Nuclear survivability (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

Fri Oct 7 02:17:17 UTC 2005

Probably the most authoritative statement out there is at
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200003/msg00081.html
I quote:

  >>So the motivation for Paul's work was to provide a minimal but highly
  >>survivable one-way communications arrangement to get out the go-code; it was
  >>NOT motivated by a requirement for a survivable command-control system that
  >>could support the forces fully in both peace and in war.

That's from Willis Ware, who was in the management structure at RAND at 
the time.

But Baran's own attitude is a bit different.  Here's quote from
Abbate's "Inventing the Internet":

	on page 1 of the introduction to his 1960 paper describing
	a survivable communications system Baran explicitly
	characterized his proposed network as a tool for recovering
	from?rather than forestalling?a nuclear war: "The cloud-of-doom
	attitude that nuclear war spells the end of the earth is
	slowly lifting from the minds of the many?. It follows that
	we should?do all those things necessary to permit the
	survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and
	reconstruct the economy swiftly."

The cited paper is Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using
Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes. Report P-1995, Rand Corporation;
I haven't been able to find it online.

		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb