Hawaii's Nuclear Scare and the Prescient Warning of the Movie "Fail Safe"

  

At a little after 8 am Saturday morning, people in Hawaii received the following message on their cellphones: “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

It took the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency 38 minutes to advise that the message had been an error – as a spokesman later explained, “Someone clicked the wrong thing on the computer.” During that 38 minutes, thousands of terrified residents and visitors scrambled to figure out what they should do. Internet searches for “how to survive nuclear” spiked dramatically, going from almost non-existent to more than doubling the number of searches for “how to make pasta.”

   

Scary as Hawaii’s morning was, there have been numerous false alarms that brought us a lot closer to a real nuclear holocaust than we were yesterday. Journalist Eric Schlosser has documented a number of them, including a 1986 incident in which President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was awakened in the middle of the night by an aide who informed him that Soviet submarines had just fired 220 missiles at the United States. Brzezinski knew that a retaliatory strike would have to be ordered immediately; the missiles would hit Washington within minutes. Moments later his aide called again: His earlier report had been mistaken. In fact, 2,200 missiles had been launched.

As we now know, nuclear annihilation did not occur that morning. Before Brzezinski reached the President, his aide called a third time. No missiles had been fired. Later it was discovered that the attack report had been caused by the malfunction of a 46-cent computer chip at North American Aerospace Defense headquarters.

  

Until recently, fears of nuclear holocaust had faded quite a bit from public attention. Belligerent exchanges between Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un changed that. We seem to be edging back toward the nervous atmosphere of the Cold War, when suburbanites built bomb shelters in their back yards and school children learned to “duck and cover” should air raid sirens signal that Soviet missiles were coming.

  

One artifact from that era, the 1964 movie Fail Safe, documented in chilling fashion how a breakdown in technology could instigate nuclear war. Schlosser’s reporting and yesterday’s incident in Hawaii are reminders of how prescient the movie (directed by Sidney Lumet from a screenplay by Walter Bernstein, based on the 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler) was. What follows are descriptions of four scenes from the film. Warning: there are spoilers throughout. 

  

The SAC command center.
Knapp and Raskob are on the left, General Bogan leans over console

Scene 1: A U.S. Congressman named Raskob (played by Sorrell Brooke) and an electronics company executive named Knapp (Russell Collins) are touring the Strategic Air Command facility in Omaha, Nebraska. A giant screen shows the positions of American fighter squadrons, armed with nuclear bombs. These squadrons are in the air continually, ready to head toward targets in Russia should SAC’s surveillance system detect a Soviet attack. The following conversation takes place as an Air Force general named Bogan (Frank Overton) leads the tour, picking up just after he’s explained how SAC’s monitors closely track Soviet activity on the ground as well as in the air.

Congressman Raskob: I'll tell you the truth, these machines scare the hell out of me. I don’t like the idea that every time I take off my hat, something up there knows I'm losing my hair. I want to be damn sure that thing doesn't get any ideas of its own.

Mr. Knapp: I see what you mean Mr. Raskob, but that's the chance you take with these systems.

Raskob: Who says we have to take that chance? Who voted who the power to do it this particular way? I'm the only one around here who got elected by anybody, and nobody gave me that power.

Knapp: It's in the nature of technology. Machines are developed to meet situations…

Raskob: And then they take over and start creating situations.

Knapp: Not necessarily.

Raskob: There's always the chance. You said so yourself.

General Bogan: We have checks on everything, Mr. Raskob. Checks and counterchecks.

Raskob: Who checks the checker? Where's the end of the line, General? Who's got the responsibility?

Knapp: No one.

Bogan: The President.

Raskob: He can't know everything that's going on, now can he? It's too complicated. And if you want to know, that's what really bothers me. The only thing that everyone can agree on is that no one's responsible.

The Pentagon

Scene 2: A group of government officials and military officers is meeting in a Pentagon conference room for a presentation on nuclear war strategy by Professor Groeteschele (Walter Matthau). Groeteschele is an aggressive proponent of the defense strategy known as “mutually assured destruction.” His views are challenged by an Air Force Brigadier General named Warren A. “Blackie” Black (Dan O’Herlihy).

General Black: We're going too fast. Things are getting out of hand….We're all trying to make war more efficient, and we're succeeding. We now have the capacity to blow up the whole world several times over.

Professor Groeteschele: Which does not mean we must do it.

