Fatalism

Today's word sounds very depressing but I'm pleased to tell you that it is as depressing as it sounds. Fatalism is the view that events are fixed and humans are powerless to change them. A very cheery thought, I know.

I don't anticipate discussing this in today's post, but I doubt I'll really stick to that. I don't plan my posts much. It makes them less spontaneous and less prone to my speaking my mind if they're planned. I only edit my posts to correct typographical errors.

I'm going to go all technopolitical on your derriéres tonight. That is, discussing the politics of technology. For those of you that don't know, the Cold War was a war between the Russian Soviet Union and the Western World that was expressed through nuclear arms. Since nuclear arms were in action, many countries in the Western World began building bunkers that were resistant to the inevitable electromagnetic pulse resulting from a thermonuclear explosion.

The Doomsday Clock is a fictional clock that shows how close we are to . . . Well, Doomsday, The End of The World, Hell, the Eternal Darkness, whatever you want to call it. At this particular moment in time, we are at 23:54 on the clock. Once we reach "midnight" or 00:00 on the Doomsday Clock, legend has it that mankind's survival is at stake. In 1949, nearing the climax of the Cold War, the Soviet Alliance pushed the clock to 23:57 by testing the first nuclear bomb. The USA pushed it a minute closer, to 23:58, when they tested their first nuclear bomb the following year. While it was pushed back to 23:43 in 1991 when Bush Snr. and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty; it's now twenty years on, Pakistan and India are in possession of their own nuclear arms, almost certainly North Korea too, Iran's motives and actions are unnerving the West, and the Doomsday Clock is ticking ever closer to our own self-destruction.

I think I've now laid a suitable foundation to begin my post properly. As we are ticking closer to our impending doom, would the Internet survive a global nuclear holocaust? Consider that a standard sized thermonuclear explosion would send out an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to easily knock even the biggest serve out of action permanently. You're probably thinking right now that the Internet would be one of the first things to go out of action, but it's quite the contrary.

At the moment, how many nuclear bombs are being used as warfare in the Western World? You're right, none. Or certainly as close to none as possible. So, what use do we have for the aforementioned nuclear-proof bunkers? They're certainly not being used for humans. They are, however, being used for server storage.

A site of particular note is the US Secure Hosting Center. It considers itself immune to a plethora of risks, with man-made conflict being only one of them. And with reinforced vault doors, 5ft thick concrete floors, walls lined with welded-seam steel (to reflect any electromagnetic pulses), and the vault doors being strong enough to withstand 800mph winds and a 20-megaton nuclear blast (that's 20 million imperial tons. To put this into perspective, a car weighs around 1.8 imperial tons), they are quite safe to make this assumption. And there are a handful or so others dotted around the globe to protect data and keep it safe.

These sites are almost completely impregnable by physical means. Even with a JCB digger, it would take probably around 6 months to get past the first few lines of physical defence. But by digital means? A lot of these datacentres may be impenetrable by physical means, but they have a large team of around-the-clock programmers working to prevent and route any DoS (Denial of Service - usually when a team attacks a server all at once, floods it with access requests and as a safety precaution, the server just shuts down) attacks or viruses (Any viruses that manage to get past the main lines of defence will be very powerful and very malicious, and will cause an unspeakable amount of damage to any valuable or sensitive data). If it takes a whole team of programmers to be working around the clock to prevent these attacks actively, there must be a large amount of attacks quite frequently.

I'm about to put into perspective the true, grim irony of what I'm trying to say. The Internet is a massive network. Anyone, anywhere with the right tools can find anyone, anywhere who is connected to the Internet. Still not getting what I'm saying? I'll be more blunt. The Pentagon computers are connected to the Internet. The Russian Federation Ministry of Defence computers are connected to the Internet. So are, I assume, the Ministries of Defence for all other countries in possession of nuclear warheads. Almost every country uses computers to activate their missiles and all other warheads. Still not making the link? If that team of programmers aren't on the ball 24/7, a hacker - it only takes one to get their foot in the door - can find their way into the Pentagon or any of the above mentioned Defence Ministries and set off every single last warhead.

They would, of course, need the launch codes. But codes are made to be broken. With the right algorithm and enough processing power behind it (which can easily be done by linking together the phenomenal processing power of computer video-graphics cards), we could be just mere weeks away from a 2nd Hiroshima, but magnified on a global scale.
It might not even be that complicated. When Clinton was president, he made what could have been a costly mistake. In his own words, he "misplaced the launch codes". He "couldn't recall when he'd last seen them". In that one insane mistake, the entire world could have been in danger.


The true, bitter irony of all of this? If every nuclear warhead in the world detonated simultaneously, would we survive? It's very very unlikely. Would our animals, our forests survive? Even less likely. The only thing that would be left on this barren planet, protected by our nuclear-proof bunkers would be our Internet. The very tool used to strike midnight on our Doomsday Clock.


"The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had."