Author: Jeemes Akers

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

                                                                       J. Robert Oppenheimer[1]

“In our new age of terrifying, lethal gadgets, which supplanted so quickly the old one, the first great aggressive war, if it should come, will be launched by suicidal little madmen pressing an electronic button. Such a war will not last long and none will ever follow it. There will be no conquerors and no conquests, but only the charred bones of the dead on an uninhabited planet.”

                                                                               William L. Shirer

Today I watched the movie Oppenheimer. It was a sobering account of the Manhattan Project—a massive, secret government- sponsored undertaking that employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly two billion dollars (more than $30 billion in today’s dollars)—to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. Over 90 percent of the cost was for building factories and producing fissile materials, with less than 10 percent going toward development and production of the actual weapons.

My youngest sister Katy and my first cousin Tom went with me to watch the movie. The day before, Tom and his wife Felicia drove Ima and I around Lebanon, Ohio—we are staying with Tom and Felicia while our house is being finished—and we went by the elementary school I attended so many years ago. The thing I remember most about the school was the regular exercises our classroom had in the event of an emergency: a sudden tornado, or a nuclear attack. We were taught to huddle under our desks and move away from the windows. That was the days of fallout shelters, civil defense shelters, movies about nuclear war—the ever-present fear of extinction.

We don’t do that anymore.

Why?

It certainly isn’t because the threat of nuclear annihilation has lessened. Putin’s bomb-rattling, North Korean threats, Xi’s aggressive policies, and—quite honestly—the utter incompetence of our own political leadership (in both parties), makes this world more dangerous than ever. So why aren’t we equipping our population, especially our children, with survival skills in the event of a nuclear holocaust? When was the last time you participated in such a drill? Do you know where your nearest civil defense shelter is located? Is there one? Do you have the goods stored away to survive a nuclear winter?

The uncomfortable truth is that the government has made a policy decision to allow ordinary American citizens to fend for themselves. Senior government officials will be whisked away to elaborate underground facilities. The elites have their own survival plans. What about you?

The movie Oppenheimer provoked these thoughts and stimulated these memories (as well as the political commentary). Bottom line: the world changed dramatically with the success of the Manhattan Project and the increased role of physicists, scientists, and technicians in the process of waging war. It is impossible to stuff the Genie back into the bottle.

By any standard of measure, the Manhattan Project was one of history’s remarkable achievements. The origin of the program traced back to a letter by Albert Einstein to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that new developments in physics opened the prospect of a new superweapon and that scientists in Nazi Germany were well on their way to developing such a weapon.

The movie largely focused on the herculean effort of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to gather a top-secret team of US, British and Canadian physicists and engineers to produce the world’s first nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that designed the actual bombs. In addition, the movie focused on the subsequent McCarthy-era investigation of Oppenheimer and his fellow left-leaning scientists and educators and—in typical Hollywood fashion—included a couple gratuitous sex scenes (the real Oppenheimer was a bit of a womanizer). As portrayed in the movie, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Historically, the project began modestly in 1939, when it took over from its earlier British counterpart “Tube Alloys.” From 1942-1946, two types of bombs were developed: a relatively simple gun-type fission weapon using a rare isotope uranium-235 and a more complex plutonium implosion-type weapon. Most of the uranium enrichment was done at Oak Ridge, Tennessee; for the plutonium, reactors were built at Oak Ridge and at Hanford, Washington. Much of the preliminary work was done by agents who rounded up German personnel and documents associated with the German project.

Allied propaganda convinced the Japanese populace that we had numerous Hiroshima and Nagasaki-type bombs: in fact, at the time, we only had two such devices.

In a decision to save millions of American lives—Stalin hoped that invading the Japanese home islands would seriously “bleed” the Americans—President Truman dropped the “Little Boy” (uranium device) on Hiroshima and the “Fat Man” (plutonium device) on Nagasaki to force Japan out of the war. (By the way, Truman does not come off well in one of the movie scenes).  

More to the purpose of this missive, the movie chased me back to my notes from an advanced Russian History class during my tenure as Visiting Professor at the College of the Ozarks. My thought was to write a missive on what happened after the time period covered by the movie.

