klein, Joel, 143–144 labor markets, 48, 64–66 labor theory of value, 23 ladies night at bars, 123 laundry service platform, 112 lemon markets theory, 44–51, 58–59, 64, 112 “Let Them Eat Pollution” (article), 167 life insurance, 1840s, 153 Lincoln Elementary, 1–2 Little, I. M. D., 22 Liu, Qihong, 128–129 Lyft car service, 173 MAD (doctrine of nuclear deterrence by mutually assured destruction), 26 mail-in-bids, for auctions, 83–84 “The Market for Lemons” (Akerlof), 44–51, 64 market frictions, 169–174 market fundamentalists, 16–17 market insights, 14–15 market makers, 107–110, 118–121 markets 18th-century book, 90–91 competitive, 35, 124–126, 172–174, 180–181 design, 133, 137–142 dysfunction of, 36, 75–77, 143 economics of platform, 107–112 equilibrium, 33 fixed-price versus auctions, 96–97 food bank system, 154–160 image problem of, 152–153 labor, 48, 64–66 lemon, 44–51, 58–59, 64, 112 multisided, 108–112, 118–124 one-sided, 108–112 in POW camps, 4, 7–13, 175–177 rules for platform, 112–117 school choice in Sweden, 151–152 selfishness in, 177–179 technology and, 169–173 trade with uninformed parties, 166–169 transformation of, 13–17 two-sided, 108–112, 118–124 See also auctions; economics; platforms Marx, Karl, 20, 23 matching problems middle school dance partners, 131–132, 134, 137–140 student to school, 138–139, 141–142, 143–149 mathematics algebraic topology, 44–45 economic theory transformed by, 15, 19–27 game theory, 136 general equilibrium model, 29, 31–34, 36–37, 40, 45, 76 kidney exchange algorithm, 163–165 models, 20, 24–25, 30 in real world economics, 35–37 Samuelson connecting economics and, 28–29 Shapley-Gale algorithm, 137–140 Matsuzaka, Daisuke, 79–81, 87–89 Maxwell, James Clark, 24 McManus, Brian, 73–75 mechanism design, 133, 134 medical residency programs, 140 merchant from Prato, 105–107 middle school dance-matching, 131–132, 134, 137–140 Milgrom, Paul, 70–71, 98, 102–103 mobile market platform, 116 modeling applied theory, 45, 50, 75–76 competition, 35, 166, 172–173 congestion pricing, 86, 94 dysfunction of, 75–77 economic, 15, 24–29 mathematical, 20, 24–25, 30 reality-based economic, 35–37, 45, 49–51, 141 models auction, 82–84 eBay, 43, 46, 48 general equilibrium, 31–34, 36–37, 40, 76 lemons, 44–51, 58–59, 64, 112 Solow, 35 See also platforms; signaling model Moldovanu, Benny, 90–91 money burning costs, 70–71 money-back guarantees, 69–71 Morals & Markets: The Development of Life Insurance in the United States (Zelizer), 153 Morgenstern, Oskar, 25–27 mortality rates, of Japanese vs German POW camps, 10–13 MS-13 gang, 67 multisided markets, 108–112, 118–124 multisided platform, 14 multiunit Vickrey auction, 93 Murphy, Frank, 9 Nasar, Sylvia, 29 Nash, John, 32 National Archives’ World War II Prisoners of War Data File, 11 network externalities, 121–124 New England Program for Kidney Exchange, 164–165 New York Department of Education, 143–144, 145, 149 Nobel Prize in Economics, 34 See also Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel noncustomers, paying, 123–124 Nordstrom’s return policy, 69–70 no-risk money-back guarantees, 69–71 normal good, 180 no-trade rule, Japanese POW camps, 10–13 nuclear deterrence, 26 Omidyar, Pierre, 39–40 one-sided markets, 108–112 online retail, 41–43, 52–55 optimized efficiency, 85–86, 133 organ sales, 160–161 organizations, sick, 142–143 out-of-town bids, for auctions, 83–84 Pareto, Vilfredo, 20, 21–22 Pareto efficiency, 22 Penny Black stamp, 82–84 Percy P.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

How about a nice game of chess? The reason that there is no winner in Global Thermonuclear War is that both sides have amassed enough weapons to destroy the other side and so any nuclear conflict would quickly escalate to mutually assured destruction (MAD). As a result, neither side has any incentive to use its weapons offensively or to disarm completely, leading to a stable, albeit tense, peace. Mutually assured destruction isn’t just a military model. A parallel in business is when companies amass large patent portfolios, but generally don’t use them on one another for fear of escalating lawsuits that could potentially destabilize all the companies involved.

…

That’s why it makes sense to consider conflict prevention measures like mediation, or, more generally, diplomacy (see win-win in Chapter 4 for some related mental models). If diplomacy by itself doesn’t work, though, there is another set of models to turn to, starting with deterrence, or using a threat to prevent (deter) an action by an adversary. Credible mutually assured destruction makes an excellent deterrent. But even one nuclear blast is so undesirable that simply the possession of a nuclear weapon has proven to be a powerful deterrent. For example, North Korea seemingly developed nuclear weapons to secure its survival as a state, despite being an authoritarian dictatorship with a well-documented history of human rights violations.

…

., 91 Kodak, 302–3, 308–10, 312 Koenigswald, Gustav Heinrich Ralph von, 50 Kohl’s, 15 Kopelman, Josh, 301 Korea, 229, 231, 235, 238 Kristof, Nicholas, 254 Krokodil, 49 Kruger, Justin, 269 Kuhn, Thomas, 24 Kutcher, Ashton, 121 labor market, 283–84 laggards, 116–17 landlords, 178, 179, 182, 188 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 132 large numbers, law of, 143–44 Latané, Bibb, 259 late majority, 116–17 lateral thinking, 201 law of diminishing returns, 81–83 law of diminishing utility, 81–82 law of inertia, 102–3, 105–8, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 129, 290, 296 law of large numbers, 143–44 law of small numbers, 143, 144 Lawson, Jerry, 289 lawsuits, 231 leadership, 248, 255, 260, 265, 271, 275, 276, 278–80 learned helplessness, 22–23 learning, 262, 269, 295 from past events, 271–72 learning curve, 269 Le Chatelier, Henri-Louis, 193 Le Chatelier’s principle, 193–94 left to their own devices, 275 Leibniz, Gottfried, 291 lemons into lemonade, 121 Lernaean Hydra, 51 Levav, Jonathan, 63 lever, 78 leverage, 78–80, 83, 115 high-leverage activities, 79–81, 83, 107, 113 leveraged buyout, 79 leveraging up, 78–79 Levitt, Steven, 44–45 Levitt, Theodore, 296 Lewis, Michael, 289 Lichtenstein, Sarah, 17 lightning, 145 liking, 216–17, 220 Lincoln, Abraham, 97 Lindy effect, 105, 106, 112 line in the sand, 238 LinkedIn, 7 littering, 41, 42 Lloyd, William, 37 loans, 180, 182–83 lobbyists, 216, 306 local optimum, 195–96 lock-in, 305 lock in your gains, 90 long-term negative scenarios, 60 loose versus tight, in organizational culture, 274 Lorenz, Edward, 121 loss, 91 loss aversion, 90–91 loss leader strategy, 236–37 lost at sea, 68 lottery, 85–86, 126, 145 low-context communication, 273–74 low-hanging fruit, 81 loyalists versus mercenaries, 276–77 luck, 128 making your own, 122 luck surface area, 122, 124, 128 Luft, Joseph, 196 LuLaRoe, 217 lung cancer, 133–34, 173 Lyautey, Hubert, 276 Lyft, ix, 288 Madoff, Bernie, 232 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 291 magnets, 194 maker’s schedule versus manager’s schedule, 277–78 Making of Economic Society, The (Heilbroner), 49 mammograms, 160–61 management debt, 56 manager’s schedule versus maker’s schedule, 277–78 managing to the person, 255 Manhattan Project, 195 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 201 manipulative insincerity, 264 man-month, 279 Mansfield, Peter, 291 manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), 15 margin of error, 154 markets, 42–43, 46–47, 106 failure in, 47–49 labor, 283–84 market norms versus social norms, 222–24 market power, 283–85, 312 product/market fit, 292–96, 302 secondary, 281–82 winner-take-most, 308 marriage: divorce, 231, 305 same-sex, 117, 118 Maslow, Abraham, 177, 270–71 Maslow’s hammer, xi, 177, 255, 297, 317 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 270–71 mathematics, ix–x, 3, 4, 132, 178 Singapore math, 23–24 matrices, 2 × 2, 125–26 consensus-contrarian, 285–86, 290 consequence-conviction, 265–66 Eisenhower Decision Matrix, 72–74, 89, 124, 125 of knowns and unknowns, 197–98 payoff, 212–15, 238 radical candor, 263–64 scatter plot on top of, 126 McCain, John, 241 mean, 146, 149, 151 regression to, 146, 286 standard deviation from, 149, 150–51, 154 variance from, 149 measles, 39, 40 measurable target, 49–50 median, 147 Medicare, 54–55 meetings, 113 weekly one-on-one, 262–63 Megginson, Leon, 101 mental models, vii–xii, 2, 3, 31, 35, 65, 131, 289, 315–17 mentorship, 23, 260, 262, 264, 265 mercenaries versus loyalists, 276–77 Merck, 283 merry-go-round, 108 meta-analysis, 172–73 Metcalfe, Robert, 118 Metcalfe’s law, 118 #MeToo movement, 113 metrics, 137 proxy, 139 Michaels, 15 Microsoft, 241 mid-mortems, 92 Miklaszewski, Jim, 196 Milgram, Stanley, 219, 220 military, 141, 229, 279, 294, 300 milkshakes, 297 Miller, Reggie, 246 Mills, Alan, 58 Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Dweck), 266 mindset, fixed, 266–67, 272 mindset, growth, 266–67 minimum viable product (MVP), 7–8, 81, 294 mirroring, 217 mission, 276 mission statement, 68 MIT, 53, 85 moats, 302–5, 307–8, 310, 312 mode, 147 Moltke, Helmuth von, 7 momentum, 107–10, 119, 129 Monday morning quarterbacking, 271 Moneyball (Lewis), 289 monopolies, 283, 285 Monte Carlo fallacy, 144 Monte Carlo simulation, 195 Moore, Geoffrey, 311 moral hazard, 43–45, 47 most respectful interpretation (MRI), 19–20 moths, 99–101 Mountain Dew, 35 moving target, 136 multiple discovery, 291–92 multiplication, ix, xi multitasking, 70–72, 74, 76, 110 Munger, Charlie, viii, x–xi, 30, 286, 318 Murphy, Edward, 65 Murphy’s law, 64–65, 132 Musk, Elon, 5, 302 mutually assured destruction (MAD), 231 MVP (minimum viable product), 7–8, 81, 294 Mylan, 283 mythical man-month, 279 name-calling, 226 NASA, 4, 32, 33 Nash, John, 213 Nash equilibrium, 213–14, 226, 235 National Football League (NFL), 225–26 National Institutes of Health, 36 National Security Agency, 52 natural selection, 99–100, 102, 291, 295 nature versus nurture, 249–50 negative compounding, 85 negative externalities, 41–43, 47 negative returns, 82–83, 93 negotiations, 127–28 net benefit, 181–82, 184 Netflix, 69, 95, 203 net present value (NPV), 86, 181 network effects, 117–20, 308 neuroticism, 250 New Orleans, La., 41 Newport, Cal, 72 news headlines, 12–13, 221 newspapers, 106 Newsweek, 290 Newton, Isaac, 102, 291 New York Times, 27, 220, 254 Nielsen Holdings, 217 ninety-ninety rule, 89 Nintendo, 296 Nobel Prize, 32, 42, 220, 291, 306 nocebo effect, 137 nodes, 118, 119 No Fly List, 53–54 noise and signal, 311 nonresponse bias, 140, 142, 143 normal distribution (bell curve), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 North Korea, 229, 231, 238 north star, 68–70, 275 nothing in excess, 60 not ready for prime time, 242 “now what” questions, 291 NPR, 239 nuclear chain reaction, viii, 114, 120 nuclear industry, 305–6 nuclear option, 238 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 305–6 nuclear weapons, 114, 118, 195, 209, 230–31, 233, 238 nudging, 13–14 null hypothesis, 163, 164 numbers, 130, 146 large, law of, 143–44 small, law of, 143, 144 see also data; statistics nurses, 284 Oakland Athletics, 289 Obama, Barack, 64, 241 objective versus subjective, in organizational culture, 274 obnoxious aggression, 264 observe, orient, decide, act (OODA), 294–95 observer effect, 52, 54 observer-expectancy bias, 136, 139 Ockham’s razor, 8–10 Odum, William E., 38 oil, 105–6 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 O’Neal, Shaquille, 246 one-hundred-year floods, 192 Onion, 211–12 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Darwin), 100 OODA loop, 294–95 openness to experience, 250 Operation Ceasefire, 232 opinion, diversity of, 205, 206 opioids, 36 opportunity cost, 76–77, 80, 83, 179, 182, 188, 305 of capital, 77, 179, 182 optimistic probability bias, 33 optimization, premature, 7 optimums, local and global, 195–96 optionality, preserving, 58–59 Oracle, 231, 291, 299 order, 124 balance between chaos and, 128 organizations: culture in, 107–8, 113, 273–80, 293 size and growth of, 278–79 teams in, see teams ostrich with its head in the sand, 55 out-group bias, 127 outliers, 148 Outliers (Gladwell), 261 overfitting, 10–11 overwork, 82 Paine, Thomas, 221–22 pain relievers, 36, 137 Pampered Chef, 217 Pangea, 24–25 paradigm shift, 24, 289 paradox of choice, 62–63 parallel processing, 96 paranoia, 308, 309, 311 Pareto, Vilfredo, 80 Pareto principle, 80–81 Pariser, Eli, 17 Parkinson, Cyril, 74–75, 89 Parkinson’s law, 89 Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson), 74–75 Parkinson’s law of triviality, 74, 89 passwords, 94, 97 past, 201, 271–72, 309–10 Pasteur, Louis, 26 path dependence, 57–59, 194 path of least resistance, 88 Patton, Bruce, 19 Pauling, Linus, 220 payoff matrix, 212–15, 238 PayPal, 72, 291, 296 peak, 105, 106, 112 peak oil, 105 Penny, Jonathon, 52 pent-up energy, 112 perfect, 89–90 as enemy of the good, 61, 89–90 personality traits, 249–50 person-month, 279 perspective, 11 persuasion, see influence models perverse incentives, 50–51, 54 Peter, Laurence, 256 Peter principle, 256, 257 Peterson, Tom, 108–9 Petrified Forest National Park, 217–18 Pew Research, 53 p-hacking, 169, 172 phishing, 97 phones, 116–17, 290 photography, 302–3, 308–10 physics, x, 114, 194, 293 quantum, 200–201 pick your battles, 238 Pinker, Steven, 144 Pirahã, x Pitbull, 36 pivoting, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 placebo, 137 placebo effect, 137 Planck, Max, 24 Playskool, 111 Podesta, John, 97 point of no return, 244 Polaris, 67–68 polarity, 125–26 police, in organizations and projects, 253–54 politics, 70, 104 ads and statements in, 225–26 elections, 206, 218, 233, 241, 271, 293, 299 failure and, 47 influence in, 216 predictions in, 206 polls and surveys, 142–43, 152–54, 160 approval ratings, 152–54, 158 employee engagement, 140, 142 postmortems, 32, 92 Potemkin village, 228–29 potential energy, 112 power, 162 power drills, 296 power law distribution, 80–81 power vacuum, 259–60 practice, deliberate, 260–62, 264, 266 precautionary principle, 59–60 Predictably Irrational (Ariely), 14, 222–23 predictions and forecasts, 132, 173 market for, 205–7 superforecasters and, 206–7 PredictIt, 206 premature optimization, 7 premises, see principles pre-mortems, 92 present bias, 85, 87, 93, 113 preserving optionality, 58–59 pressure point, 112 prices, 188, 231, 299 arbitrage and, 282–83 bait and switch and, 228, 229 inflation in, 179–80, 182–83 loss leader strategy and, 236–37 manufacturer’s suggested retail, 15 monopolies and, 283 principal, 44–45 principal-agent problem, 44–45 principles (premises), 207 first, 4–7, 31, 207 prior, 159 prioritizing, 68 prisoners, 63, 232 prisoner’s dilemma, 212–14, 226, 234–35, 244 privacy, 55 probability, 132, 173, 194 bias, optimistic, 33 conditional, 156 probability distributions, 150, 151 bell curve (normal), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 Bernoulli, 152 central limit theorem and, 152–53, 163 fat-tailed, 191 power law, 80–81 sample, 152–53 pro-con lists, 175–78, 185, 189 procrastination, 83–85, 87, 89 product development, 294 product/market fit, 292–96, 302 promotions, 256, 275 proximate cause, 31, 117 proxy endpoint, 137 proxy metric, 139 psychology, 168 Psychology of Science, The (Maslow), 177 Ptolemy, Claudius, 8 publication bias, 170, 173 public goods, 39 punching above your weight, 242 p-values, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 Pygmalion effect, 267–68 Pyrrhus, King, 239 Qualcomm, 231 quantum physics, 200–201 quarantine, 234 questions: now what, 291 what if, 122, 201 why, 32, 33 why now, 291 quick and dirty, 234 quid pro quo, 215 Rabois, Keith, 72, 265 Rachleff, Andy, 285–86, 292–93 radical candor, 263–64 Radical Candor (Scott), 263 radiology, 291 randomized controlled experiment, 136 randomness, 201 rats, 51 Rawls, John, 21 Regan, Ronald, 183 real estate agents, 44–45 recessions, 121–22 reciprocity, 215–16, 220, 222, 229, 289 recommendations, 217 red line, 238 referrals, 217 reframe the problem, 96–97 refugee asylum cases, 144 regression to the mean, 146, 286 regret, 87 regulations, 183–84, 231–32 regulatory capture, 305–7 reinventing the wheel, 92 relationships, 53, 55, 63, 91, 111, 124, 159, 271, 296, 298 being locked into, 305 dating, 8–10, 95 replication crisis, 168–72 Republican Party, 104 reputation, 215 research: meta-analysis of, 172–73 publication bias and, 170, 173 systematic reviews of, 172, 173 see also experiments resonance, 293–94 response bias, 142, 143 responsibility, diffusion of, 259 restaurants, 297 menus at, 14, 62 RetailMeNot, 281 retaliation, 238 returns: diminishing, 81–83 negative, 82–83, 93 reversible decisions, 61–62 revolving door, 306 rewards, 275 Riccio, Jim, 306 rise to the occasion, 268 risk, 43, 46, 90, 288 cost-benefit analysis and, 180 de-risking, 6–7, 10, 294 moral hazard and, 43–45, 47 Road Ahead, The (Gates), 69 Roberts, Jason, 122 Roberts, John, 27 Rogers, Everett, 116 Rogers, William, 31 Rogers Commission Report, 31–33 roles, 256–58, 260, 271, 293 roly-poly toy, 111–12 root cause, 31–33, 234 roulette, 144 Rubicon River, 244 ruinous empathy, 264 Rumsfeld, Donald, 196–97, 247 Rumsfeld’s Rule, 247 Russia, 218, 241 Germany and, 70, 238–39 see also Soviet Union Sacred Heart University (SHU), 217, 218 sacrifice play, 239 Sagan, Carl, 220 sales, 81, 216–17 Salesforce, 299 same-sex marriage, 117, 118 Sample, Steven, 28 sample distribution, 152–53 sample size, 143, 160, 162, 163, 165–68, 172 Sánchez, Ricardo, 234 sanctions and fines, 232 Sanders, Bernie, 70, 182, 293 Sayre, Wallace, 74 Sayre’s law, 74 scarcity, 219, 220 scatter plot, 126 scenario analysis (scenario planning), 198–99, 201–3, 207 schools, see education and schools Schrödinger, Erwin, 200 Schrödinger’s cat, 200 Schultz, Howard, 296 Schwartz, Barry, 62–63 science, 133, 220 cargo cult, 315–16 Scientific Autobiography and other Papers (Planck), 24 scientific evidence, 139 scientific experiments, see experiments scientific method, 101–2, 294 scorched-earth tactics, 243 Scott, Kim, 263 S curves, 117, 120 secondary markets, 281–82 second law of thermodynamics, 124 secrets, 288–90, 292 Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S., 228 security, false sense of, 44 security services, 229 selection, adverse, 46–47 selection bias, 139–40, 143, 170 self-control, 87 self-fulfilling prophecies, 267 self-serving bias, 21, 272 Seligman, Martin, 22 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 25–26 Semmelweis reflex, 26 Seneca, Marcus, 60 sensitivity analysis, 181–82, 185, 188 dynamic, 195 Sequoia Capital, 291 Sessions, Roger, 8 sexual predators, 113 Shakespeare, William, 105 Sheets Energy Strips, 36 Shermer, Michael, 133 Shirky, Clay, 104 Shirky principle, 104, 112 Short History of Nearly Everything, A (Bryson), 50 short-termism, 55–56, 58, 60, 68, 85 side effects, 137 signal and noise, 311 significance, 167 statistical, 164–67, 170 Silicon Valley, 288, 289 simulations, 193–95 simultaneous invention, 291–92 Singapore math, 23–24 Sir David Attenborough, RSS, 35 Skeptics Society, 133 sleep meditation app, 162–68 slippery slope argument, 235 slow (high-concentration) thinking, 30, 33, 70–71 small numbers, law of, 143, 144 smartphones, 117, 290, 309, 310 smoking, 41, 42, 133–34, 139, 173 Snap, 299 Snowden, Edward, 52, 53 social engineering, 97 social equality, 117 social media, 81, 94, 113, 217–19, 241 Facebook, 18, 36, 94, 119, 219, 233, 247, 305, 308 Instagram, 220, 247, 291, 310 YouTube, 220, 291 social networks, 117 Dunbar’s number and, 278 social norms versus market norms, 222–24 social proof, 217–20, 229 societal change, 100–101 software, 56, 57 simulations, 192–94 solitaire, 195 solution space, 97 Somalia, 243 sophomore slump, 145–46 South Korea, 229, 231, 238 Soviet Union: Germany and, 70, 238–39 Gosplan in, 49 in Cold War, 209, 235 space exploration, 209 spacing effect, 262 Spain, 243–44 spam, 37, 161, 192–93, 234 specialists, 252–53 species, 120 spending, 38, 74–75 federal, 75–76 spillover effects, 41, 43 sports, 82–83 baseball, 83, 145–46, 289 football, 226, 243 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 Spotify, 299 spreadsheets, 179, 180, 182, 299 Srinivasan, Balaji, 301 standard deviation, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error, 154 standards, 93 Stanford Law School, x Starbucks, 296 startup business idea, 6–7 statistics, 130–32, 146, 173, 289, 297 base rate in, 157, 159, 160 base rate fallacy in, 157, 158, 170 Bayesian, 157–60 confidence intervals in, 154–56, 159 confidence level in, 154, 155, 161 frequentist, 158–60 p-hacking in, 169, 172 p-values in, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 standard deviation in, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error in, 154 statistical significance, 164–67, 170 summary, 146, 147 see also data; experiments; probability distributions Staubach, Roger, 243 Sternberg, Robert, 290 stock and flow diagrams, 192 Stone, Douglas, 19 stop the bleeding, 234 strategy, 107–8 exit, 242–43 loss leader, 236–37 pivoting and, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 tactics versus, 256–57 strategy tax, 103–4, 112 Stiglitz, Joseph, 306 straw man, 225–26 Streisand, Barbra, 51 Streisand effect, 51, 52 Stroll, Cliff, 290 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 24 subjective versus objective, in organizational culture, 274 suicide, 218 summary statistics, 146, 147 sunk-cost fallacy, 91 superforecasters, 206–7 Superforecasting (Tetlock), 206–7 super models, viii–xii super thinking, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 surface area, 122 luck, 122, 124, 128 surgery, 136–37 Surowiecki, James, 203–5 surrogate endpoint, 137 surveys, see polls and surveys survivorship bias, 140–43, 170, 272 sustainable competitive advantage, 283, 285 switching costs, 305 systematic review, 172, 173 systems thinking, 192, 195, 198 tactics, 256–57 Tajfel, Henri, 127 take a step back, 298 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2, 105 talk past each other, 225 Target, 236, 252 target, measurable, 49–50 taxes, 39, 40, 56, 104, 193–94 T cells, 194 teams, 246–48, 275 roles in, 256–58, 260 size of, 278 10x, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 Tech, 83 technical debt, 56, 57 technologies, 289–90, 295 adoption curves of, 115 adoption life cycles of, 116–17, 129, 289, 290, 311–12 disruptive, 308, 310–11 telephone, 118–19 temperature: body, 146–50 thermostats and, 194 tennis, 2 10,000-Hour Rule, 261 10x individuals, 247–48 10x teams, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 terrorism, 52, 234 Tesla, Inc., 300–301 testing culture, 50 Tetlock, Philip E., 206–7 Texas sharpshooter fallacy, 136 textbooks, 262 Thaler, Richard, 87 Theranos, 228 thermodynamics, 124 thermostats, 194 Thiel, Peter, 72, 288, 289 thinking: black-and-white, 126–28, 168, 272 convergent, 203 counterfactual, 201, 272, 309–10 critical, 201 divergent, 203 fast (low-concentration), 30, 70–71 gray, 28 inverse, 1–2, 291 lateral, 201 outside the box, 201 slow (high-concentration), 30, 33, 70–71 super, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 systems, 192, 195, 198 writing and, 316 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 30 third story, 19, 92 thought experiment, 199–201 throwing good money after bad, 91 throwing more money at the problem, 94 tight versus loose, in organizational culture, 274 timeboxing, 75 time: management of, 38 as money, 77 work and, 89 tipping point, 115, 117, 119, 120 tit-for-tat, 214–15 Tōgō Heihachirō, 241 tolerance, 117 tools, 95 too much of a good thing, 60 top idea in your mind, 71, 72 toxic culture, 275 Toys “R” Us, 281 trade-offs, 77–78 traditions, 275 tragedy of the commons, 37–40, 43, 47, 49 transparency, 307 tribalism, 28 Trojan horse, 228 Truman Show, The, 229 Trump, Donald, 15, 206, 293 Trump: The Art of the Deal (Trump and Schwartz), 15 trust, 20, 124, 215, 217 trying too hard, 82 Tsushima, Battle of, 241 Tupperware, 217 TurboTax, 104 Turner, John, 127 turn lemons into lemonade, 121 Tversky, Amos, 9, 90 Twain, Mark, 106 Twitter, 233, 234, 296 two-front wars, 70 type I error, 161 type II error, 161 tyranny of small decisions, 38, 55 Tyson, Mike, 7 Uber, 231, 275, 288, 290 Ulam, Stanislaw, 195 ultimatum game, 224, 244 uncertainty, 2, 132, 173, 180, 182, 185 unforced error, 2, 10, 33 unicorn candidate, 257–58 unintended consequences, 35–36, 53–55, 57, 64–65, 192, 232 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), 306 unique value proposition, 211 University of Chicago, 144 unknown knowns, 198, 203 unknowns: known, 197–98 unknown, 196–98, 203 urgency, false, 74 used car market, 46–47 U.S.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

The superintelligence could proceed to polish off the rest of us at its leisure by commandeering every weapon, vehicle and machine with the facility for remote control. Or it could release deadly pathogens into the environment, plundering and replicating samples from research labs which store smallpox, mustard gas and whatever other neurotoxins we have lying around. Or it could take control of our nuclear weapons and execute the mutual assured destruction scenarios which we have managed (sometimes narrowly) to avoid ever since the beginning of the cold war. Humanity versus a fully fledged superintelligence with internet access would be like the Amish versus the US Army. How do I destroy thee? Let me count the ways . . . The Terminator scenario is not the worst thing we have to worry about.

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Today, while the world hangs on every utterance of Justin Bieber and the Kardashian family, relatively few of us even know the names of Vasili Arkhipov and Stanislav Petrov, two men who quite literally saved the world. Perhaps this survival illustrates our ingenuity. There was an ingenious logic in the repellent but effective doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). More likely we have simply been lucky. We have time to rise to the challenge of superintelligence – probably a few decades. However, it would be unwise to rely on that period of grace: a sudden breakthrough in machine learning or cognitive neuroscience could telescope the timing dramatically, and it is worth bearing in mind the powerful effect of exponential growth in the computing resource which underpins AI research and a lot of research in other fields too. 9.7 – It’s time to talk What we need now is a serious, reasoned debate about superintelligence – a debate which avoids the twin perils of complacency and despair.

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

‘The Bonn/Moscow Alliance: The War is Over’ (Der Spiegel, 23 July 1990) List of Abbreviations ABM Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty CBMs confidence-building measures CCP Chinese Communist Party CDU Christian Democratic Union of Germany (Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands) CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe CSU Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union) CTBT Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty DMZ De-Militarized Zone DRV Democratic Republic of Vietnam EC European Community EU European Union ERWs enhanced radiation warheads FBS forward-based systems FRC Foreign Relations Committee, US Senate FRG Federal Republic of Germany GDR German Democratic Republic GLCM ground-launched cruise missiles G7 Group of Seven HVA Main Directorate for Reconnaissance, GDR (Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung) ICBMs intercontinental ballistic missiles INFs intermediate-range nuclear forces MAD Mutual Assured Destruction MBFR mutual and balanced force reduction (talks) MFN Most Favoured Nation trade status MIRVs multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NORAD North American Aerospace Defense Command NSC National Security Council NSDD National Security Decision Directive NVA National People’s Army of the GDR (Nationale Volksarmee) PRC People’s Republic of China SALT Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SDI Strategic Defense Initiative SED Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) SLBMs submarine-launched ballistic missiles SPD Social Democratic Party of Germany (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) SRINFs shorter-range INFs UN United Nations List of Contributors James Cameron is a Stanton Research Fellow at Fundação Getulio Vargas in Brazil.

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He warned that stark ultimatums would ‘make it impossible for them to give in’; his preference was to ‘sit around a table and tell the Russians quietly’.6 Even though any summit was clearly a long way off, Reagan’s private letters to Soviet leaders were intended to establish some kind of personal rapport.7 George Shultz, secretary of state from 1982 to 1989, supported the president, believing that a two-pronged strategy of fortifying national strength while conducting limited and firm dialogue could yield ‘a more stable’, if still ‘competitive’, Soviet-American relationship.8 Reagan’s intellectual complexities were most evident in his approach to nuclear weapons. It is ironic that the president who advocated ‘peace through strength’ and authorized one of the biggest arms build-ups of the Cold War did not, at heart, believe in the nuclear option. He was convinced that the Pentagon’s deterrence doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was literally mad because the human cost of a major US-Soviet nuclear war would be annihilation. Many of Reagan’s advisers believed that he could never have brought himself to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. Since his days in Hollywood, Reagan held what has been described as a ‘visionary, even utopian’ belief in nuclear abolitionism.

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At their second meeting in Reykjavik in October 1986, this trust emboldened them into a passionate dialogue about a nuclear-free world. Even though pulling back from the brink of such a revolutionary step, much to the relief of their aides, the two men had clearly developed radically new conceptions of security. On his side, Reagan repudiated the traditional American doctrine of deterring war though Mutual Assured Destruction as literally mad: his Star Wars project (SDI) was intended to abolish nuclear weapons for the benefit of the world. Gorbachev, likewise, moved beyond security as a zero-sum game, benefiting one side only at the expense of the other, to talk about ‘sufficient security’ rather than superiority.

