My Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised* work + ...** = stable nuclear-deterrence (i.e., no war involving nukes)***
* Links to the praise are below, along with excerpts.
** e.g., my tenure since 2016 as an/the-world’s-most accidental threat-analyst; you emailing the U.S.’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)
*** !?
Details are (linked-to) below, mostly via: 1) a copy of my October 5, 2022 email to DTRA, 2) additions-to-the-copy that excerpt from reports published after 10/5.
A 10/7 screenshot of the email
Re: DTRA
From the June 2022 article on TheAtlantic.com titled “What if Russia Uses Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine?” (my emphases):
In 2019, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) ran extensive war games on how the United States should respond if Russia invades Ukraine and then uses a nuclear weapon there. DTRA is the only Pentagon agency tasked exclusively with countering and deterring weapons of mass destruction. Although the results of those DTRA war games are classified, one of the participants told me, “There were no happy outcomes.” The scenarios for nuclear use were uncannily similar to the ones being considered today. When it comes to nuclear warfare, the participant said, the central message of the 1983 film War Games still applies: “The only winning move is not to play.”
Subject of said email to DTRA
My Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised work + …* = stable nuclear-deterrence (!?)
Body of the email
* e.g., my tenure since 2016 as an accidental threat-analyst
Hello all,
Details: ike1952yang2020ruscica2024.substack.com/p/stable-nuclear-deterrence
Excerpt:
Links to said praise*
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2005-02-13/one-more-thing-on-43-things (cached by Google; the praise is from the CEO of a defunct then-startup funded by Amazon and co-founded by members of Amazon’s first “personalization and recommendations” team)
blogmaverick.com/2005/01/31/grokster-and-the-financial-future-of-america/#comment-7049 (blogmaverick.com is Mark Cuban’s blog)
* praise for innovations (INs) that are: 1) products of my work from 1992 to 2005, 2) complemented by the disruptive INs that are products of my work since 2005 (all of my INs are previewed below)
Excerpts from the praise
From a 1998 email sent to me by the then-Manager of the Learning Sciences and Technology Group at Microsoft Research:
Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models require getting rid of the “originator” within the first eighteen months.
From a 2004 email sent to me by said CEO (previously Amazon’s first Director of Personalization):
Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it “the age of the amateur” or “networks of shared experiences” instead of [AI-powered] CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong-learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have—it’s fascinating stuff.
Re: the “. . .” in the title of this page
— Summary (details below) —
From* a University of Pennsylvania criminologist’s 2013 book:
The world’s ~78 million psychopaths (Ps) are IMPERILED (PsIMP) by ongoing advances in molecular-genetics research.
By 2034, involuntary “indefinite detention” of Ps—“time bombs waiting to explode”—could/should result from mandatory biomarker-testing of all people.
I read said book in December 2015, soon after I recognized that my planned startup (MPS) would contribute** to the imperiling of Ps. By mid-2016 I thought it was at least:
likely that a growing number of Ps were aware that PsIMP, and were preparing to resist
somewhat likely that Ps’ war chest was (very) large and growing larger (rapidly)
These seeming likelihoods led me to conclude during Fall 2016 that PsIMP portended: 1) a THREAT to MPS, 2) a THREAT/THREAT to the rest of my industry, 3) a threat/T/T to many other people (hereafter, 1-3 are abbreviated as T2M).
Since then my focus has been preventing/subduing T2M (e.g., by improving my understanding of T2M, by supplying (updated) T2M-analysis to U.S.-government agencies).
In late 2021 I recognized that my worst-case-analysis-re:-T2M (mWCA) must incorporate nuclear weapons. From mWCA (current version):
There are STRONG indicators that: 1) Ps are resisting (PR)*, 2) PR either includes** autocratic-leaders-with-nukes (e.g., Putin***, Xi Jinping) or it will soon, 3) absent my work being leveraged: 3.1) PR-with-nukes would (continue to) resist via a domino-theory that centers on challenging the U.S. et al. (US+) to a succession of game-of-chicken variants, 3.2) each variant would force US+ to choose between a default-loss (e.g., parts of Ukraine where “huge natural gas deposits” were discovered in 2010) or a Cuban-Missile-Crisis-like risk****.
* For starters, see the sections below titled “Re: [in 2016] I thought it was (very) likely that Ps were preparing to resist” and “Precedents for Ps-RESISTING-PsIMP that I was aware of in 2016”; more indicators of PR are provided/linked-to in other sections.
** e.g., because Ps are to repressive kleptocracies what Murder, Inc. was to organized crime in the U.S. during the 1930s; for more re: “PR either includes . . .”, see: 1) the following footnote (***), 2) the sections titled “Re: the likelihood that: 1) a large and growing number of Ps are aware that PsIMP, 2) they're resisting, 3) their war chest is very large and growing larger rapidly” and “Re: mWCA now incorporates nukes possessed by Russia and China”
*** From 2020 book Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West:
“[Putin] was always asking, ‘What is that word beginning with s? Sovest–conscience.’ They don’t have receptors for this.”