Today it is hard for us to imagine the complicated strategy of the post-WWII bipolar “Cold War” world where the U.S. and the Soviet Union competed at all points for regional and global dominance. The term has come to denote a period from 1945—after the Axis Powers were defeated in World War II—to the fall of the Soviet Union (some put dates at 1947-1991). It is called the “Cold War” because there was no “hot” war or large-scale fighting between the two superpowers (the US and its NATO allies, and the USSR and the Warsaw Pact); although there were major “proxy” regional wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

The two-word couplet “Cold War” was first used by English writer George Orwell in an essay “You and the Atomic Bomb” in the British paper Tribune on 19 Oct 1945 and again in early March 1946 when he said Russia was beginning a “cold war” against Britain and its empire. In the U.S., a Democratic Party speechwriter injected the term into modern political jargon in mid-April 1947. It also was the title of a book by newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann. Others point to a speech by Winston Churchill in 1946, delivered in Fulton, Missouri, calling for an Anglo-American alliance against the Soviets, who he accused of establishing an “iron curtain” from the Baltic to the Adriatic.

Back to the Manhattan Project. Despite the official secrecy surrounding the project, Soviet spies managed to penetrate the program. Soviet intelligence efforts were accelerated after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with much of their efforts targeting the wartime German nuclear project and, of course, the Manhattan Project. Aided by a network of spies headed by German theoretical physicist Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs (1911-1988), who worked at Oppenheimer’s site at the Los Alamos Lab, by 1945 the Soviets obtained rough blueprints of the first U.S. device. Stalin—the wartime dictator of the Soviet Union—made the development of an atomic bomb his highest priority, pushing through the Soviet top-secret program in 1943-1949.

The Soviet scientific nuclear research was directed by physicist Igor Kurchatov(1903-1960). Using intelligence obtained from the Manhattan Project, Kurchatov—Oppenheimer’s Soviet counterpart—supervised the quick development and testing, roughly based on the Allied plans. As a result, the USSR conducted its first nuclear device weapons test (device RDS-1, code named “First Lightning”) at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan in late August 1949. Kurchatov himself died after being exposed to radiation in the Chelyabinsk-40 accident (a more serious incident than Chernobyl in 1986).

 Another name associated with the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons program was Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Dr. Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989). Sakharov worked under Kurchatov and Igor Tamm to develop the atomic bomb and then, based largely on the Teller-Ulam device,played a key role in developing the Soviet Union’s first megaton-range hydrogen bomb (the sloika or layered cake device), tested in 1955.

The military logistics of the Soviet bomb program was managed by NKVD head Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899-1953), the ruthless Georgian Bolshevik who was Stalin’s longest-lived and most influential secret police chief.    

After the war, there were suspicions in the U.S. that leftist-leaning officials had helped provide information to facilitate the Soviet research program. (The movie, in my view, did a good job capturing this tension).

In recent years, we have learned more about the fierce competition between Western Allied nations and Soviet special teams in the closing days of World War II to sweep up Nazi scientists and technocrats involved in Nazi Germany’s missile, biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs. Several books have now appeared concerning Operation Paperclip, a secret program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians (many of whom were former registered Nazi Party members), were recruited and brought back to the U.S. by the government in the post-war period. Among these scientists was Wernher von Braun and his rocket team. The U.S. program was an outgrowth of a Joint Chiefs of Staff initiative originally called Operation Overcast in late July 1945, with the idea to use Nazi “wonder weapons” to shorten the war against Japan. To that end, JCS established the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA)to supervise the operation. It was renamed Operation Paperclip in November 1945. (The name derived from the practice of Army officials who attached a paperclip to the folders of those German rocket experts and other scientists they wanted to employ). In early September 1946, President Truman formally approved the project in a secret directive.

Operation Paperclip was designed to gain a postwar military advantage over the USSR. For its part, the Soviet Union was even more active. During Operation Osoaviakhim, for example, headed by Ivan Serov, in the early hours of October 22, 1946, Soviet military and intelligence units forcibly (at gunpoint) transported to the Soviet Union over 2,500 German “specialists”—scientists, engineers, and technicians—from the Soviet occupation zone of Germany and the Soviet sector of Berlin. Around 4,000 family members were taken also, ostensibly as war reparations.

All in one night.[2]

I realize that much more could be written on what followed the Manhattan Project. We are still living with the unintended consequences, geostrategic implications, and scientific “fallout” of that amazing event.

Hopefully, I have stimulated your interest in the topic.

I definitely encourage you to watch the movie.

[1] Oppenheimer’s famous quote is from the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture written in Sanskrit, and centers on a dialog between the great warrior prince (Arjuna) and his charioteer Lord Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu). Hindu thought has a non-linear concept of time, and the great god is involved not only in the creation, but also the dissolution of creation. In the quote above, “death” literally translates as “world-destroying time.” The meaning of the passage which so appealed to Oppenheimer: no matter what Arjuna does, everything is in the hands of the divine. See, James Temperton, “’Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ The Story of Oppenheimer’s Infamous Quote,” WIRED (Science), Jul. 23, 2023. For an article describing the adverse response in India concerning Director Christopher Nolan’s combination of a sex scene with the sacred Hindu text, see Naman Ramachandran, “’Oppenheimer’ Sacred Text Reading Sex Scene Raises Hackles in India: ‘This is a Direct Assault on Religious Beliefs of a Billion Tolerant Hindus,’” Variety, Jul. 23, 2023.