Black: We won't be able to stop from doing it…We're setting up a war machine that acts faster than the ability of men to control it. We're putting men into situations that are getting too tough for men to handle.

Groeteschele:  Then we must toughen the men!

  

General Black and Professor Groeteschele

Scene 3: SAC’s surveillance system has detected an unidentified aircraft crossing into U.S. airspace, prompting a defense alert and a heightening of response measures. After a few tense minutes the potential intruder is identified as an off-course commercial airliner and the alert is cancelled, but a computer error causes one American bomber to continue on an attack trajectory toward Russia. As military personnel work to recall it, the command center in Omaha is connected via speaker phone to the conference room in the Pentagon, allowing the Secretary of Defense and other officials to discuss options. At one point the electronics industry executive Knapp interrupts to make a point regarding the technology involved.

Knapp: The more complex an electronic system gets, the more accident prone it is. Sooner or later it breaks down…A transistor blows, a condenser burns out…sometimes they just get tired, like people.

Prof. Groeteschele: Mr. Knapp overlooks one factor: the machines are supervised by humans. Even if the machine fails, the human being can always correct the mistake.

Knapp: I wish you were right. The fact is, the machines work so fast, they are so intricate, the mistakes they make are so subtle, that very often a human being just can't know if a machine is lying or telling the truth.

The President speaks to the Soviet Premiere

Scene 4: Russian defense systems succeed in jamming all attempts to recall the wayward bomber; it continues on its attack trajectory toward Moscow. The American president (Henry Fonda) speaks to the Soviet premiere (unseen) from an underground communications center. He informs him that the bomber’s pilots may be able to evade Soviet defenses. In order to avoid retaliatory attack by the Russians and full-scale nuclear war, the President promises that, if Moscow is destroyed, he will order an American jet to drop a nuclear bomb on New York City.  

The unthinkable happens, prompting a final exchange between the President and his Soviet counterpart. This tragedy, the Premiere says, was nobody’s fault, no human being is to be blamed. The President responds:

“We're to blame,” he says. “Both of us. We let our machines get out of hand.”

He describes the day’s events as "a taste of the future."

"Do we learn from it," he asks, "or go on the way we have?”

The Sony hack and the nature of technology

The cyber attack on Sony Pictures, besides being an amazingly effective act of corporate sabotage, provides some interesting insights into the fundamental nature of technology. 

In my book (Not So Fast: Thinking Twice About Technology) I describe four characteristics that are widely (not universally) shared by technological systems. These are underlying, inter-related qualities that appear repeatedly in technological applications, regardless of the specific field of endeavor in which they appear, and so can be said to define technology’s inherent tendencies or dispositions. 

The four characteristics are:

1. Technology is by nature expansive. 

2. Technology is by nature rational, direct, and aggressive. 

3. Technology by its nature combines or converges with other technologies. 

4. Technology by its nature strives for control.

Here are some of the ways the Sony hack demonstrates those characteristics:

Technology is by nature expansive. 

The philosopher of technology Langdon Winner sums up this point nicely: “If there is a distinctive path that modern technological change has followed it is that technology goes where it has never been. Technological development proceeds steadily from what it has already transformed and used up toward that which is still untouched.”

The evolution of the Internet within a few decades from a private network for academic researchers into a ubiquitous system of communications that runs everything from national utilities networks to national economies is one of the fastest and most powerful examples of technological expansion ever seen. 

The motion picture industry is another technological system that’s steadily widened its reach, not quite as quickly, but fast enough. The number of theater screens in the U.S. rose from 5,000 in 1907 to 18,000 in 1914; there are now nearly 40,000. By the 1950s theatrical movies were also being shown on TV; by the 1960s the TV networks were making movies of their own. Today we no longer need theaters or TV sets to watch a film; they’re available in airplanes, in cars, or on our smartphones while riding the subway to work. 

All these modes of expansion have been in progress internationally as well as domestically, of course. Indeed, the Sony hack affirms in bizarre fashion just how thoroughly the combined technologies of the Internet and motion pictures have penetrated global culture: Through their agency two marginally talented comedians have caused the leaders of two nuclear nations to trade threats with one another. 

There’s considerable irony in the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much the United States can do to respond to the attack, given that North Korea is relatively backward, technologically, and therefore doesn’t depend on the sorts of computer networks that would be our most likely targets of reprisal.

Technology is by nature rational, direct, and aggressive. 