From 2019 book The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime:
As we move along the continuum to Category 9 [of 22 categories of violent crime], we traverse an important threshold. The remainder of the scale encompasses persons who commit “evil” acts partly or wholly as the result of varying degrees of psychopathy . . .
TNE co-author Michael H. Stone, MD, is a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. TNE co-author Gary Brucato, PhD, is: 1) a clinical psychologist and researcher in the areas of violence, psychosis, and other serious psychopathology, 2) the assistant director of the Center of Prevention and Evaluation at the New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University Medical Center.
More details re: Putin are below (e.g., the following lowlights).
**** From a March 2022 post on the blog of the RAND Corporation:
[R]ulers like Putin . . . conflate the continuation of their rule with their personal survival . . . Perpetuating their own rule at any cost or risk of nuclear war is . . . rational for them [my emphasis].
From a March 2022 article in The New York Times (NYT; my emphases):
“[A] former U.S. intelligence official for Europe . . . recently wrote that ‘scores of war games carried out by the United States and its allies’ all projected that Mr. Putin would launch a single nuclear strike if he faced limited fighting with NATO or major setbacks in Ukraine that he blamed on the West.
. . . A recent Princeton University simulation, projecting out each side’s war plans and other indicators, estimated that it [i.e., said single nuclear strike] would be likely to trigger a tit-for-tat exchange that, in escalating to strategic weapons like intercontinental missiles, could kill 34 million people within a few hours.”
“Late in the Obama administration, two American war simulations imagined . . . [a] skirmish between NATO and Russia that Moscow met with a single nuclear strike. In the first, Pentagon leaders proposed a retaliatory nuclear strike . . . [A] civilian White House official . . . persuaded them to stand down and isolate Moscow diplomatically. . . . [T]he second simulation ended with American nuclear strikes . . .”
From an October 10, 2022 op-ed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta:
Some intelligence analysts now believe that the probability of the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine has risen from 1-5 percent at the start of the war to 20-25 percent today.
More details below.
Sadly/bleeply, there are indicators that US+’s (WC)As-re:-autocratic-leaders-with-nukes don’t include the implications of PsIMP (ESP. implications re: achieving stable nuclear-deterrence (SND)). Re: s/b:
From an article in the May/June 2022 issue of Foreign Affairs:
As [former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara once observed, the United States’ “security depends on assuming a worst possible case, and having the ability to cope with it [my emphasis].”
Re: “ESP. implications . . .”:
From a 2022 op-ed in NYT, co-authored by two former members of the U.S. National Security Council staff (my emphases):
In the 20th century, constructive doomsaying helped prevent the Cold War from becoming a shooting war. It was ultimately worst-case thinking that stabilized nuclear deterrence and staved off Armageddon.
Key to SND ASAP: you emailing*** the U.S.’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (details (linked-to) below include text you can copy-paste).
* The two sentences that I attribute to the book summarize excerpts from the book that are linked-to in the sentences and/or that appear below.
** i.e., would make an unplanned/inadvertent contribution
*** Warning (‘x + y = z’ format): Ongoing advances in neuroscience re: “brain-reading,” esp. re: “memory detection” (details below) + precedent of revenge-SEEKING after World War II (details below) = not emailing DTRA could make you a target of many people’s wrath**** in the near future (i.e., the wrath of many of the world’s ~7.7 billion non-Ps).
**** You might be safer if you recommend to others that they read this write-up.
. . .
More re: mSND [my blueprint for SND] is TIMELY
. . .
From an October 6, 2022 article in NYT:
“We are trying to figure out: What is Putin’s off ramp?” Mr. Biden said . . .
. . .
From said October 6, 2022 article in NYT:
On Thursday, Mr. Biden said he did not think it would be possible for Russia to use a tactical weapon and “not end up with Armageddon.”
“We’ve got a guy I know fairly well,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Putin at the fund-raiser. “He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.”
. . .
— Re: [in 2016] I thought it was (very) likely that a growing number of Ps were aware that PsIMP —
From a 2016 article on PsychologyToday.com:
A [meta-analytic] review of [48] studies found that the correlation between psychopathy and intelligence is nearly zero [i.e., ~2.3% of Ps have an IQ ≥ 130; ~16% ≥ 115].
From the 2012 article in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin titled “The Corporate Psychopath”:
Today’s corporate psychopath may be highly educated—several with Ph.D., M.D., and J.D. degrees have been studied . . .
En route to raising awareness, Ps can use the pretense of screening job applicants to test for psychopathy (i.e., to identify other Ps).