[2] A good listing of sources concerning Operation Osoaviakhim can be found in the Wikipedia article on the topic, including a couple CIA reports.

“It is not clear what might happen if a military group were to seize Russian tactical nuclear weapons.”

                                                                          Francois Diaz-Martin[1]

“All warfare is based on deception …”

                                                                          Sun Tzu[2]

“OTR warheads are stored in an incomplete assembly, the so-called readiness stage (sometimes referred to as SG-“4”). This means that the neutron tubes are not installed, the MED electronic detonators are not connected, and the electrical system is not connected to power sources … Without the 12^th GUMO specialist, they surely wouldn’t be able to complete the warhead.”

                                                                          Matej Rafael Risko[3]

Like many of you, I have been following the extraordinary recent events in Russia. The 24-hour stand-off between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian Defense Ministry appears to be over. In my view, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s aborted march on Moscow is the most bizarre episode of the 17-month Russo-Ukrainian War (so far), and it’s strange, sudden ending, has already provoked an endless amount of speculation in the mainstream press and social media platforms.

So let me take a stab at my thoughts on the topic.

As most of you know, my primary axiom when it comes to talking about such events—what I like to call the Akers corollary—is that nothing is ever as it seems.

In this vein, on Monday (June 26, 2023), a good friend sent me a video by Amir Tsarfati concerning the possibility that the Wagner Group now possesses tactical nuclear weapons. Tsarfati is an Israeli-born Christian commentator who typically specializes in analyzing events in the Middle East. I don’t always agree with him, but his viewpoints are consistently well-reasoned and biblically sound. This is the crux of his argument: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been extremely muted in handling Prigozhin and the “coup” participants; the Wagner Group column stopped well short of Moscow when—by all appearances—they had encountered very little opposition and had things going their way; and we still don’t know all of the details of the deal brokered by Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko.[4]

As one possible answer to this perplexing puzzle, Tsarfari suggested that what we may be seeing is a case of maskirovka (literally “disguise”), a Russian military form of deception. In his view, Prigozhin never intended for his convoy to reach Moscow and stopped 200 miles short after reaching their real goal, Voronezh-45, a facility close to the central Russian city of Voronezh, where tactical nuclear weapons were stored. These weapons could have been loaded onto rebel trucks.

Why?

If Russian forces opt, in the future, to use tactical nuclear weapons to halt Ukraine’s ongoing offense, then Putin has “plausible deniability”— (two favorite words for anyone with an intelligence background)—he can deny he authorized use of such weapons, blaming it instead on rogue mercenary groups.

So, if that is happening, what we are watching now is pure Kabuki theater: orchestrated public statements and dance moves by Prigozhin, Putin and the Kremlin, designed to cover what’s really going on. Prigozhin flies to Belarus to start his “exile,” the authorities drop their criminal cases against the mutineers, Putin rails against “traitors” in public statements, and Wagner group units are welcomed to Belarus.[5]

There may even be a shake-up in the Russian military high command as part of the ruse.

Because we know so little about the deal that ended the uprising, or, for that matter, Prigozhin’s true aims and motives, conspiracy theories abound. Circulating in the far-right social media, for example, is a conspiracy of the CIA (the favorite conspiratorial whipping boy on both political extremes) to concoct a plan with Putin and Prigozhin to divert international attention from the Hunter Biden story.[6] To me, that is just ignorance gone to seed.

What about the idea that the Wagner Group may have obtained tactical nuclear weapons, a purported nuclear heist? Pro-Ukraine Twitter accounts quoted “The Freedom of Russia Legion” saying the Wagner Group took control of the Voronezh-45 site.[7] Similar claims were made by Vladimir Osechkin, the exiled former Russian entrepreneur-turned-human rights advocate as well as Igor Sushko, “Winds of Change” founder and pro-Ukraine activist.[8] Some critics point out, however, that the overhead images reportedly showing the Voronezh-45 site were incorrect.

Several so-called experts have been skeptical that the Wagner Group would be able to deploy the tactical nuclear weapons, even if they obtained them from Voronezh-45. These arguments are mostly technical in nature. The OTR-21 “Tochka” is a Soviet-era mobile short-range ballistic missile launch system—the most likely tactical nuclear weapons to be taken by the Wagner Group—and stored in an incomplete assembly. (As I mentioned in one of the quotes at the beginning of the missive). Even if the rebels gained control of all the physical components, and assembled them, they could not necessarily use it. Moreover, any rogue group would have to mate the warhead with a functional delivery system, a complex process at best, that likely would require active (or forced) cooperation from Russian nuclear storage personnel. These difficulties further ignore the question of activation codes (permissive action links or PALS).[9]

There is also, unsurprisingly, misinformation. Videos on social media showing Russian air forces “engaging” the rebels was, in fact, CGI footage from the Arma 3 video game.[10] 

In sum, is it possible that the whole episode was an absolute ploy? Certainly. Is it possible that Putin is more “crazy like a fox” than a whimpering, worrying, leader who escaped a troublesome coup by plane? Certainly. And what of Prigozhin—Putin’s chef—who assembled a force of 25,000 mercenaries (many of whom were former prisoners) to fight the costliest battles on the Ukrainian front?[11] Is he cowering for his life, staying away from windows or high-rise apartments in fear of Putin’s thuggish revenge (as some western commentators would have us believe)?

Have we really seen the last of him?

My view, for what it is worth, is that we have only seen Act 1 of this play unfold.[12] In the midst of all the uncertainties, one thing is crystal clear: if Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons in the future, and Putin denies culpability to gain global sympathy, the whole story has been orchestrated to accomplish that end.

If this happens, it means that Putin and the upper echelon of the Russian military have determined that the war with Ukraine will increasingly worsen—and the bulk of Western military equipment has yet to arrive—leaving tactical nuclear weapons as their only choice to turn the tide.

Or, perhaps it is just as it appears, the storyline that has been laid out for us by the western media.

Perhaps.

But remember, nothing is as it seems.

[1] Francois Diaz-Martin, “What would happen if a military group took over Russia’s nuclear arsenal? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jun. 26, 2023.

[2] Sun Tzu, The Art of War (from Chapter One, “Laying Plans”)

[3] Risko is a research fellow with a focus on nuclear deterrence at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University in Prague. He contends that possessing tactical nuclear weapons and arming them for use on the battlefield are two different things. Quote is found in: Yevgeny Kuklychev, “Did Wagner Rebels Capture Warheads At Russia’s Secret Nuclear Facility,” Newsweek, Jun. 23, 2023.

[4] Gareth Jones, “Belarus leader says he talked Prigozhin back from brink,” Reuters, Jun. 27, 2023. Lukashenko claimed it was an emotional, expletive-laden phone call with Prigozhin, who told the Wagner Group leader they would be “crushed like a bug”; at the same time, he advised Putin to refrain from “rushing” to crush the mutineers.

[5] Angus MacSwan and Alex Richardson, “Mercenary chief Prigozhin starts exile in Belarus, Putin praises Russian troops,” Reuters, Jun.27, 2023.See also, excellent putsch postmortem article by Yaroslav Trofimov, “After Weekend of Chaos in Russia, Questions Remain Over Fate of Wagner,” The Wall Street Journal, Jun. 26, 2023.

[6] “Did Wagner Rebels Capture Warheads.”

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] “What would happen if a military group took over.”

[10] “Did Wagner Rebels Capture Warheads.”

[11] See, among others, Hugh Lawson, “Explainer: Who is Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin?” Reuters, Jun. 24, 2023.

[12] U.S. Secretary of State Blinken has the same view, see “After Weekend of Chaos.”

“By some metrics, China now produces more high-quality research papers in the [AI] field than the U.S. but still lags behind in ‘paradigm-shifting breakthroughs’ … In generative AI, the latest wave of top-tier AI systems, China remains one to two years behind U.S. development and reliant on U.S. innovations, China tech watchers and industry leaders have said.”

                                                                                 Karen Hao[1] 

“Unlike the West, where anything goes on the web, China’s censors insist on strict political guidelines for CPC-conforming information dissemination. Chinese netizens are unable to pull up references to the decade-long Cultural Revolution, the June 1989 tragedy in Tiananmen Square, human-rights issues in Tibet and Xinjiang, frictions with Taiwan, the Hong Kong democracy demonstrations of 2019, pushback against zero-COVID policies, and much more… This aggressive editing of information is major pitfall for a ChatGPT with Chinese characteristics.”

                                                                                Stephen S. Roach[2]

“Whoever controls information controls the world.”

                                                                               Jing Tsu[3]  

               Today’s techno-dilemma faced by Chinese Communist Party technocrats, functionaries and decision-makers rests on two horns; first, Beijing’s leaders—led by President Xi Jinping—are chaffing to make China the self-sufficient center, the Middle Kingdom, of the technological universe; but, secondly, the announcement and exponential speed of developments in ChatGPT research and development by U.S.-based companies (as well as the increasing industry reliance on super-semiconductor chips) demonstrate how far behind they are in the race for technical dominance.

         In the interest of saving space, this missive will focus on the second dilemma horn: the hurdles Chinese high-tech firms must overcome if they are to achieve AI global dominance. What is at stake? In the words of veteran China tech observer Kai-Fu Lee, former president of Google’s China operation: “developing big models of AI is a historic opportunity that China cannot afford to miss.”[4]

         But China still has a long way to go. In today’s exponentially changing world, the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and its proprietary cousins confronts Chinese tech-strategists with a clear conundrum: as one seasoned China watcher observes, “the harder the Party tries to control ChatGPT content, the smaller the resulting output of chatbot-generated Chinese intelligence will be—yet another constraint on the AI intellectual revolution in China.”[5] Of course, that did not stop Chinese firms like Baidu, Alibaba, and Kunlun from unveiling their own chatbot versions, thereby opening the latest round in the ongoing U.S.-China tech war.[6]

But there remain significant hurdles to overcome. Take, for example, Baidu’s experience. Baidu (literally “hundred times”), headquartered in Beijing’s Haidian District, is one of the largest AI and Internet companies in the world, employing some 45,000 workers. The company was incorporated in January by U.S.-educated Yanhong (Robin) Li and Eric Xu. At the present time, Baidu holds a 76% market share in China’s search engine market (with its Baidu App, based on an AI-powered Baidu Core) reaching 544 million MAUs in December 2020, based on company statistics.[7] 

Baidu’s chatbot, Ernie Bot (Wenxin Yiyan—short for “Enhanced Representation through kNnowledge IntEgration”), was launched in March 2023, as Beijing’s answer to the November 2022 announcement of OpenAI’s chatbot—an event some observers in China call the “iPhone moment for AI.”[8] But it was soon apparent that Baidu’s version of the LLMs that fueled OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 and GPT 3.5 trailed significantly far behind its American counterparts in terms of training power and performance. (NOTE: None of OpenAI’s chatbots are officially available in mainland China).[9]  

Even within China, Ernie Bot’s rolling-out ceremony clearly fell far short of expectations. During the launch stream presentation, Robin Li, Baidu’s CEO, admitted the chatbot’s answers to questions and images were prerecorded.[10] The rollout was immediately accompanied by an overwhelming wave of disappointment in China: Chinese publications with testing access ridiculed the chatbot’s performance, social media users mocked it with memes, and Baidu’s stock dropped by 6.4%. (The market value has since recovered a bit as observers realized Ernie Bot fell way short in the “wow” category but was probably good enough for the Chinese market).[11] At the same time, Baidu clearly gained a first-mover advantage in China with its public rollout.

What happened? A large part of Baidu’s problem, and of LLMs in general in China, is that state censorship encumbers China with small language models because chatbots are forced to operate in “a firewalled Internet ruled by government censorship.”[12] Indeed, China’s first ChatGPT-style bot, dubbed ChatYuan and launched in January 2023, by a small Chinese startup called YuanYu (operating as a “mini-program” inside WeChat), was suspended within weeks after users posted screengrabs of its answers to political questions online.[13] Baidu’s predecessor to Ernie Bot, ERNIE-ViLG, suffered much the same fate when released as a demo in August 2022. The model was part of Wenxin, a large-scale project in natural-language processing, trained on a data set of 145 million image-text pairs and containing 10 billion parameters (the values that a neural network adjusts as it learns). Just don’t ask about Tiananmen Square or China’s political leaders.[14]

When, for example, Ernie Bot is asked about any politically sensitive issue, or about President Xi Jinping, the answer is “as an artificial language model, I cannot answer that question.”[15] (The chatbot provided the same answer when asked to write a fictional debate between Jack Ma—of Alibaba fame—and President Xi about the role of the private sector in China).[16]

Yet even with these Party-imposed limitations, Baidu’s chatbot holds a lead over other Chinese LLM contenders according to a recent Xinhua think tank survey.[17] The contenders include Alibaba Group Holding’s Tongyi Qianwen (literally “seeking truth by a thousand answers),[18] Kunlun’s Tiangong, voice recognition firm iFlytek’s SparkDesk, and image recognition company SenseTimes’s SenseChat. In another survey—using different LLM metrics—Clue, a Chinese website that follows AI research development, found cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360’s Smart Brain to be the top performing model, followed by iFlytek’s SparkDesk. These two still lagged far behind Western chatbots.[19]

In addition to problems for these high-tech firms caused by an environment of government censorship, Chinese chatbot companies face a lack of access to a new generation of superchip semiconductors, critical to today’s LLMs. Chinese technical consultants note that “China’s domestic AI industry is now generally short of computing chips, and if the U.S. further sanctions China’s chip technology, it will definitely affect computing power development in the short term.”[20] As a result, according to Chinese media reports, China’s high-tech industry is now “scrambling” for advanced chips to support its AI ambitions amid growing interest around ChatGPT chatbots, “but soaring demand, combined with US-led trade curbs, has limited supplies.”[21]

And, make no mistake about it, China is desperate for high performance superchips.[22] As of May 2023, China had at least 79 LLMs with more than one billion parameters, according to official state-affiliated statistics, each of which require hundreds if not thousands of advanced chips to train.[23] TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance, for example, has ordered more than one billion dollars’ worth of GPUs from Nvidia this year, (ByteDance is rumored to be testing its own AI chatbot internally), and Baidu has reportedly procured more than 10,000 Nvidia GPUs (equivalent to the amount purchased by Google).[24]

U.S. government export control laws now prohibit chipmakers like Nvidia from selling high performance superchips to Chinese firms. In September 2022, the U.S. government told Nvidia to stop exporting high performance A100 and H100 chips to China and Russia, also restricting sales of AMD’s MI250 Accelerator chip. Washington has also asked Taiwan’s TMSC—the world’s largest high-performance chipmaker—to stop producing chips for Chinese high-tech firms such as Shanghai-based Birentech Technology.[25] These prohibitions are forcing U.S.-based firms to tailor lower-end versions of the chips for China. As a result, there are only about 40,000 Nvidia A-100 chips available in China, according to the country’s leading AI officials.[26]

Why does China continue to rely on AI-enabling superchips made in the West? Why is it so difficult to attain Xi’s goal of self-reliance in this critical technology sector? When pressed for an explanation, Chinese experts point to four “challenges” in being able to catch up: gaps in training models, as discussed above a lack of access to new generation of superchip semiconductors, the availability of data sets, and the uniqueness of the Chinese language. These problems become even more obvious when discussing LLMs. At the present time, China, lags behind in targeted investment (the U.S. has 3.5 times more investment in LLMs), the U.S. also possesses of the half of the world’s LLMs, and the highest repository citation count.[27] Indeed, last year the U.S. outproduced China five-fold in fielding AI machine learning systems.[28] 

Compounding these problems is a huge human resource issue—a  shortage of AI-related professionals and researchers in China. According to a report in April 2023 by Hong Kong-based Renrui Human Resources Technology, China will face a shortage of 5.5 million AI engineers in 2025 (compared to 4.3 million in 2022) and estimates show that by 2025 only one out of 2.6 AI-related job positions will be filled.[29] As early as 2019, think tank MarcoPolo reported China faced a brain drain problem because most of its AI talents were choosing to stay in the U.S. after their studies (78% of Chinese AI researchers who completed graduate studies in the U.S. remained at U.S. institutions, while 21% returned to China-based institutions).[30]

There also is the issue of tech-related exponential growth. Simply put, developments in ChatGPT technologies—on both sides of the ocean—are racing ahead of control efforts. As such, even in China’s highly centralized system, we see some indications that AI-related developments are outpacing regulators’ efforts to construct meaningful guardrails. In January 2022, the Chinese government proposed a new regulation banning any AI-generated content that “endangers national security and social stability” to cover AI’s like Baidu’s ERNIE-ViLG.[31] More recently, in April 2023, Beijing’s cyberspace regulator announced a series of measures to manage generative AI services. But these measures are still in draft and must be submitted to the proper Party authorities before adoption.[32]

It is worth noting, however, that after Elon Musk returned from his recent visit to China, he mentioned that Chinese authorities recognize the need for oversight and regulation of “risky” technologies such as generative AI.[33] But Beijing’s perceptions of necessary guardrails run through a nationalistic and historic filter that is missing in the West. While in the U.S. we are obsessed with guaranteeing that future families of ChatGPT technologies abide by today’s social code—that is, they must be free of potential race, gender, and other biases—Baidu and others of its ilk are only concerned that they don’t offend Party sensibilities. Certainly, we cannot expect Beijing’s digital engineers,  coders, and military strategists to be hampered (or guided) by Western legal, moral and ethical values, such as keeping a “human in the loop” to control AI-enhanced decision-making regarding machines in a battlefield setting.

