On Saturday afternoon, I held a technical session on Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) with a friend. He’s working towards his Ph.D. in the space, working on the material’s end of the problem. We went over why this was an important focal point for future research and explained the history of NTP in general, including its natural outgrowth from the Manhattan Project. Somewhere along the way, we started attracting conspiracy theorists.
You know the type. The person in question started out by asking us whether this would get us to another solar system. There are very few questions that get under my skin. But this was one of them. He asked in a way that dismissed all of the work being done and the progress that has been made. After all, yes, of course, this won’t get us to Alpha Centuari, but that doesn’t matter. Each little step we take, each foot we gain, is another step on the path forever outward bound.
By saying that, I foolishly fell into this individual’s trap. Because the minute I finished my answer, they responded with,
“We already have the technology do this [go to other solar systems]. They don’t want us to know about it.”
– conspiracy theorist
In the moment, I did what I had to. I shut the theorist down and brought the focus back to our technical discussion. However, his remark stayed with me. It crystallized the problem with conspiracy theorists; they lack a sense of scale. I suspect because there’s a disconnect between what is taught in schools across the world and the mechanics of how systems – human or machine – work. Most people seem to be entirely unfamiliar with systems theory and are unable to model the effects of even simple systems in their minds.
As an exercise in systems thinking, let us assume that the conspiracy theorist is correct; there indeed is magical technology out there somewhere that can take us to Alpha Centauri and back. Let us take it as a given that Captain Picard was thrown back into history thanks to the Borg, and we captured the Enterprise while he was in the middle of a stirring and inspiring speech about the history of humankind.
Okay, cool. What’s next?
We can’t just put the Enterprise in a warehouse and call it a day. We’d have to work to understand its secrets. And that’s where systems thinking comes into play. To extract its secrets and to keep its existence a secret, a conspiracy would have to exist. A conspiracy that we can model and understand.
The Enterprise is a formidable vessel capable of warp travel. Its functioning involves advanced physics that isn’t well understood currently. The “Heisenberg Compensator” itself would re-write much of our current understanding of physics and upturn the foundations of quantum theory on its head. To understand a machine that advanced it would mean hiring hundreds of professional physicists as well as legions of graduate/Ph.D. students and training them for several years as they teach each other and themselves the basics of its functioning. We are essentially talking about the NSA’s mathematics program on steroids. To make any significant progress, we’re talking about thousands of academics and the start of an enclosed world with all of the trappings of academia, including papers, talks, lecture series, etc.
How would you prevent this from leaking to the outside? All of those physicists will have friends outside of their pocket universe, people they went to school with, ex-colleagues, professional correspondents, conference friends. Will you bar all contact forever between them and their personal networks? If that’s the case, then how will you recruit? How will you get new physicists and mathematicians as your hiring needs expand?
For the sake of argument, let us make a further assumption. Let’s assume that there’s a magical, ill-defined means through which sharing any knowledge from the pocket academic universe leads to instant death. If you talk about it, you die. Instantly. No questions asked. Does this mean that they’ll have to spend their entire lives with the program? How would you acquire the great minds you need if you have such a ridiculous requirement? Why would the next or current Nobel prize winner want to work with you if they can’t work on anything else ever again?
Will you pay these people forever to just sit there and work on this tiny thing whose derivatives you can’t share? What if they could lead to better, life-saving technologies elsewhere? Would you, the architect of the conspiracy, perhaps embark on the Men in Black conceit and start sharing things every now and then? In that case, then how will you explain where the newfound knowledge came from? And over time, as you share more and more downstream work from the insights that you’ve gained, what’s stopping clever people on the outside from making progress towards your secret work?
You may dismiss these concerns and say that you will completely wall off your pocket universe. But then what happens when you encounter a problem that you can’t solve? And it’s a small, but narrow, critical problem that you don’t have the skills to approach. Will you call in consultants? Will you police their derivative works too?
We have a real world example of this. In 1957, a report was written by someone at the NSA about mathematics in the NSA,
FINDING RT-c. The Agency has not been able to carry out enough long-range research directed.toward the identification and development of special fields of mathematics and statistics of particular interest to the Agency.
– A Study of the Mathematical Effort in the National Security Agency, 1957 [PDF]
This has been due partly to a reluctance on the part of some Agency personnel to encourage such activity, and partly to the unusual susceptibility of a cryptanalytic organization to the extreme pressures of immediate problems. Such fields as. abstract theory of rotor maze information, Bayesian statistics, theory of stochastic search, and theory of special iterative convergence schemes might have been, and still should be, further developed as basic mathematical research with a good expectation of eventual dividend in cryptology.
For those who might not be familiar, Bayesian statistics is a thriving field now and forms the basis of many AI/ML algorithms. I am not a mathematician, but stochastic optimization/search and iterative schemes are thriving fields as well 60+ years into the future. Whatever special knowledge that the NSA guarded back in 1957 is almost certainly public domain in one form or the other by this point. Enough clever minds have worked on these fields that they’ve likely stumbled across most of the NSA’s areas of interest independently.