The Future of War by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Markoff, long peace, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, open economy, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, systematic bias, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, Valery Gerasimov, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, zero day

For the foreseeable future each side could eliminate the other as a modern industrial state. Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defense for much of that decade, argued that the two superpowers could impose ‘unacceptable damage,’ put at 25 per cent of population and 50 per cent of industry, on each other. Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) conveyed exactly what it was supposed to convey—destruction would be assured and mutual and certainly unacceptable. Contrary to what had been assumed, therefore, the system tended towards stability. This was not so much a deliberate policy choice but recognition of a condition which confirmed the risks involved in any attempt to achieve a decisive victory through a knockout blow.

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When he realised what he had done, and after arrest by the FBI for the hack, Lightman reached the embittered, dying scientist who had invented the programme to persuade him to give him the clue to turning it off. This was done seconds away from catastrophe. As WOPR was a learning machine it could realise that some games led to futility, which became a metaphor for mutual assured destruction. After this point was reached through a drawn game of tic-tac-toe the computer had the last line: ‘A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?’5 As with the doomsday machine in the earlier movies, the plot depended on a prior decision to give deterrence a form of automaticity that prevented human beings interrupting the launch sequence.

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.), 114–115 Lettres sur la Philosophie del’Histoire (Barot), 115 Levi, Michael, 272 Levy, Jack, 137 Lewis, Bernard, 181 liberalism, nationalism and, 46–47 See also war, liberal vision of Liberia, 172 Libya, xv, 174, 219, 250 Lieber, Francis, 30–31, 33 limited war, 30 Lincoln, Abraham, 37 Livermore, Thomas, 128 Locarno Treaties, 49 Long Peace, xi Low, David, 61 Ludendorff, Erich, 57 Luttwak, Edward, 217, 273 Lyall, Jason, 206–207 MacArthur, Douglas, 90 machine guns, 12, 14 MacMillan, Margaret, 43 MAD. See mutually assured destruction de Madariaga y Rojo, Salvador, 49–50, 84, 174 Malaysia, 169, 197 Mali, 172, 262 al-Maliki, Nouri, 269 The Man Who Ended War (Godfrey), 20 Manhattan Project, 71 Mao Zedong, 122, 195, 203 Master of the World (Verne), 20 Mattis, James, 223 McConnell, Mike, 234 McCune, Emma, 214–215 McFate, Montgomery, 195 McMaster, H.

The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 by Robert Service

Able Archer 83, active measures, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Chicago School, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

His technical advisers – Richard Allen, Fred Iklé and William Van Cleave – had always known otherwise. Their words failed to hit home until Reagan made his own enquiries.6 He learned to his horror that America could not prevent a nuclear ‘first strike’. The Americans could only retaliate – which would mean that they would blow Moscow to bits: this was the logic of ‘mutually assured destruction’. The problem was that the entire planet would suffer from blast, fire, radiation and smoke that would kill hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions. America too would be devastated, and Reagan found little consolation in the thought that the Russians would suffer an equal calamity.

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Mike Beaver, his spokesman, claimed that it was Brylcreem that gave him the dark gloss.22 There was an underestimation of Reagan’s ultimate purposes even at high levels in his own administration. National Security Adviser Richard Allen sought to rectify the situation by spreading the word that the President was serious about making nuclear war impossible.23 Reagan had been talking about ‘defensive concepts’ since 1973. Hating the idea of mutually assured destruction, he searched for a way of protecting America from the threat of nuclear holocaust. Among those who knew his thoughts were theoretical physicist Edward Teller and President Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget Director Caspar Weinberger, and after entering the White House he continued to talk about possibilities with them as well as with Ed Meese, Martin Anderson and Richard Allen.24 Meese held some exploratory meetings, and Reagan in early 1982 instructed the National Security Council staff to explore ways of moving beyond traditional defence strategy.

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He banked on impressing on all NATO countries that they would risk estrangement from Washington if they failed to show the same toughness.25 As he drafted his Christmas message to the American people, Poland remained close to his heart: ‘We can’t let this revolution against Communism fail without offering a hand.’26 Thatcher expressed her support but other NATO leaders were more guarded in their statements.27 Even the Vatican took a cautious view. Cardinal Casaroli assured Reagan in December 1981 that ‘the time was not yet ripe for major change in Eastern Europe’. Reagan explained his general strategy as moving beyond the constraints of mutually assured destruction towards big reductions in the number of weapons on both sides.28 Casaroli in the same year was intervening with the Kremlin frequently on the Polish question.29 Neither Pope nor General Secretary wished to see violent trouble in Warsaw. John Paul II made his second papal visit to Poland in August 1983.

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

On a planet of more than 6 billion people, there have to be thousands and thousands of lost souls ready and willing to detonate one of those weapons in a crowded urban center. How long before those two sets intersect? That driver with the rigged SUV isn’t going to be deterred by the conventional logic of détente-era nuclear politics. Mutually assured destruction isn’t much of a deterrent to him. Mutually assured destruction, in fact, sounds like a pretty good outcome. Game theory has always had trouble accounting for players with no rational self-interest, and the theories of nuclear deterrence are no exception. And once the bomb goes off, there’s no second line of defense—no vaccines or quarantines to block off the worst-case scenario.

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page 254 But if the trends of asymmetric warfare continue The one thing we can do now to prevent such a dark future is to radically reduce, if not eliminate, the current stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the world. The United States alone has around 10,000 weapons in its active arsenal. This is madness in an age of asymmetric warfare, where mutually assured destruction is meaningless. (It was madness in the cold war too, but for different reasons.) If all the nuclear powers agreed to limit their stockpiles to no more than ten weapons per country—thereby reducing the total number of weapons in the world from 20,000 to less than a hundred—we would reduce by more than an order of magnitude the risk that a weapon would fall into the wrong hands.

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

A few idealistic voices—like Freeman Dyson’s—suggested that nonworking nuclear weapons might be the solution to everyone’s problems. More realistic voices answered that one-sided disarmament in an armed world was bad policy, and that mutually assured destruction (with the famous acronym MAD) had prevented nuclear war for over fifty years. So the question was, how would you know you could mutually assure destruction unless you tested the weapons? And if you needed to test the weapons, how could you sign a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty? The arms controller Jasons had done scattered studies on every stage of the test ban arguments: on seismic verification of underground tests in the 1960s, and on other signatures of nuclear explosions in the 1970s and 1980s.

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Christofilos said this system would transmit six words per minute. He figured it would cost $138 million. Such an uninformative one-way signal is essentially a beeper; Jasons call it a “bell-ringer.” “The signals would be only of emergency-type signals, like ‘Go to hell,’” said Ruina. Or, said a Jason, “‘My God, we’ve an atomic attack. Go and mutually assure destruction.’” Christofilos wrote around eight Jason reports on Bassoon/Sanguine. They were all classified confidential or secret. He seems to have worked alone on them; the reports list no other authors. The Jasons nevertheless all know about this project—it’s one of the few they mention without being asked—though they are vague on the details, either because they don’t know them or because they don’t remember which ones are classified.

The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches by Marshall Brain

Amazon Web Services, basic income, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, digital map, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, Garrett Hardin, income inequality, job automation, knowledge worker, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Stephen Hawking, Tragedy of the Commons, working poor

And Russia has about the same. Each warhead can destroy an entire city, killing millions of people. Why do we have all of these missiles, which pose an immediate existential threat to the entire ecosystem of the planet as well as our own species? We call it the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. "Mutually Assured Destruction" - MAD - even the name sounds like we are insane. Yet this is the best idea we have been able to come up with as a species for dealing with nuclear bombs. And many other countries have warheads as well that they could unleash at any moment for any insane reason. In addition, we worry that terrorists will get hold of a nuclear device and detonate it in a major city, killing millions.

The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

MAYBE REAGAN WAS playing four-dimensional chess, though more likely it was just a happy accident, but while he was cutting planetary science to the bone, and then shaving bone to the marrow, and then just sort of idly needling around in there to see which bits of gooey tissue NASA could do without, the president was also funding a secret space program that would eventually pay Apollo-level technological dividends and enable planetary exploration for the next two decades.109 It was called the Strategic Defense Initiative and, as envisioned, would be a missile defense shield designed to deflect or destroy an incoming Soviet nuclear strike.110 The idea was to nullify the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which asserted that if Ivan launched nukes at Uncle Sam (or vice versa), it would be suicide because the other side would retaliate with everything it’s got.111, 112 The Strategic Defense Initiative, went the argument, would deter the Soviets from attacking because we would survive the onslaught unscathed.

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The Mariner camera couldn’t capture animals scurrying about, of course, but it might give us the broad strokes of what the die-hard creatures of cruel, cold, crimson Mars were up against.322 So while the theoretical mattered, a lot of Gavin’s research required reading about the practical, and he zeroed in on the Minuteman 1 intercontinental ballistic missile program. Now there was a program where reliability mattered! And not only to aerospace engineers, who had a financial interest in flying solid hardware, but also to the survival of the human race, which had gone all in on the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. The Minutemen had to launch on command the first time, every time; they were, after all, the only thing standing between peace and the mine-shaft gap. The only difference between the Minuteman and Mariner, from Tom’s perspective, was total hardware lifetime: a Minuteman had a very short-duration mission, launch to flash.

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“Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI),” Atomic Heritage Foundation, last modified July 18, 2018, https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/strategic-defense-initiative-sdi. 111.A. Wellerstein, “Why Build So Many Nukes? Factors Behind the Size of the Cold War Stockpile” (presentation, Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle: MIT Faculty and Nuclear Arms Reduction, Cambridge, MA, May 2011), http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/235/wallslides.pdf. Mutually Assured Destruction, of course, required both countries to build ever-growing arsenals of increasingly sophisticated doomsday weaponry, keep them on constant alert, and have them pointed perpetually at each other, because if you couldn’t absolutely annihilate your opponent, destruction was not mutually assured.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

Although the Cold War involved near-misses, most notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the Americans and the Soviets gradually came to understand each other’s signals. Eventually each was able to read the other’s nuclear grammar fluently. After 1962 the two sides set up a nuclear hotline and even agreed to exchanges of personnel so that they could minimise the risk they would stumble into war. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction worked because it was based on an understanding between two highly organised actors. Russia and the United States have both cut their stockpiles of nuclear weapons drastically since the end of the Cold War. Today their arsenals stand at roughly a tenth of where they were at their peak.

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Suppose also that you knew the identity of the attacker. Would a military response be merited? If not, why not? If so, where do you stop? The line between reality and virtual reality is blurring. Some of America’s best strategists have been working on the problem for almost a decade. They have yet to come up with a clear doctrine. Mutually assured destruction does not work, yet nothing has emerged to take its place. The US Cyber Command believes the next global war will start in cyberspace. Doubtless they are talking up their own book. But they are right to worry that the temptation to strike by stealth is irresistible on a battlefield in which there are no rules of engagement.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

So long as everyone with a huge portfolio of unexamined, overlapping, generous patents was competing with similarly situated manufacturers, there was a mutually assured destruction — a kind of detente represented by cross-licensing deals for patent portfolios. But the rise of the patent troll changed all that. Patent trolls don't make products. They make lawsuits. They buy up the ridiculous patents of failed companies and sue the everloving hell out of everyone they can find, building up a war-chest from easy victories against little guys that can be used to fund more serious campaigns against larger organizations. Since there are no products to disrupt with a countersuit, there's no mutually assured destruction. If a shakedown artist can buy up some bogus patents and use them to put the screws to you, then it's only a matter of time until the same grifters latch onto the innumerable "agreements" that your company has formed with a desperate dot-bomb looking for an exit strategy.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

It is not clear whether Albert Wohlstetter ever came to regard himself as a neoconservative, but he and his students merged more or less seamlessly with this movement because of his dark view of the threat posed by the Soviet Union. He did not accept the received wisdom of the 1960s and 1970s that mutual assured destruction (MAD) would be sufficient to deter the Soviet Union. Wohlstetter argued that the threat to wipe out tens or hundreds of millions of civilians was both immoral and noncredible. He noted that with increasing ICBM accuracies and the deployment of multiple warheads, a so-called counterforce war might one day become thinkable—for example, if the Soviets launched a first strike on American nuclear bases, wiping out the bulk of U.S. land-based nuclear forces and holding back enough weapons to deter a submarine-based counterstrike on cities.

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.: as instrument of foreign policy, 36, 62-64; limits of, 181-82, 188-89; role of, in Cold War, 59 Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), 147-48, 153-54 Millennium Challenge Corporation, H9> 153 Millennium Development Goals, 142, 2iin 33 Milosevic, Slobodan, 42, 136 MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles), 35 Mises, Ludwigvon, 39 modernity, philosophical crisis of, 22 modernization, 54, 57, 139; in Japan, 129; and jihadism, 74; and political development, 125-26 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 15, 16-17, 18-19, 2 °> 37 multilateralism, 11,64-65, 153-54, 163, 173; in Asia, 174-75 multi-multilateralism, 158, 168-69, 172, 2i5n2 222 Murray, Charles, 18-19, 2 ° Muslims, 69-70; cultural diversity of, 75. See also jihadists mutual assured destruction (MAD), 33 Myroie, Laurie, 2031121 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 85 National Democratic Institute (NDI), 150 National Endowment for Democracy (NED), 134, 137, 150, 187 national greatness, 42-43 National Interest, 20, 40 National Security Strategy of the United States (NSS), 3, 81-83, 88 > IOI » io 4> 142, 184, 2oi-2nn nation-building, 9-10, 63-64, 131, 151-52; George W.

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

To address the problem of multiple Nash equilibria, the obvious line of attack is to find grounds for ruling out some of these equilibria as inferior. Selten argued that some equilibria are inferior because they can only emerge when players make threats which are not credible. For example, the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of nuclear deterrence relies on nuclear powers threatening catastrophic retaliation in response to a nuclear attack. But the threat is not credible if the recipient of the threat does not believe it would be carried out. In Dr Strangelove the Russians designed their Doomsday machine to trigger catastrophic retaliation automatically and irrevocably once an attack had been detected, removing any possibility of non-retaliation and hence making their threat completely credible.fn3 In business, a monopoly firm in a particular market will often loudly threaten a price war to any firm considering entering the market as a competitor.

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His career reads like that of a Grade-A Cold War defence hawk. From 1948 to 1953 he worked for the Marshall Plan and then the White House; after that he had stints at RAND and various consultancy jobs in Washington drawing on his expertise in military strategy. Although it was John von Neumann who invented the infamous nuclear war jargon ‘mutually assured destruction’ (largely because he liked the acronym MAD), it was Schelling who became a MAD expert. Schelling was close to some of the most influential figures in the Cold War. In his day job as an economics professor at Harvard he co-taught a course on foreign policy with one of the dominant minds behind post-war US foreign policy, Henry Kissinger.

…

objection, 107, 119–20 Friedman, Milton, 4–5, 56, 69, 84, 88, 126, 189 awarded Nobel Prize, 132 and business responsibility, 2, 152 debate with Coase at Director’s house, 50, 132 as dominant Chicago thinker, 50, 132 on fairness and justice, 60 flawed arguments of, 132–3 influence on modern economics, 131–2 and monetarism, 87, 132, 232 at Mont Pèlerin, 5, 132 rejects need for realistic assumptions, 132–3 Sheraton Hall address (December 1967), 132 ‘The Methodology of Positive Economics’ (essay, 1953), 132–3 ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’ (article, 1970), 2, 152 Frost, Gerald, Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty (2002), 7* Galbraith, John Kenneth, 242–3 game theory assumptions of ‘rational behaviour’, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 Axelrod’s law of the instrument, 41 backward induction procedure, 36–7, 38 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 focus on consequences alone, 43 as form of zombie science, 41 and human awareness, 21–3, 24–32 and interdependence, 23 limitations of, 32, 33–4, 37–40, 41–3 minimax solution, 22 multiplicity problem, 33–4, 35–7, 38 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 the Nash program, 25 and nature of trust, 28–31, 41 the Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 real world as problem for, 21–2, 24–5, 29, 31–2, 37–8, 39–40, 41–3 rise of in economics, 40–41 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138–9 and spectrum auctions, 39–40 theory of repeated games, 29–30, 35 tit-for-tat, 30–31 and trust, 29, 30–31, 32, 41 uses of, 23–4, 34, 38–9 view of humanity as non-cooperative/distrustful, 18, 21–2, 25–32, 36–8, 41–3 Von Neumann as father of, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 zero-sum games, 21–2 Gates, Bill, 221–2 Geithner, Tim, 105 gender, 127–8, 130–31, 133, 156 General Electric, 159 General Motors (GM), 215–16 George, Prince of Cambridge, 98 Glass–Steagall Act, repeal of, 194 globalization, 215, 220 Goldman Sachs, 182, 184, 192 Google, 105 Gore, Al, 39 Great Reform Act (1832), 120 greed, 1–2, 196, 197, 204, 229, 238 Greenspan, Alan, 57, 203 Gruber, Jonathan, 245 Haifa, Israel, 158, 161 Harper, ‘Baldy’, 7 Harsanyi, John, 34–5, 40 Harvard Business Review, 153 Hayek, Friedrich and Arrow’s framework, 78–9 economics as all of life, 8 and Antony Fisher, 6–7 influence on Thatcher, 6, 7 and Keynesian economics, 5–6 and legal frameworks, 7* at LSE, 4 at Mont Pèlerin, 4, 5, 6, 15 and Olson’s analysis, 104 and public choice theory, 89 rejection of incentive schemes, 156 ‘spontaneous order’ idea, 30 The Road to Serfdom (1944), 4, 5, 6, 78–9, 94 healthcare, 91–2, 93, 178, 230, 236 hedge funds, 201, 219, 243–4 Heilbroner, Robert, The Worldly Philosophers, 252 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22, 98, 107, 243–4 Helmsley, Leona, 105 hero myths, 221–3, 224 Hewlett-Packard, 159 hippie countercultural, 100 Hoffman, Abbie, Steal This Book, 100 Holmström, Bengt, 229–30 homo economicus, 9, 10, 12, 140, 156–7 and Gary Becker, 126, 129, 133, 136 and behaviour of real people, 15, 136, 144–5, 171, 172, 173, 250–51 and behavioural economics, 170, 171, 172, 255 long shadow cast by, 248 and Nudge economists, 13, 172, 173, 174–5, 177 Hooke, Robert, 223 housing market, 128–9, 196, 240–41 separate doors for poor people, 243 Hume, David, 111 Huxley, Thomas, 114 IBM, 181, 222 identity, 32, 165–6, 168, 180 Illinois, state of, 46–7 immigration, 125, 146 Impossibility Theorem, 72, 73–4, 75, 89, 97 Arrow’s assumptions, 80, 81, 82 and Duncan Black, 77–8 and free marketeers, 78–9, 82 as misunderstood and misrepresented, 76–7, 79–82 ‘paradox of voting’, 75–7 as readily solved, 76–7, 79–80 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 incentives adverse effect on autonomy, 164, 165–6, 168, 169–70, 180 authority figure–autonomy contradiction, 180 and behavioural economics, 171, 175, 176–7 cash and non-cash gifts, 161–2 context and culture, 175–6 contrast with rewards and punishments, 176–7 ‘crowding in’, 176 crowding out of prior motives, 160–61, 162–3, 164, 165–6, 171, 176 impact of economists’ ideas, 156–7, 178–80 and intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 and moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 morally wrong/corrupting, 168–9 origins in behaviourism, 154 and orthodox theory of motivation, 157–8, 164, 166–7, 168–70, 178–9 payments to blood donors, 162–3, 164, 169, 176 as pervasive in modern era, 155–6 respectful use of, 175, 177–8 successful, 159–60 as tools of control/power, 155–7, 158–60, 161, 164, 167, 178 Indecent Proposal (film, 1993), 168 India, 123, 175 individualism, 82, 117 and Becker, 134, 135–8 see also freedom, individual Industrial Revolution, 223 inequality and access to lifeboats, 150–51 and climate change, 207–9 correlation with low social mobility, 227–8, 243 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 and economic imperialism, 145–7, 148, 151, 207 and efficiency wages, 237–8 entrenched self-deluding justifications for, 242–3 and executive pay, 215–16, 219, 224, 228–30, 234, 238 as falling in 1940–80 period, 215, 216 Great Gatsby Curve, 227–8, 243 hero myths, 221–3, 224 increases in as self-perpetuating, 227–8, 230–31, 243 as increasing since 1970s, 2–3, 215–16, 220–21 and lower growth levels, 239 mainstream political consensus on, 216, 217, 218, 219–21 marginal productivity theory, 223–4, 228 new doctrine on taxation since 1970s, 232–5 and Pareto, 217, 218–19, 220 poverty as waste of productive capacity, 238–9 public attitudes to, 221, 226–8 rises in as not inevitable, 220, 221, 242 role of luck downplayed, 222, 224–6, 243 scale-invariant nature of, 219, 220 ‘socialism for the rich’, 230 Thatcher’s praise of, 216 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233–5, 239 trickle-down economics, 232–3 US and European attitudes to, 226–7 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 innovation, 222–3, 242 Inside Job (documentary, 2010), 88 Institute of Economic Affairs, 7–8, 15, 162–3 intellectual property law, 57, 68, 236 Ishiguro, Kazuo, Never Let Me Go, 148 Jensen, Michael, 229 Journal of Law and Economics, 49 justice, 1, 55, 57–62, 125, 137 Kahn, Herman, 18, 33 Kahneman, Daniel, 170–72, 173, 179, 202–3, 212, 226 Kennedy, President John, 139–40 Keynes, John Maynard, 11, 21, 162, 186, 204 and Buchanan’s ideology, 87 dentistry comparison, 258–9, 261 on economics as moral science, 252–3 Friedman’s challenge to orthodoxy of, 132 Hayek’s view of, 5–6 massive influence of, 3–4, 5–6 on power of economic ideas, 15 and probability, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 190, 210 vision of the ideal economist, 20 General Theory (1936), 15, 188–9 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 128 Khrushchev, Nikita, 139–40, 181 Kilburn Grammar School, 48 Kildall, Gary, 222 Kissinger, Henry, 184 Knight, Frank, 185–6, 212 Krugman, Paul, 248 Kubrick, Stanley, 35*, 139 labour child labour, 124, 146 and efficiency wages, 237–8 labour-intensive services, 90, 92–3 lumpenproletariat, 237 Olson’s hostility to unions, 104 Adam Smith’s ‘division of labour’ concept, 128 Laffer, Arthur, 232–3, 234 Lancet (medical journal), 257 Larkin, Philip, 67 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 Lazear, Edward, ‘Economic Imperialism’, 246 legal system, 7* and blame for accidents, 55, 60–61 and Chicago School, 49, 50–52, 55 and Coase Theorem, 47, 49, 50–55, 63–6 criminal responsibility, 111, 137, 152 economic imperialist view of, 137 law and economics movement, 40, 55, 56–63, 64–7 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 transaction costs, 51–3, 54–5, 61, 62, 63–4, 68 Lehmann Brothers, 194 Lexecon, 58, 68 Linda Problem, 202–3 LineStanding.com, 123 Little Zheng, 123, 124 Lloyd Webber, Andrew, 234–5, 236 lobbying, 7, 8, 88, 115, 123, 125, 146, 230, 231, 238 loft-insulation schemes, 172–3 logic, mathematical, 74–5 The Logic of Life (Tim Harford, 2008), 130 London School of Economics (LSE), 4, 48 Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), 201, 257 Machiavelli, Niccoló, 89, 94 Mafia, 30 malaria treatments, 125, 149 management science, 153–4, 155 Mandelbrot, Benoît, 195, 196, 201 Mankiw, Greg, 11 marginal productivity theory, 223–4 Markowitz, Harry, 196–7, 201, 213 Marx, Karl, 11, 101, 102, 104, 111, 223 lumpenproletariat, 237 mathematics, 9–10, 17–18, 19, 21–4, 26, 247, 248, 255, 259 of 2007 financial crash, 194, 195–6 and Ken Arrow, 71, 72, 73–5, 76–7, 82–3, 97 axioms (abstract assumptions), 198 fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201, 219 and orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 214 Ramsey Rule on discounting, 208–9, 212 and Savage, 189–90, 193, 197, 198, 199, 205 and Schelling, 139 Sen’s framework on voting systems, 80–81 standard deviation, 182, 192, 194 and stock market statistics, 190–91, 195–6 use of for military ends, 71–2 maximizing behaviour and Becker, 129–31, 133–4, 147 and catastrophe, 211 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 61, 63–9 economic imperialism, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 147, 148–9 Posner’s wealth-maximization principle, 57–63, 64–7, 137 profit-maximizing firms, 228 see also wealth-maximization principle; welfare maximization McCluskey, Kirsty, 194 McNamara, Robert, 138 median voter theorem, 77, 95–6 Merton, Robert, 201 Meucci, Antonio, 222 microeconomics, 9, 232, 259 Microsoft, 222 Miles, David, 258 Mill, John Stuart, 102, 111, 243 minimum wage, national, 96 mobility, economic and social correlation with inequality, 226–8, 243 as low in UK, 227 as low in USA, 226–7 US–Europe comparisons, 226–7 Modern Times (Chaplin film, 1936), 154 modernism, 67 Moivre, Abraham de, 193 monetarism, 87, 89, 132, 232 monopolies and cartels, 101, 102, 103–4 public sector, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Mont Pèlerin Society, 3–9, 13, 15, 132 Morgenstern, Oskar, 20–22, 24–5, 28, 35, 124, 129, 189, 190 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 91, 92–3 Murphy, Kevin, 229 Mussolini, Benito, 216, 219 Nash equilibrium, 22–3, 24, 25, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 Nash, John, 17–18, 22–3, 24, 25–6, 27–8, 33–4, 41–2 awarded Nobel Prize, 34–5, 38, 39, 40 mental health problems, 25, 26, 34 National Health Service, 106, 162 ‘neoliberalism’, avoidance of term, 3* Neumann, John von ambition to make economics a science, 20–21, 24–5, 26, 35, 125, 151, 189 as Cold War warrior, 20, 26, 138 and expansion of scope of economics, 124–5 as father of game theory, 18, 19, 20–22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 34, 41 final illness and death of, 19, 34, 35, 43–4 genius of, 19–20 as inspiration for Dr Strangelove, 19 and Nash’s equilibrium, 22–3, 25, 38* simplistic view of humanity, 28 theory of decision-making, 189, 190, 203 neuroscience, 14 New Deal, US, 4, 194, 231 Newton, Isaac, 223 Newtonian mechanics, 21, 24–5 Nixon, Richard, 56, 184, 200 NORAD, Colorado Springs, 181 nuclear weapons, 18–19, 20, 22, 27, 181 and Ellsberg, 200 and game theory, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 35, 70, 73, 198 MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), 35, 138 and Russell’s Chicken, 33–4 and Schelling, 138, 139 Nudge economists, 13, 171–5, 177–8, 179, 180, 251 Oaten, Mark, 121 Obama, Barack, 110, 121, 157, 172, 180 Olson, Mancur, 103, 108, 109, 119–20, 122 The Logic of Collective Action (1965), 103–4 On the Waterfront (Kazan film, 1954), 165 online invisibility, 100* organs, human, trade in, 65, 123, 124, 145, 147–8 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 42–3 Osborne, George, 233–4 Packard, David, 159 Paine, Tom, 243 Pareto, Vilfredo 80/20 rule’ 218 and inequality, 217, 218–19, 220 life and background of, 216–17 Pareto efficiency, 217–18, 256* Paul the octopus (World Cup predictor, 2010), 133 pensions, workplace, 172, 174 physics envy, 9, 20–21, 41, 116, 175–6, 212, 247 Piketty, Thomas, 234, 235 plastic shopping bag tax, 159–60 Plato’s Republic, 100–101, 122 political scientists and Duncan Black, 78, 95–6 Black’s median voter theorem, 95–6 Buchanan’s ideology, 84–5 crises of the 1970s, 85–6 influence of Arrow, 72, 81–2, 83 see also public choice theory; social choice theory Posner, Richard, 54, 56–63, 137 ‘mimic the market’ approach, 61–3, 65 ‘The Economics of the Baby Shortage’ (1978), 61 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 price-fixing, 101, 102, 103–4 Princeton University, 17, 19–20 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 26–8, 29–32, 42–3 prisons, cell upgrades in, 123 privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 probability, 182–4 and Keynes, 185, 186–7, 188–9, 210 Linda Problem, 202–3 modern ideas of, 184–5 Ramsey’s personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 and Savage, 190, 193, 197, 198, 199, 203, 205 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 see also risk and uncertainty Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 productivity Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and efficiency wages, 237–8 improvement in labour-intensive services, 92–3 labour input, 92 protectionism, 246, 255 psychology availability heuristic, 226 behaviourism, 154–8, 237 and behavioural economics, 12, 170–71 cognitive dissonance, 113–14 and financial incentives, 156–7, 158–60, 163–4, 171 framing effects, 170–71, 259 of free-riding, 113–14, 115 intrinsic motivations, 158–60, 161–3, 164, 165–6, 176 irrational behaviour, 12, 15, 171 learning of social behaviour, 163–4 moral disengagement, 162, 163, 164, 166 motivated beliefs, 227 ‘self-command’ strategies, 140 view of in game theory, 26–31 view of in public choice theory, 85–6 and welfare maximization, 149 ‘you deserve what you get’ belief, 223–6, 227–8, 236, 243 public choice theory as consensus view, 84–5 and crises of the 1970s, 85–6 foolish voter assumption, 86–8 ‘paradox of voter turnout’, 88–9, 95–6, 115–16 partial/self-contradictory application of, 86, 87–9 ‘political overload’ argument, 85, 86–7 ‘public bad, private good’ mantra, 93–4, 97 and resistance to tax rises, 94, 241 self-fulfilling prophecies, 95–7 and selfishness, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 as time-bomb waiting to explode, 85 public expenditure in 1970s and ’80s, 89 Baumol’s cost disease, 90–92, 93, 94 and Keynesian economics, 4 and public choice theory, 85–8, 89, 241 and tax rises, 241–2 public-sector monopolies, 48–9, 50–51, 93–4 Puzzle of the Harmless Torturers, 118–19 queue-jumping, 123, 124 QWERTY layout, 42 racial discrimination, 126–7, 133, 136, 140 Ramsey, Frank, 186–8, 189, 190, 205, 208 Ramsey Rule, 208–9, 212 RAND Corporation, 17, 41, 103, 138, 139 and Ken Arrow, 70–71, 72–3, 74, 75–6, 77, 78 and behaviourism, 154 and Cold War military strategy, 18, 20, 21–2, 24, 27, 33–4, 70, 73, 75–6, 141, 200, 213 and Ellsberg, 182–4, 187, 197–8, 200 and Russell’s Chicken, 33 Santa Monica offices of, 18 self-image as defender of freedom, 78 rational behaviour assumptions in game theory, 18, 28, 29–32, 35–8, 41–3, 70, 124 axioms (abstract mathematical assumptions), 198 Becker’s version of, 128–9, 135, 140, 151 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173, 174–5 distinction between values and tastes, 136–8 economic imperialist view of, 135, 136–8, 140, 151 and free-riding theory, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 107–8, 109–10, 115–16 and orthodox decision theory, 198, 199 public choice theory relates selfishness to, 86 term as scientific-sounding cover, 12 see also homo economicus Reader’s Digest, 5, 6 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 87–8, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and top-rate tax cuts, 231, 233 regulators, 1–2 Chicago view of, 40 Reinhart, Carmen, 258 religion, decline of in modern societies, 15, 185 renewable energy, 116 rent-seeking, 230, 238 ‘right to recline’, 63–4 risk and uncertainty bell curve distribution, 191–4, 195, 196–7, 201, 203–4, 257 catastrophes, 181–2, 191, 192, 201, 203–4, 211–12 delusions of quantitative ‘risk management’, 196, 213 Ellsberg’s experiment (1961), 182–4, 187, 197, 198–200 errors in conventional thinking about, 191–2, 193–4, 195–7, 204–5, 213 financial orthodoxy on risk, 196–7, 201–2 and First World War, 185 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 hasard and fortuit, 185* ‘making sense’ of through stories, 202–3 ‘measurable’ and ‘unmeasurable’ distinction, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 210–11, 212–13 measurement in numerical terms, 181–4, 187, 189, 190–94, 196–7, 201–2, 203–5, 212–13 orthodox decision theory, 183–4, 185–6, 189–91, 193–4, 201–2, 203–5, 211, 212–14 our contemporary orthodoxy, 189–91 personal probabilities (beliefs as probabilities), 187–8, 190, 197, 198, 199, 204–5 precautionary principle, 211–12, 214 pure uncertainty, 182–3, 185–6, 187–9, 190, 197, 198–9, 210, 211, 212, 214, 251 redefined as ‘volatility’, 197, 213 the Savage orthodoxy, 190–91, 197, 198–200, 203, 205 scenario planning as crucial, 251 Taleb’s black swans, 192, 194, 201, 203–4 ‘Truth and Probability’ (Ramsey paper), 186–8, 189, 190 urge to actuarial alchemy, 190–91, 197, 201 value of human life (‘statistical lives’), 141–5, 207 see also probability Robertson, Dennis, 13–14 Robinson, Joan, 260 Rodrik, Dani, 255, 260–61 Rogoff, Ken, 258 Rothko, Mark, 4–5 Rumsfeld, Donald, 232–3 Russell, Bertrand, 33–4, 74, 97, 186, 188 Ryanair, 106 Sachs, Jeffrey, 257 Santa Monica, California, 18 Sargent, Tom, 257–8 Savage, Leonard ‘Jimmie’, 189–90, 193, 203, 205scale-invariance, 194, 195–6, 201, 219 Scandinavian countries, 103, 149 Schelling, Thomas, 35* on access to lifeboats, 150–51 awarded Nobel Prize, 138–9 and Cold War nuclear strategy, 138, 139–40 and economic imperialism, 141–5 and game theory, 138–9 and Washington–Moscow hotline, 139–40 work on value of human life, 141–5, 207 ‘The Intimate Contest for Self-command’ (essay, 1980), 140, 145 ‘The Life You Save May be Your Own’ (essay, 1968), 142–5, 207 Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 172 Schmidt, Eric, 105 Scholes, Myron, 201 Schwarzman, Stephen, 235 Second World War, 3, 189, 210 selfishness, 41–3, 178–9 and Becker, 129–30 and defence of inequality, 242–3 as free marketeers’ starting point, 10–12, 13–14, 41, 86, 178–9 and game theory, 18 and public choice theory, 85–6, 87–8, 89, 94, 95–7 Selten, Reinhard, 34–5, 36, 38, 40 Sen, Amartya, 29, 80–81 service sector, 90–93, 94 Shakespeare, William, Measure for Measure, 169 Shaw, George Bernard, 101 Shiller, Robert, 247 Simon, Herbert, 223 Skinner, Burrhus, 154–5, 158 Smith, Adam, 101, 111, 122 The Wealth of Nations (1776), 10–11, 188–9 snowflakes, 195 social choice theory, 72 and Ken Arrow, 71–83, 89, 95, 97, 124–5, 129 and Duncan Black, 78, 95 and free marketeers, 79, 82 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 social media, 100* solar panels, 116 Solow, Bob, 163, 223 Sorites paradox, 117–18, 119 sovereign fantasy, 116–17 Soviet Union, 20, 22, 70, 73, 82, 101, 104, 167, 237 spectrum auctions, 39–40, 47, 49 Stalin, Joseph, 70, 73, 101 the state anti-government attitudes in USA, 83–5 antitrust regulation, 56–8 dismissal of almost any role for, 94, 135, 235–6, 241 duty over full employment, 5 economic imperialist arguments for ‘small government’, 135 increased economic role from 1940s, 3–4, 5 interventions over ‘inefficient’ outcomes, 53 and monetarism, 87, 89 and Mont Pèlerin Society, 3, 4, 5 and privatization, 50, 54, 88, 93–4 public-sector monopolies, 48–50, 93–4 replacing of with markets, 79 vital role of, 236 statistical lives, 141–5, 207 Stern, Nick, 206, 209–10 Stigler, George, 50, 51, 56, 69, 88 De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum (with Becker, 1977), 135–6 Stiglitz, Joseph, 237 stock markets ‘Black Monday’ (1987), 192 and fractals (scale-invariance), 194, 195–6, 201 orthodox decision theory, 190–91, 193–4, 201 Strittmatter, Father, 43–4 Summers, Larry, 10, 14 Sunstein, Cass, 173 Nudge (with Richard Thaler, 2008), 171–2, 175 Taleb, Nassim, 192 Tarski, Alfred, 74–5 taxation and Baumol’s cost disease, 94 and demand for positional goods, 239–41 as good thing, 231, 241–2, 243 Laffer curve, 232–3, 234 new doctrine of since 1970s, 232–4 property rights as interdependent with, 235–6 public resistance to tax rises, 94, 239, 241–2 and public spending, 241–2 revenue-maximizing top tax rate, 233–4, 235 tax avoidance and evasion, 99, 105–6, 112–13, 175, 215 ‘tax revolt’ campaigns (1970s USA), 87 ‘tax as theft’ culture, 235–6 top-rate cuts and inequality, 231, 233–5, 239 whines from the super-rich, 234–5, 243 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 153–4, 155, 167, 178, 237 Thaler, Richard, 13 Nudge (with Cass Sunstein, 2008), 171–2, 175 Thatcher, Margaret, 2, 88, 89, 104, 132 election of as turning point, 6, 216, 220–21 and Hayek, 6, 7 and inequality, 216, 227 privatization programme, 93–4 and top-rate tax cuts, 231 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944), 20, 21, 25, 189 Titanic, sinking of (1912), 150 Titmuss, Richard, The Gift Relationship, 162–3 tobacco-industry lobbyists, 8 totalitarian regimes, 4, 82, 167–8, 216, 219 see also Soviet Union trade union movement, 104 Tragedy of the Commons, 27 Truman, Harry, 20, 237 Trump, Donald, 233 Tucker, Albert, 26–7 Tversky, Amos, 170–72, 173, 202–3, 212, 226 Twitter, 100* Uber, 257 uncertainty see risk and uncertainty The Undercover Economist (Tim Harford, 2005), 130 unemployment and Coase Theorem, 45–7, 64 during Great Depression, 3–4 and Keynesian economics, 4, 5 United Nations, 96 universities auctioning of places, 124, 149–50 incentivization as pervasive, 156 Vietnam War, 56, 198, 200, 249 Villari, Pasquale, 30 Vinci, Leonardo da, 186 Viniar, David, 182, 192 Volkswagen scandal (2016), 2, 151–2 Vonnegut, Kurt, 243–4 voting systems, 72–4, 77, 80, 97 Arrow’s ‘Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives’, 81, 82 Arrow’s ‘Universal Domain’, 81, 82 and free marketeers, 79 ‘hanging chads’ in Florida (2000), 121 recount process in UK, 121 Sen’s mathematical framework, 80–81 Waldfogel, Joel, 161* Wanniski, Jude, 232 Watertown Arsenal, Massachusetts, 153–4 Watson Jr, Thomas J., 181 wealth-maximization principle, 57–63 and Coase, 47, 55, 59, 63–9 as core principle of current economics, 253 created markets, 65–7 extension of scope of, 124–5 and justice, 55, 57–62, 137 and knee space on planes, 63–4 practical problems with negotiations, 62–3 and values more important than efficiency, 64–5, 66–7 welfare maximization, 124–5, 129–31, 133–4, 148–9, 176 behavioural economics/Nudge view of, 173 and vulnerable/powerless people, 146–7, 150 welfare state, 4, 162 Wilson, Charlie, 215 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 186, 188 Wolfenschiessen (Swiss village), 158, 166–7 Woolf, Virginia, 67 World Bank, 96 World Cup football tournament (2010), 133 World Health Organization, 207 Yale Saturday Evening Pest, 4–5 Yellen, Janet, 237 THE BEGINNING Let the conversation begin … Follow the Penguin twitter.com/penguinukbooks Keep up-to-date with all our stories youtube.com/penguinbooks Pin ‘Penguin Books’ to your pinterest.com/penguinukbooks Like ‘Penguin Books’ on facebook.com/penguinbooks Listen to Penguin at soundcloud.com/penguin-books Find out more about the author and discover more stories like this at penguin.co.uk ALLEN LANE UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com First published 2019 Copyright © Jonathan Aldred, 2019 The moral right of the author has been asserted Jacket photograph © Getty Images ISBN: 978-0-241-32544-5 This ebook is copyright 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Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