From a 2011 article in U.K. newspaper The Independent:
My companion, a senior UK investment banker, and I are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees. He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”
— Re: [in 2016] I thought it was (very) likely that Ps were preparing to resist —
From 2015 book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, co-authored by University of Pennsylvania professor Philip Tetlock (my emphases):
“OUTSIDE FIRST
. . . If Bill Flack were asked whether, in the next twelve months, there would be an armed clash between China and Vietnam over some border dispute, he wouldn’t immediately delve into the particulars of that border dispute and the current state of China-Vietnam relations. He would instead look at how often there have been armed clashes in the past. ‘Say we get hostile conduct between China and Vietnam every five years,’ Bill says. ‘I’ll use a five-year recurrence model to predict the future.’ In any given year, then, the outside view would suggest to Bill there is a 20% chance of a clash. Having established that, Bill would look at the situation today and adjust that number up or down.”
“Statisticians call that the base rate . . .”
I thought the correct base-rate re: Ps-preparing-to-resist might be 75%.
From a 2015 article on TheAtlantic.com (my emphases):
[A] team of mine at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has concluded after analyzing the historical record[:] . . . [I]n 12 of 16 cases over the last 500 years in which there was a rapid shift in the relative power of a rising nation that threatened to displace a ruling state, the result was war.
— Precedents for Ps-RESISTING-PsIMP that I was aware of in 2016 —
From the 2018 article titled “Los Extraditables, the Pablo Escobar-Led Gang That Launched a Bloody Campaign [during the 1980s] Against U.S. Extradition”:
The terrorist group . . . claimed “we prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison in the United States . . .”
Escobar was a drug-trafficker whose net worth exceeded $60 billion (in 2022 dollars). The other leaders of Los Extraditables were wealthy drug-traffickers.
From 2001 book Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (my emphases):
“[Escobar] intended, he said, to use the public’s weariness with [Extraditables-funded] violence to his benefit. He planned to turn up the violence until the public cried out for a solution, a deal.
. . . A communiqué from the Extraditables not long after hammered home the point:
We are declaring total and absolute war on the government, on the individual and political oligarchy, on the journalists who have attacked and insulted us, on the judges that have sold themselves to the government, on the extraditing magistrates . . . on all those who have persecuted and attacked us. We will not respect the families of those who have not respected our families. We will burn and destroy the industries, properties and mansions of the oligarchy.”
“At his [Escobar’s] peak, he would threaten to usurp the Colombian State.”
“Ever since Pablo’s men had blown that Avianca flight out of the sky . . .”
“[A] total of 457 police had been killed since Colonel Martinez had started his hunt. Young gunmen in that city were being paid 5 million pesos for killing a cop.”
From 2008 book The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Columbia University historian Adam Tooze:
Hitler had seen himself as locked in a global confrontation with world Jewry. . . . For Hitler, a war of conquest was not one policy option amongst others. Either the German race struggled for Lebensraum [i.e., territory] or its racial enemies would condemn it to extinction.
From 2019 book Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War:
The failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler [my emphasis] stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this period, since it was from this that all subsequent failures—the failure to rearm sufficiently . . . to build alliances . . . to project British power . . . to educate public opinion—stemmed.
. . .
Re: my T2M-analyses from late 2016 through 2021
— Re: PsIMP —
From a 2020 article in Nature:
In the past decade, studies of psychopathological genetics have become large enough to draw robust conclusions.
. . .
Re: 2022 updates to my (WC)A-re:-T2M
— Re: PsIMP —
From 2022 book Coercive Brain-Reading in Criminal Justice, published by Cambridge University Press:
“[N]euroimaging data could be very helpful in predicting future dangerousness. For example, Glenn, Focquaert, and Raine expect that it would be possible in the future to identify with 80 per cent certainty that a child or young adult will develop persistent violent behaviour, by either neuroimaging, genetic tests, or other biological examinations.”
“Emerging neurotechnology offers increasingly individualised brain information, enabling researchers to identify mental states and content. When accurate and valid, these brain-reading technologies also provide data that could be useful in criminal legal procedures, such as memory detection[*] with EEG and the prediction of recidivism with fMRI.”
* e.g., memories of past thoughts that are consistent with a dangerous level of psychopathy
. . .
Re: the Biden administration leveraging mSND ASAP via you emailing DTRA (part 2 of 3)
From 2005 book Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy during the Cold War:
Within days of its receipt the “long telegram” [of February 22, 1946] and Kennan’s other dispatches had been circulated, read, commented upon, and for the most part accepted in Washington as the most plausible explanation of Soviet behavior, past and future.
From 2005 book The Cold War: A New History (my emphases):
Kennan’s “long telegram” [KLT] became the basis for United States strategy toward the Soviet Union throughout the rest of the Cold War . . . What would be needed, as Kennan put it in a published version of his argument the following year, was a “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.”