Once upon a time, the NSA used to be decades ahead of everyone else in the field of cryptology. Perhaps they still are, but due to the internet and the need for secure digital communications, there are more people working outside the NSA in the field than ever before, and I suspect that the gap has narrowed considerably.
If They (it’s always a “They”) have some magical propulsion technology, then given enough time, the world will catch up. Eventually. Nothing has to leak. Just the downstream implications and work products will eventually lead to breakthroughs that feed towards our broader goals
I have dealt with a very pointed, vertical slice of this problem, but the scope of the problem expands as you look outside the slice. After all, where will you house the Enterprise? In a giant underground facility somewhere? That facility will need custodians, cooks, maintenance personnel, IT people, receptionists, engineers, administrators, security, construction workers, supply chain managers, procurement experts, etc.
All of these people will come from somewhere, and they will go somewhere. When they drive their cars in during shifts, the cars will be visible from space. Enemy nations will know that there is a secret facility in that location where something significant must be going on, given how heavily guarded it would be and the number of vehicles coming and going.
If you propose that all of these people should live on base, then you’d have to construct accommodations, handle sewage, etc. It would be an entire town, with all the infrastructure that it implies. Even if you decide to make it underground, the displaced earth will have to go somewhere during construction, the town would need energy from somewhere else, and it would need ways to send waste out.
In an age before spy satellites, the US Military built entire cities focused on an advanced technology project that would forever change the world. It was called the Manhattan Project. It involved some 125,000 people who lived in secret cities across the US. An extremely expensive feat of logistics and planning helmed by General Leslie Groves. If you read articles about it today, you’ll find all of them talking about how impressive the secrecy was and how only a few hundred people knew about the Bomb before it was dropped. Here’s a quote from one of these articles,
Moeller guesses that just a few hundred people in the country knew about the bomb before it was dropped. Nothing was explained to the tens of thousands who lived and worked in the cities that produced them, working “like moles in the dark,” as Life magazine put it in 1945.
– The secret cities where the atomic bomb was built
“Obviously people knew something was afoot, but they didn’t really know what it was,” Moeller said.
They’re wrong. And we have historical evidence to back this up. From Alex Wellerstein’s excellent blog, Restricted Data,
[…] Fission had been discovered in 1939, chain reactions were talked about publicly a few months later, and by the early 1940s the subject of atomic power and atomic bombs had become a staple of science journalists and science fiction authors.
– Death dust, 1941
In his post, Dr. Wellerstein describes how in 1944 — a year before they dropped the Bomb — a science fiction story was published talking about an Atomic Bomb made out of U-235! The author had guessed the existence of the Bomb, entirely independently, earning him and his editor, the science fiction great, John Campbell a congratulatory visit from the FBI.
The U-235 Bomb story has nothing on the piece that Campbell himself wrote in 1941,
With all the world seeking frantically for the secret of that irresistible weapon, what are America’s chances in the race?
It is a question of men and brains and equipment. Thanks to Hitler’s belief that those who don’t agree with him must be wrong, America now has nearly all the first-rank theoretical physicists of the world. Mussolini’s helped us somewhat, too, by exiling his best scientists. Niels Bohr, father of modern atomic theory, is at Princeton, along with Albert Einstein and others of Europe’s greatest.
The National Defense Research Committee is actively and vigorously supporting the research in atomic physics that seeks the final secrets of atomic power. Actively, because the world situation means that they must, yet reluctantly because they know better than anyone else can the full and frightful consequences of success. Dr. Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the Committee, has said: “I hope they never succeed in tapping atomic power. It will be a hell of a thing for civilization.”
– “Is Death Dust America’s Secret Weapon,” 1941 [PDF]
It’s really impressive that he’s quoting Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1941, one of the main architects of the Manhattan Project. Campbell even manages to mention exiled European scientists and Dr. Bohr, who were instrumental in the success of the program.
He got all of this from the scant public information available at the time. If random science fiction authors, without the benefit of any real access, could figure it out, do you really think that at least some of the many trained professionals who worked on the program didn’t piece together the reality? Especially those charged with refining Uranium who had to be told not to stack highly enriched Uranium lest it explode?
If only Uncle Sam knew,
All of this is my extremely long-winded way of saying that conspiracies don’t exist in a vacuum. They exist in a context, the chaotic, wider arching system. Any attempt to create a parallel system away from the broader human endeavor is both expensive and formidable. For every resource you need, for each person you hire, it increases the cost and complexity. As the conspiracy grows so does the effort of maintaining it. A well functioning conspiracy needs coordination and communication between all of its parts.
Personally, I suspect that the effort increases exponentially, especially for more complicated knowledge work. To elaborate, work cannot be carried out in narrow silos, as each team working on a particular problem will need added context supplied by other teams. This need for context necessitates continuous communication that can easily lead to clever folks piecing together what’s going on. So you must create mechanisms that somehow allow for sharing some of the theory behind the secret information without sharing all of it.
And that burden increases as you start creating systems to bring new people on. It’s very much like a startup. You’ll have to onboard the new people, initiate them into the project’s culture, teach them what they need to learn to be effective, mentor them etc. Sooner or later you’ll need HR, which is when the complexity really mounts.