Number—a unique eight-digit number that identifies each of the targets in the Air Force’s Bombing Encyclopedia BMEWS—Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, the radar system built after Sputnik to detect Soviet missiles heading toward the United States BOMARC—a ground-launched antiaircraft missile with an atomic warhead, designed by Boeing (BO) and the Michigan Aerospace Research Center (MARC), that was deployed at sites in the United States and Canada CND—Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British antiwar group whose logo later became known as the “peace symbol” DEFCON—Defense Readiness Condition, the American military’s readiness for hostilities, ranked on a scale from DEFCON 5 (the lowest level of alert) to DEFCON 1 (nuclear war) DEW Line—the Distant Early Warning Line, a radar system that extended across the Arctic in North America to detect Soviet bombers DIRECT—Defense Improved Emergency Message Automatic Transmission System Replacement Command and Control Terminal, the Pentagon computer system currently deployed to send and receive a nuclear attack order DUL—the Deliberate, Unauthorized Launch of a missile ENIAC—the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, America’s first large-scale electronic, digital computer, built for the Army to calculate the trajectory of artillery shells and later used at Los Alamos to help design a thermonuclear weapon EOD—Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the rendering safe of warheads, bombs, and anything else that might detonate FCDA—the Federal Civil Defense Administration, which from 1951 until 1979 advised the American public on how to survive a nuclear war H-Bomb—a hydrogen bomb, the most powerful weapon ever invented, deriving its explosive force not only from nuclear fission but also from nuclear fusion, the elemental power of the sun ICBM—Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, a missile that can propel a nuclear warhead more than 3,400 miles JAG—the nickname for a military attorney, a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps K crew—a backup crew for the Titan II missile, on call to give advice during an emergency LOX—liquid oxygen, a propellant that was used as an oxidizer, in combination with rocket fuel, to launch Atlas and Titan I missiles MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction, a nuclear strategy that seeks to maintain peace by ensuring that adversaries have the capability to destroy one another MANIAC—the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer, an early electronic, digital computer used at Los Alamos to help design the first hydrogen bombs MART—Missile Alarm Response Team, the security police who responded to problems at Titan II missile sites MFT—Mobile Fire Team, a heavily armed four-man team of Air Force security officers MIMS—Missile Inspection and Maintenance Squadron, the repair crews who kept Titan II missiles ready to launch MIRV—Multiple Independently targetable Reentry Vehicle, a ballistic missile carrying two or more warheads that can be aimed at different targets MIT—Massachusetts Institute of Technology MSA—a nickname for the vapor-detection equipment built by the Mine Safety Appliance Company and installed in Titan II silos NATO—North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the military alliance formed in 1949 to defend Western Europe against an attack by the Soviet Union NORAD—North American Air Defense Command, an organization created in 1958 by the United States and Canada to defend against a Soviet attack, later renamed the North American Aerospace Defense Command NRC—Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that licenses and regulates civilian nuclear power plants OPLAN—Operations Plan, the term used since 2003 to describe the nuclear war plans of the United States PAL—Permissive Action Link, a coded device installed within a nuclear warhead or bomb, much like a lock, to prevent unauthorized use of the weapon PK—Probability of Kill, the likelihood of a target being destroyed PPM—Parts per Million PTPMU—Propellant Tank Pressure Monitor Unit, the gauge in a Titan II launch control center that provided digital readouts of the fuel and oxidizer pressures within the missile PTS—Propellant Transfer System, the facilities and equipment used to handle the fuel and oxidizer for a Titan II missile RAF—Royal Air Force, the armed service in Great Britain that during the Cold War was responsible for land-based aircraft and missiles RAND—a think tank in Santa Monica, California, created by the Air Force after the Second World War, whose name was derived from the phrase “Research ANd Development” RFHCO—Rocket Fuel Handler’s Clothing Outfit, a liquidproof, vaporproof outfit with an air pack and a bubble helmet that looked like a space suit, commonly known among Titan II crews as a “ref-co” RV—Reentry Vehicle, the nose cone of a missile containing its warhead SAC—Strategic Air Command, the organization that until 1992 was responsible for the long-range bombers, the land-based missiles, and most of the nuclear weapons deployed by the U.S.

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Once the Soviets felt confident that they could retaliate after being attacked, they’d feel much less pressure to strike first. Leaving the cities of the United States and the Soviet Union vulnerable to annihilation, McNamara now thought, would keep them safe. The strategy was soon known as MAD: “mutually assured destruction.” The strategic thinking at the White House and the Department of Defense, however, didn’t correspond to the targeting policies at SAC headquarters in Omaha. The gulf between theory and practice remained vast. Although the SIOP had been revised during the Kennedy administration, General Power had blocked significant changes in weapon allocation.

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The failed attempt to decommission an aging weapon system reflected the new balance of power. Robert McNamara had assumed that once the Soviet Union felt confident about its ability to destroy the United States in any nuclear exchange, it would stop building new missiles. But the Soviets didn’t share McNamara’s faith in mutually assured destruction. After the humiliation of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one of their diplomats had told an American counterpart, “You Americans will never be able to do this to us again.” In a rivalry where a nation’s power was measured numerically in warheads and bombs, the Soviet Union now sought to gain the upper hand.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

But as his assistants entered more and more complicated computational requests, von Neumann finally did what human beings do: he erred. The computer did not. It was a revelatory moment in the history of defense science. A machine had just outperformed a brain the Pentagon relied on, one of the greatest minds in the world. The Pentagon’s strategy for nuclear deterrence in the 1950s was based on a notion called mutual assured destruction, or MAD. This was the proposition that neither the Soviets nor the Americans would be willing to launch a nuclear attack against the other because that action would ensure a reciprocal action and ultimately guarantee both sides’ demise. At RAND, analysts began applying the Prisoner’s Dilemma strategy to a nuclear launch, keeping in mind that the driving principle of the dilemma was distrust.

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President Eisenhower, age seventy-one when he left office, had been a five-star general and served as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. President Kennedy was a dashing young war hero, full of idealism and enthusiasm, and just forty-three years old. Kennedy sought a more adaptable, collegial style of policy making when it came to issues of national security. The Eisenhower doctrine was based on mutual assured destruction, or MAD. The Kennedy doctrine would become known as “flexible response.” The new president believed that the U.S. military needed to be able to fight limited wars, quickly and with flexibility, anywhere around the world where communism threatened democracy. In describing his approach, Kennedy said that the nation must be ready “to deter all wars, general or limited, nuclear or conventional, large or small.”

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Gouré claimed that during his trip to Moscow, he had seen firsthand evidence indicating that the Soviet Union had built a vast network of underground bunkers, which would protect the Russian people after a nuclear first strike against the United States. The Soviet action would inevitably be followed by a U.S. nuclear response. The concept of mutual assured destruction was based on the idea that the superpowers would not attack each other, provided they remained equally vulnerable to a nuclear strike. Gouré’s frightening premise suggested that the Soviet Politburo believed they could survive a nuclear war and protect the majority of their population as well.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

The world had come together to decisively arrest the proliferation of nuclear weapons to new states. From the first test, their destructive power was clear. Popular revulsion at the possibility of a thermonuclear apocalypse was a powerful motivator for signing the treaty. But these weapons have also been contained by cold calculation. Mutually assured destruction hemmed in possessors since it soon became clear that using them in anger is a quick way of ensuring your own destruction. They’re also eye-wateringly expensive and difficult to manufacture. Not only do they require rare and difficult-to-handle materials like enriched uranium-235, but maintaining and ultimately decommissioning them is also challenging.

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Earlier in the chapter I discussed the frictions between the United States and China. Despite their differences there are still obvious places for collaboration between these vying powers. Synthetic biology is a better starting point than AI here, thanks to lower existing competition and the obvious mutually assured destruction of novel biothreats. The SecureDNA project is a good example, laying out a path for governing synthetic biology similarly to how chemical weapons have been curtailed. If China and the United States could create, say, a shared bio-risk observatory, encompassing everything from advanced R&D to deployed commercial applications, it would be a precious area of collaboration to build on.

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See disinformation/misinformation Mitchell, Melanie, 73 Model T, 24 Modern Turing Test, 76–77, 78, 115, 190, 210 Mojica, Francisco, 129–30 Montreal Protocol (1987), 45, 263 Moore, Gordon, 32–33, 35 Moore’s Law, 32–33, 67, 81, 108 Motorwagen, 24 Mumford, Lewis, 29, 217 mutually assured destruction, 43 N nanotechnology, 101 narrow path, defined, viii National Laboratory for Quantum Information Sciences (China), 122 nation-state fragility amplifiers, vii, 11 AI and, 166–67 authoritarianism and, 158–59 bad actor empowerment and, 165–66, 168 cyberattacks and, 160–63 democracies and, 158, 185 disinformation and, 169–73 fragility and, 152–54 globalization and, 155–56 inadvertent, 173–77 military applications and, 167–69 power and, 163–64 technological unemployment and, 177–81 nation-states containment and, 143, 159 economic inequality and, 153–54 equilibrium of, 147 functions of, 158 importance of, 151–52 regulation and, 230–31 technology symbiosis with, 156–58 trust and, 152–53 See also geopolitics; governments; nation-state fragility amplifiers Neuralink, 91 neural networks, 59, 64 See also deep learning 1984 (Orwell), 196 Nobel, Alfred, 35 Nordhaus, William, 30–31 North Korea, 44, 161 NotPetya, 161–62, 163 Noyce, Robert, 32 nuclear technology arms race rhetoric and, 126 catastrophe and, 205 containment of, 42–45, 264–65 development of, 41–42 ego and, 141 safety and, 241 NVIDIA, 130, 250, 251 O Odin, 82 offensive vs. defensive capabilities, 157, 234 off-grid living, 198 off switches, 244–45 omni-use technology, 105, 110–12 AI and, 111, 130 containment and, 233 contradictions and, 202 power and, 182 regulation and, 229–30 OpenAI, 62, 64, 69, 251 openness imperative, 127–29 opioids, 36 Oppenheimer, J.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

Of note, it wouldn’t just be able to respond with counter cyber weapons, but also would include “Global selective strike systems e.g. penetrating bomber, submarines with long range cruise missiles, and Conventional Prompt Global Strike [a ballistic missile].” Foreign Policy magazine’s reaction to the news perhaps sums it up the best: “Wow.” When we think about deterrence, what most often comes to mind is the Cold War model of MAD, mutually assured destruction. Any attack would be met with an overwhelming counterstrike that would destroy the aggressor as well as most life on the planet, making any first strike literally mad. Yet rather than just getting MAD, deterrence really is about the ability to alter an adversary’s actions by changing its cost-benefit calculations.

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multifactor authentication: A layered approach to security uses two or more mechanisms to authenticate identity, such as something the user knows, like a password, something the user has (like a smart card), where the user is, and/or something the user is physically, such as a biometric characteristic like the fingerprint. mutually assured destruction (MAD): The military strategy of a “balance of terror” that held during the Cold War. The great powers shied away from direct conflict by MAD guaranteeing that the initiator of any hostilities would also be destroyed. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST): Located in the US Department of Commerce, NIST is the federal agency that works to develop and apply new standards and frameworks, especially for areas where industry has no clear consensus.

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See digital currency logic bomb, 93, 124 Lucas, George, 119 Lynn, William, 97–98, 135–136 malware characteristics of, 33–34, 154, 157–159, 174, 251 consequences of, 132, 147–149 defending against, 60–62, 205–206, 212, 224–225 (see also Conficker; DNS Changer Virus; Stuxnet) examples of, 58, 65, 72–73, 75, 91, 115–119 Mandiant, 76, 226 Manning, Bradley, 38, 52–53, 55, Markov, Sergei, 110 McAfee, 60, 91, 157 McConnell, Mike, 99, 151, 196 McGeehan, Ryan, 216 metadata, 104, 250 mobile device, 14, 32, 246, 250–252 Moltke, Helmuth Graf, 212 money mules, 86, 217 Moore, Tyler, 231 Morse code, 181 multifactor authentication, 244 Mulvenon, James, 139, 161 mutually assured destruction (MAD), 145 Nacht, Michael, 157 Nasibett, John, 248 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), 201, 204, 212 National Security Agency (NSA), 50, 104, 134, 140–141, 199–200, 209 network-centric, 129 New York Times, 76, 95, 128, 141, 213, 226 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 122–124 North Korea, 126–127, 151, 182, 191, nuclear weapons, 7, 71, 99, 137–138, 144–147, 160–162, 190, 247 Nye, Joseph, 3, 152 Obama, Barrack, 2–3, 202, 204 Operation Orchard, 126–128 Operation Shady RAT, 58, 91–93 packet, 17–18, 23–24, 166 Pac-Man, 46 Pakistan, 21, 25, 102 Palmer, Alan, 237 Panetta, Leon, 146 password, 32, 40, 60, 65, 103, 241–244 patch, 62–63, 72, 139, 218, 245 patriotic hacking, 74, 110–114, 142, 179–180, 186 PayPal, 54, 83, 195, 206–207 Pearl Harbor, 37, 68, 70, 165, People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 114, 140–143 Petraeus, David, 33 phishing, 40–41, 57–58, 86, 217, 222–223 piracy cyber, 83, 139, 179–180, 189, 194 maritime, 177–179 pornography, 20, 40, 105, 109, 206–207 Postel, Jon, 26, 29 privacy, 33–35, 74, 106, 108–110, 175, 199, 208, 218, 228, 234 protocol, 18, 22–23, 110, 140, 227 pwn, 41, 58 Pyrrhic Victory, 156 Pyrrhus of Epirus.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

So breakers can tap this energy source to amplify their power of one—and to connect, communicate, and collaborate with those of like mind—just as easily as any maker. If today’s breakers are much more empowered, they are also less easily deterred. There is no mutual assured destruction—MAD—doctrine keeping Al Qaeda or ISIS from going to extremes. Just the opposite: for the jihadist suicide bombers, mutual assured destruction is like an invitation to a party and a date with ninety-nine virgins. As the Harvard University strategist Graham Allison summed it up: “Historically, there has always been a gap between people’s individual anger and what they could do with their anger.

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The two superpowers even maintained a “hotline”—a special communication system connecting the White House and the Kremlin—so each could clear up any misunderstanding with the other to prevent any direct hot wars with nuclear weapons. Strategically, both sides deployed enough nuclear weapons to guarantee not only a first-strike capability but also a retaliatory second-strike capability if the other side fired first, creating a system of “mutual assured destruction,” or MAD, which all but guaranteed that neither side would ever use any of their atomic weapons. More important, though, the intense competition between America and the Soviet Union to collect allies on their respective sides of the chessboard provided a steady flow of resources to create and reinforce order in so many of these new states, which enabled many of them to get by with just C+ leadership—or, to put it in human terms, to get by without exercising regularly, lowering their cholesterol, building muscle, studying hard, or increasing their heart rate.

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Moore’s law; climate change and; computing power and; financial flows and; the Market and morality, see ethics, innovation in Morning Edition (radio show) mortality rates Mortenson, David Mother Nature; adaptability of; as complex system; as entrepreneurial; interdependence in; as political mentor; resilience of Mother Nature, human impact on; black elephants in; deniers of; Great Acceleration in; natural buffers and adaptive responses to; novel entities introduced by; planetary boundaries of, see planetary boundaries; stewardship and; see also biodiversity loss; climate change; population growth Mubarak, Hosni Mukunda, Gautam Muller, Wayne Mundie, Craig Muñoz, Andrés, Jr. Murthy, Vivek Muse (Somali pirate) Muslim Brotherhood mutation mutual assured destruction (MAD) Myers, Richard Namib desert beetle Namibia nanotechnology Naranya NASSCOM Nasser, Gamal Abdel National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Geographic Channel National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Public Radio national security Native Americans NATO natural selection Nature Navarro, Joe Naylor, Kit NBD Nano Ndiaeye, Mayoro Ndiamaguene, Senegal Ndiaye, Ndiougua Ndiaye, Ousmane neo-Nazis Neota Logic .NET Netflix Netscape networking; fiber optics and; latency in; Moore’s law and; software-enabled; wireless Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice New Deal New Media Inc.

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

By the mid-1960s, fears eased of a technological arms race that might encourage either side to unleash a surprise attack. For the foreseeable future, each side could eliminate the other as a modern industrial state. Robert McNamara, as secretary of defense, argued that so long as the two superpowers had confidence in their capacity for mutual assured destruction—an ability to impose “unacceptable damage” defined as 25 percent of population and 50 percent of industry—the relationship between the two would be stable. These levels, it should be noted, reflected less a judgment about the tolerances of modern societies and more the point at which extra explosions would result in diminishing marginal returns measured by new damage and casualties, the point at which—to use Winston Churchill’s vivid phrase—“all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”

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What they thought was truly distinctive to their type of warfare was the attention paid to political education and propaganda. Vietnam, a war for which the civilian strategists had not prepared and on which they had relatively little of value to say, marked the end of the “golden age” of strategic studies. Just as the arrival of mutual assured destruction and a period of relative calm took the urgency out of the Cold War, Vietnam “poisoned the academic well.”43 Colin Gray charged the civilian “men of ideas” with being overconfident about the ease with which theory might be transferred to the “world of action.” The prophets had become courtiers, living off their intellectual capital.

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Furthermore, while the United States’ evident military superiority in a particular type of war was likely to encourage others to fight in different ways, that military capacity would also constrain opponents’ ambitions. As a regular conventional war against the United States appeared to be an increasingly foolish proposition, especially after its convincing performance in the 1991 Gulf War, one form of potential challenge to American predominance was removed, just as the prospect of mutual assured destruction had earlier removed nuclear war as a serious policy option. Nonetheless, the presentation of the RMA was shaped by political preferences about the sort of war the Americans would like to fight. It offered a neat fit between a desire to reduce the risks of high casualties or Vietnam-style campaigns and a Western ethical tradition that stressed discrimination and proportionality in warfare.

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

What the United States and the Soviet Union in effect agreed to observe was the primary (virtually exclusive) right of each to decide matters within its sphere. A crucial element of this de facto agreement was there would be no attempt to change these boundaries by military (or even political) means. After 1949, this accord was reinforced by the concept of “mutually assured destruction” based on the fact that both sides had sufficient nuclear strength to respond to any attack and destroy the other. The second part of the tacit agreement was the de facto economic disjuncture of the two zones. The United States would offer no assistance in the reconstruction of the Soviet bloc.

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The severity of this threat is almost completely unpredictable since it depends on a whole sequence of events any one of which might not happen. So far there have only been two-power confrontations, first the United States (and its British and French allies) against the Soviets, then India against Pakistan, flanked by a rather passive China. In these cases the threat of mutually assured destruction has been obvious to the two sides and the response, after a couple of half-crises, has been disciplined avoidance of escalation. Nuclear deterrence has worked. However, when more than two powers are involved in more complex conflicts, outcomes become more fraught. It was multipower conflicts in which some could not read the intentions of others which produced both world wars.

How Democracy Ends by David Runciman

barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, post-truth, power law, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, Russell Brand, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, Yogi Berra

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is the great cinematic representation of the paranoid style in American politics. It satirised the world of conspiracy theories and it helped to fuel them. The inevitable secrecy of the nuclear state made it ripe for the wildest kinds of suspicion – in the upside-down universe of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) nothing was too crazy to be believable. Today, though we live in an age when conspiracy theories are everywhere, few of them concern nuclear weapons. The paranoia has spread its wings and moved on. Kissinger, once the pre-eminent symbol of the sinister underside of American democracy, is now just another has-been on the international conference circuit.

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The next time a nuclear weapon is detonated with human beings in the firing line everything changes. Until that happens – or until nuclear weapons are abolished – nothing really changes. The uncertainty persists. The irony is that the use of nuclear weapons is now more likely than it was a generation ago. We no longer live in a world of mutually assured destruction. Nuclear warfare could take place without destroying everything. Terrorists may acquire crude versions of nuclear weapons, in which case any taboo against their use would be meaningless. Equally, the super-sophisticated versions now available to the American military may tempt a commander-in-chief to see them as an extension of conventional warfare, capable of tactical precision and contained fall-out.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

In game theory, offense and defense converge, since second-strike retaliation can be sufficiently destructive to deter first-strike attacks. This line of reasoning was the same doctrine Andy Marshall helped develop in nuclear-war-fighting scenarios during the Cold War in the early 1960s. The doctrine was called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Now a new doctrine of Mutual Assured Financial Destruction was emerging. To Andy Marshall, financial weapons were new, but deterrence theory was not. The distinction between offensive and defensive capabilities in financial warfare is not the only dichotomy. There is also a distinction between physical targets, such as exchange computers, and virtual targets, such as business relationships.

…

In this scenario, Taiwan is left to its fate. Andy Marshall’s Air-Sea Battle is deterred by China’s weapons of wealth destruction. Perhaps the greatest financial threat is that these scenarios might play out by accident. In the mid-1960s, at the height of Cold War hysteria about nuclear attacks and Mutual Assured Destruction, two films, Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove, dealt with nuclear-war-fighting scenarios between the United States and the Soviet Union. As portrayed in these films, neither side wanted war, but it was launched nonetheless due to computer glitches and actions of rogue officers. Capital markets today are anything but fail-safe.

