Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

16Brittle Powered by the design precautions developed for energy systems in Part Three.Though technical failures are not the main focus of this study, they offer cautionarytales. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration missile worthhundreds of millions of dollars had to be blown up shortly after launch becauseone misplaced minus sign in a computer program put it on the wrong trajectory.Analogously, had there been a nuclear war during a substantial period in the1960s, all U.S. missile warheads would reportedly have missed their targets bya wide margin, owing to a systematic error in reentry calculations. A radarimage of the rising moon once caused a U. S. nuclear attack alert; once this wasfixed, a flock of geese caused a new alert. 31 In a recent fifteen-month period theU.S. had one hundred fifty-one false attack alerts, four of them serious. 32The great care applied to such matters is clearly not always enough: a fireincinerated three Apollo astronauts in 1967, and a Space Shuttle nitrogenpurge error suffocated a worker in 1981. Both events occurred duringextremely high-technology launch-pad operations where the utmost precautionswere presumably being taken. Some technical systems are simply socomplex that they exceed the limits of attainable reliability and foresight—aproblem to which the next chapter returns.Command, control, and communications disruptionsAny system is by definition most vulnerable to disruption through its controlmechanisms—those meant to affect its operation most by applying theleast perturbation. The management structures and procedures for usingthese control systems, and the communications systems used to provide theirinput and transmit their output, share in this enhanced vulnerability. As systemsgrow more complex, the volume and speed of information flow neededto control them grow until only computers can cope with these demands.Computers’ undiscriminating willingness to do what they are told, howevernonsensical, increases control vulnerability further. And finally, through computers,the ability to affect much by little becomes concentrated in one place,perhaps accessible electronically from many other places.For example, a Swedish Government assessment of “The VulnerableSociety” notes that the central computer of the National Social InsuranceBoard, in the northern town of Sundsvall, sends over fifty million paymentsor financial messages per year (at a peak rate of half a million per day) toSweden’s eight million people. Computer failurewould affect large numbers of [people] …, chiefly those … with the least socialand economic protection. [Non-military] threats to the computer … might