The point I’m making here isn’t that the hackers unleashed an aggressive technological attack on Sony, although obviously they did. Rather I refer to the nature of technology itself. 

Computer software, hardware, and the Internet are mechanical and mathematical (algorithmic) systems that run by logical rules, rigorously following specific instructions. In that sense they are relentlessly rational. They respond to those instructions when received without consideration of what happens outside the system and without moral judgement. “Good" for a machine means that it works; "bad" means it doesn't. The single most important value for a technological system is efficiency—results. 

Somehow the hackers responsible for the Sony attack learned the instructions that unlocked the data in Sony’s computer system. Once those instructions were received, the system executed them directly and aggressively — that is, with all the power at its disposal and without the slightest hesitation. The executives and filmmakers involved may be traumatized by the results, but you can be sure the technology is suffering no remorse. Sony’s servers probably purred as they handed over terabytes of information to the hackers. 

We have a habit of underestimating how faithfully technology follows instructions. We needn’t assign human-like powers of decision to machines, as Stanley Kubrick did to HAL in 2001, for disaster to occur. “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” showed that blind obedience is all that’s required. 

Technology by its nature combines or converges with other technologies. 

Technology is irrepressibly catalytic. Invention leads to other inventions; individual technologies and technological systems can be assembled into new combinations; techniques invented for one purpose are applicable to any number of other uses and spread outward into the culture, spawning still other uses. Bronze casting techniques developed for the molding of church bells became useful in the manufacture of cannons. Henry Ford borrowed the concept of the assembly line from the slaughter houses in Chicago (dis-assembly lines, actually); McDonald’s applied the idea to hamburgers. 

The microprocessor has spawned wave after unprecedented wave of technological convergence. Computers have merged with telephones and televisions and Wall Street trading and household appliances and games and genetics and, soon we’re told, the human brain. Inventors are often the last ones to realize the ways their inventions will be used. The Internet wasn’t designed to be the world’s largest shopping mall, or as a weapon to be used by thieves and terrorists, but it’s certainly proving itself handy for those purposes.

The Sony hack demonstrates the processes of convergence and diffusion in fairly obvious ways. In earlier days movies played in theaters for a few weeks and disappeared. Now, thanks in large part to the powers of digitization, theaters are the first step in a very long distribution chain that includes pay-per-view, pay cable, DVD, Netflix, Amazon, On Demand, Hulu, and any number of other channels, both licit and illicit, not to mention old-fashioned “free” TV. Sony's hackers both learned of the "The Interview" and killed it via the web. How long will it be before pirated copies of the film show up there? Not long, I’d wager, if they haven’t already. 

“The Interview” episode also demonstrates the fabled democratization of technology, which is another way of describing technological diffusion. The tools needed to become a computer hacker are very easy to come by, and plenty of people seem to have acquired the skills to use them. Daily, it seems, we learn of the latest fruits of their labors.

Technology by its nature strives for control.

Long before before human beings learned about agriculture, we were using technology to gain control, over the threats of nature and our enemies. Indeed, a substantial body of anthropological opinion holds that the use of tools is what made us human in the first place. Nowhere has that point been made more eloquently than in the famous opening sequence of 2001. 

The lust for control is just as prevalent in the jungles of business enterprise today, and international corporations like Sony use every technology at their disposal to maintain and extend it. Indeed, the fact that there is a Sony Pictures studio is a manifestation of a hardware company deciding, as the home video revolution took off, that it needed to have control of a steady supply of software to play on that hardware. The studios would undoubtedly still own the theaters, too, if the Supreme Court would let them. Convergence and control go hand in hand. Their offspring is giganticism.

The problem, as any spiritual guru will tell you, is that control is an illusion, nowhere more so than in the application of massively complex technological systems. Technologies allow companies to broaden their reach globally, but in doing so vulnerabilities inevitably arise. This is true partly because every system has glitches, and partly because the more powerful a technology is the greater influence it exerts on its surroundings. The effects radiate out promiscuously, and uncontrollably. Sony’s executives have spent a horrifying week watching a steady stream of unexpected consequences unfold. 

It’s a human failing to think we have more control than we do, a failing that seems to disproportionately afflict technologists. Again, the exercise of control is in many respects what technology has always been about, and hacking is simply another way of grabbing hold of the levers. Whether the cause of a breakdown is driven by intention or by accident, no system is fail safe.  

©Doug Hill, 2014