…

See easy-money policy of Federal Reserve Monnet, Jean, 116 Montenegro, 136 Morell, Mike, 37–39 Morgan, J. P., 220 Morgan Stanley, 32–33, 262 Morocco, 152, 153 Mourdock, Richard, 205 M-Subzero, 280, 283–84 Mubarak, Hosni, 156 Mulheren, John, 18–19, 32–33 Mundell, Robert, 125 Mussolini, Benito, 294 Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), 46, 63 Mutual Assured Financial Destruction, 46 “Myth of Asia’s Miracle, The” (Krugman), 94 M-Zero (M0), 280 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 254 Napoleon Bonaparte, 114 Napoleonic Wars, 115 NASDAQ Stock Market closure, August 22, 2013, 60, 296–97 National Defense University, 59 National Journal, 63 National Security Agency (NSA), 53 negative real interest rates, 183–84 neofascism, 294–95 Netherlands, 233 New Scotland Yard, 37 New York Times, The, 39, 51, 55, 133, 144 9/11 attacks continuity of government operations, failure of, 63 as failure of imagination, 256, 257 9/11 attacks, and insider trading, 17–28, 63 Mulheren’s opinion of, 18 9/11 Commission’s failure to find connection between, 21–22, 23, 25–27 Poteshman’s statistical analysis of, 22–23 signal amplification and, 24, 25, 26, 27 social network analysis of, 19–20, 25 Swiss Finance Institute study of, 23 9/11 Commission, 21–22, 23, 25–27 9/11 Truth Movement, 27 Nitze, Paul, 43 Nixon, Richard, 1, 2, 5, 58, 85, 209, 220, 235, 252, 285 Nolan, Dave, 32–33 numeraire, gold as, 219–20 Obama, Barack, 37, 57, 129, 156, 202–3, 206, 252–53 Obamacare legislation, 247–48 offensive aspects of financial war, 46 Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), 53–54 Oman, 152 one-child policy, China, 95, 102 O’Neill, Jim, 139–40, 146, 150 Operation Duplex-Barbara, 59 Otto I, Emperor, 114 Outline of Reform (C-20), 235 Pakistan, 30, 151, 156 panic dynamic, 62 Panic of 1907, 198 Panic of 2008, 46, 47, 52, 76, 77, 170, 188, 196, 201–2, 211, 296 panics, 224 paper gold transactions, 275–76, 284–86 Paulson, Hank, 206 Pei, Minxin, 106 permanent disability, 246 Peterson, Peter G., 51 Petraeus, David, 37 Pettis, Michael, 108–9 phase transitions, 172, 265, 289–90 Ph.D. standard, 177 physical targets, in financial war, 46 piecemeal engineering, 292 piggyback trading, 24 Plaza Accord, 1985, 118–19 Pleines, Günter, 277 Poland, 200, 233 Ponzi scheme, in wealth management products (WMPs), 102–3 Popper, Karl, 292 Portugal, 128, 200 Poteshman, Allen M., 22–23 pound sterling, 157, 161, 209 price discovery, 68 primary deficit sustainability (PDS) framework, 177–83 Project Prophesy, 28–34 Pufeng, Wang, 44, 45 Putin, Vladimir, 151 Qatar, 152 Qiao Liang (Unrestricted Warfare), 44–45 Qin Dynasty, 90 Qing Dynasty, 90, 91 quantitative easing (QE), 159–61 end of, implications of, 297 by Federal Reserve, 184–85 in Japan, 160–61 in United Kingdom, 160 quantity theory of credit (creditism), 168 quantity theory of money (monetarism), 168–69 Quantum Dawn 2, 54 Rajoy, Mariano, 134 Ramo, Joshua Cooper, 120 random numbers, 268–69 Rauf, Rashid, 37 Ray, Chris, 35–36, 38, 40 Raymond, Lenny, 35 Reagan, Ronald, 2, 63, 118, 166, 176–77, 210 Reagan administration, 235 real incomes, decline in, 78–79 regime uncertainty, 84–87, 125–26 regional trade currency blocs, 255–56 regression analyses, 4–5 Reinhart, Carmen, 182, 183 repatriation of gold, 40, 231–34 Republicans, 175–76, 179, 180, 205, 294 Reserve Bank of Australia, 52–53 revolution in military affairs (RMA), 43–44 Rise of the Warrior Cop (Balko), 294 risk financial, 85, 268–70 gold as risk-free asset, 219 investments and, 218–19 systemic, 11–12, 81, 188, 249–50, 251, 259, 270 uncertainty distinguished, 85, 268 Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Knight), 268 Roett, Riordan, 192 Rogoff, Kenneth, 182 Rollover (film), 1, 3 Roman Empire, fall of, 5 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 85, 295 Rothschild, Nathan, 216 Rouhani, Hassan, 57, 152 Rubin, Robert, 177, 195, 196 rule-of-law society, 166–67 Russia, 139, 151, 152, 233.

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

A Kremlin report concluded that war might “create on the whole globe conditions impossible for life.” Yet the mushroom cloud had a silver lining: “Strange as it may seem,” Churchill told the British Parliament, “it is to the universality of potential destruction that I think we may look with hope and even confidence.” The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction had been born, and although a string of terrifying slip-ups brought the world several times to the brink of Armageddon, in the end the West fought no Third World War. Instead, it fought a war in the Third World over the ruins of the western European and Japanese empires, waged mostly through proxies (normally rural revolutionaries for the Soviets and thuggish dictators for the Americans).

…

After a number of years, the world’s population would once again reach 2.7 billion and certainly become even bigger. Fortunately for us all, the men who actually made the decisions in the Soviet Union and United States in the 1950s realized that the only way to handle nuclear weapons was through Mutual Assured Destruction, a no-middle-ground doctrine where one false move would mean annihilation all around. The details of how to play this game remained nail-bitingly murky, and there were some close calls, particularly when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev tried to work out the rules in the autumn of 1962.

…

Since 1986 the number of warheads in the world has fallen by two-thirds, with further big reductions agreed upon in 2010. The thousands of weapons that the Americans and Russians still have could kill everyone on earth with megatons to spare, but Nightfall now seems far less likely than it did during the forty years of Mutual Assured Destruction. Biology, sociology, and geography continue to weave their webs; history goes on. FOUNDATION Asimov’s story “Nightfall” has not, so far at least, provided a very good model for explaining the onward march of history, but perhaps his Foundation novels can do better. Far, far in the future, says Asimov, a young mathematician named Hari Seldon takes a spaceship to Trantor, the mighty capital of a Galactic Empire that has endured for twelve thousand years.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Expressed differently, nuclear weapons had the effect of dampening down competition between the two dominant powers of their day because leaders understood that a nuclear war would be disproportionately costly regardless of the interests at stake. Behind that was the sinister genius of mutually assured destruction (popularly known as MAD) and what was known as second-strike capability, namely, the ability to absorb a nuclear strike by the other side and still be in a position to retaliate on a scale that would deter (assuming rationality was at work) the other side from acting in the first place.

…

See Gulf War Latin America, 10, 48, 71, 192–93, 283–84 League of Nations, 31 legitimacy, 21–22, 31–32, 101, 105, 195–98, 200–201, 225–27 and Iraq War, 123–24, 196 See also sovereign obligation; world order liberal democratic order, 55–73, 210–11 Libya intervention (2011), 89, 115, 117, 136, 160–63, 235, 236 linkage, 220–21 Lisbon Treaty (2009), 190 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 188–89 MAD (mutually assured destruction), 42, 43 major-power relations, 201, 202–3, 215–24, 233, 326n2 post–Cold War, 12, 77–79, 101 post–World War II, 59, 153 in Westphalian order, 22–23 See also China; Cold War; Russia al-Maliki, Nouri, 174 Mao Tse-tung, 80, 84 Marshall Plan, 39, 70 Medvedev, Dmitry, 100 Middle East, 8–9, 50, 62–63, 71, 151–77, 180, 268–83 and Arab Spring, 118, 155–60, 163, 172, 230 and Iran, 131, 132, 273, 274–75 and Iraq War, 89, 122–24, 153–55 and Israel, 125, 275–76 and military force, 276–77 and oil, 269–70 and stateless groups, 279–83 and Yemen, 172–73 See also Iraq War; Syrian crisis military force, 22–23, 28–29, 59, 99, 132, 133, 165–66, 170, 234 and Cold War, 38–41 preventive vs. preemptive, 123–24, 127–28, 240–42 and self-determination, 107 and terrorism, 120–22 and U.S. foreign policy, 217, 240–43, 273, 276–77 monetary systems, 147–49, 249, 251 and China, 81–82 and European integration, 189, 190 post–World War II, 56–57, 65–66 Monroe Doctrine, 48 multilateralism, 198, 254–55 multipolarity, 203 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 63 nationalism.

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

After a twenty-year period in which he contributed to practically every branch of mathematics, this is what he did in the last ten years of his life: played a key role on the Manhattan Project, pioneered the physics behind the hydrogen bomb, developed the first computers, figured out the optimal way to route bombers and choose targets at the end of World War II, and created the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD), the governing geopolitical principle of survival throughout the Cold War. Even after being diagnosed with cancer in 1955 at the age of fifty-two, he served in the first civilian agency overseeing atomic research and development, attending meetings, though in great pain, in a wheelchair for as long as he was physically able.

…

Even after being diagnosed with cancer in 1955 at the age of fifty-two, he served in the first civilian agency overseeing atomic research and development, attending meetings, though in great pain, in a wheelchair for as long as he was physically able. Despite all he accomplished in science, somehow von Neumann’s legacy in popular culture is as one of the models for the title character in Stanley Kubrick’s apocalyptic comedy, Dr. Strangelove: a heavily accented, crumpled, wheelchair-bound genius whose strategy of relying on mutually assured destruction goes awry when an insane general sends a single bomber on an unauthorized mission that could trigger the automated firing of all American and Soviet nuclear weapons. In addition to everything else he accomplished, John von Neumann is also the father of game theory. After finishing his day job on the Manhattan Project, he collaborated with Oskar Morgenstern to publish Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

First, it sought to maximize US influence and minimize the USSR’s influence abroad. Second, it avoided direct confrontation with the USSR to avert nuclear war. Third, it tried to prevent a regional “domino effect” favoring the USSR. Fourth, it contained communist expansion through a variety of discrete strategies, such as nuclear deterrence through mutually assured destruction (or “MAD”), security cooperation efforts like NATO, coercive diplomacy, covert operations, proxy wars in places like Korea and Vietnam, the “rollback” of communist governments through regime change, and aiding democratic nations, also known as the Truman Doctrine. These facets of containment lasted throughout every administration, both Democrat and Republican, although each had a slightly different take on it.

…

(West Point), 235, 236 Military budget, 37–38, 41, 46, 47, 50, 102, 106–7, 445 Military contractors, 51, 101–2, 128–31 Military education, 235–40 Military force, declining utility of, 104–8 Military-industrial complex, 50, 166–67 Militias, 3, 101, 123–24, 153 Mimicry operations, 191 Mitchell, William “Billy,” 17–19, 20, 238, 249, 250 Mobutu Sese Seko, 157 Montgomery, Bernard, 234 Moral corruption, 113 “Moral hazard,” 186–87 More, Thomas, 127 Morocco, 97 Mueller, Robert, 202 Mutually assured destruction (“MAD”), 78–79 Myanmar, 150 My Lai massacre, 122 Myth-busting, 111 Myth of bifurcated victory, 232–33, 235 Napoleon Bonaparte, 32, 230, 250 Narco-wars. See Drug wars Narrative, controlling the, 41, 66, 67–68, 108–13, 227 Nash equilibrium, 161 Nasrallah, Hassan, 242 Natanz nuclear facility, 16 National debt, 46, 167 National Defense University, 23, 71, 232–33, 237–38 National guard vs. active duty, realignment of, 38–40 Nationalism, 105 National Security Agency, 137–38, 202 National Security Strategy, 75, 76–77 Nation-building, 4, 93–94, 150 Nation-states, 8, 247 conventional war and, 30–32 retreat of, 147–50 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 2, 13, 21, 33, 37, 103–4, 168, 200, 245 Naval training, 55–57 Navy SEALs, 38, 172 Newbold, Gregory, 263n New Rules of War, 6, 9–10, 80, 248 New superpowers.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

It is too easy to imagine a cell securing a loose nuke or dirty bomb (clad in fissionable radioactive material) and importing it on one of those ubiquitous container ships that enter ports around the world, mostly uninspected. The second half of the twentieth century was marked by the unthinkable peril of nuclear winter, a thermonuclear exchange among state superpowers devoted to “mutual assured destruction”—the so-called MAD strategy of threatening reciprocal annihilation in order to deter conflict altogether. The first half of the twenty-first century will be marked by the “lesser” peril of a singular random act by a terrorist madman, a peril that may however seem even more horrific to urban dwellers.

…

See also Johnson, Boris London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), 186, 379n32 Los Angeles: carbon emissions, 319; inequalities in transportation, 195, 196; mitigation, 230–233; participatory budgeting, 306, 396n14 Los Angeles Microfinance Network (LAMN), 230 Lovelock, James, 17–18 Lübeck in Hanseatic League, 109 Luzhkov, Yury, 86, 172–174, 331, 400n48 Ma, Yo-Yo, 272, 287–288 MacArthur Park, 232–233 MAD (mutual assured destruction) strategy, 127 Mafia, 50–52, 107–108 Mailer, Norman, 10, 27, 37 “Make-work” jobs, 200 Malls, 44–45, 47, 276 Market fundamentalism, 226, 227 Marketplace, 14–15, 16 Market privatization of digital media, 254 Martindale, Don, 65 Maslin, Paul, 84 Masur, Kurt, 287 Mau, Bruce, 46–47, 366n46 Mayer, Marissa, 220 Mayors, 83–102; ambitions, 94–95, 98–99; characteristics, 87–100; corrupt, 89; expectations, 92–93; as homeboys, 98; how cities shape, 100–102; humor, 89–90; as managers, 92; mobilization of relationships by, 93; and NRA, 89; personal engagement by, 95–98; personality, 85–86, 88–89, 99–100; popularity, 84–85; pragmatism, 90–92; unique role, 350–352; work of, 86–87.

…

See also Global parliament of mayors Mayors Against Illegal Guns, 6, 113, 122–123, 129, 317 Mayors for Peace, 122–123, 128, 317 McCarthy, Kathleen, 117 McWorld, 143, 180 MedCities, 132–133 Megacities, 15–16 Menon, Anil, 106 Mer-Khamis, Juliano, 287 Metropolis, 16, 164, 316 Mexico, crime, 202, 381–382n66 Mexico City business revival, 223 Mexico City Pact (2010), 6 Michigan, emergency managers, 321 Microfinance, 229–230, 385–386n32 Millennium Development Goals, 134, 183, 204, 290–291 Mitigation of inequality, 213–237; best-practices approach, 233–237; example, 230–233; informal economy in, 228–230; injustice in, 224–228; poverty in, 216–224; and pragmatism of cities, 215 MNCs (multinational corporations), 168–169, 310–315 Mobility, 217–219 Mockus, Antanas, 295–298 Moore, Clover, 337 Moral freedom, 161 Moscow. See Luzhkov, Yury Moussa, Qadoura, 91, 268–270 MoveOn.org, 242, 260 Mumbai, 188, 200–201 Multiculturalism, 156–157, 283–286 Multinational corporations (MNCs), 168–169, 310–315 Mumford, Lewis, 36, 62 Musa, Kadara. See Moussa, Qadoura Music file-sharing techniques, 266 Mutual assured destruction (MAD) strategy, 127 mySociety, 263 Napster, 266 Nationalism, 115 Nationality, failure of, 154–157 National League of Cities, 111 National Rifle Association (NRA), 89, 112–113, 148–149, 325, 399n41 “National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act” (proposed), 148 National self-determination, 160–161 Nation-states, 145–163; as autonomous, 115; cities as alternatives, 3–4, 18–19; climate negotiations, 146; communities of, 156; cooperation by, 152; democracy in, 155; and failure of nationality, 154–157; and failure of sovereignty, 157–163; as global actors, 74–78, 147–148, 154; jurisdictional disputes, 9–11, 75–77, 147–150; origins and development, 114, 153–154; relationship of cities to, 8–11, 145–147 “Natural” human differences, 180 Naturalism, artificial, 35 Naturalness of country life, 29–31 Natural networks, 113–117 Nature, inequality in, 205–208 “Necropolis,” 36, 62 Nenshi, Naheed, 170, 177, 213, 217 Neocolonialism, 182 Neo-Nazis, 253 Networks, 5–8, 106–140; current, 11–12, 117–121; electronic, 262–267; environmental, 130–138; historical, 107–113; intercity, 135, 136, 301, 316–319; natural, 113–117; node and synapse metaphor of, 112; security, 121–130 Network society, 243 New cities, 55–58, 384n17 Newsom, Gavin, 95, 260, 265, 387n3 New Songdo City (South Korea), 16 Newtown, Connecticut, massacre (2012), 129, 148 New York City: bike-share program, 137; bridging capital, 115–116; carbon emissions, 319; crime, 203; culture, 278; fiscal crisis, 145; inequality in, 184; Mailer on, 10; MTA rail service, 151; parks, 45–46, 207–208; personality of mayors, 88; Police Department, 124.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

It risked what US Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner had referred to as ‘the threat of cascading default, bank runs, and catastrophic risk’. But Syriza did not have the same fear. Alexis Tsipras’s line was that he would do ‘as much as I can’ to keep Greece in the euro. He also used the analogy of ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD for short), the Cold War theory behind nuclear deterrence, and firmly believed there was no legal basis to throw Greece out. But he clearly implied that there was a price for euro membership that he believed was not worth paying. Greece’s European partners started to make contingencies for what Grexit would mean for their tourists.

…

After the May election the threat of a disorderly euro exit was Greece’s fundamental bargaining chip in a renegotiation of the EU loan agreement. By June, drachmail had been replaced by pragmatism. Syriza said it would stick to some of the headline targets of the Troika deal, but achieve them through tax rises rather than spending cuts. Within a month, all talk of mutually assured destruction had disappeared. New Democracy knew their trump card. At their final rally in Syntagma Square before the June election, there were flares, dodgy dance music, and an attempt at an impassioned speech from Greece’s would-be euro saviour, the ND leader Antonis Samaras. ‘The first choice Greece must make,’ he declaimed, ‘is: euro or drachma?’

…

The fundamental imbalance, however, between Western debts and over-consumption, and Eastern surpluses and overproduction, got even worse. In the USA, the defence secretary and others have played down any potential leverage that China might possess with its still massive stock of US government debt. The situation is broadly described as ‘mutually assured destruction’. China would sustain massive collateral damage if, for example, it attempted to dump its bond holdings. In this situation, the USA does appear to have obliged China to become a forced lender, a type of bonded banker for its ever-growing debts. It is a form of international financial repression.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

For now, the forces of integration have triumphed, in both Beijing and Washington. The Chinese-American economic relationship is one of mutual dependence. China needs the American market to sell its goods; the United States needs China to finance its debt. It’s globalization’s equivalent of the nuclear age’s Mutual Assured Destruction. (And to add to the forces of stability, the Chinese and American nuclear arsenals also act as deterrents.) The best scenario would be for China and the United States to work together to slowly unwind their suicide pact. China would benefit by having more money to reinvest in its domestic economy.

…

Raja, 166 monarchy, 76, 123–24 Mondale, Walter, 251 Monier-Williams, Monier, 170 Montgomery, Bernard Law, 254 Morocco, 17, 209, 239–41, 278 Morocco bombings (2003), 17 Morris, James, 184 mortgages, 42, 46, 85, 152, 217, 222, 225 Mountbatten, Louis, 36, 164 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 74 MRI machines, 30 Mugabe, Robert, 109, 131 multiculturalism, 65 multilateralism, 246–55, 267–69 multipolar order, 1–5, 39, 52–53, 233, 241–42, 243–50, 266–69, 274 multi-spindle wheel, 72 Mumbai, 150, 173, 180, 210 Mumtaz Mahal, 70–71 Mussolini, Benito, 195 Mutual Assured Destruction, 140 Naím, Moisés, 130 Nanjing, 63 nanotechnology, 200–202, 215 Napoleon I, Emperor of France, 100 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 84–85 National Academy of Sciences, 204 national debt, 46–49, 130, 138, 140, 217–19, 241–42 National Debt Clock, 46 nationalism, 34–42, 43, 76, 101, 134–35, 143, 145, 158–59, 180–83, 192, 274 nationalization, 197 national saving, 218 National Science Foundation, 205 nation-states, 34–42, 75 natural gas, 31, 129, 260 natural resources, 6, 30–34, 38, 65, 103–4, 115, 129–32, 232, 260 Nazism, 10, 25, 36–37, 143, 266, 275, 276 Needham, Joseph, 122–23 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 84, 86, 154, 156, 162–65, 169, 173, 177, 181 neoconservatives, 141–42, 247, 253 Netherlands, 67, 72, 79, 80, 188, 209 New Delhi, India, 150 Newsweek, 96, 227 New World, 79, 80, 187 “new world order,” 38 New York, N.Y., 48, 221, 224 New York Times, 163, 188, 203, 258 Nigeria, 60, 86, 98, 130, 149 Nixon, Richard M., 233, 284 Nobel Prize, 139, 210, 215 nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU), 217 nonalignment policy, 163–66, 177 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 5, 34, 39, 57, 168, 173, 272 North Africa, 12–13, 20, 80 North America, 78–79 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 13, 173, 247, 268 North Korea, 6, 19, 20, 141, 175, 235–36, 246, 259, 264 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (1968), 174–78, 265 nuclear weapons, 6, 17, 29, 34, 96, 140, 142, 167, 174–78, 249, 251, 256, 259–60, 265, 273, 275 Nunn, Sam, 265 Nye, Joseph, 121 Obama, Barack, xii, 139, 178, 251, 256, 259, 266, 279 Odah, Salman al-, 14–15 Oglethorpe University, 276 oil, 6, 30–32, 38, 115, 232–33, 260 Olympic Games, 5, 103, 105, 137, 187 Omdurman, Battle of, 188 one-child policy, 148, 214n O’Neill, Thomas P.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

If it had been up to von Neumann’s purely intellectual reasoning alone, many of the bombs he helped to create would have exploded on the Soviet Union. Thankfully, there was another thinker on hand, whose deeper grasp of human foibles added a new dimension to game theory that, among other things, helped save the world from mutually assured destruction. Enter Thomas Schelling. CAMP DAVID, MARYLAND, SEPTEMBER 1961 SOME OF AMERICA’S best foreign policy and military strategists were in the room: a young Henry Kissinger; Colonel DeWitt Armstrong, the Pentagon’s top authority on Berlin; McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security adviser; and John McNaughton, the top arms control aide of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

…

Von Neumann was too quick to draw the parallel between life and poker.) It is much more desirable to avoid war altogether than to fight a destructive war that does not change the balance of power, so while war is certainly a conflict of interests, there is nothing zero-sum about it. Compared to the likely alternative of mutually assured destruction, the cold war was a win for both sides. Thomas Schelling’s war games were part of his effort to bring that mutual win about. The war games were, in a way, a prelude to John List’s field experiments with Minnie Mouse pins. Schelling realized that however compelling the equations of game theory might be, you could not take the human element out of war.

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War by Michael Dobbs

air freight, Alan Greenspan, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, global village, Google Earth, Herman Kahn, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, stakhanovite, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, yellow journalism

Deploying missiles to Cuba strengthened Khrushchev's hand, and compensated for his shortage of intercontinental missiles. On the other hand, Khrushchev could not deliver a knockout blow against the United States under any circumstances. The surviving U.S. nuclear strike force would still be able to wreak much greater damage on the Soviet Union than the Soviets had inflicted on America. The doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction—MAD for short—was alive and well even after the deployment of Soviet missiles to Cuba. An army was on the move. To prepare for a possible invasion of Cuba, the president had ordered the greatest emergency mobilization of U.S. troops since World War II. All of a sudden, everybody in the military seemed to be heading toward Florida, by road, rail, and air, accompanied by huge amounts of equipment.

…

Some military leaders, such as LeMay and Power, were enthusiastic proponents of the first-strike option. The idea repelled and frightened Kennedy—he agreed with McNamara that it was impossible to guarantee the destruction of all Soviet nuclear weapons—but the plans were drawn up anyway. The nuclear debate was shifting from an abstract faith in deterrence through "mutual assured destruction" to practical considerations on how to fight and win a limited nuclear war. The American nuclear war plan was known as the Single Integrated Operational Plan, SIOP for short. Kennedy had been horrified by the first such plan, SIOP-62, which called for the dispatch of 2,258 missiles and bombers carrying 3,423 nuclear weapons against 1,077 "military and urban-industrial targets" scattered throughout the "Sino-Soviet bloc."

…

., radar in Morse code experts (diddy chasers) Moscow Knox in military parades in Presidium meetings in submarine communications with as target U.S. Embassy in Moscow State University Mount Weather MRBMs (medium-range ballistic missiles) in Cuba Khrushchev's confirmation of low-level photos of as strategic weapons in Turkey see also R-12 missiles Munich, appeasement at Murmansk Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) Naftali, Timothy Nagasaki Napoleon I, Emperor of France Napoleonic wars National Airlines National Archives National Intelligence Estimate National Photographic Interpretation Center National Press Club National Security Agency (NSA) National Security Council, Executive Committee of, see ExComm NATO Cuba-Turkey swap and NATO Council naval blockade (quarantine) Berlin and communications and Coolangatta and effectiveness of ending of Grozny and JFK and, see Kennedy, John F., naval blockade and Khrushchev's denunciation of press and pros and cons of public relations aspect of radiation detection devices and RFK's favoring of Russell's views on Soviet demonstrations against Soviet ships approach to Soviet submarines and NAVFAC Grand Turk Navy, Soviet see also specific ships Navy, U.S.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

Treasury secretary, attempted to reassure an audience of Chinese students that the country’s investments were safe in the United States, he was met with derisive laughter.10 It has become a cliché that the relationship between American debtor and Chinese creditor is now so dependent that it represents a new form of “mutually assured destruction”—a financial version of the nuclear balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war. It is clear that neither country’s situation is entirely comfortable, but it is surely worse to be the debtor nation. Shakespeare warned, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

…

., 122, 182, 265–66 Mao Tse-tung, 22, 23, 26, 237 Marchais, Georges, 46 Marcos, Ferdinand, 18, 43 Marx, Karl, 2 Marxism, 2, 27, 54 Medvedev, Dmitry, 283, 287 Merkel, Angela, 189, 194–95, 269–70 Mexico, 9, 71, 73, 77, 122, 188, 206, 271 as failed state, 210–11, 256–60 NAFTA and, 74, 116, 157, 259 Mexico City, 258 Microsoft, 120, 155, 261 middle class, 6, 140, 141, 205, 238 Middle East, 4, 10, 18, 85, 89, 96, 185, 195, 212, 233, 241, 245, 256, 257, 272, 288 see also Gulf War; specific countries Mihailova, Nadezhda, 148 Miles, James, 169, 284 missile tests, Chinese, 136–37, 187 Mitchell, Andrea, 108 Mitterrand, François, 45–49 Monnet, Jean, 216, 219 Morales, Evo, 78 Morgan Stanley, 110 Moscow, 53, 54, 55, 57, 238, 279 Mubarak, Hosni, 257 Mullen, Michael, 185–86 multinationals, 17, 81, 157, 193 Muslims, 147, 226, 245, 257, 260, 269, 288 see also Islamists mutually assured destruction, 183 Nabokov, Vladimir, 311n Naim, Moises, 77, 229–30, 241 National Intelligence Council (NIC), 180–81, 193, 267 National Interest, 100 nationalism, nationalists, 129, 147, 160, 263, 290 in China, 152, 220, 238, 261, 268–69, 283 U.S., 152, 157–58, 220, 267–68, 269 Nationalists, Chinese, 136 nationalization, 191–92 National Security Strategy, 184 national sovereignty, 203, 213, 216, 220, 222, 223, 230, 240, 246, 248, 275 nation building, 149, 209–10 nation reconstruction, 149 NATO, 96, 132, 133, 230, 234, 235, 236, 240, 253, 312n–13n Nehru, Jawaharlal, 80, 81 neoconservatives (neocons), 96, 103–5, 146, 165–68, 240, 307n Netherlands, 151, 158, 215, 219, 221, 269 New Asian Hemisphere, The (Mahbubani), 139 New Deal, 38, 296n new world order, 4, 8, 90, 93, 95–96, 176, 230 Bush Sr. and, 63, 87, 88, 225 New World Order, The (Robertson), 161 New York, N.Y., 16, 18, 221 9/11 in, 90, 96, 161–62, 164, 199, 280 New York Times, 168, 238, 261 Nicaragua, 43, 73, 242 9/11, 10–11, 90, 96, 103, 104, 134, 164–65, 167, 184, 199, 254, 273 antiglobalization and, 156–57 Europe and, 146–47 NonZero (Wright), 124 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 74, 116, 157, 259 North Korea, 159, 168, 186, 229, 273, 275, 311n nuclear deterrence, 183, 272 nuclear disarmament, 222, 287, 288 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), 212 nuclear proliferation, 3–4, 5, 9, 10, 176, 198, 199, 220, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229, 241, 242, 243, 248, 249, 280, 286, 287, 288, 311n terrorism and, 211–12 zero-sum future and, 262, 272–73, 275 Obama, Barack, 2, 173, 176, 182, 184–87, 196–99, 203, 222, 240, 243, 285, 287 Afghanistan war and, 230, 252–53, 254, 314n in election of 2008, 170, 179, 245, 268 election of 2010 and, 292 global problems and, 9, 197–99, 210, 211, 212, 224–27, 244, 272, 288, 291 Japanese relations and, 190 at UN, 9, 197–99 Of Paradise and Power (Kagan), 152 oil, 9, 48, 81, 89–90, 125, 175, 204–5, 221, 244, 272, 274, 275, 288 financial crisis and, 192–95 price controls removed from, 37, 39 price of, 204, 236, 242, 247, 248 Soviet, 55, 60, 66 Okinawa, 186, 190 Oklahoma City bombing (1994), 161 O’Neill, Jim, 76 Opel, 195 opinion polls, 140, 158, 165, 170, 196, 238, 245, 254–55, 264, 284, 316n Opium Wars, 17, 135–36 Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, 110, 259 O’Rourke, Kevin, 271 outsourcing, 122, 168 Ozawa, Ichiro, 190 Pacific, 185, 186, 187, 190–91, 274, 280 Pakistan, 10, 208, 251–52, 254, 255–56, 258, 273, 274, 311n terrorism in, 211, 212, 251, 252, 256, 313n Pale Fire (Nabokov), 311n Palestine, 207, 241, 272 pandemics, 9, 198, 199, 225 Paris, 46, 152 Parsons, Sir Anthony, 31 Paulson, Hank, 112 peace, 103, 118, 126–34 democratic, theory of, 5–6, 94, 127–31, 134, 140, 174, 283, 304n globalization and, 5–6, 10, 127–28, 140 peace dividend, 103 peacekeeping activities, 131, 199, 223, 225, 230, 255, 288–89, 316n People’s Daily, 22, 239 perestroika, 54–60 Perot, Ross, 157, 158, 267 Persian Gulf, 184, 193, 205, 241, 247, 272 see also Gulf War Peshawar, 251–52, 254, 313n Peskov, Dmitry, 235–36, 237 Peterson Institute for International Economics, 181–82 Pew polls, 158, 196, 254–55, 284 Philippines, 18, 43, 138, 206 Pinochet, Augusto, 36, 71, 75 piracy, Somali, 209, 210, 256 Pittsburgh G20 summit (Sept. 2009), 217, 218–19, 221, 225 Poland, Poles, 64–67, 100, 146, 147, 149, 150, 158, 165, 235, 270, 279, 280 population, 146, 206–9, 240, 257, 263, 269, 285 Portugal, Portuguese, 72, 147, 165, 188, 235 Post-American World, The (Zakaria), 181, 262 poverty, 27, 80, 81, 109, 115, 118, 138, 139, 149, 175, 189, 238, 272, 281 globalization and, 157, 255 global problems and, 198, 199, 202, 206–9, 220, 229 in Obama’s UN speech, 9, 198, 199 power, 118, 126, 162–70, 248 in Asia, 6, 142–43 of European Union, 151, 160 technological, 93, 94, 128 U.S., 10, 93, 96, 162–70, 173, 174, 176, 179, 180–81, 183–88, 213, 246, 249, 253 Prior, Jim, 31 privatization, 24, 57, 94, 191 in France, 47–48 in Great Britain, 17, 32–35 in Latin America, 72, 74, 75 productivity, 119, 122, 151 progress, 118–26 Project for the New American Century (PNAC), 104 prosperity, 10, 107–18, 133, 134, 140, 173, 194, 196, 249 protectionism, 80, 83, 158, 192, 195, 206, 218, 280 in Latin America, 72–75, 77 zero-sum future and, 262–68, 274 Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), 253 Putin, Vladimir, 146, 168, 235–36, 237, 283 Rand, Ayn, 108–9, 110 Rao, Narasimha, 79–83 Reagan, Ronald, 16, 17, 18, 35–45, 64, 74, 87, 114, 118, 119, 191, 213, 225, 296n defense buildup and, 55 Fukuyama and, 99, 104 Greenspan and, 42, 107 Latin America and, 75, 76 Soviet Union vs.