In my mind, at least, that is a huge difference between the two systems.

Finally, there’s the existential issue, the danger to the human species presented by rapidly growing algorithm-driven AI models such as ChatGPT, or its future techo-permutations. As one AI expert frames the issue: “Instead of asking ‘What can AI do for us?’ we should be asking ‘What can AI do to us?’”[34]

I wonder how many Party cadres in China are asking that question?

[1] Karen Hao, “OpenAI CEO Calls for Collaboration with China to Counter AI Risks,” The Wall Street Journal, Jun. 10, 2023.

[2] Stephen S. Roach, “Opinion: China wants to tightly control AI at home. The technology has other plans,” MarketWatch, Jun. 14, 2023. Roach is the former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, a faculty member at Yale University, and author of several books, including Accidental Conflict: America, China, and the Clash of False Narratives (Yale University Press, 2022).

[3] Quote from Jing Tsu, “Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern.”

[4] “Can AI give China the upper hand.”

[5] Roach, “China wants to tightly control AI.”

[6] See, among others, “Can AI give China the upper hand.”

[7] See Baidu Inc’s “Company Overview,” 2023.

[8] “Can AI give China the upper hand.”

[9] “Baidu’s Ernie Bot tops Chinese large language model rankings by Xinhua think tank, but lags OpenAI’s Chat GPT,” South China Morning Post, Jun. 12, 2023.

[10] Will Knight, “China’s ChatGPT Rival Needs to Watch Its Words,” WIRED, Mar. 21, 2023.

[11] Zeyi Yang, “The bearable mediocrity of Baidu’s ChatGPT competitor,” MIT Technology Review, Mar. 22, 2023.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Fan Yang, “AI chatbots with Chinese characteristics: why Baidu’s ChatGPT rival may never measure up,” The Conversation, Mar. 24, 2023.

[14] Zeyi Yang, “There’s no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AI,” MIT Technology Review, Sep. 14, 2022.

[15] Cissy Zhou, “Testing Ernie: How Baidu’s AI chatbot stacks up against ChatGPT,” NikkeiAsia, Mar. 22, 2023.

[16] Ibid.

[17] “Baidu’s Ernie Bot tops Chinese large language model rankings.”

[18] See, among others, Shadine Taufik, “Meet Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba’s answer to ChatGPT,” Tech in Asia, Apr. 11, 2023.

[19] Baidu’s Ernie Bot tops Chinese.”

[20] Ibid.

[21] “China’s Big Tech Firms scramble for advanced chips amid US sanctions and ChatGPT craze,” South China Morning Post, Jun. 14, 2023.

[22] See my missive on the topic of semiconductors as a Chinese strategic vulnerability—Jeemes Akers, “China’s Achilles Heel,” Sep. 2021.

[23] “China’s Big Tech Firms scramble.”

[24] Ibid.

[25] Jeff Pao, “China leads US in tech that matters most: report,” Asia Times, Mar. 4, 2023. The report cites a report by Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute asserting that China now leads in 37 of 44 key technologies. The U.S. maintains a leading edge in the design and development of advanced semiconductor devices, advanced integrated circuit design and fabrication, and in research fields relating to high-performance computing.    

[26] “China’s Big Tech Firms scramble.”

[27] “Can AI give China the upper hand.”

[28] Ibid.

[29] Jeff Pao, “China’s artificial intelligence engineer shortage,” Asia Times, Jun. 13, 2023.

[30] Ibid.

[31] “There’s no Tiananmen Square.”

[32] Luc Olinga, “Elon Musk Asks a Question That Haunts the World,” TheStreet, Jun. 13, 2023.

[33] Angela Palumbo, “Elon Musk says China Wants to Regulate AI. The U.S. Is Still Deciding How. BARRON’S, Jun. 6, 2023.

[34] Roman V. Yampolskiy, “I’m an AI expert: Here’s my worst-case scenario,” THEHILL, Jun. 11, 2023.

“I love interesting people with eccentric stories and outsiders of the world.”

                                                                                      Paloma Faith

“In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.”

                                                                             Friedrich Nietzsche

While Ima and I made a brief visit to Bartlesville, Oklahoma earlier this month (June 2023)—looking in on KaLeigh’s cobalt refinery project—my good friend from my Texas Christian University (TCU) grad school days, Danny “Shack” Shackleford and his wife Cindy, drove up from south of Tulsa to pay us a visit. It had been decades since I had seen Shack in person. Shack and I both were students in the TCU History Department at the same time. We spent part of the afternoon talking about our professors and fellow students over hamburgers at the Painted Horse Restaurant. The restaurant—one of Ima’s favorite eating places—is in a row of small shops and eateries in the old section of downtown Bartlesville, just across the street from the modern, soaring brick, glass, and steel high rises of Phillips Conoco Petroleum Corporation.