From 2011 book George F. Kennan: An American Life:
“[KLT] was the geopolitical equivalent of a medical X-ray, penetrating beneath alarming symptoms to yield at first clarity, then comprehension [of the clarity’s implications] . . .”
“[T]he realities which it [KLT] described were ones that had existed, substantially unchanged, for about a decade [my emphasis] . . .”
“[KLT] set out no fully conceived grand strategy, but it was a start . . .”
“Kennan regarded the ‘long telegram,’ years later, as resembling ‘one of those primers put out by alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers . . .’”
“Harriman [U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1943 to January ‘46] found the telegram ‘fairly long, and a little bit slow reading in spots.’ But it did contain what Kennan ‘hadn’t been allowed to say before.’ Harriman shared it with Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, who had long been looking for an analysis of this kind. Forrestal, in turn, had the telegram reproduced and circulated all over Washington, including to Truman himself. As Kennan recalled:
[‘]Six months earlier this message would probably have been received in the Department of State with raised eyebrows and lips pursed in disapproval. . . .[’]
It all showed, Kennan concluded, that the real world was less important than the government’s ‘subjective state of readiness . . . to recognize this or that feature of it.’ Harriman did not find this surprising. ‘That was one of the things,’ he later recalled, ‘that I couldn’t get George to understand—that our timing had to be right.’ It was ‘why I didn’t want a lot of [his] stuff to go in, because I knew it would have gone in the files and died. But this was just the critical time. It hit Washington at just the right moment. . . .’”
From the October 14, 2022 article syndicated by Reuters titled “Is this a drill? Upcoming Russian nuclear exercises a challenge for the West” (my emphases):
With Russia expected to soon carry out large-scale drills of its nuclear forces as Russian President Vladimir Putin threatens to use them, the United States and its allies will be challenged to ensure they can spot the difference between exercises and the real thing.
Russia typically holds major annual nuclear exercises around this time of year, and U.S. and Western officials expect them perhaps in just days. They will likely include the test launch of ballistic missiles, U.S. officials say.
But with Putin having openly threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia in its unraveling invasion of Ukraine, some Western officials are worried Moscow could deliberately try to muddy the waters about its intentions.
From an October 13, 2022 article on Bloomberg.com (my emphases):
Russia has conducted other military drills since its invasion of Ukraine, and they were not a prelude to bigger action against Kyiv.
Still, “if I were going to hide an attack, that’s how I would do it, exercises,” said William Alberque, director of strategy, technology and arms control at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. He noted Russia had previously used exercises to mask preparations for attacks, including in its invasion of Georgia in 2008. In the case of Ukraine, Russia did not attempt to hide its military buildup on the border before it went in.
Moving from exercise to an operation could be fairly swift, making the window to assess and react to any switch very tight, according to a European defense official who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters.
From an October 15, 2022 article on TheAtlantic.com (my emphases):
Through its satellites, other surveillance capabilities, and various forms of on-the-ground intelligence, the U.S. government would probably (not certainly) be able to spot signs of Russian efforts to move tactical nuclear weapons out of storage facilities.
A particular challenge with reading the Kremlin’s tea leaves is that Russia has nearly two dozen “dual use” delivery systems, some already being used in the war in Ukraine, which can carry conventional or nuclear warheads. U.S. intelligence could “assume they have conventional warheads on them, but actually they don’t,” because Putin has “switched them out somewhere and we didn’t detect that,” Kroenig noted. “So it is possible, I guess, that we just start seeing mushroom clouds in Ukraine . . .”
From said Bloomberg article (my emphases):
Meanwhile, around 14 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will take part in “Steadfast Noon” starting Monday and located in the western part of Europe, more than 1,000 km (621 miles) from Russia’s border, according to a NATO official. The exercise, which runs for two weeks, will test a mix of more than 50 fighter, escort and surveillance jets as well as tankers needed for a nuclear mission, but will not use any live bombs.
The drills will involve flights from an air force base in the northeast of Belgium to test procedures related to the dropping of nuclear bombs, Belgian broadcaster VRT NWS reported . . .
. . .
Re: presentation-errors above
From 2012 book APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur—How to Publish a Book, co-authored by Guy Kawasaki, a former chief evangelist at Apple:
Every time I turn in the “final” copy of a book [Kawasaki has (co-)authored twelve books], I believe that it’s perfect. In APE’s case, upward of seventy-five people reviewed the manuscript, and [co-author] Shawn [Welch] and I read it until we were sick of it. Take a wild guess at how many errors our copy editor found. The answer is 1,500. [APE is 410 pages.]
And, of course, I’m preoccupied with . . .
— End of excerpt from my write-up —
Best,
[phone-number redacted] (I’m near Washington, D.C.)