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

And so the RAND Corporation was hired to conduct experiments (like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which we looked at earlier), determine probable outcomes, and then program computers to respond appropriately in any number of individual circumstances. Led by the as yet undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic John Nash (the mathematician portrayed in the movie A Beautiful Mind), they adopted a principle called MAD, or mutually assured destruction, which held that if the use of any nuclear device could effectively guarantee the complete and utter annihilation of both sides in the conflict, then neither side would opt to use them. While this didn’t stop the superpowers from fighting smaller proxy wars around the world, it did serve as a deterrent to direct conflict.

…

., 4 LifeWaves, 107 Lilla, Mark, 53 Lincoln, Abraham, 82 Linnaeus, Carolus, 90 Lippman, Walter, 45 local economic transfer systems (LETS), 149 long now, overwinding and, 140–49, 193, 194 Lost (TV show), 32, 34, 39, 199 Luntz, Frank, 47 machines: digiphrenia and, 93, 95, 98–99; event-based, 98–99; fractalnoia and, 224, 225, 230, 231; humans as, 95; needs of, 81; new “now” and, 4–5; off-loading of time intensive tasks to, 93. See also computers MacLeish, Archibald, 223–24 Macy’s, 160 MAD (mutually assured destruction), 221 Mafia Wars (game), 63 Major League Baseball, 41, 89 makeup, overwinding and, 149–59 management: role of, 187; scientific, 81 Mandlebrot, Benoit, 201, 229 manhood, 39 March, James G., 125 marketing/market research, 6, 85, 128, 158, 240 mashup, 149–59 mass production, 161–62, 165 Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor, 157 McCain, John, 41 McDonald, Mark, 86 McKenna, Dennis, 251–52 McKenna, Terence, 251–53 McLuhan, Marshall, 115, 202, 214–15, 219 Mead, Margaret, 225 media: apocalypto and, 248; change and, 265; consumers and, 166, 167; digiphrenia and, 7; fractalnoia and, 202, 203–4, 205, 210–11, 214–15, 223; global, 214–15; overwinding and, 166, 167; zombie movement and, 248.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

In Europe, American and Soviet tanks were facing off across the newly constructed Berlin Wall. When the Soviets prepared to install nuclear missiles in Cuba in October 1962, it felt as if the world had come to the brink. The United States had more than 30,000 nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was rapidly catching up. The deterrence logic of “mutually assured destruction” was scant solace. So began the Apollo program, the largest and most complex technical undertaking in human history.5 At its peak, it involved 500,000 people and 20,000 companies. Its cost in present-day dollars was more than $100 billion. To get to the Moon so quickly, NASA needed a huge budget and a tight and single-minded focus on the goal.

…

., 239 Los Angeles Times, 71 Losing My Virginity (Branson), 86, 87 Louis IX, king of France, 23 Louis XVI, king of France, 68 Lovelock, James, 286 Lowell, Percival, 163–64 Lucian of Samosata, 20 Lucretius, 18–19 Luna program, 50–51 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, 156 Lunokhod rover, 143 Lynx rocket plane, 101 M5 fiber, 161 McAuliffe, Christa, 55, 74 Mack 3 Blackbird, 69 McKay, Chris, 173 McLellan, William, 283 magnetic implants, 207 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 190 magnetic sails, 186, 223 magnitude of time, 248–50, 249 Manhattan Project, 36, 221 Manifest Destiny, applied to space, 146–47, 199 Manned Habitat Unit, 169 many worlds concept, 17–20, 17, 49, 267 Mao Zedong, 141 Marconi, Guglielmo, 237 Mariner 2, 51 Mariner 4, 164 Marino, Lori, 190 Marriott hotels, 145 Mars, 28, 237, 270 challenges of travel to, 166–70 distance from Earth to, 50, 148, 166 Earth compared to, 171–72, 216 establishing a colony on, 166–71, 169, 192, 195, 200–201, 203, 214, 248 evidence of water on, 124–25, 163–66, 165, 173 fly-bys of, 51, 170 imaginative perceptions of, 163–65 latency on, 178 map of, 163 obstacles to exploration of, 66–67, 148 one-way journey to, 166, 170–71, 200 as potentially habitable, 124–25, 163, 165–66, 171, 172–74, 234, 278 privately funded missions to, 170–71 probes to, 40, 51, 52, 164–65, 176, 246 projected exploration of, 94–98, 101, 104, 115, 119, 157, 161, 163–74, 178, 181, 182 property rights on, 145, 198–99 sex and reproduction on, 200 simulated journey to, 169–70 soil of, 170 staging points for, 161 terraforming of, 172–74, 182, 216, 227 tests for life on, 52 Mars Direct, 169 Mars500 mission, 169 Mars One, 170–71, 198–201 Mars Society, 166 Mars 3 lander, 51 Masai people, 120 Massachusetts General Hospital, 250 Masson-Zwaan, Tanja, 199 mathematics, 19 as universal language, 236–37 Matrix, The, 260 matter, manipulation of, 258 matter-antimatter annihilation, 220, 220, 221–22 Mavroidis, Constantinos, 182 Max-Q (maximum aerodynamic stress), 46 Maxwell, James Clerk, 183 Mayor, Michel, 126–28, 133 medicine: challenges and innovation in, 92–93, 263 cyborgs in, 205 medicine (continued) as lacking in space, 200 in life extension, 259 nanotechnology in, 225, 259 robots in, 180, 181, 182, 205 mediocrity, principle of, 261 Mendez, Abel, 278 mental models, 13–17, 18–19 Mercury: orbit of, 126, 215 property rights on, 145 as uninhabitable, 124 mercury poisoning, 118 Mercury program, 41, 42, 71, 74, 272 meta-intelligence, 94 meteorites, 152, 160, 160, 164, 195 methane, 52–53, 125, 132, 278 as biomarker, 217–18 methanogens, 217 “Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, A” (Goddard), 30, 31 Methuselah, 131 mice, in scientific research, 48–49, 250–51 microbes, microbial life, 97–98, 173, 174, 217, 241, 246, 286 habitable environments for, 122–25, 165–66, 186 microcephaly, 203 microgravity, 115 microsatellites, 90 Microsoft, 84, 188 microwaves: beaming of, 223–24 signals, 187 Microwave Sciences, 223 Middle East, population dispersion into, 8, 118 migration: early human population dispersion through, 5–9, 9, 15, 19 motivation for, 9–12, 11 military: covert projects of, 69–72 Eisenhower’s caveat about, 79 in Internet development, 77, 78–79 nanotechnology in, 180–81, 225 in rocket development, 30, 32–39, 55–56, 71 in space programs, 73, 76, 79, 144, 153 Milky Way galaxy, 227, 240, 253, 263, 270 ancient Greek concept of, 18 Drake equation for detectable life in, 188, 233–35 Earth-like exoplanets in, 129–33, 233, 291 formation and age of, 235 size of, 242 Millis, Marc, 290 mind control, 245 mind uploading, 259 miniaturization, see nanotechnology minimum viable population, 201, 251 mining: of asteroids, 155–56, 182, 214 of Enceladus, 227 on Moon, 214 by robots, 178, 182 Minsky, Marvin, 177, 179 MirCorp, 75 mirrors, 173 Mir Space Station, 75, 115, 167–68 Miss Baker (monkey), 47–48, 48 Mission Control, 43, 100, 158, 269 MIT, 38, 77, 90, 141, 226, 257 mitochondrial DNA, 6, 9 Mittelwerk factory, 33, 35 Mojave Desert, 71, 82, 83 population adaptation to heat in, 118–19 molecules, in nanotechnology, 151 Mongols, 23, 24 monkeys, in space research, 47–48, 48 Montgolfier brothers, 68 Moon: age of, 50 ancient Greek concept of, 18 in asteroid capture, 156 distance from Earth to, 49–50, 150, 166, 267 first animals on, 49 first man on, 71, 158 latency on, 178 lunar base proposed for, 157–63, 158, 160, 195, 214, 248 manned landings on, 44–45, 49–50, 54, 56, 63, 71, 84, 99, 104, 108, 143, 157, 158, 176, 219, 270, 272 obstacles to exploration of, 66 orbit of, 25 probes to, 40, 51, 129, 140, 143 projected missions to, 92, 143, 157–63, 166, 214, 275 property rights on, 145–47, 198–99 proposed commercial flights to, 102 in science fiction, 20, 26 soil of, 159, 160, 162 as staging point for Mars, 161 staging points for, 148 telescopic views of, 31, 49–50 as uninhabitable, 124, 166 US commitment to reach, 41–45 Moon Treaty (1979), 146 Moon Treaty, UN (1984), 279 Moore, John, 203 Moravec, 259–60 Morgan, Barbara, 74 Morrison, Philip, 187, 239 Mosaic web browser, 79 Moses, 148 motion, Newton’s laws of, 25, 67–68 multistage rockets, 29 multiverse, 252–57, 255 Musk, Elon, 94–98, 97, 100–101, 112–13, 148, 205 mutation, 6–7 cosmic rays and, 204 7R, 10–12, 11, 15 mutually assured destruction, 42 Mylar, 184, 225 N1/L3 rocket, 44, 54 nanobots, 179–82, 181, 224–28 NanoSail-D, 184, 185 nanosponges, 180 nanotechnology, 151–52, 179–82, 208, 214, 245, 280, 283 projected future of, 257–59 see also nanobots National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 83, 90, 96, 97–98, 114, 116–17, 128, 144, 153, 156, 176, 178, 182, 184–85, 185, 195, 200, 205, 206, 216, 224, 226, 271, 275, 280, 290 and Air Force, 71 artistic depiction of space colonies by, 196, 196 budget of, 39, 42, 43, 49, 54, 64, 75, 99, 104, 140, 144, 158, 166, 188, 238, 270, 272, 284 cut back of, 45, 49, 54, 188 formation of, 38–39, 145, 269 private and commercial collaboration with, 99–102, 104 revival of, 103–5 space program of, 51, 55–56, 71–76, 92, 157–58, 285–86 stagnation of, 63–67, 141, 147, 166 National Geographic Society, 7, 265 National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 187–88 National Science Foundation (NSF), 78–79 Native Americans, 118 naturalness, 256 natural selection, 6, 16, 123, 164, 251, 291 Nature, 187 Naval Research lab, 37 Navy, US: Bureau of Aeronautics, 30 in rocket development, 36–37 Nayr, Ernst, 238 Nazis, 48 Propaganda Ministry of, 32 von Braun and, 32–34, 141, 269 NBC, 75 Nedelin, Mitrofan, 43 “needle in a haystack” problem, 188–89, 242–43 “Nell” (rocket), 29 Neptune, 127, 131, 225 as uninhabitable, 125 Nergal, 163 Netscape, 80 New Mexico, 88, 88, 105 Newton, Isaac, 24–25, 25, 30, 67–68, 110, 262, 267 New York Times, 30, 94 Nicholas, Henry, 214 Niven, Larry, 198, 253 Nixon, Richard, 108, 167 Nobel Prize, 126, 180, 214 nomad planets, 128 Noonan, James, 266 nuclear fission, 220, 220, 221 nuclear fusion, 110, 161–62, 220, 221, 221, 222 nuclear reactors, 224 nuclear weapons, 36, 42, 78, 129, 146, 197–98, 222, 234–35, 244, 245, 246, 286 Nuremberg Chronicles, 17 Nyberg, Karen, 200 Obama, Barack, 104 Oberth, Hermann, 28, 31–32, 36, 268 oceans: acidification of, 195 sealed ecosystem proposed for, 197 Oculus Rift, 176 Ohio, astronauts from, 74 Okuda, Michael, 228 Olsen, Ken, 213 100 Year Starship project, 224 100 Year Starship Symposium, 229 101955 Bennu (asteroid), 156 O’Neill, Gerard, 196, 251–52 Opportunity rover, 165 optical SETI, 190, 243 Orbital Sciences Corporation, 100–101, 275 orbits: concept of, 25 geostationary, 149–50, 150 legislation on, 146 low Earth, 49, 54, 63, 70–71, 70, 74–75, 97, 100, 110, 113–14, 151, 155, 184 manned, 40–41, 141–42 staging points from, 148 orcas, 190 Orion spacecraft, 104 Orteig, Raymond, 90 Orteig Prize, 90–91 Orwell, George, 35 OSIRIS-REx, 156 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 145–47, 198–99 “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking” (Clarke), 201 oxygen, 156, 159, 161, 170, 172, 173–74, 182, 193–95, 214 Oymyakon, Siberia, population adaptation to cold in, 119–20 ozone, as biomarker, 217 Pacific Ocean, 9, 224 Pac-Man, 175 Page, Larry, 92 Paine, Thomas, 167 Pale Blue Dot (Sagan), 121 “Pale Blue Dot,” Earth as, 53, 118–22, 121, 130 Paperclip, Operation, 141 parabolic flight, 93 paradox, as term, 241 Paratrechina longicornis (crazy ant), 193 Parkinson’s disease, 202–3 particle physics, standard model of, 256 Pascal, Blaise, 120 Pauley, Phil, 196–97 PayPal, 95, 97 Pensées (Pascal), 120 People’s Daily, 162 People’s Liberation Army, 144 Pericles, 18 Pettit, Don, 100, 273 phenotype, 6 philanthropy, 95 PhoneSat, 185 photons, 183, 186 in teleportation, 229, 230, 231 photosynthesis, as biomarker, 217 pigs, 250 Pinker, Steven, 16 Pioneer probes, 50, 51–52 piracy, 24 Pitcairn Island, 202 planetary engineering, 172 Planetary Resources, 156 planetary science, 51–52, 176 Planetary Society, 184 planets: exploration of, 49–53 formation of, 156 plate techtonics, 132, 241 play, imagination in, 10, 14 pluralism, 17–20, 17, 49 plutonium, 66 poetry, space, 272–73 politics, space exploration and, 63–64, 104, 141, 214, 238 Polyakov, Valeri, 115, 167–68 population bottleneck, 201–2, 287 Poynter, Jane, 193 Princess of Mars, A (Burroughs), 164 Principia (Newton), 25 Project Orion, 221, 221 Project Ozma, 187–88, 237, 253 prokaryotes, 172 property rights, in space, 145–47, 198 Proton rockets, 65, 113 proton scoop, 222–23 Proxmire, William, 238 Puerto Rico, 239, 243 pulsar, 131 Pythagorean Theorem, 238 Qian Xuesen, 141 Qi Jiguang, 24 Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, 92 quantum entanglement, 230–32, 230 quantum genesis, 255 quantum mechanics, 258 quantum teleportation, 230–32, 230 quantum theory, 189 qubits, 230 Queloz, Didier, 126–28, 133 R-7 rocket, 37 R-16 rocket, 43 radiation, infrared, 109, 253–54, 254 radioactivity, as energy source, 124, 181 radio waves, 66, 187, 189, 242 ramjets, 222–23 RAND Corporation, 222 Rare Earth hypothesis, 241 RCS Energia, 106 RD-180 engine, 72 Reagan, Ronald, administration of, 167, 271 reality TV, 75, 171, 214, 282 “Realm of Fear,” 229 reasoning, human capacity for, 13–17, 18–19 red dwarfs, 131 Red Mars (Stanley), 174 Red Scare, 141 Redstone rocket, 36–37, 71 reindeer, 119–20 remote sensing, 175–91, 224 RepRap Project, 227 reproduction, sexual, 6, 172 Ride, Sally, 74 “Right Stuff,” as term, 71, 114 Right Stuff, The (Wolfe), 272 Ringworld series (Niven), 253 risk: as basic to human nature, 9, 262 genetic factor in, 10–12 of living on Mars, 167–70 in pushing human limits, 120 of space tourism, 102, 105–9, 155 of space travel, 42–43, 55–56, 56, 106–9, 152–53 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 174 robonaut project, 179 robots, robotics: as aids to humans, 249, 250 in asteroid redirection, 104 commercial, 178 ethical issues of, 179 nanotechnology in, 179–82, 181 remote control of, 177–78 remote sensing through, 176 self-assembly and self-replication by, 226–28, 258, 259 in spacecraft, 50, 100, 100 space exploration by, 53–57, 66, 98, 133, 161, 177–79, 179, 208, 224–28 see also cyborgs; nanobots Rocketdyne, 112 rocket equation, 27, 53, 72–73, 110–11, 111, 148, 220, 268 rocket fuel, 110–13, 148, 156, 159, 161 comparison of efficiency of, 219–24 Rocket Performance Calculator, 222 rockets: alternatives to, 148–53 “bible” of, 267 challenges in launching of, 43–44, 46–49, 106, 107, 111–12, 148 comparison of US and Soviet, 44 cost of, 112–13, 113 developing technology of, 21–39, 43, 101, 103, 112–13, 183, 262 fuel for, 110–13, 148, 156, 159, 161, 220–21 launched from planes, 84 liquid-fueled, 28–29, 29 physics and function of, 110–14 proposed energy technologies for, 220–24 reusable, 101, 103, 111, 112, 113 solar sails compared to, 183 as term, 23 visionaries in development of, 26–30, 94 in warfare, 22–24, 30, 32–34 see also specific rockets “Rockets to the Planets in Space, The” (Oberth), 28 Rogers Commission, 271 Rohrabacher, Dana, 284 Rome, ancient, 18, 67, 163 Rovekamp, Roger, 207 rovers, 66–67, 92, 125, 140, 143, 158, 165, 167 nanotechnology in, 181–82 remote sensing through, 176 Rozier, Jean-François de, 68 RP-1 kerosine, 110 RS-25 rocket, 112 Russia, 23, 26–27, 149, 178 space program of, 37, 65–66, 72, 75, 84, 91, 104, 106, 107–8, 113, 114, 140, 143, 168, 184, 195, 200, 271 space tourism by, 75, 102 tensions between US and, 72 see also Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 27, 47 Russian Space Agency, 102 Rutan, Burt, 72, 82–86, 85, 88, 88, 89, 91, 97–98, 105–6, 214 Rutan, Dick, 83–84 Rutan Aircraft Factory, 83 Saberhagen, Fred, 177, 259 Sagan, Carl, 53, 121–22, 121, 176–77, 184, 198, 234–35, 238, 240 Sahakian, Barbara, 98 Sahara Desert, 238 sails: solar, 183–86, 185 wind-driven, 67–68, 183, 262 Salyut space station, 54, 108 satellites: artificial Earth, 36–39, 37, 40, 65, 71, 106 commercial, 96, 105 communications, 101, 142, 153 in energy capture, 253 geostationary, 149 GPS, 144 launching of, 154, 154 miniature, 90, 184–85 Saturn: moon of, 125, 227 probes to, 52–53 as uninhabitable, 125 Saturn V rocket, 43, 44, 46, 54, 83, 104, 111, 113, 113, 166 Scaled Composites, 83, 89 science fiction, 192, 196, 222, 223, 239, 250, 253 aliens in, 186–87 in film, 28, 204 Mars in, 164, 174 roots of, 20 technologies of, 228–32, 259 see also specific authors and works scientific method, 213 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 187–90, 234, 239, 254 evolution and technology of, 237–39, 242–43, 242 lack of signals detected by, 236–37, 240–44 new paradigms for, 258 “Searching for Interstellar Communications” (Cocconi and Morrison), 187 sea travel: early human migration through, 8, 9 exploration by, 109, 262 propulsion in, 67–68 self-replication, 226–28, 258, 259 Senate, US, Armed Services Preparedness Committee of, 39 SETI Institute, 188 78–6 (pig), 250 sex: promiscuous, 12 in reproduction, 6, 172 in space, 200, 214 Shackleton Energy Company, 161 Shane, Scott, 98 Shatner, William, 88–89 Shelley, Mary, 206 Shenlong (“Divine Dragon”), 145 Shenzhou 10, 142–43 Shepard, Alan, 41, 84 Shostak, Seth, 243 Siberia, 65, 119–20, 238 population dispersion into, 8, 118, 218 Sidereal Messenger, The (Galileo), 270 Siemienowicz, Kazimierz, 267 Simonyi, Charles, 75 Sims, 175 simulation: infinite regression in, 261 living in, 257–62 simulation hypothesis, 261 Sinatra, Frank, 45 singularity, 207 in origin of cosmos, 255 and simulation, 257–62 technological, 258–59 Singularity University, 94, 259 Skylab space station, 54, 116 Skype video, 176 smart motes, 181, 225 smartphones, 92, 185 Smithsonian Institution, 30, 81 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 85, 91, 271 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 103 Snowden, Edward, 178 social media, 195 Sojourner rover, 165 SolarCity, 96–97 solar flares, 167 solar power, 96, 181, 183–86 solar sails, solar sailing, 183–86, 185, 223, 225, 227 Solar System: discovery of first planet beyond, 126–27 edge of, 50, 53, 121 formation of, 156 habitability potential in, 122, 124–26 latency variations in, 178 probes into, 51–52, 66, 177, 185–86, 208, 270 projected travel within, 248–49, 263 property rights in, 145–47, 198 worlds beyond, 126–29, 156, 208, 215, 250, 263 solar wind, 162, 223 sound barrier, breaking of, 69, 71 South America, 11, 202, 218 Soviet Union, 30, 34, 37, 141 fall of, 47, 65, 75, 197, 271–72 rocket development in, 35–39 space program failures and losses of, 43, 47, 50–51, 54, 269 space program of, 37–39, 40–43, 141, 149, 237, 271 Soyuz spacecraft, 43, 55, 75, 84, 91, 102, 106, 113, 143 crash of, 107–8 space: civilians in, 55, 74 civilian vs. military control of, 37–39, 69–71, 79, 153 commercialization of, 55, 63, 73–76, 79–80, 88–89, 92, 97, 99–109, 100, 110, 147, 153–56, 154, 199, 214, 249, 275 debris in, 144, 152 first American in, 41 first man in, 40–41, 41 first women in, 40, 74 as infinite, 18, 19, 22 as inhospitable to human beings, 53–54, 114–17, 121 legislation on, 39, 78, 90, 144, 145–47, 198–200 living in, 192–208 “living off the land” in, 166, 200 peaceful exploration of, 39 potential for human habitabilty in, 123 prototype for sealed ecosystem in, 192–97 Space Act (1958), 39, 90 Space Adventures, 102, 275 space colonization: challenges of, 197–201 cyborgs in, 204–8 evolutionary diversion in, 201–4 legal issues in, 198–200 of Mars, 166–71, 169, 192, 195, 203 off-Earth human beings in, 215, 250–51 prototype experiments for, 192–97 space elevators, 27, 148–53, 150, 160–61, 185, 280 “Space Exploration via Telepresence,” 178 Spaceflight Society, 28 space hotels, 102–3 Space Launch System (SLS), 104 space mining, 155–56, 161–62 “Space Oddity,” 142 spaceplanes, 71–72, 85, 144 Spaceport America, 1–6, 105 Space Race, 35–39, 37, 40–43, 50, 55, 139 SpaceShipOne, 72, 85, 85, 88–89, 88, 91 SpaceShipTwo, 88, 101, 105 Space Shuttle, 45, 46, 49, 64, 72, 84, 85, 111–13, 112, 159, 167, 194, 219–20, 222, 275 disasters of, 55–56, 56, 74–75, 107, 111–13 final flight of, 271 limitations of, 55–56, 64–65 as reusable vehicle, 54–55 space sickness, 114 spacesuits, 89, 182, 195–96 space-time, 255, 255 manipulation of, 258 space tourism, 63, 73, 75–76, 79–80, 88–89, 91, 101–3, 154, 170, 214 celebrities in, 88, 101–2 revenue from, 154–55, 155 risks of, 102, 105–9, 155 rules for, 105 space travel: beyond Solar System, see interstellar travel bureaucracy of, 105–10, 271 cost of, 39, 42, 45, 49, 54, 55, 66, 75, 81–82, 91, 112–14, 113, 139–49, 153, 155–56, 158–59, 161, 166, 179, 183, 198, 214, 217, 222, 224–26, 252, 270, 275, 284 early attempts at, 21–22, 22 effect of rocket equation in, see rocket equation entrepreneurs of, 81–98 erroneous predictions about, 214 failures and disasters in, 21–22, 22, 38, 43, 47, 50–51, 54–56, 56, 63–64, 68, 72, 74–75, 101, 102, 107, 142, 184, 269, 271, 275 fatality rate of, 107–9 fictional vignettes of, 1–4, 59–62, 135–38, 209–12 Internet compared to, 76–80, 77, 80 life extension for, 250–51 lifetimes lived in, 251 living conditions in, 114–17 new business model for, 99–105 Newton’s theories as basis of, 25 obstacles to, 21, 63, 66–67, 105–109 space travel (continued) as part of simulation, 261–62 public engagement in, 45, 73, 85, 93, 162, 177, 217 remote sensing vs., 175–91 risks of, 43–44, 83, 89, 93, 105–9 speculation on future of, 76–80, 133, 213–32, 248–52 suborbital, 84 telescopic observation vs., 49–50 visionaries of, 26–39, 80, 94, 109 SpaceX, 96, 97, 100–103, 113–14, 275 SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, 96, 100, 100, 102, 170 special theory of relativity, 228, 231 specific impulse, 220 spectroscopy, 127, 165, 176 spectrum analyzer, 237 Speer, Albert, 34 Spielberg, Steven, 238 Spirit of St.

Nuclear War and Environmental Catastrophe by Noam Chomsky, Laray Polk

Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, energy security, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Kwajalein Atoll, language acquisition, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, nuclear ambiguity, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Abbreviations ACHRE: Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments AEC: Atomic Energy Commission ALEC: American Legislative Exchange Council API: American Petroleum Institute ARPA-E: Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy BIOT: British Indian Ocean Territory BLEEX: Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton BP: British Petroleum CDB: China Development Bank CIA: Central Intelligence Agency CND: Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament COP: Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC CTBT: Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty CW: chemical weapons DARPA: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DEFCON: defense readiness condition DOD: Department of Defense DOE: Department of Energy DU: depleted uranium EPA: Environmental Protection Agency GE: General Electric HEU: highly enriched uranium IAEA: International Atomic Energy Agency IBM: International Business Machines ISN: Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies IT: Information Technology LEU: low-enriched uranium MAD: mutually assured destruction MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology NAM: Non-Aligned Movement NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization NAVSTAR GPS: navigation system for timing and ranging, Global Positioning System NEPA: National Environmental Policy Act NIH: National Institutes of Health NNI: National Nanotechnology Initiative NPT: Non-Proliferation Treaty NSC: National Security Council NSF: National Science Foundation NSG: Nuclear Suppliers Group NWFZ: nuclear-weapon-free zone OPEC: Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries OSRD: Office of Scientific Research and Development PNE: peaceful nuclear explosion POW: prisoner of war PTBT: Partial Test Ban Treaty R&D: research and development RADAR: radio detection and ranging SDS: Students for a Democratic Society START: Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty TRIPS: Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights UN: United Nations UNFCCC: UN Framework on Convention on Climate Change WgU: weapon-grade uranium WTO: World Trade Organization 1.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

The 1950s saw a dizzying number of potentially revolutionary technologies become popular—atomic and hydrogen bombs, nuclear power plants, Sputnik, the double helix, passenger jets, dishwashers, polio vaccines, the lobotomy (invented in the 1930s), television, and transistor radios—and other trends, such as rock & roll and suburban housing developments. The disruptive influences of modern science and technology continued to be felt in the 1960s as quarks, lasers, Apollo, nylon, Pampers, the pill, LSD, napalm, DDT, mutually assured destruction, and the ARPANET entered the world stage. The most disruptive and destructive of all was the development of computers around the work of John von Neumann at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton to study and control the effects of nuclear bombs.29 The technocratic promise of the computer seemed to promise both delivery and destruction.

…

If Wiener was right in arguing that information arms all its possessors equally, double heaps of suspicion may support an ultrarational strategy that strains toward the irrationality found across cold war discourse. Kolman’s counterdefense of cybernetics against other Soviet critics, for example, resembles a game-theoretic scenario in which (like the policy of mutually assured destruction) both parties seek to settle their disagreements in order to avoid a larger collective loss.100 The basic logic of this cybernetic worldview, asserts historian Peter Galison, is to adopt the logic of the “enemy Other” and to preempt and predict the behavior of the intelligent and rational foe to the point where the positions are reversed and foe and friend become indistinguishable.101 Cybernetics—like its sister disciplines of game theory, information theory, and others—appears as a method for rationalizing the enemy, distributing structural strategy evenly across opponents and flattening the chances that an enemy will have to take strategic or logical advantage over an ally.

The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, language acquisition, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Sinatra Doctrine, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Transnistria

It had taken eight years to negotiate such a document, and the beginning was modest indeed, but it was a step in the right direction. From then on, while continuing to compete globally and fighting proxy wars throughout the world, from Vietnam to Angola, the two superpowers kept negotiating to reduce their nuclear arsenals, finding solace in the doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD), according to which both countries had enough weapons to wipe each other off the face of the earth and were thus obliged to negotiate in order to survive. Nixon flew to Moscow in May 1972 to sign SALT I—the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty—with Brezhnev, and President Jimmy Carter flew to Vienna in 1979 to sign SALT II with the same leader.

…

See Ukraine Kyrgyzstan Akayev and, 224, 345–346 CIS and, 322, 345–346 military forces, 346 nuclear weapons and, 346 sovereignty and, 173 U.S. and, 345–346, 382 Landsbergis, Vytautas, 197–198 Language, of Ukraine’s military, 289, 290 Lapychak, Chrystyna, 292 Latvia, 45, 191 annexation of, 192 sovereignty and, 174, 175, 197 Lebed, Aleksandr, 108, 118 Lenin, Vladimir, xiii, 328, 395, 398 Lezginka (dance), 288 Ligachev, Yegor, 28–29 Likhachev, Dmitrii, 175–176 Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, 6 Lincoln, Abraham, 67, 101 Lithuania, 45, 191, 197 demonstrations in, 50–51, 117–118 sovereignty and, 34, 37, 38, 50, 174, 198 Lobov, Vladimir, 209–210 Loyalty, 289 Lubianka Square, 139–140 Lukashenka, Aliaksandr, 324–325 Lukianenko, Levko, 60, 165–169, 278, 279 Lukianov, Anatolii, 125 Luzhkov, Yurii, 94, 122 MAD. See Mutual assured destruction Madrid peace conference. See Middle East Peace Conference Major, John, 75, 113, 209, 378 Make Way for Ducklings (McCloskey), 20 Makhamov, Kakhahr, 163 The Malachite Casket (Bazhov), 228 Malkina, Tatiana, 98 Maria (Yeltsin’s granddaughter), 100 Marshall, George, 329 Marshall Plan, for Soviet Union, 205–206, 329–331, 341 Massacres Babyn Yar, 66–67, 266, 285 Katyn Forest, 369 Tiananmen Square, 77 Matlock, Jack, 26, 48, 65, 69, 76, 193, 206 Bush, George H.

…

See Multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles Missiles Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, 51 Cuban Missile Crisis, 6 ICBMs, 209 MIRVs, 209, 211 tests, 15–17 Mitterand, François, 75, 112, 209, 235, 240–241 Mlynář, Zdenĕk, 12 Moiseev, Mikhail, 81, 127, 135, 136, 137–138 Moldova (Moldavia), 50, 65, 193 CIS and, 360, 361 local nationalism in, 34 sovereignty and, 173, 178 Transnistria, 177, 360, 361, 362 U.S. and, 382 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, xviii, 34, 193, 301, 369, 400 Morozov, Kostiantyn, 287–291, 324 Moscow, xix coup d’état of August 1991 and, 102–104, 107–109, 118–120, 134, 139–141, 142–143 food shortage in, 205 Moscow Echo (radio station), 103, 108, 115 Moscow Summer Olympics, 6 Most-favored-nation trade status Soviet Union and, 21 Ukraine and, 62 Mulroney, Brian, 75, 79 Multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs), 209, 211 “Muslim Charter,” 355 Mutalibov, Ayaz, 224, 357, 361 See also Azerbaijan Mutual assured destruction (MAD), 6 Nagornyi Karabakh, 360, 362 cease fire in, 213 ethnic clashes in, 33–34, 213, 357, 361 Nairobi, 32 Najibullah, Mohammad, 203 Narodna Rada (People’s Council), 165 National Security Council, xxi Nationality with mixed ethnicity, 288–289 Ukraine military and passport, 289 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 7, 25, 339, 406 Natural gas, 226, 270, 297, 301, 353 Nazarbayev, Nursultan, 14, 25, 44, 83, 88, 215, 219, 310–311, 402 Almaty summit and, 363, 364 Belavezha Agreement and, 320, 321, 348 biography, 350 CIS and, 345, 346–353, 356 coup d’état of August 1991 and, 114 economic reform and, 222 legacy, 185–186, 213, 405 with new union treaty, 41, 163, 185 nuclear arms and, 346, 348–349 political standing, 352 sovereignty of Kazakhstan and, 179, 181, 182, 249, 351 “10 + 1” and, 184–185, 186 See also Kazakhstan Nazis, 66, 67, 192, 281, 329 Neto, Agostinho, 8 New York, 32 New Zealand, 210 News media, 215, 235, 261, 266, 272, 279, 292, 298, 344, 347, 356, 364 censorship of, 98, 116, 137 coup d’état of August and, 98–99, 103, 108, 113, 115–116, 118–119, 138, 158, 161 foreign press, 98, 115–116, 118, 161, 372, 373–374, 377 radio stations, 103, 108, 115, 118 Ukrainian sovereignty and, 263 See also specific news outlets Nezavisimaia gazeta (Independent Newspaper), 98, 171, 230 Nicholas I (Tsar), 20 Nicholas II (Tsar), 28, 323, 338 Niiazov, Saparmurat, 249 Nikolaevich, Boris, 218 Niles, Thomas, 299, 379 9/11, xvi Nixon, Richard, 8, 63, 65, 117, 290 Brezhnev and, 3, 6, 51, 53 Niyazov, Saparmurat, 224, 352–353 See also Turkmenistan North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Geek Wisdom by Stephen H. Segal

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 13, battle of ideas, biofilm, Charles Babbage, fear of failure, Henri Poincaré, Jacquard loom, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, nuclear paranoia, Saturday Night Live, Snow Crash, Vernor Vinge, W. E. B. Du Bois

Though the word was never uttered in 1984’s seminal teen-computer-hacker-political-thriller War Games, the idea lies at the heart of the conflict that fuels the movie: a new Pentagon supercomputer that controls the nation’s nuclear launch codes is caught up in a relentless war-game simulation trying to answer the question, “How can the United States win a nuclear war?” We all know it’s a flawed question—the whole point of the Cold War arms-race theory of “mutual assured destruction” was that, in a world of opposing superpowers, the sheer volume of weaponry is meant to deter the use of any nukes at all. But back in 1984, when computer networks were new and exotic, it seemed entirely reasonable to worry that an artificial intelligence might start firing missiles based on the inhuman outcome of an algorithm.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

But the nuclear comparison is faulty, and as the cyber expert James Lewis has pointed out, the false analogy has kept us from accurately understanding how cyber plays into the daily geopolitical conflict. Nuclear arms were designed solely for fighting and winning an overwhelming victory. “Mutually assured destruction’’ deterred nuclear exchanges because both sides understood they could be utterly destroyed. Cyberweapons, in contrast, come in many subtle shades, ranging from the highly destructive to the psychologically manipulative. Until recently, Americans were fixated on the most destructive class of cyberweapons, the ones that could turn off a nation’s power or interfere with its nuclear command-and-control systems.

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But we knew the only attack that could threaten the existence of the country would come at the tip of a Soviet or Chinese intercontinental missile, or in the form of terrorists with access to nuclear weapons. And after some terrifying close calls, notably the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, we found an uneasy balance of power with our primary adversaries—mutually assured destruction—to deter the worst. It worked, or has so far, because the cost of failure is so high. In the cyber age, we have not found that balance, and probably never will. Cyberweapons are entirely different from nuclear arms, and their effects have so far remained relatively modest. But to assume that will continue to be true is to assume we understand the destructive power of the technology we have unleashed and that we can manage it.

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Strangelovian reputation, and its widely underappreciated solutions are arguably why we are still here. The idea of the strategic triad— nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers—and the equally important fourth element—space- and ground-based electronic early warning systems—has suffered from the unfortunate moniker of “Mutually Assured Destruction.” What the four were, in concept and in fact, were Mutally Assured Survival. The use of MAD instead of MAS is one of history’s greatest marketing errors. There is a voluminous literature on this.4 For those disinclined to read any of it, the 1983 movie War Games (with uncredited technical advisers from RAND) ended with the WOPR computer explaining the central insight of the Cold War: “What a strange game.

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History’s greatest technological advances are often cited as fire, the wheel, and storing instructions as data. The first is arguably a discovery, but the others are inventions. We can add a few more—the time value of money, the automobile, the transistor, and the World Wide Web. In the Introduction, the structure of Mutually Assured Survival (dreadfully mislabeled as Mutually Assured Destruction) was given high marks. Not all military technology ideas had similar merit. In Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon’s Scientific Underworld, Defense Technology International editor Sharon Weinberger tells the remarkable story of how tens of millions of dollars were spent on a crackpot idea for what amounted to a nuclear hand grenade, despite the efforts of the most senior Pentagon scientists to scuttle the project, and the dubious utility of such a weapon.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

Thus, even protective plans can seem aggressive, as in the case of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Popularly known as Star Wars, SDI would have relied on lasers in space to shoot down Soviet missiles. Had it worked, it would have upset a fragile balance of deterrence (mutually assured destruction via nuclear annihilation). Now, LAWS, automated cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns threaten to disrupt long-settled expectations about the purpose and limits of international conflict. We must find new ways of limiting their development and impact. War may at first appear as a state of exception, where ordinary ethical reasoning is suspended (or at least radically circumscribed).

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A ruthless power may try to kill the people in control of its rival’s military. If the rival’s forces were hard coded to respond with deadly force the moment any attack was detected, that first-strike strategy would be futile. Given devastating weaponry available globally, the logic of nuclear deterrence (mutually assured destruction) may apply a fortiori to autonomous systems with a dead man’s switch. Such a strategy is extremely dangerous. Automation can lead to disastrous results, causing the very danger it is meant to foreclose. In 1960, shortly before the US election, the United States’ Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (based in Greenland) “detected” a Soviet missile launch, asserting “99.9% certainty” that one had occurred.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics by John J. Mearsheimer

active measures, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, deindustrialization, discrete time, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, illegal immigration, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War

Nor were the Soviets able to gain a decisive nuclear advantage over the Americans at any time during the Cold War. Thus, each side was forced to live with the fact that no matter how it employed its own nuclear forces, the other side was still likely to have a survivable nuclear retaliatory force that could inflict unacceptable damage on an attacker. This “Texas standoff” came to be called “mutual assured destruction” (MAD), because both sides probably would have been destroyed if either initiated a nuclear war. However desirable it might be for any state to transcend MAD and establish nuclear superiority, it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.135 Military Power in a MAD World A MAD world is highly stable at the nuclear level, because there is no incentive for any great power to start a nuclear war that it could not win; indeed, such a war would probably lead to its destruction as a functioning society.

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It is difficult, however, to achieve and maintain nuclear superiority, because rival states will go to great lengths to develop a nuclear retaliatory force of their own. As emphasized in Chapter 4, great powers are likely to find themselves operating in a world of nuclear powers with the assured capacity to destroy their enemies—a world of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. Some scholars, especially defensive realists, argue that it makes no sense for nuclear-armed states in a MAD world to pursue nuclear superiority.9 In particular, they should not build counterforce weapons—i.e., those that could strike the other side’s nuclear arsenal—and they should not build defensive systems that could shoot down the adversary’s incoming nuclear warheads, because the essence of a MAD world is that no state can be assured that it has destroyed all of its rival’s nuclear weapons, and thus would remain vulnerable to nuclear devastation.

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Defensive realists suggest that once nuclear-armed rivals develop the capability to destroy each other as functioning societies, they should be content with the world they have created and not attempt to change it. In other words, they should become status quo powers at the nuclear level. According to offensive realism, however, those rival nuclear powers will not simply accept mutual assured destruction (MAD) but instead will strive to gain nuclear superiority over the other side. I will attempt to show that the nuclear weapons policies of both superpowers were largely consistent with the predictions of offensive realism. With the exception of the American and British cases, which are discussed in the next chapter, my four different cuts at the historical record are dealt with here in the order in which they were described above.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Towards a more secure world In the face of these challenges, how do we persuade people to take the security threats from emerging technologies seriously? Even more importantly, can we engender cooperation between the public and private sectors on the global scale to mitigate these threats? Over the second half of the last century, the fear of nuclear warfare gradually gave way to the relative stability of mutually assured destruction (MAD), and a nuclear taboo seems to have emerged. If the logic of MAD has worked so far it is because only a limited number of entities possessed the power to destroy each other completely and they balanced each other out. A proliferation of potentially lethal actors, however, could undermine this equilibrium, which was why nuclear states agreed to cooperate to keep the nuclear club small, negotiating the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in the late 1960s.

Democracy Incorporated by Sheldon S. Wolin

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, illegal immigration, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, mass incarceration, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, new economy, offshore financial centre, Plato's cave, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, single-payer health, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen

As then Vice President Nixon explained, “tactical atomic explosives are now conventional.”52 When the Cold War threatened to become too normal and abstract, déjà vu all over again, there would be “war scares,” including air raid drills during which children practiced protecting themselves from nuclear attacks by huddling under their schoolroom desks.53 Perhaps the most unnerving example of the mentality at work constructing a Cold War power imaginary was the doctrine of “Mutual Assured Destruction” formulated in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Instead of targeting an enemy’s military facilities “each side should target the other’s cities” in order to cause the most casualties possible. “The assumption behind it,” according to one historian, “was that if no one could be sure of surviving a nuclear war, there would not be one.”54 If there had been one, incinerated parents could die comforted with the knowledge that, thanks to school desks, their children would have been spared.

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Bush’s signing statements, 236 and government, 199 and inequality, 147 and inverted totalitarianism, 45, 47, 61 and Iraq War, 93 and McCarthy, 37 and The National Security Strategy of the United States, 83, 88 privatization of, 213, 284 and Reagan, 272 and religion, 116 and Republican Party, 199, 200 and science, 125 and September 11, 2001, attacks, 5 and Superpower, 60, 62, 132, 147 support for, 112, 198–200 and terrorism, 73 universal training for, 34–35, 39 and World War II, 106 Mill, John Stuart, 219 Miller, Zell, 199 Missouri Compromise of 1820, 208 Mommsen, Hans, 41 monarchy, xxi, 53, 96, 171, 234, 248, 253. See also sovereign Mubarak, Hosni, 47 Musharraf, Pervez, 175 Muslims, 124, 181, 199 Mussolini, Benito, xvii, 21, 22, 44, 51, 53, 84–85, 112, 169 Mutual Assured Destruction, 33 myth: and Cold War, 223 cosmic, 10–11 definition of, 10 democratic, 52 and elections, 148 and George W. Bush, 1–2 and Iraq War, 10 and media, 2, 12–13 and The National Security Strategy of the United States, 83 of new world, 69–71, 72 and NSC-68, 29 and presidency, 102–3 and Reagan, 271 and Riefenstahl, 1 and September 11, 2001, attacks, 9–10, 13–14 and Smith, 123 and Strauss, 169 and technology, 12 Weber on, 12 and World War II, 25 Nader, Ralph, 166, 205–6, 216 Nagasaki, 183 Napoleon I, 95 nationalism, 35, 112, 116, 204 National Security Council, 28, 167 The National Security Strategy of the United States (2002), 70, 71, 72, 82, 83, 84–93 National Union for Social Justice, 23 natural rights, 252 Nazi Germany, 66 comparison with, xvii and Huntington, 181 mobilization in, 106, 107 plebiscites in, 64 and Reichstag fire, 4 social services in, 196 and Strauss, 169 as totalitarian, xxi Zakaria on, 176 Nazis: American understanding of, 25 and business, 63, 112 and capitalism, 47 and constitution, 51 coordination by, 215 and democracy, 52–54 and economy, 55, 67, 108 and elections, 53, 54, 64, 101, 166 and elitism, 162 labor camps of, 57 and Lebensraum, 48, 49 and The National Security Strategy of the United States, 85 and opinion surveys, 59 overreaching by, 49 politicization by, 65–66 and preemptive war, 48 and race, 300n58 and Riefenstahl, 1, 3 social control by, 55–56 and Superpower, 62 and Vichy government, 96 and war, 55, 67 Negroponte, John, 134 neoconservatives, 19, 48, 74, 93, 130, 154, 165, 224, 264, 326n9, 327n10, 333 n13 neoliberalism, 221 neomercantilism, 219–20 New Deal, xxiii, 21, 22–23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 36, 38, 39, 156, 188, 203, 220, 221, 270, 273 New York Times, 8 Nicaraguan contras, 271 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 27, 40, 298n27 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 118, 170, 171, 173 Nixon, Richard, 33, 65, 104, 156, 230, 304n29 North Korea, 124 NSC-68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, 28–31, 301n70 nuclear weapons, 14, 16–17, 30, 33, 39, 50 Nunn, Sam, 103 oil/energy policy, 47, 49, 133, 197, 309n20 Olin Foundation, 171 opinion surveys, 59–60 Oppenheimer, J.

Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism From Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda by John Mueller

airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, classic study, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Doomsday Clock, energy security, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, long peace, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shock, Oklahoma City bombing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, side project, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, Timothy McVeigh, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

To achieve this balance each side had to maintain sufficient nuclear capability to retaliate with equal or greater force and to persuade the other side that it was willing to do so if attacked. It sounds simple, but it required careful calculations, convincing communications, and complex negotiations aimed at preventing either side from gaining a destabilizing advantage. Deterrence was maintained by mutual assured destruction (MAD), a tense standoff aimed at preventing nuclear war.23 The simple existence of the nuclear arsenals, therefore, somehow required all sorts of exquisite theorizing about their precise capacities and about how they should be deployed. The theory then ingeniously looped back on itself to further require that the arsenal be big and impressive enough to be persuasive to the presumed perspective of the theorists on the other side.

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bin Laden’s interest in, network, 213 intelligence agencies closing operation, 164–165 selling secrets, 169–170, 207 Khattab, Ibn, connection to bin Laden, 202–203 Khrushchev, Nikita Britain and France reversing invasion at Suez, 249n.12 Cuban missile crisis, 39–40 struggle against capitalism, 34–35 supporting Shevchenko, 248n.31 world war, 33 Korean War, 38, 47–48, 50 Kornienko, Georgy, world war and Soviets, 33 Kosko, Bart, government overestimating threat, 220 Kramer, Stanley, On the Beach, 57 Krauthammer, Charles, Arab world, 261n.1, 261n.4 Kremlin, 246n.15, 247n.22 Kristof, Nicholas, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, 181 Kristol, William, 261n.4 Langewiesche, William Atomic Bazaar, 183, 268n.5 book jacket flap, 268n.5 constructing bomb, 111, 173 obtaining nuclear weapons, 105 odds against terrorists, 184 passed “point of no return,” 93 Lapp, Ralph, A-bombs, 242n.19 Laqueur, Walter, proliferation of WMD, 228 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 266–267n.43 leadership, nuclear weapons programs, 113 Lenin, Vladimir, 34 Levi, Michael, 165, 171, 175, 184, 187, 189, 213, 264n.6 Lewis, Jeffrey, 178, 191 Libya, 124–126, 145, 258n.31 likelihood acceptable risk, 197–198 acquisition scenarios, 190–191 arraying barriers, 184, 186 assessing, 186–191 assigning and calculating probabilities, 187–189 comparisons of improbable events, 191–193 multiple attempts, 189–190 policy for reducing, 193–197 probability of nuclear fission bomb, 267n.48 terrorist bomb, 183, 238 World at Risk, 182 Lockerbie bombing, 125, 258n.32 London, image of destruction, 24 longer-term effects, nuclear attack, 8 The Looming Tower, Wright, 201 “loose nukes,”165–168, 208–210, 238 Los Alamos National Laboratory, 267n.48 Los Alamos scientists bomb design, 173–174 difficulties of making nuclear weapons, 174–175 sensitive detection equipment, 176 Los Angeles, port security, 141 Los Angeles International Airport, 19 lottery tickets, terrorism comparison, 191 Lugar, Senator Richard, 20, 171, 181, 194 McCain, Senator John, 130–131, 230 McCarthyism, Communist menace, 49 McCone, CIA Director John, Chinese threat, 91, 96 McNamara, Robert, 66–67, 68, 248n.33 McNaugher, Thomas, missiles, 116 McPhee, John, sense of urgency, 162 Mahmood, Sultan Bachiruddin, 203–205, 271n.16 Majid, Abdul, Pakistani nuclear scientist, 203–204 marijuana bale, smuggling atomic device, 177 Martin, Susan, 232 measured ambiguity, catchphrase, 86 melancholy thought, Winston Churchill, 35 Middle East, 225, 261n.4 Milhollin, Gary, 174, 175 military, Canada, 106 military attacks, appeal of nuclear weapons, 147 military planning, nuclear weapons, 14–15 military strategy, stabilizing or destabilizing, 66 military value, nuclear weapons, 108–110, 236, 237–238 Mir, Hamid, 164, 210–211, 264n.7 credibility of, 273n.36 missile capacity, 153, 154 missile crisis, Cuba, 40 The Missiles of October, Cuba, 40 Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 9/11 attack, 206 morality, Canada without weapons, 112–113 Morison, Samuel Eliot, 269n.23 Morrison, Phillip, chance for working peace, 26 Mowatt–Larssen, Rolf, xi, 20 Mueller, Robert, xi, 228, 274n.16, 276n.37 Mukhatzhanova, Gaukhar, points of no return, 94–95 Muller, Richard, 146, 172, 192 multiple groups, likelihood, 189–190 Musharraf, General Pervez, criticism, 260n.24 Muslim extremists, publications of violence, 223 mustard gas, calculation for causalties, 12 mutual assured destruction (MAD), deterrence, 64 Myers, General Richard, 20, 22 Naftali, Timothy, 76, 249n.12, 263n.29 Nagasaki atomic bomb, 9–10 human costs, 141 military value of atomic bomb, 10 surrender of Japanese, 43 taboo of nuclear weapons, 61–63 napalm, 243n.30 National Intelligence Estimate (1958), 119 National Intelligence Estimate (2007), 274n.16 National Planning Association, diffusion, 104 national security threat, terrorism and U.S., 233 NATO missiles, European demonstrations, 60 “naughty child” effect, Russia, 108 neglect, cold war, 86 Negroponte, John, probability of attack, 181 nerve gas, calculation for causalties, 12 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 264n.33 Neufeld, Michael, missiles, 116 neutron bomb, 4, 14, 81 New Jersey Lottery, 270n.6 Nimitz, Admiral Chester W., 269n.23 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), nuclear, 119–121 North Korea American-led forced invading, 247n.27 attention, 108, 238 axis of evil, 144 calm policy discussion, 151, 152–153 deterrence, 262n.19 “eating problem,” 152 hysteria, 263n.25 invasion of South Korea, 49 nuclear weapon, x proliferation, 93 proliferation fixation, 135–137 sanctions, 136, 145 “supreme priority” of, 149–150 Nth country problem, nuclear weapons, 91 nuclear age, verge of new, x nuclear arsenals, 64–65, 145, 237 nuclear bomb, 17, 269n.16 “The Nuclear Bomb of Islam,” bin Laden, 211–212 nuclear crisis, Cuba, 39 nuclear diffusion, 237 nuclear energy, security, 139–140 “nuclear era,” Hiroshima, ix nuclear explosion, 61–62, 181, 243n.9 nuclear fears classic cold war, 56–57 declining again, 60–61 On the Beach, 57 reviving in early 1980s, 58–60 subsiding in 1960s and 1970s, 57–58 nuclear fission bomb, probability of attack, 267n.48 nuclear forensics, 155, 164, 190, 194, 264n.6 nuclear fuel, cartelization, 260n.28 nuclear metaphysics, deterrence, 63–67 nuclear proliferation, xiii, 89 nuclear radiation, dirty bomb, 18 nuclear reactor meltdown, Chernobyl, 7 Nuclear Regulatory Agency, radiation, 7 The Nuclear Revolution, Mandelbaum, 246n.7 nuclear sting operation, 194 Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, Kristof, 181 nuclear tipping point, Brookings Institution, 93–94 nuclear virginity, Canada, 112 nuclear war, x, 64 nuclear weapons.

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

Baggott, Jim, 2009, Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb: 1939–49, Icon Books, London. Binmore, Ken, 2007, Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Burks, Arthur W., 1966, Theory of Self-reproducing Automata, University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Byrne, Peter, 2010, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Copeland, Jack B. (ed.), 2004, The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computing, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, and Artificial Life Plus The Secrets of Enigma, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Davis, Martin, 2000, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, W.

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Using entangled photons rather than hydrogen atoms is easier for such experiments. 75. This and what follows is from Stefano Osnaghi, Fábio Freitas and Olival Freire Jr, ‘The Origin of the Everettian Heresy’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 40, pp. 97–123. 76. Peter Byrne, 2010, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family, Oxford University Press, Oxford. 77. Philip Ball discusses the problems and advantages of this and other interpretations of quantum mechanics in his wonderful 2018 book Beyond Weird, The Bodley Head, London. 78. G. C. Ghirardi, A. Rimini and T.

House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, book value, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, Irwin Jacobs, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Northern Rock, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, too big to fail, traveling salesman, uptick rule, vertical integration, Y2K, yield curve

He opened that the move was “absolutely necessary because Bear Stearns has a balance sheet that is about $400 billion in size and it has about $176 billion worth of securities plus it has $42 billion in loans outstanding to others who own securities. If Bear Stearns had gone under, virtually all of these securities would become available for sale and be pushed into the market”—at prices that would have forced all securities firms to mark their own assets down in what surely might have led to the financial equivalent of mutually assured destruction—“and the result would have been a fairly significant financial collapse. So the Fed had no choice but to bail out Bear Stearns. This is a too-big-to-fail situation.” Inside Bear, the news about the Fed facility was announced around the firm. “We went out and we announced it to the trading floor,” Friedman said.

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The idea was to reject the lowball offers to buy the company and threaten to blow the company up by filing for bankruptcy. With the company would go the global financial system, to which Bear Stearns was so deeply connected. The thinking was that nobody—not the federal government, not JPMorgan, not other banks and investment banks—would want to experience the consequences of such mutually assured destruction and that, accordingly, the threat of such an option would be sufficient to award Bear more time—for instance, a real twenty-eight days—to fashion an orderly sale process or to be offered a price for the firm that would allow everyone to save face. It was just a germ of an idea, but one that was largely in keeping with the firm's image of being a bunch of rough-and-tumble iconoclasts.

…

He and Flexner somehow figured out that the Saudis had not obtained the air rights over nearby Grand Central Station that would be needed for them to build a skyscraper on the site. So Bear Stearns bought an option on the air rights from billionaire Carl Lindner for around $10 million contingent on Bear Stearns getting control of the site. “This was the true mutual assured destruction kind of deal because if you buy the air rights and you can never cut a deal with the owner of the building, then you've just lost 100 percent of whatever you paid for the air rights because they're only good for that building,” Flexner explained. “But they weren't that expensive and we could get an option on them for a few weeks or months or something.

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

When the oil-producing countries in OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, dominated by Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries) then dramatically increased the price of oil in 1973 and again in 1975, recession was unavoidable. The second challenge was the intensity of the Cold War. We tend now to think of the 1950s as being its height because of the political conformism of the McCarthy era, the Korean War, and the development of the insane but (as it turned out) correct theory of Mutually Assured Destruction. Yet the fact that it had persisted for twenty more years with no abatement was surprisingly demoralizing. Although it was clear to internal dissidents that the communist economies were failing, the disastrous results of central planning would not be understood in the West for another decade because of the publication of false statistics by the Soviet Union.

The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

If the Soviet Union knew a confrontation would end hopelessly with bombs and rockets hitting Moscow, then the chances for peace would be greater, or so the theory went. John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State under Dwight Eisenhower, called the policy ‘‘massive retaliation.’’ Later it would become ‘‘mutually assured destruction,’’ with the more fitting acronym MAD. Ronald Reagan had lived through World War II and the Cold War. He was opposed to this policy, which had been pursued by both Democratic and Republican presidents with the Soviets. American presidents dating back to 1969 were of the belief that if the United States waited and played its cards right, it could have security on the cheap without war or confrontation.

…

See also Bitburg fiasco Korean Airlines Flight 007, 54 Koresh, David, 154 Kosovo, 189–91 Kuwait, 125–26, 128–29, 131, 134, 137 Lebanon: Iran-Contra scandal, 89–90; 1983 involvement, 59–62; TWA 847 hijacking, 88–89 Lennon, John, 72 leveraged buyout, 67 Lewinsky, Monica, 193–96 Lieberman, Senator Joe, 208–9, 233–34 Live Aid concert, 73 Los Angeles riots, 170–72 Luce, Henry, ‘‘The American Century,’’ Life magazine, 76 280 Index MAD (mutually assured destruction), 52 Madonna, 73 McCain, John, 205–7 McFarlane, Robert ‘‘Bud,’’ National Security Advisor, 88–89 McVeigh, Timothy, 176–78 media, 194; campaigns, 81–82, 146, 149, 188; domestic affairs, 172–74, 177, 203; foreign affairs, 131, 134, 160; politics, 140, 194–96 media markets, 31–32, 86, 113, 150, 188, 196, 207, 209, 237– 40 Medicare, 121, 185, 187 Microsoft, 163–64 Middle East, 14, 129, 141, 175, 224, 237, 243 Middle East Peace Accord, 155–57 midterm elections, 79, 129, 157, 204, 224 Milken, Michael, 67–68 Milosevic, Slobodan, 189–91 misery index, 27 modernism, 71–72 Mogadishu, 156 Mondale, Walter, 80–82 ‘‘Morning in America,’’ 83, 85, 187 MTV, 72 1980s, 25, 31–32, 35–36, 46– 47, 65–66, 69–70, 72, 77 1990s, 32, 131, 141, 152, 163, 165, 169, 176, 180–81, 196, 199–200 Nixon, Richard, 4, 17 ‘‘No Child Left Behind,’’ 213, 237 noblesse oblige, 112 Noriega, Manuel Antonio, 118–19 North, Oliver, 89–92 nuclear: freeze, 55, 56; prospect, 96; war, 55–57 Nader, Ralph, 208 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 142, 161 Nagin, Ray, 243– 44 NASA, 93, 95 NASDAQ, 162 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 189–91 Nelson, Prince Rogers, ‘‘Prince,’’ 72 New Democrat, 145, 157, 184 New Orleans, 243– 45 New Right, 28, 29 New York City, 220.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Such vertical axes of surveillance, targeting and burrowing are far from new, however. Rather, current incarnations echo and intensify centuries of burrowing against attack from above – in medieval siege warfare, in the trenches of World War I, in the vast concrete bunkers of World War II, and in the preparations for ‘mutually assured destruction’ of the Cold War. (American journalist Albert Kahn memorably quoted one child’s fear when researching the psychological effects of the latter. ‘Please mother!’ the child pleaded. ‘Can’t we go some place where there isn’t any sky?’2) All of these outbursts of bunkering have repeatedly reworked prevailing notions of the use of warfare from above to try to destroy defensive and military architectures on or below ground.

…

Their brute, immovable materiality strongly evokes collective and personal memories of what archaeologist Graham Fairclough has called ‘a remembered past’. Here emerges a powerful series of resonances with the way the excavation of bunkers linked seamlessly in the Cold War with constructions of modernist Brutalism above the surface47 within an all-powerful rhetoric of mutually assured destruction or ‘exterminism’.48 Such complexes – ‘ruins of the twentieth century, of ideologies, conflicts, and dreams of mastery through reinforced concrete’49 – lie ready for exploration by a spectrum of groups, from conspiracy theorists, archaeologists, architects, place marketers, to photographers and developers.

The Happiness Effect: How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost by Donna Freitas

4chan, fear of failure, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Skype, Snapchat, TED Talk, Year of Magical Thinking

4.The Selfie Generation: Why Social Media Is More of a “Girl Thing” 5.Performing for God: Religion On (and Off) Social Media 6.Virtual Playgrounds: The Rise of Yik Yak, the Joys of Snapchat, and Why Anonymity Is Just So Liberating 7.An Acceptable Level of Meanness: The Bullies, the Bullied, and the Problem of Vulnerability 8.So You Wanna Make That Facebook Official? 9.The Ethics of Sexting: Tinder, Dating, and the Promise of Mutually Assured Destruction 10.My Smartphone and Me: A Love-Hate Relationship 11.Taking a Timeout from the Timeline: Students Who Quit Social Media and Why Conclusion: Virtues for a Generation of Social Media Pioneers Taking Control of Our Smartphones: How Student Affairs Professionals, Faculty, and Parents Can Help Young Adults Feel Empowered with Respect to Social Media and Their Devices Acknowledgments Appendix: Methodology Notes Index FOREWORD Margaret has to avoid Facebook because seeing how happy everyone else appears online makes her unhappy by comparison.