Two can keep a secret if they’re both dead.
What is truly funny is that I have never heard conspiracy theorists talk about real conspiracies with any depth or understanding. There are real conspiracies out there. Wild, incredible conspiracies that are backed by a large amount of documentation and data. Conspiracies with multiple points of collaboration that meet most evidentiary thresholds. They aren’t discussed much, but they are of significant import to history.
To keep it relevant to conspiracy theories, here’s one potential conspiracy that I’ve never heard conspiracy theorists mention. (I hope that I don’t set off some form of avalanche with this — this is purely conjecture and there is a distinct likelihood that I am incorrect.),
Gen. Groves, Gen. Curtis LeMay, and the others involved with the bombing of Hiroshima may have committed some light treason along the way. And why we need to re-evaluate President Truman’s legacy.
This conspiracy comes to us by way of Dr. Alex Wellerstein (more here) and Robert McNamara. To appreciate it, we need some context. Gen. LeMay, a self described war criminal, commanded the strategic bombing campaign of Japan. He is responsible for the firebombing of most Japanese cities. And — according to the statement given by Robert McNamara — was the one who pushed to drop the Bomb (McNamara says that it was “dropped on his command”, but I am assuming that to be a figure of speech).
Most people are taught that President Truman was the one who gave the command, but this is inaccurate. He was given options and told to approve them by his generals. He wrestled with his conscience and decided to go ahead. But here’s where it gets mildly tricky and treasonous. It seems that the generals involved may have misled him about the targets.
In his personal diaries, drafts of the speech he gave after dropping the Bomb, as well as the final speech he gave, he identifies Hiroshima, a city, as a military target. In his personal diary entry, President Truman writes about taking Kyoto off the list, emphasis is Alex Wellerstein’s,
This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.
He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.
– President Truman’s Diary, July 25th, 1945
And then during the speech he gave after the Bomb had been dropped, President Truman says, (empahsis mine)
The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction. […]
– Radio Address Given by President Truman on August 9th, 1945
The language in his original drafts is even starker,
Draft #2: The world will note that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima which is purely a military base.
– President Truman and his speech writers
Purely a military base.
Dr. Wellerstein states, and this is conjecture on his part, that Truman revised the speech that he gave on the 9th after seeing the reports of casualties and aerial photographs on the 8th. But he still may have thought that it was a military target and that only some innocent people died.
Here’s my proposed conspiracy; President Truman may have developed this misunderstanding on his own, but his advisors made sure that they did not disabuse him of it. That’s very important. He must have stated his preference that the US shouldn’t target civilians and to minimize harm during the meetings. Someone must have realized at some point that he thought that Hiroshima was a military base or a “purely military target.” Why didn’t they correct him?
Why didn’t anyone say, “Sir, Hiroshima is an industrial city with a military base, but it is not a military base“?
I would like to go even further and pose the question. He walked away from his meeting with Stimson assuming that they wouldn’t target civilians, when Stimson meant something completely different; did that mean that he was being misled before that day?
On its own the evidence is inconclusive, but where it gets really interesting is when you take what happens next into account. Truman was so horrified by the outcome that he stopped the further use of the Bomb,
[…] On August 10th, he told his cabinet that “he had given orders to stop atomic bombing” because, as Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”
Crucially, President Truman didn’t know about Nagasaki, and was surprised when he learned about the bombing. He immediately gave the order to discontinue using the bomb without his express consent. It’s a good thing he did, because further targets had already been selected. General LeMay was raring to go.
What if, and this is conjecture, the Generals knew that President Truman would be horrified by the idea of killing so many civilians and would have never given his assent if he knew that they would kill so many innocent people. What if they kept him in the dark? Either on purpose or via an implicit strategy to never detail what the casualties would be.
If any of this is true, then a few generals lied — explicitly or via omission — to the POTUS and usurped some of his power as Commander in Chief. That’s not exactly treason in the legal sense, but I like to think of it as a dash of light treason.
What really gets me is that it’s somewhat likely to be true, McNamara’s recollections of LeMay are particularly illuminating on the kinds of people we’re talking about,
If you notice, the above conspiracy theory is fairly “boring.” It is endlessly fascinating to me. But I’ve watched people fall asleep to my tales. Who can blame them? It is, at end of the day, office politics writ large. The “conspiracy” involves pushing a decision maker into a favorable decision for their faction. And the questions involved revolve around who knew what and when as well as what they did with that information. There is no magical technology. No blood drinking. Or, any of the usual fare. It’s conjecture related to court politics and the dynamics of the Presidency in the mid-20th century.
Even more disappointingly (to the conspiracy theorist), there is no one mastermind, there is no grand secret group in charge. It’s a chaotic group of people, all playing telephone with each other. A group of people with the weight of history on their shoulders, doing their best in the moment. There is no hint of any real coordination or grand machinations.
It is what it is. And that must be really disappointing for most folks.
Areoform 
Hi. Nice to meet you.
LikeLike
Nice to meet you as well! So I’m interviewing the authors of Red Atlas in May, would you be interested in joining? Love your insights into the industry!
LikeLike