Cybernetics, Culpability, and Risk: Automatic Launch and Accidental War

Abstract

In this paper I will pursue an interesting if frightening isomorphism between Aristotelian and Marxian paradigms of deception. The former is intrapersonal: a self-deceived agent devises strategies to prevent himself from knowing either a principle or a consequence of some action that would make it immoral to perform that action.1 The latter paradigm is interpersonal: a political deceiver is one who tries to prevent others from knowing either the principles or consequences of his own actions. Physicist Ray Kidder of Livermore Labs, who resigned their Star Wars project, says of this latter case that ‘the public is getting swindled by one side that has access to classified information and can say whatever it wants..., whereas [skeptics]... would go to jail [because of Reagan’s ‘gag rule’ on research].’2 A political decision structure can be designed to preclude public discussion of the projectible consequences of particular programs or policies. Paradoxically, then, as outsiders we must devise independent means to discover these consequences in order even to raise this question of deception, and thereby to address the issue of culpability in the case of ‘accidental’ war.3 Luckily, such independent means exist, in the accidental war studies conducted by mostly former military personnel who preceded the governmental gag rule on military research.