…

Some lament that nobody really talks anymore, and that “friend has changed as a word” because of Facebook. It’s not only friendships, either, that college students still prefer to strike up in person. When it comes to dating, romance, sex, and hooking up, their preference for an in-person, face-to-face spark is undeniable. 9 THE ETHICS OF SEXTING TINDER, DATING, AND THE PROMISE OF MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION Sexting responsibly would mean, if you’re not sending your pictures or, like, sexy text messages to somebody you don’t know. Jeremy, sophomore, Catholic university I do not know of any peers who engage in [sexting] now, as it is widely known to negatively impact your reputation on campus.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain by Daniel Gardner

Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Doomsday Clock, feminist movement, haute couture, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Linda problem, mandatory minimum, medical residency, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, the long tail, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Y2K, young professional

In November 2007, the esteemed professor of Near Eastern studies Bernard Lewis cast the fight against terrorism as the third great fight against totalitarianism, after the struggles against Naziism and Communism. But there is an important difference, Lewis wrote. The Nazis “had no weapons of mass destruction. The Soviets had them, but were deterred from using them by what came to be known as ‘mutually assured destruction.’ Our present adversaries either have or will soon have weapons of mass destruction, but for them, with their apocalyptic mind-set, mutual assured destruction would not be a deterrent; it would be an inducement. ” Thus, according to Lewis, neither a genocidal maniac who came within a hair of conquering Europe and dominating the planet nor a superpower capable of snuffing out civilization on 15 minutes notice were as dangerous as scattered bands of fanatics who may, someday, get their hands on a WMD or two. 267: “. . . of death or 9/11 increased support for the president.”

Shoot for the Moon: The Space Race and the Extraordinary Voyage of Apollo 11 by James Donovan

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Charles Lindbergh, drop ship, Gene Kranz, Hans Lippershey, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, white flight

In 1953, Eisenhower had threatened to use a hydrogen bomb against China, and U.S. senators had often called publicly for an atomic bomb to be dropped on Russia. Soon after the Soviet Union had detonated its own nuclear device, the two superpowers had begun to coexist under an unwritten but clearly understood doctrine known as “mutually assured destruction,” meaning that everyone was aware that the full-scale use of nuclear weapons would cause the almost complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. This knowledge—and each country’s fear of a massive, preemptive nuclear strike from the other—was all that kept the Cold War from becoming hot.

…

But neither the public nor the press seemed to care about the distinction, and the May 15, 1958, successful launch into orbit of Sputnik 3, a 2,926-pound research satellite with a large array of instruments, only increased the nation’s anxiety. The United States and the USSR had yet to engage in full-scale combat, but each side was heavily armed, and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction was of little comfort. Further fueled by an almost constant barrage of opinion pieces and articles on the imminent dangers of Soviets in space, not to mention speeches and statements by Senator Lyndon Johnson and other Democratic congressmen eager to exploit the purported missile gap for their own political gain, Americans quickly began demanding a full-fledged space program.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

At the time, Baran had been tasked with developing a scheme for an indestructible telecommunications network for the US Air Force. Cold War planners feared that the hub-and-spoke structure of the telephone system was vulnerable to a preemptive Soviet first strike. Without a working communications network, the United States would not be able to coordinate a counterattack, and the strategic balance of “mutually assured destruction” between the superpowers would be upset. What Baran proposed, according to Harvard University science historian Peter Galison, “was a plan to remove, completely, critical nodes from the telephone system.”15 In “On Distributed Communications” and a series of pamphlets that followed, he demonstrated mathematically how a less centralized latticework of network hubs, interconnected by redundant links, could sustain heavy damage without becoming split into isolated sections.16 The idea was picked up by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a group set up to fast-track R&D after the embarrassment of the Soviet space program’s Sputnik launch in 1957.

…

In the early 1960s, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union entered a new and alarming phase. At first, American strategy was based on deterrence. By matching Soviet buildup, the United States could ensure that nuclear war would cause such total annihilation that it would be an unthinkable option for the enemy. But some thinkers, led by Herman Kahn at RAND, didn’t buy the “mutually assured destruction” doctrine. In a controversial 1962 treatise, titled Thinking About the Unthinkable, published after he left RAND to found his own group, the Hudson Institute, Kahn argued that not only was a nuclear war winnable, but “the living would not envy the dead” as conventional thinking held.71 Many, if not most of the population, would survive.

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

In the end, the bond desk’s attempts to best Meriwether precipitated a scandal. Salomon’s was accused of breakng the rules that governed the US government bond auctions. Both Paul Mozer, who had succeeded Coats as the head of Government bond trading, and Meriwether were forced to leave Salomons. It was MAD (mutually assured destruction).5 Modus operandi After leaving Salomon’s, Meriwether gradually put together LTCM. He assembled his old team; this time they would be in complete control; their profits would not have to subsidize the bloated and unprofitable activities of a full-service investment bank. The presence of Merton, Scholes and Mullins was puzzling.

…

There was one final meeting; if there was no progress, then we would give it away. The meeting was ugly. Sensing victory, the dealer’s lawyers became aggressive and attacked us personally. Now lawyers and expert advisors have principles; we didn’t like being called ‘scum’. Legally, we were on weak ground – it was time for the MAD (mutually assured destruction) strategy. We set up a last meeting, claiming that we had new evidence. How were they to know that we had nothing of the sort? We were going to use standover tactics; if we were scum then we were going to give them something to support their views. At the meeting, we laid out the position.

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz

Doomsday Book, mutually assured destruction

In your dreams the bombs were always going off, evaporating you while you walked, while you ate a chicken wing, while you took the bus to school, while you fucked Paloma. You would wake up biting your own tongue in terror, the blood dribbling down your chin. Someone really should have medicated you. Paloma thought you were being ridiculous. She didn’t want to hear about Mutual Assured Destruction, The Late Great Planet Earth, We begin bombing in five minutes, SALT II, The Day After, Threads, Red Dawn, WarGames, Gamma World, any of it. She called you Mr. Depressing. And she didn’t need any more depressing than she had already. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment with four younger siblings and a disabled mom and she was taking care of all of them.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Kennedy was elected President of the United States in November 1960 the Americans had perhaps seventeen times as many usable nuclear weapons as the Soviets. Which of the superpowers possessed the larger nuclear arsenal had by now, however, become largely meaningless. For by the early 1960s the nuclear arms race had long reached the point of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), as it was aptly labelled. Interballistic missiles could deliver their devastating load within minutes. Fleets of bombers and submarines were armed with nuclear weapons, ready to unleash them should the command be given. The world had to live with the possibility that a crisis could escalate to the point where the button would be pressed; or that a nuclear bomb could wreak devastation by accident (such as came close to wiping out East Anglia when in 1957 an American bomber crashed into a repository holding three nuclear bombs).

…

Earlier in the year Reagan had announced a new nuclear programme, the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), dubbed ‘Star Wars’ since it aimed at a comprehensive anti-missile defence system located in space. It threatened to tip the nuclear balance decisively in America’s favour. The Soviets did not have the resources to match it. But when they tried to ensure that restrictions on it be included in talks on nuclear arms limitation, the Americans refused. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) remained much as it had been. It provided its own perverse brand of security of a sort. Not that this was how ordinary people saw it. Fear returned. The new Cold War brought new anxieties about a nuclear holocaust. These were not at the same pitch as they had been during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

…

It has become ever clearer that what happens abroad can no longer be detached from daily life at home. If, nonetheless, despite significant downsides change in Europe over the past seventy years has been substantially positive, this derives in no small measure from two post-war developments: NATO and the European Community. A third element – the ‘mutually assured destruction’ of nuclear weapons – was perhaps most important of all in deterring any descent into another major conflagration in Europe. The shield of NATO and active American engagement were essential guarantees of the post-war order in Western Europe. Especially since the Vietnam War there has been widespread – often justified – hostility in Europe towards American foreign policy.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Despite the support of all these colonels and generals, militarily the Warsaw Pact had a huge numerical superiority over NATO. In order to reach parity in conventional armament, Western countries would probably have had to scrap liberal democracy and the free market, and become totalitarian states on a permanent war footing. Liberal democracy was saved only by nuclear weapons. NATO adopted the doctrine of MAD (mutual assured destruction), according to which even conventional Soviet attacks would be answered by an all-out nuclear strike. ‘If you attack us,’ threatened the liberals, ‘we will make sure nobody comes out of it alive.’ Behind this monstrous shield, liberal democracy and the free market managed to hold out in their last bastions, and Westerners could enjoy sex, drugs and rock and roll, as well as washing machines, refrigerators and televisions.

…

(game show) 315–16, 315 Jesus Christ 91, 155, 183, 187, 271, 274, 297 Jews/Judaism: ancient/biblical 60, 90–1, 94, 172–3, 174, 181, 193, 194–5, 268, 390; animal welfare and 94; expulsions from early modern Europe 197, 198; Great Jewish Revolt (AD 70) 194; homosexuality and 225–6; Second World War and 164–5, 165, 182 Jolie, Angelina 332–3, 335, 347 Jones, Lieutenant Henry 254 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 354–5 Joyce, James: Ulysses 240 JSTOR digital library 383 Jung, Carl 223–4 Kahneman, Daniel 294, 295–6, 338–9 Kasparov, Garry 320–1, 320 Khmer Rouge 264 Khrushchev, Nikita 263, 273–4 Kurzweil, Ray 24, 25, 27; The Singularity is Near 381 Kyoto protocol, 1997 215–16 Lake Fayum engineering project, Egypt 161–2, 175, 178 Larson, Professor Steve 324–5 Law of the Jungle 14–21 lawns 58–64, 62, 63 lawyers, replacement by artificial intelligence of 314 Lea, Tom: That 2,000 Yard Stare (1944) 244, 245, 246 Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences 371–2 Lenin, Vladimir 181, 207, 251, 271, 272, 273, 375 Levy, Professor Frank 322 liberal humanism/liberalism 98, 181, 247; contemporary alternatives to 267–77; free will and 281–90, 304; humanism and see humanism; humanist wars of religion, 1914– 1991 and 261–7; individualism, belief in 290–304, 305; meaning of life and 304, 305; schism within humanism and 246–57; science undermines foundations of 281–306; technological challenge to 305–6, 307–50; value of experience and 257–9, 260, 387–8; victory of 265–7 life expectancy 5, 25–7, 32–4, 50 ‘logic bombs’ (malicious software codes) 17 Louis XIV, King 4, 64, 227 lucid dreaming 361–2 Luther, Martin 185–7, 275, 276 Luther King, Martin 263–4, 275 Lysenko, Trofim 371–2 MAD (mutual assured destruction) 265 malaria 12, 19, 315 malnutrition 3, 5, 6, 10, 27, 55 Mao Zedong 27, 165, 167, 251, 259, 263, 375 Maris, Bill 24 marriage: artificial intelligence and 337–8, 343; gay 275, 276; humanism and 223–5, 275, 276, 291, 303–4, 338, 364; life expectancy and 26 Marx, Karl/Marxism 56–7, 60, 183, 207, 247–8, 271–4; Communist Manifesto 217; Das Kapital 57, 274 Mattersight Corporation 317–18 Mazzini, Giuseppe 249–50 meaning of life 184, 222, 223, 299–306, 338, 386 Memphis, Egypt 158–9 Mendes, Aristides de Sousa 164–5, 164 Merkel, Angela 248–9 Mesopotamia 93 Mexico 8–9, 11, 263 Michelangelo 27, 253; David 260 Microsoft 15, 157, 330–1; Band 330–1; Cortana 342–3 Mill, John Stuart 35 ‘mind-reading’ helmet 44–5 Mindojo 314 MIT 322, 383 modern covenant 199–219, 220 Modi, Narendra 206, 207 money: credit and 201–5; Dataism and 352, 365, 379; intersubjective nature of 144, 145, 171, 177; invention of 157, 158, 352, 379; investment in growth 209–11 mother–infant bond 88–90 Mubarak, Hosni 137 Muhammad 188, 226, 270, 391 Murnane, Professor Richard 322 Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar 64 Muslims: Charlie Hebdo attack and 226; Crusades and 146, 147, 148, 149; economic growth, belief in 206; evaluating success of 174; evolution and 103; expulsions of from early modern Europe 197, 198; free will and 285; lawns and 64; LGBT community and 225 see also Islam Mussolini, Benito 302 Myanmar 144, 206 Nagel, Thomas 357 nanotechnology 23, 25, 51, 98, 212, 269, 344, 353 National Health Service, UK 334–5 National Salvation Front, Romania 136 NATO 264–5 Naveh, Danny 76, 96 Nayaka people 75–6, 96 Nazism 98, 164–5, 181, 182, 247, 255–7, 262–3, 375, 376, 396 Ne Win, General 144 Neanderthals 49, 156, 261, 273, 356, 378 Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylonia 172–3, 310 Nelson, Shawn 255 New York Times 309, 332–4, 347, 370 New Zealand: Animal Welfare Amendment Act, 2015 122 Newton, Isaac 27, 97–8, 143, 197 Nietzsche, Friedrich 234, 254, 268 non-organic beings 43, 45 Norenzayan, Ara 354–5 Novartis 330 nuclear weapons 15, 16, 17, 17, 131, 149, 163, 216, 265, 372 Nyerere, Julius 166 Oakland Athletics 321 Obama, President Barack 313, 375 obesity 5–6, 18, 54 OncoFinder 323 Ottoman Empire 197, 207 ‘Our Boys Didn’t Die in Vain’ syndrome 300–3, 301 Page, Larry 28 paradox of knowledge 55–8 Paris Agreement, 2015 216 Pathway Pharmaceuticals 323 Petsuchos 161–2 Pfungst, Oskar 129 pharmacists 317 pigs, domesticated 79–83, 82, 87–8, 90, 98, 99, 100, 101, 231 Pinker, Steven 305 Pius IX, Pope 270–1 Pixie Scientific 330 plague/infectious disease 1–2, 6–14 politics: automation of 338–41; biochemical pursuit of happiness and 41; liberalism and 226–7, 229, 232, 232, 234, 247–50, 247n, 252; life expectancy and 26–7, 29; revolution and 132–7; speed of change in 58 pollution 20, 176, 213–14, 215–16, 341–2 poverty 3–6, 19, 33, 55, 205–6, 250, 251, 262, 349 Presley, Elvis 159–60, 159 Problem of Other Minds 119–20, 126–7 Protestant Reformation 185–7, 198, 242–4, 242, 243 psychology: evolutionary 82–3; focus of research 353–6, 360–2; Freudian 117; humanism and 223–4, 251–2; positive 360–2 Putin, Vladimir 26, 375 pygmy chimpanzees (bonobos) 138–9 Quantified Self movement 331 quantum physics 103, 170, 182, 234 Qur’an 170, 174, 269, 270 rats, laboratory 38, 39, 101, 122–4, 123, 127–8, 286–7 Redelmeier, Donald 296 relativity, theory of 102, 103, 170 religion: animals and 75–8, 90–8, 173; animist 75–8, 91, 92, 96–7, 173; challenge to liberalism 268; Dataism 367–97 see also Dataism; defining 180–7; ethical judgments 195–7; evolution and see evolution; formula for knowledge 235–7; God, death of 67, 234, 261, 268; humanist ethic and 234–5; monotheist 101–2, 173; science, relationship with 187–95, 197–8; scriptures, belief in 172–4; spirituality and 184–7; theist religions 90–6, 98, 274 revolutions 57, 60, 132–7, 155, 263–4, 308, 310–11 Ritalin 39, 364 robo-rat 286–7 Roman Empire 98, 191, 192, 194, 240, 373 Romanian Revolution, 1989 133–7, 138 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 365–6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 223, 282, 305 Russian Revolution, 1917 132–3, 136 Rwanda 15 Saarinen, Sharon 53 Saladin 146, 147, 148, 150–1 Santino (chimpanzee) 125–7 Saraswati, Dayananda 270, 271, 273 Scientific Revolution 96–9, 197–8, 212, 236–7, 379 Scotland 4, 303–4, 303 Second World War, 1939–45 21, 34, 55, 115, 164, 253, 262–3, 292 self: animal self-consciousness 124–7; Dataism and 386–7, 392–3; evolutionary theory and 103–4; experiencing and narrating self 294–305, 337, 338–9, 343; free will and 222–3, 230, 247, 281–90, 304, 305, 306, 338; life sciences undermine liberal idea of 281–306, 328–9; monotheism and 173, 174; single authentic self, humanist idea of 226–7, 235–6, 251, 281–306, 328–41, 363–6, 390–1; socialism and self-reflection 251–2; soul and 285; techno-humanism and 363–6; technological challenge to liberal idea of 327–46, 363–6; transcranial stimulator and 289 Seligman, Martin 360 Senusret III 161, 162 September 11 attacks, New York, 2011 18, 374 Shavan, Shlomi 331 Shedet, Egypt 161–2 Silico Medicine 323 Silicon Valley 15, 24, 25, 268, 274, 351, 381 Sima Qian 173, 174 Singapore 32, 207 smallpox 8–9, 10, 11 Snayers, Pieter: Battle of White Mountain 242–4, 243, 246 Sobek 161–2, 163, 171, 178–9 socialist humanism/socialism 247–8, 250–2, 256, 259–60, 261–2, 263, 264, 265, 266–7, 271–4, 325, 351, 376 soul 29, 92, 101–6, 115–16, 128, 130, 132, 138, 146, 147, 148, 150, 160, 184–5, 186, 189, 195, 229, 272, 282, 283, 285, 291, 324, 325, 381 South Korea 33, 151, 264, 266, 294, 349 Soviet Union: communism and 206, 208, 370, 371–2; data processing and 370, 370, 371–2; disappearance/collapse of 132–3, 135, 136, 145, 145, 266; economy and 206, 208, 370, 370, 371–2; Second World War and 263 Spanish Flu 9–10, 11 Sperry, Professor Roger Wolcott 292 St Augustine 275, 276 Stalin, Joseph 26–7, 256, 391 stock exchange 105–10, 203, 210, 294, 313, 369–70, 371 Stone Age 33–4, 60, 74, 80, 131, 155, 156, 157, 163, 176, 261 subjective experience 34, 80, 82–3, 105–17, 143–4, 155, 179, 229, 237, 312, 388, 393 Sudan 270, 271, 273 suicide rates 2, 15, 33 Sumerians 156–8, 159, 162–3, 323 Survivor (TV reality show) 240 Swartz, Aaron 382–3; Guerilla Open Access Manifesto 383 Sylvester I, Pope 190–1 Syria 3, 19, 149, 171, 220, 275, 313 Taiping Rebellion, 1850–64 271 Talwar, Professor Sanjiv 286–7 techno-humanism: definition of 352–3; focus of psychological research and 353–9; human will and 363–6; upgrading of mind 359–66 technology: Dataism and see Dataism; inequality and future 346–50; liberal idea of individual challenged by 327–46; renders humans economically and militarily useless 307–27; techno-humanism and see techno-humanism Tekmira 203 terrorism 14, 18–19, 226, 288, 290, 311 Tesla 114, 322 Thatcher, Margaret 57, 372 Thiel, Peter 24–5 Third Man, The (movie) 253–4 Thirty Years War, 1618–48 242–3 Three Gorges Dam, 163, 188, 196 Thucydides 173, 174 Toyota 230, 294, 323 transcranial stimulators 44–5, 287–90, 362–3, 364 Tree of Knowledge, biblical 76–7, 77, 97, 98 tuberculosis 9, 19, 23, 24 Turing, Alan 120, 367 Turing Machine 367 Turing Test 120 23andMe 336 Twitter 47, 137, 313, 387 US Army 287–90, 362–3, 364 Uganda 192–3, 195 United States: Dataism and 374; energy usage and happiness levels in 34; evolution, suspicion of within 102; Kyoto protocol, 1997 and 215–16; liberalism, view of within 247n; nuclear weapons and 163; pursuit of happiness and 31; value of life in compared to Afghan life 100; Vietnam War and 264, 265; well-being levels 34 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 21, 24, 31 Urban II, Pope 227–8 Uruk 156–7 Valla, Lorenzo 192 Valle Giulia, Battle of, 1968 263 vampire bats 204–5 Vedas 170, 181, 270 Vietnam War, 1954–75 57, 244, 264, 265 virtual-reality worlds 326–7 VITAL 322–3 Voyager golden record 258–9 Waal, Frans de 140–1 Walter, Jean-Jacques: Gustav Adolph of Sweden at the Battle of Breitenfeld (1631) 242, 243, 244–5 war 1–3, 14–19; humanism and narratives of 241–6, 242, 245, 253–6 Warsaw Pact 264–5 Watson (artificial intelligence system) 315–17, 315, 330 Watson, John 88–9, 90 Waze 341–2 web of meaning 143–9 WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) countries, psychology research focus on 354–5, 359, 360 West Africa: Ebola and 11, 13, 203 ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

The domestic political contest between the Democrats and Republicans turned on how the Cold War was or was not being won. JFK gained the upper hand in his campaign against Richard Nixon by alleging that a “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviets had developed under Eisenhower. The widely shared view of the likelihood of global conflict was captured in phases such as “mutually assured destruction” and influenced many areas of American policy, including the international role of the dollar and the growth of U.S. trade with nations outside the Soviet bloc. American leaders in politics, business, and the defense community believed that increasing the flow of goods between the United States and the other nations of the free world was an effective bulwark against communism.

…

Mills, Ogden Mini-Depression (1937-1938) Mini recession, Greenspan/FOMC response Minneapolis Fed, open presidency Minton, Bruce Fat Years and the Lean Mintz, Steven Missouri Pacific Railroad, purchase Mitchell, Charles Mitchell, John Mondale, Fritz Mondale, Walter Monetary order Monetary policy, unification (implication) Money changes, biblical view functions fungibility hoarding issuance, federal government control one-to-one substitute perspective, change printing, power Roosevelt impact state role, increase turnover/velocity Wilson perspective Money supply adequacy, public concern flexibility change increase gold/silver, role (debate) increase Fed, impact public clamor stability Money Trusts attack breaking, fight Bryan perspective, change challenge panic impact power, increase Pujo Committee investigation Republican viewpoint rise Monopoly NRA protection power, attack profits, enhancement Moral hazard Morgan, Iwan Deficit Government Morgan, J.P. buyout campaign contributions control investments, pooling panic impact power Strong, interaction Morgenthau, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Henry Morrow, Dwight Multilateral trade framework Murphy, Charles Muskie, Edmund Mussolini, Benito rise Mutually assured destruction (MAD) Myers, Margaret National Bank Act (1865) passage National Banking Act, enactment National Bank of Commerce, Houston bank rescue National banks branch establishment, restrictions closure, FDR authority creation number (1935) National Citizens League, Laughlin organization National City Bank campaign contributions National currency adoption creation devaluation Roosevelt impact National Currency Act (1863) National Industrial Recovery Act National Monetary Commission Aldrich group meetings banking reform bill blue-ribbon report establishment National monetary system, infrastructure (establishment) National Recovery Administration centralization FDR attempt Johnson control National Reserve Association banker control proposal Near-banks, status Negative liberty Neo-Keynesian economic policies, comparison Neo-Keynesian socialists, impact New Deal authoritarian nature, displeasure Baruch analysis Boom (1933) criticism FDR statist initiatives, Fed Board (impact) FDR tempering, Hoover deal Federal Reserve System, role laws, Supreme Court void price controls/rationing private investment rate, decline RFC, impact sensitivity New Dealers, The New Deal III New Era Investing New era thinking New York Clearing House bailout, organization clearing claims reduction treatment trust membership, absence New York Reserve Bank actions, Fed control (inability) New York Stock Exchange, decline Nixon, Richard betrayal China trip devaluation dollar/gold link, cessation financial legacy gold convertibility, cessation Keynesian claim NEP resignation unemployment observation wages/prices, 90-day freeze Nixonomics Nominal economic growth, driving Non-military discretionary expenditures, funding Norman, Montagu Norris, George North, Gary North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), formation Northern Pacific Railroad Cooke control insolvency Northern Securities Company, anti-trust action Norton, Charles D.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

The likelihood of at least one powerful actor being insane is not small. The likelihood that devastating weapons will be built and released accidentally (possibly through overly sensitive automated systems) is also considerable. Finally, the likelihood of a conflict between two [powers capable of unleashing a mutually assured destruction scenario] escalating until one feels compelled to exercise a doomsday option is also non-zero. This indicates that unless adequate defences can be prepared against weapons intended to be ultimately destructive - a point that urgently needs research - the number of actors trying to possess such weapons must be minimized.

…

And even if no one deliberately launched a strike, interpenetrating forces with the necessary autonomy and fast reaction times could produce accidental escalation. 490 Global catastrophic risks During the Cold War period, the world's military power was largely concentrated in two camps, one dominated by the United States and the other by the Soviet Union. As both sides continued to develop and stockpile massive amounts of nuclear weapons, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) emerged. Full-scale war could have resulted in the annihilation ofboth powers, and so neither one made the first move. Unfortunately, many of the factors that allowed MAD to work in deterring World War I I I may not be present in an arms race involving nano-built weapons: 1. The Cold War involved only two primary players; once a rough parity was achieved (or perceived) , the resulting standoff was comparatively stable.

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., Our Molecular Future 500 Mulligan, J. 464 multiple catastrophic events 167 multiple reliabilities 161-2 multiplier effects, social collapse 367 multiregional hypothesis, origin of modern humans 2 1 1 multi-stakeholder partnerships, role in biotechnology risk management 462-3 muons, effect on life 249, 254 mutation 49 mutual insurance 170 Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) 490 Myers, N . and Knoll A.H. 69 Nagasaki bomb 428 nano-built weaponry 487-8, 489-92 nanofactories 485-6, 495, 498 block-assembly operation 497 products 486-7 Nanofuture, Hall, J . S . 500 nanomachines 486 Nanomedicine, Vol I: Basic Capabilities, Freitas, R.A. Jr 501 nanoparticles, environmental and health risks 484 nanorobots 486 nanoscale machines 482 nanoscale technologies 481 associated risks 483-4 product simplicity 482-3 Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation, Drexler, K.E. 501-2 nanotechnology 24-5, 81, 481-2 interaction with AI 328-9, 33 1-2, 338 see also molecular manufacturing National Research Council ( N RC), guidelines on biotechnological research 460-1 Native Americans, effect of smallpox 296 natural disasters, perceived risk 168 natural selection 49-50 effect on human intelligence 325-6 naval fuel, H E U 413 Nazi Germany, totalitarianism 505, 506 ideology 5 14 stability 507 Nazism 1919-1945, Noakes, J. and Pridham, G. 5 1 8 Neanderthals 9 , 56, 57 near-Earth objects 545 dynamical analysis 226-9 see also asteroids; comets near-Earth object searches 14, 226 neo-catastrophic explanations, Fermi paradox 1 34 neural networks 312, 340 tank classifier problem 321-2 neutron stars 39 hyperons 351 Newby-Clark, I.R. et a!.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates by John Logie

1960s counterculture, Berlin Wall, book scanning, cuban missile crisis, dual-use technology, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, Isaac Newton, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, pre–internet, publication bias, Richard Stallman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, search inside the book, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

There’s a great deal of mistrust right now and it certainly looks to me as if most of it is richly deserved. There’s been an inordinate amount of bullying and threats, a fair amount over-zealous advocacy on all sides that has sometimes crossed the line into bad faith litigation or deceptive lobbying. (“War and Peace”) Litman’s language here echoes the Cold War threat of “mutually assured destruction,” and even if the stakes of the copyright cold war are comparatively minor, the time has come for the combatants to stand down. Refusal to engage in the rhetoric of warfare is both a form of conscientious objection and a long overdue step on the path toward copyright policies tailored to the practical realities and the immense potential of digital media.

Twilight of Abundance: Why the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short by David Archibald

Bakken shale, carbon tax, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, deindustrialization, energy security, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), means of production, Medieval Warm Period, mutually assured destruction, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, peak oil, price discovery process, rising living standards, sceptred isle, South China Sea, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

It has been estimated that as of November 2012, Iran had 7.6 metric tons of uranium enriched to 3.5 percent U235 and 232 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 percent U235. Further enriched, the latter quantity is estimated to provide enough uranium for one bomb with a fifty-kilogram core of 90 percent U235. GUARANTEED SECOND STRIKE The U.S.-Russian nuclear standoff gave mankind the most peaceful period in world history. This was the period of mutually assured destruction, or MAD, that made the nuclear powers cautious in their dealings with each other. Each power feared that any use of its own nuclear weapons would trigger massive retaliation ensuring its own complete destruction. We no longer have MAD to keep the peace, and the international fabric is being degraded by questions such as whether Iran will launch an “out of the blue” nuclear strike on Israel as soon as it is capable of doing so.

The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks

Boeing 747, Brownian motion, mutually assured destruction, South China Sea

This is the mainstream; we're just like very smart kids; infants with a brilliant construction kit. They're real because they live the way they have to. We aren't because we live the way we want to.' 'Linter,' I said, sitting beside him. 'This is the fucking mental home; the land of the midnight brain. This is the place that gave us Mutual Assured Destruction; they've thrown people into boiling water to cure diseases; they use Electro-Convulsive Therapy; a nation with a law against cruel and unusual punishments electrocutes people to death -' 'Go on; mention the death camps,' Linter said, blinking at the blue distance. 'It was never Eden. It isn't ever going to be, but it might progress.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

That’s exactly the message your audience—and the average American—needs to hear. “We’ve watched years of the mob coming for everybody. It’s time we stop giving in to it. Not just so that a guy like you isn’t taken out, but the average American doesn’t fear that something they said twenty years ago might be used against them today. “That idea of mutually assured destruction is not the America that I want to be part of. I want to be part of something that has a little bit of forgiveness, that understands we’re all imperfect creatures and is a little more respectful of our ability to disagree, which our country was founded on.” “So how can people fight back and stand strong?”

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

The simulation was too complex for most users, so an alternative analog version was developed.29 In 1962, two major events in the early history of videogames took place. The first followed the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw the launch of the computer war game STAGE (Simulation of Total Atomic Global Exchange) by the US Department of Defense. Rather than ending in mutually assured destruction, the simulation predicted that the United States would defeat the Soviet Union in a thermonuclear war.30 Unfortunately, unlike in WarGames, there is no record of the simulation playing tic-tac-toe to show otherwise (luckily, this has never been tested in practice; otherwise the history of videogames—and the rest of the world—would be much shorter.)

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

“There’s been talk about the conflict between Earth and Mars, how it could even lead to war.” “Yes,” she said, “but the talk always goes on to declare this impossible, because everyone is so vulnerable. Mutual assured destruction, as always.” “I’ve always wondered about that,” Wahram admitted. “What if a first strike is made to look like an accident, and is so successful that no one knows who did it, and meanwhile the victim is mostly vaporized? A scenario like that might make one think there is not any certain mutually assured destruction.” “Who would feel that way?” Swan asked. “Almost any power on Earth could make the calculation. They’re safer than any of us. And Mars is notoriously self-absorbed, and also can’t be punctured with a single dart.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Though this isn’t a new Cold War, that conflict offers a useful metaphor for how the battle for free markets can be managed. For decades, the United States and the Soviet Union amassed nuclear arsenals large enough to destroy Earth many times over. The resulting stalemate, which came to be known as mutually assured destruction, helped prevent catastrophic conflict. Today, there are no ties more important for the future of the free market than those that bind America and China—the world’s most powerful advocate of free trade and open markets and the largest and most influential practitioner of state capitalism.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

The threat of nuclear war that hung over much of the twentieth century at least had the advantage of focusing the mind. Nuclear war, for all its considerable flaws, you at least have to admit was gripping. It adhered to certain established narrative conventions. You had near misses, global panics. You had mutually assured destruction, game theory, mushroom clouds, total and instant annihilation. You had plot, was what you had: you had drama. And even more crucially, you had characters. You had protagonists and antagonists, guys with fingers on buttons who either did or did not choose to push them. And when it came to protestors on the streets calling for complete nuclear disarmament, you had an entirely rational and achievable demand.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Thus we have an explanation of the incentive to invade for trifles: a word, a smile, and any other sign of undervalue. Hobbes called it “glory”; more commonly it is called “honor”; the most accurate descriptor is “credibility.” The policy of deterrence is also known as the balance of terror and, during the Cold War, was called mutual assured destruction (MAD). Whatever peace a policy of deterrence may promise is fragile, because deterrence reduces violence only by a threat of violence. Each side must react to any nonviolent sign of disrespect with a violent demonstration of mettle, whereupon one act of violence can lead to another in an endless cycle of retaliation.

…

They also avoided using the smaller, “tactical” nuclear weapons, many of them comparable to conventional explosives, on the battlefield or in the bombing of enemy facilities. And the United States refrained from using its nuclear arsenal in the late 1940s when it held a nuclear monopoly and did not have to worry about mutually assured destruction. I’ve been quantifying violence throughout this book using proportions. If one were to calculate the amount of destruction that nations have actually perpetrated as a proportion of how much they could perpetrate, given the destructive capacity available to them, the postwar decades would be many orders of magnitudes more peaceable than any time in history.

…

code of the streets; see also honor cognitive dissonance cognitive illusions, xxiii; see also availability heuristic; cluster illusion; conjunction fallacy; loss aversion; overconfidence; positive illusions; sunk-cost fallacy Cohen, Dov Cohen, Jonathan Cold War end of interstate wars in Europe mutually assured destruction proxy wars superpower confrontations Cole, Michael Collier, Paul Collins, Randall Colombia Columbine High School commerce: Christian ideology vs. cooperation in and genocide growth of international trade and money protectionist tariffs and transportation see also gentle commerce common knowledge communality, see Community, ethic of communal violence, see intercommunal conflict communism collapse of and genocide ideology of Community, ethic of compartmentalization, moral compassion see also empathy; sympathy complex systems, science of Concert of Europe concrete operations, Piagetian stage Conflict Catalog conformity Congo, Democratic Republic of (DRC) Congo Free State conjunction fallacy conquest Conquest, Robert Conrad, Joseph conscience; see also moral sense conscientious objection consciousness conscription, see military conscription conservatism and intelligence and morality and treatment of animals see also liberalism, and conservatism Constantine, Emperor Constitution, U.S.: amendments: Second Eighth Thirteenth Nineteenth design of and gentle commerce Cool Hand Luke (film) Cooney, Mark cooperation in commerce evolution of and intelligence norms of in Prisoner’s Dilemma games and Tragedy of the Commons coordination games corporal punishment: of children and torture Correlates of War Project Cosmides, Leda cosmopolitanism and democracy and end of Cold War vs. genocidal ideologies introduction to concept and liberalism vs. macho dominance opposition to and Rights Revolutions costly signaling counter-Enlightenment Country Joe and the Fish Coupland, Reginald coups d’état Courtwright, David Cousins, Norman Cramb, J.

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

On the morning of the accident, an Air Force pilot and his six-man crew were participating in an exercise that was part of Operation Chrome Dome, something that had begun in the late 1950s as part of Strategic Air Command. In a show of force inherent to the military doctrine of the day—something called mutual assured destruction, or MAD—airplanes regularly circled Earth carrying thermonuclear bombs. The idea behind MAD was that if the Soviet Union were to make a sneak attack on America, SAC bombers would already be airborne to strike back at Moscow with nuclear weapons of their own, thereby assuring the mutual destruction of both sides.

…

As radical and impressive as it sounds, the technology was not what raised flags and eyebrows at the Pentagon. The significance of the event came from the fact that with China’s satellite kill, the world moved one dangerous step closer to the very wicked problem of weaponizing space. To enter into that game means entering into the kind of mutual-assured-destruction military industrial–complex madness that has not been engaged in since the height of the Cold War. Actions of this magnitude, certainly by those of a superpower like China, are almost always met by the U.S. military with a response, either overt or veiled, and the Chinese satellite kill was no exception.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Earlier, Heinrich Heine, the German poet, also identified the change: “Money is the God of our time.”1 In the later half of the twentieth century, individuals became true believers. Human history is a sequence of ‘ations’—civilization, industrialization, urbanization, globalization; interspersed with actual or threatened annihilation (war, genocide, or the mutually assured destruction [MAD] pact of the Cold War). The most recent “ation” is financialization—the conversion of everything into monetary form (known as another “ation”—monetization). Increasing wealth, increasing consumption, increased borrowing, and the need to save for retirement has financialized individual lives.

…

., 183, 328 MSNBC, 93 Mullins, David, 144, 248 multistrategy, 243 Mumbai Stock Exchange, 91 Münchau, Wolfgang, 351 Mundell, Robert, 170 municipal bonds, 211-214 TOBs (tender option bonds), 222 Murakami, Takashi, 324 Murder on the Orient Express, 302 Murdoch, Rupert, 149, 164, 322 Museum of Modern Art, 324 mutually assured destruction (MAD), 38 My Broker: A Monk Tycoon Reveals the 7 Laws of Spiritual Growth, 98 N Nader, Ralph, 326 Narvik, Norway, 221 National Australia Bank (NAB), 228 National City Bank, 342 national debt clock, 34 National Economic Council, 215 National Health Service, 47 National Homeownership Strategy, 181 National Public Radio (NPR), 185 natural gas, 251 negative amortization, 182 Nemesis, 366 nest eggs, 27 net risk, 240 networks, 270 vulnerability of, 272-273 Neues Deutschland, 260 Neutron Jack.

The Cold War: Stories From the Big Freeze by Bridget Kendall

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, white flight

Further afield, and complicating the new ‘Great Game’, a nuclear-armed China had joined the fray. Skirmishes on the Soviet–China border had been alarming but had not turned into a full-scale war and, given the stockpiles of missiles building up, all sides seemed to want to keep it that way. The deadly logic of the doctrine of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ had also delivered détente between the United States and the Soviet Union, yielding not just the SALT I arms-control deal, but also an agreement between Washington and Moscow that they would not – in theory at least – take advantage of each other by upsetting the equilibrium in the ‘Third World’.

…

and Berlin Wall 212, 213 and Cuban Missile Crisis 229, 230–1, 238 and Indochina 295 Kent, Bruce 430 KGB, Soviet Union Andropov as head 245, 279, 352 power of 163, 172, 250–1, 255, 256, 439, 479, ‘Reminder for the Arrested’ 253 Khmer Rouge 332–3 Khrushchev, Nikita 167 and art 248 and Berlin Wall 213, 214 and Cuba 230, 231, 236, 243 deposing of 163, 243–6 and de-Stalinisation 246, 277 fear of West German success 212 and Hungarian Revolution 180 and International Youth Festival 252 as leader 161–3, 169, 299, 300 and Nixon 163, 253 Secret Speech 159–74, 178, 259 ‘thaw’ 163, 255, 259 and transformation of Soviet Union 169 Kim Il Sung 83 Király, Major-General Béla 191 Kissinger, Henry 313, 314, 317, 320, 349 KKE (Kommounistikó Kómma Elládas) (Communist Party of Greece) 3, 9 Kohl, Helmut 456, 457 Komsomol (Young Communist League) 247 KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotników) (Workers’ Defence Committee) 405, 409, 410 Korean War 81–97 armistice 86 casualties 85 fear of nuclear weapons 117 US losses 295 Kosygin, Alexei 244, 259 Kryuchkov, Vladimir 477, 492 Lattimore, Owen 108–11 Latvia 32, 475–6, 477, 478, 486 Laur, Reni 462 Lefortovo Prison, Moscow 250 Lefteri Nea (‘Free Young’) 7, 8 Leipzig 136, 455 ‘Lenin’s lessons’ 394 Lenin Shipyard, Gdańsk 406–9 Leopold II, King of Belgium 196, 202 Léopoldville, Congo 196, 202 Levin, Mikhail 247 Ligachev, Yegor 440 Lisboa, Angola (later Huambo) 374 Lithuania 32, 475–6, 477, 478, 486 ‘Little Red Book’ 261 Litvinov, Maxim 246 Lityński, Jan and Krystyna 410 Liu Shaoqi 269 Long March 113 Los Alamos 118, 121, 122 Luanda, Angola 368, 370 Lucky Dragon (Japanese fishing boat) 119, 125–9 Lumumba, Patrice 196, 197–8, 202, 203, 204–7 L’Unità (newspaper) 47 Ly Quy Chung 339 MacArthur, General Douglas 84, 89, 92 Makronisi prison camp 18 Manhattan Project 101 Mao Zedong 67–70, 76, 78, 84, 259, 261 Maoism 263, 332, 368 Márquez, García, ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ 321 Marshall, General George 68 Marshall Island 120 Marshall Plan Czechoslovakian refusal of 22, 23, 25 in Italy 38, 39, 40, 43 Stalin fear of 52 in West Germany 133 Marx-Engels Platz, East Berlin 139, 143 Marxism 111, 229, 314, 367, 369, 387 Marxism–Leninism 211, 259, 260, 370, 422 Masaryk, Jan 23, 25 Masaryk, Tomáš 23 Matlock, Jack 492 McCarran Committee 110 McCarthy, Joseph 101, 102, 103, 104, 108, 109 McCarthyism 99–114 blacklisting 103, 113 entertainment industry 103 US army and 103 Middle East 84, 149 Minh, Duong Van 331 Missing (film) (Costa-Gavras) 326 Mobutu, Colonel Joseph-Désiré (Mobutu Sese Seko) 197, 207, 208, 368 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi 150, 151, 152, 154 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact see Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact MNC (Mouvement National Congolais) see National Congolese Movement Monroe Doctrine 313 Montalva, Eduardo Frei 313 Mosaddegh, Mohammad 149, 150–7 Moscow News (newspaper) 443, 449 Moscow Olympics, US boycott 352, 387 Moscow Protocol 280 Moskva (magazine) 254 Movimento para a Indepêndencia da Angola (Movement for the Independence of Angola) 371 MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) 368, 369, 370, 372, 374, 375, 383 mujahidin, Afghan resistance 388, 389–90, 396, 397 Munich agreement 1938 23 Mussolini, Benito 37 ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ 367 Nagasaki 117, 118 Nagy, Imre 178, 179, 180, 184, 185, 190 Namibia 377, 380 Nanjing 68 Naples, Italy 40, 41 National Congolese Movement (Mouvement National Congolais) (MNC) 196, 201 National Liberation Front see EAM (Ethnikó Apeleftherotikó Métopo) National Security Council, Washington 39 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Able Archer exercise 421 and Congo Crisis 205 formation of 24, 54, 55 Germany and 133, 457 Greek membership of 7 and Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia 280 Nazarbayev, Nursultan 492 Nazi–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) 476 Neto, Agostinho 368, 370, 380 New Cold War 419–35 first-hand accounts 124–35 Nezavisimaya Gazeta (newspaper) 447 9/11 390 Nitschke, Karl-Heinz 362 Nixon, Richard and Chile 313, 314 and China 260, 349 television debate 163, 252, 253 and Vietnam War 297, 299, 332 NLF (National Liberation Front of South Vietnam) see Vietcong Non Aligned Movement 6 North Atlantic Treaty Organization see NATO North China Daily News (newspaper) 74 Novaya Zemlya 120 Novotný, President Antonín 277, 282 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty 349 Ogoniok (newspaper) 449 Operation Ajax 151 Operation Boot 151 Operation Carlotta 379 Organisation of African Unity 368, 370 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four 248, 260, 478 Osama bin Laden 390 Ostpolitik 350–64 first-hand accounts 352, 353–64 Outer Space Treaty 349 Palach, Jan 280, 290, 291 Partial Test Ban Treaty 349 Pastenak, Boris, Dr Zhivago 174 Pearl Harbor 67 Pentagon Papers 299, 307 ‘percentages agreement’ 6 perestroika 163, 246, 389, 439–51 first-hand accounts 443–51 Pershing II ballistic missiles 422 Phnom Penh, Cambodia 332, 333 PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado) (International and State Defence Police) 371 Pienkowska, Alina 416 Pinochet, General Augusto 315, 316, 322, 327 Pinter, Harold 281 Platz der Luftbrücke, Berlin 55 Pleiku, Vietnam 296 Pol Pot 333 Poland Czechoslovakia and 278, 279 invasion in Second World War 476 Khrushchev’s secret speech and 178 martial law 408, 421 Soviet influence in 21 uprising 135, 259 Workers’ Defence Committee 405 see also Solidarity movement Polish United Workers’ Party 407 Pope Paul II 405 Pope Pius XII 45 Portugal 367, 368, 371 Potsdam agreement 39, 51, 52 Poznan, Poland 178, 182 Prague Spring 275–91 first-hand accounts 281–91 Soviet policy reaction 244, 245, 249, 250 Pravda (newspaper) 180 ‘Project Matterhorn,’ Princeton University 118 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 309 Pugo, Boris 492 Putin, Vladimir 245, 457 racial segregation 195, 200, 232 Radio Free Europe (Radio Liberty) 181, 182, 248, 409 Radio Londra 41 Radio Moscow 198 RAF (Royal Air Force) 4, 12 RAF Alconbury 425, 428 RAF Molesworth 423, 424, 426, 427, 428, 429, 431 Rathausstrasse, East Berlin 143 Reagan, Ronald and Angola 370 and Gorbachev 440, 444, 445 on shooting down of airliner 421 and Soviet Union 352, 422, 423, 424 ‘Reagan Doctrine’ 422, 423 Red Army 9, 21, 51, 68 Red Guards 261, 262, 263, 265, 266, 270–1 Red Scare see McCarthyism refugees camps 29, 30, 31–2, 33 East German 211, 215, 220, 222, 351 in Korean War 85–6, 91, 92 and Vietnam War 332, 334, 337, 338 Reichsmark 51 reparations 51, 133, 177 Reuter, Ernst 54 Revolution (newspaper) 237 Riesaer Petition 362 Roberto, Holden 368 Robotnik(newspaper) 405, 410 Romania 6, 21, 279, 442 Roosevelt, President F.D. 6, 44, 47, 102 Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel 101 RIAS (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor) 134 Rusk, Dean 214 ‘Russification’ 475 Rutskoy, Aleksandr 501 Ryzhkov, Nikolai 498 Saigon, fall of 297, 298, 331–45 first-hand accounts 335–45 Sakharov, Dr Andrei 119, 245, 440, 444, 446 SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) I and SALT II 349 Sariwon, Korea 90 Savimbi, Jonas 368, 370, 374, 379 Schabowski, Günter 456 Scobie, General Ronald 3, 4 Scout movement 28 Second World War Baltic republics 475 and Greece 3, 5, 6 and Iran 149 nuclear weapons 117, 118 Sino-Japanese War and 67, 76 and Soviet Union 392 SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) (Socialist Unity Party) 133, 142, 143 Semipalatinsk 117, 120 Seoul 84 Seven Days War, Israel 282 Shanghai, fall of 65–79 first-hand accounts 70, 71–9 Shevardnadze, Eduard 443 Sinatra, Frank 38 Sino-Japanese war 67 Sino-Soviet Treaty 70 Sinyavsky, Andrei (Abram Tertz) 245, 248, 249, 255 Slánský, Rudolf 278 Slovakia 27, 28 Smith, Walter Bedell 111 Smith Act 1940 104, 106 Snow, Edgar 111, 112, 113–14 Journey to the Beginning 113 Socialist Republic of Vietnam 332 Solidarity movement, Poland 135, 403–18 first-hand accounts 408, 409–18 Solovki prison 164 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 245, 248, 251 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 163, 164 The First Circle 247 The Gulag Archipelago 440 South Africa 368, 369–70, 371, 372, 374, 375, 377–81 South African Defence Force 372, 381 South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) 377 Soviet Air Defence Command 421 Soviet Union 159–74, 489–503 and Angola 369, 370 and atomic bomb 48, 83, 117, 121, 149 backing for decolonisation 195 and Berlin Blockade 53–4 building programmes 169 and China 68, 70, 161, 259, 333, 334 and Congo Crisis 197, 206 and Cuba 229, 230 culture in 162, 245, 253–5, 440, 448 and Czechoslovakia 22–8, 278–80 declaration of war on Japan 83 economy 244 expansionism 5, 32, 37, 52 500 Days Plan 497 and Greece 7 H-bomb research 119 housebuilding programme 163 and Italy 39, 41, 47 labour camps 161, 164, 245, 247, 251, 252, 254 ‘Law on the Press and Other Forms of Mass Information’ 446 liberalisation 162, 163 and Middle East 149 ‘perestroika’ reforms 163, 246, 389, 439–51 and Polish strike 407 and post war Germany 52, 53, 135 psychiatric hospitals 245, 249 purges 161 samizdat 245, 247, 248, 249, 440 Union Treaty 492 and Vietnam 333 view of Stalin 134, 161, 162 Yalta agreement 21 and Yugoslavia 6 see also Hungarian Revolution space race 244, 300 SS Meredith Victory 85 Stalin, Josef banishments 164 Berlin Blockade 54 and Cuba 236 cult of 248 and Czechoslovakia 22, 25 death of 161, 164, 165, 166, 168, 247 and Greece 5, 6 and Italian election 39 and Italy 41 and Khrushchev 168 and Korea 83 and post war Germany 51, 133 ‘spheres of influence’ 21 and Tito 6 Yalta agreement 47 Stalin statue 179, 184, 187, 188 Stalingrad 41 ‘Star Wars’ 422 START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) 445 Stasi police 144, 224, 352, 361, 362 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks see SALT Suez Crisis 181 Suslov, Mikhail 388, 408 SWAPO see South West African People’s Organization Syngman Rhee 83 Taiwan 70, 71 Taraki, Nur Mohammad 387, 388 Tehran 150, 151 Teller, Edward 118, 121, 122, 124 Tempelhof Airport, Berlin 53, 55, 60, 62 Tempo (magazine) 25 Tertz, Abram see Sinyavsky, Andrei Tet Offensive 298, 309, 335, 339 Thatcher, Margaret 422, 423, 457 Tito, Marshal Josip 6, 21, 69, 182 Tobadamaru (Japanese cargo ship) 93, 94 Treaty of Friendship 68 Treaty of Varkiza 17 Trieste 44 Trikeri prison camp 18 Truman, President Harry on Communist infiltrators 101 and Czechoslovakia 23 and Iran 150 on Italy 37 and Korea 84, 85 McCarthyism and 102 on Soviet atomic bomb 117 Truman Doctrine 7, 18 Turkey 7, 230, 231 ‘The Two Thousand Words’ 278, 283 Ulam, Stanisław 118, 122 Ulbricht, Walter 133, 134–5, 141, 211, 212, 213, 278, 350 Un-American Activities Committee see HUAC Uncle Sam 74 The Uncounted Enemy (CBS documentary) 309 Union of Czechoslovak Writers 277 UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) 368, 369, 370, 374–5, 377, 379, 383 United Nations Congo crisis 197, 205 Korean War 84, 85 Vietnamese Boat People 334 US and Afghanistan 390 and Angola 368, 370 anti-war demonstrations 298–9, 306, 309 backing for decolonisation 195 Berlin airlift 53 in Central and Latin America 313 and Chile 313, 314, 317, 327 and China 67, 68, 69 and Congo Crisis 197, 204, 205 covert interventions 38, 39 and Czechoslovakia 23, 24, 280 and Greece 5, 6, 7 H-bomb research 118 and Hungarian revolution 181 increased defence spending 422 and Indochina 295–6 and Iran 149, 150 and Italian election 37–9, 43–4 and NATO 54, 55 nuclear warheads 230 popular culture 103, 136, 177, 359 and post war Germany 52–4, 55 and Sino-Soviet split 259, 260 Yalta agreement 21 see also Cuban Missile crisis; Korean War; Marshall Plan; McCarthyism; Vietnam War USS Maddox 296 Ustinov, Dmitri 388 Vietnam currency 342, 343 New Economic Zone 332, 343 re-education camps 332, 342, 344 Vietnam Veterans Against the War 307, 308–9 Vietnam War 293–310 aftermath 331–45 distraction of détente 349 public opinion in US 298–9 Vietnam–Cambodia war 333–4 Vietnam–China war 334 Vietnamese Boat People 334 Vietcong (National Liberation Front) 298, 331, 335, 339, 340 Viljoen, Major-General 372, 379 Voice of America 198, 247 Volpin, Aleksandr 249, 253 Walentynowicz, Anna 406, 411, 412, 413 ‘war games’ 235, 421 Warsaw Pact 177, 178, 180, 279, 407 Wałęsa, Lech 406–8, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 418 Watergate scandal 299 Die Wende 458 West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany) border with East 211 currency 52 economic success 212 relationship with East 350–1, 456, 457, 458 symbolic of West 135 US missile base 422 Westmoreland, Colonel 309 Wheeler, John 121, 124 Wheeler, Lois 113, 114 ‘Winter Soldier Investigation’ 299, 307 Worker (journal) 409 World Festival of Youth and Students Moscow 1957 163 Yakovlev, Aleksandr 498, 499 Yakovlev, Yegor 443 Yalta agreement 1945 6, 21, 39, 47, 51, 478 Yanayev, Gennady 492 Yeltsin, Boris 441, 450, 477, 482, 491, 492, 493–4, 498 Young Pioneers 181, 247 Yugoslavia 6, 9 Zaire see Congo Zervas, Napoleon 11 Zinn, Howard, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal 306 Zuchthaus 146 Acknowledgements This book began as two fifteen-episode series for BBC Radio 4, Cold War: Stories from the Big Freeze, the first of which was broadcast in July 2016, the second in July 2017.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

At the same time Russia was embedding in our grid, “little green men”—armed Russian Special Forces wearing green uniforms without insignia—had started cycling into Crimea. The Kremlin was signaling to Washington that if it retaliated on behalf of its Ukraine ally, or ever dared turn off the lights in Moscow, Russia had the ability to turn around and do the same. Call it mutually assured destruction for the internet era. And if Russia did attack the grid, we were screwed. The Department of Homeland Security had emergency preparedness plans for natural disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, and power outages that spanned days. But there was no grand master plan for a cyberattack that denied power to millions of people for any sustained period.

…

Cyber Command started planting time bombs in Iran’s communications systems, air defenses, and critical parts of its grid. By June 2019 it was safe to assume that Iran’s attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure was Tehran responding in kind. What the security community witnessed that summer was, in effect, mutually assured destruction in real time. That summer spark plugs were everywhere. A series of escalating military skirmishes spiraled into the cyber domain. That May and June, the United States blamed Iran for snapping mines onto the hulls of several oil tankers as they passed through the Gulf of Oman—a vital shipping lane for a third of the world’s oil—and then detonating them nearly all at once.

Respectable: The Experience of Class by Lynsey Hanley

Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Etonian, full employment, housing crisis, illegal immigration, intentional community, invisible hand, liberation theology, low skilled workers, meritocracy, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent

While growing up I colluded with the papers I relied on to give me a sense of the world outside, knowing they were offering up only one small part of it, but needing those offerings all the same. The idea that we all might die, unfathomably horribly, because of something called MAD – the Cold War nuclear doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction – was so terrifying to me that I needed to know more about it; and yet the more I found out, the more frightened I became. The exposure was too early and – ironically for newspapers which even then I understood to be biased – too raw, too graphic, for me to comprehend without going bananas in the process.

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, cashless society, defense in depth, Donald Trump, drop ship, employer provided health coverage, independent contractor, information security, John Markoff, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, pirate software, placebo effect, ransomware, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stuxnet, the payments system, transaction costs, web application

“I’m trying to ruin his ChronoPay because if he will not have money, he will hopefully stop all these things.” Not long after that interview with Gusev, Vrublevsky finally acknowledged that the Pharma Wars, as many were calling their feud, had progressed beyond the point of return. Rather, Vrublevsky said wryly, neither side appeared to be deterred by “mutual assured destruction.” Here he was referring to a doctrine of military strategy in which both sides in a nuclear arms race are discouraged from launching a first strike based on the certainty that the aggressor’s action will trigger an equivalent response. “The problem is that Gusev is not trying to hit me with his weapons, but he is trying to scare me,” Vrublevsky said in one of his many phone calls to this author.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

Another option is to cede Kirkuk to Kurdistan—but since Kurdistan is landlocked, it would have to share revenues fairly with Baghdad, lest the rump Iraqi government spike taxes on Kurdistan for exporting through its territory (which Kurdistan’s other neighbors, including Syria and Turkey, could do as well). Through such territorial compromises, the Mideast may graduate from mutually assured destruction to mutual assurances—and use its armies to guard pipelines instead of borders. Arabs want to restore the glory they enjoyed during the European Middle Ages, and they actually have the wealth to do so. But even more pointless territorial disputes stand in the way of regional integration.

I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay by John Lanchester

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Celtic Tiger, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, money market fund, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, off-the-grid, Own Your Own Home, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, value at risk

Niall Ferguson has called the resulting economic hybrid “Chimerica.”3 I don’t think there’s any historical parallel for this new transnational economic entity, and the look of it, frankly, gives me the willies: there’s something profoundly unnatural about such a skewed trans-Pacific balance of saving and spending. The Chinese would, I suspect, dearly love to dump a significant proportion of the T-bills and diversify into other areas of savings, but they can’t, because it would be an act of economic mutually assured destruction: the dollar would crash, which would wipe out (a) American consumption and (b) Chinese savings, with consequences roughly equal to a smallish world war. But the European Union had no equivalent phenomenon and therefore no China to blame; and, as Greenspan points out in that piece, it also had historically low interest rates.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Once the missile existed the Soviets were “unlikely to miscalculate our capability to retaliate” and would be afraid to attack. The ICBM would thus achieve its highest purpose. It would have “deterred Total War.” Schriever was articulating a concept that would subsequently become known as Mutual Assured Destruction. And once they had attained the means to penetrate what he called the “New Environment—outer space,” they could move on to the next contribution to “preserve the peace.” They would power their rockets to even higher speeds than 20,000 feet per second in order to fling into orbit around the earth the spy satellites Arnold and von Kármán had envisioned.

…

No American leader could contemplate a first strike, as it was called, against the Soviet Union without knowing that enough of Russia’s nuclear arsenal would survive intact to destroy the United States in turn. A nuclear stalemate was complete. The strategists referred to the condition as Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD. There was nothing mad about the grim equation. It made perfect sense by enforcing a nuclear peace. The arms race should have ended there. It was senseless to go on, but go on it did on both sides at the cost of trillions. Technology was in the saddle of a horse named Fear in a race of human folly.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

See John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, The Advent of Netwar (Santa Monica: Rand, 1996), p. 5. Chapter 6 196 serving as useful asset managers at one historical moment, then disappearing, or perhaps fading only to reemerge later as useful again. The Cold War was synonymous with a specific military diagram—bilateral symmetry, mutual assured destruction (MAD), massiveness, might, containment, deterrence, negotiation; the war against drugs has a different diagram—multiplicity, specificity, law and criminality, personal fear, public awareness. This book is largely about one specific diagram, or organizational design, called distribution, and its approximate relationship in a larger historical transformation involving digital computers and ultimately the control mechanism called protocol.61 In this diagramatic narrative it is possible to pick sides and describe one diagram as the protagonist and another as the antagonist.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

We have also seen the ways in which data leaks and breaches: the critical excursions and chain reactions that lead to privacy meltdowns and the rhizomatic mushroom cloud. These analogies are not mere speculations: they are the inherent and totalising effects of our social and engineering choices. Just as we spent forty-five years locked in a Cold War perpetuated by the spectre of mutually assured destruction, we find ourselves in an intellectual, ontological dead end today. The primary method we have for evaluating the world – more data – is faltering. It’s failing to account for complex, human-driven systems, and its failure is becoming obvious – not least because we’ve built a vast, planet-spanning information-sharing system for making it obvious to us.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

The overcrowding was absurd. It sometimes took as long as an hour to get a turn in the bathroom, which was filthy, and where the only roll of toilet paper had MIKE scrawled across the top in Sharpie. The prevalence of misleadingly positive reviews could only be explained by the system of mutually assured destruction implicit in the Airbnb review process. Praise was usually repaid in kind. However, the merest tremble of complaint, however valid, was sure to be answered with devastating slander. One previous guest wrote that when she and her boyfriend accidentally checked out late, Luna “threatened to keep our airbnb deposit unless we gave her a positive review.”

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, urban sprawl, working-age population

The nineteenth-century German military philosopher Clausewitz had famously declared politics to be the ‘continuation of war by other means’. By the mid-twentieth century the Cold War had become the new definition of those ‘other means’. Everyone assumed it would last forever. Some – primarily on the Western side – were even thankful for it. Peace was assured by the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction, which had the pleasing acronym MAD: whichever side started a nuclear conflict would assure its own annihilation. Retaliation was inevitable, therefore war was unthinkable. The Cold War was a stalemate that had once been known as the Balance of Power. That balance had not been achieved easily.

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

24 Could such an approach help us out of our ethical problems with an infinite Universe? It would have to be that a host of possible worlds were defunct because they made the existence and persistence of conscious life impossible. While this is believable for the extreme cases in which all possible moral outrages are committed so that mutual assured destruction always occurs, it is not a convincing panacea. After all, many of those other worlds that display an abundance of bad behaviour look embarrassingly like parts of our own history. It is not too hard to imagine the victory of evil over good. It need not lead to extinction, merely tyranny.

Know Thyself by Stephen M Fleming

Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, citation needed, computer vision, confounding variable, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, global pandemic, higher-order functions, index card, Jeff Bezos, l'esprit de l'escalier, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, patient HM, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, side project, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury

It was the height of the Cold War between the United States and Russia, and there was a very real threat that long-range nuclear missiles could be launched by either side. That fateful morning, the alarms went off in Petrov’s command center, alerting him that five US missiles were on their way to Russia. Under the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, his job was to immediately report the attack to his superiors so they could launch a counterattack. Time was of the essence—within twenty-five minutes, the missiles would detonate on Soviet soil.1 But Petrov decided that the alert was unlikely to be a real missile. Instead, he called in a system malfunction.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

I happen to believe that people should be able to hire and fire whomever they want to. But the authoritarian Left disagrees. And not only do they disagree, they’ve captured the legal system to the extent that you can only be targeted for having the wrong politics today. All of this raises a broader strategic possibility: the possibility of mutually assured destruction. Before I founded the Daily Wire, I ran an organization called Truth Revolt. The goal of the organization was to act as a sort of reverse Media Matters: to use a team of activists to encourage advertisers not to spend their money with left-wing outlets. In launching Truth Revolt, we openly acknowledged that we didn’t like our own tactics.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Colonization of Mars, double helix, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tragedy of the Commons, warehouse robotics

No fiery white cloud, no roar on the soundtrack; just a reporter’s tinny voice, chattering about the end of the Martian rioters’ doomsday threat, and the vindication of the concept of strategic defense. Although apparently the missiles had come from the Amex lunar base, launched by rail gun. “I never did like the idea,” Arkady said. “It was mutual assured destruction all over again.” Roald said, “But if there’s mutual assured destruction, and one side loses the capability . . . “We haven’t lost the capability here, though. And they value what’s here as much as we do. So now we’re back to the Swiss defense.” Destroy what they wanted and take to the hills, for resistance forever. It was more to his liking.