After lunch, we visited the local historical museum and I took Shack and Cindy by the office of Westwin Elements, where they met several team members and had a nice chat with KaLeigh.

During our time at the restaurant, I asked Shack about his family. Shack’s hometown for all the years I knew him was Perryton, Texas, population 8,500, just across the border from the Oklahoma panhandle. I was there only once, to pick up Shack on our way to snow ski in Colorado.

Maybe you have heard of Perryton in the news lately. Parts of the city were flattened by a powerful tornado that ripped through much of the place in mid-June. Three people—including an 11-year-old—were killed and over 100 inhabitants taken to the local hospital with injuries.

The storm hit within a week after our visit.

Fortunately, Shack and Cindy moved out of Perryton a few years ago—after they both retired from teaching in the local school district—but I thought they still had family there. When I called Shack after the storm to ask him about family members, he said only Cindy’s sister still lived in town. Her house was at the opposite end of town from the storm damage. Both Shack and Cindy knew the three individuals, and their families, who had been killed by the storm.

Our conversation at the Painted Horse concerned things of the past: fellow students and professors who have since passed, our many shared softball episodes, the untimely death of our mutual friend Mark “Stadium” Fletcher, and finally, whether we had both heard from a unique individual we have both come to call “Crazy Dave”—David Bennett.

It has been at least three decades since either of us had heard from him.

I can’t image what the TCU and Forth Worth, Texas experience would have been without Crazy Dave. Indeed, Dave and several other friends, were near perfect compliments to my moral freefall during those years. Wounded by a fractured relationship, I drifted away from God and my family in Ohio.

Ever been there?

The sensation of drifting away from God, I mean.

My first encounter with Crazy Dave would set the pattern for my years in Fort Worth. The year was 1974, and I attended TCU on the G.I. Bill and a teaching fellowship. Crazy Dave and I stayed in the Pete Wright Dorm located in the middle of campus. That’s also where I first met Shack. The dormitory—one of the many yellow brick buildings on the then-TCU campus—was close to the student center and Reed Hall, the building where our history classes met.

I could write a book about the eclectic group of denizens who frequented Pete Wright Hall during the year I was there. In my most recent conversation with Shack, several names came up. There were several good softball players including my lifelong friends Robert Johnson and Eustace Fleidner. Terry Lynch was also there, easily one of the tightest individuals I’ve ever met (he was the one who was always short with the pot ante during our poker games, and when we went to an all-you-can eat steakhouse in Dallas, Terry slid several steaks on his plate before those at the end of the table had a chance). There was Mark “Stadium” Fletcher, an accountant who spent his post-TCU days in Dallas; a great guy who died far too early in life. Donny Morrison was a really good athlete from Cleburne, Texas. Both Shack and I couldn’t remember the real name of the guy we called the “Snake Man.” (I took him to a local pet shop one weekend so he could buy a white mouse for his pet boa constrictor; he was an RA in the dorm, a pre-med student who got kicked out over a dispute with a professor in the Chemistry Department, but somehow managed to stay on in the dorm for the duration of the semester.)

And that only scratches the surface.

At any rate, very late one weekend evening (the dorm was almost empty), I walked down to the first floor to get a soda and chips out of the vending machine. As I passed a door left slightly ajar, I heard a giggle inside. I peeked in to see what was going on.

“Quick, get in here and shut the door,” a voice said from inside the room.

It was Crazy Dave’s room. The window in the room was open and he had propped himself up against one bed, and using the other bed to steady his aim, held a high-tech, titanium metal slingshot between his knees. Beside him was a box of small marble-sized steel balls. He used these as ammunition to shoot across the commons area separating our dorm from a neighboring dorm, Tom Brown Hall. Crazy Dave had started on the left-hand side of the third floor of the other dorm—the top floor—shooting out the windowpanes in succession. Even at a distance, you could hear the sound of shattered glass and a distinctive metallic kerplunk as the giant metal BBs smashed against the metallic window blinds. He had worked his way down to the second floor by the time I entered the room. With each successful window conquest, Dave would celebrate with a chug of Lone Star beer—he had a six-pack by the bed—with his distinctive giggle commemorating his marksmanship.

It was a fascinating scene to behold.

But I wasn’t allowed to soak in the scene for long. With a loud scream, a group of students from the target dorm charged across the common’s area—like Santa Anna’s men charging the Alamo—toward our dorm. “Let’s get out of here,” Crazy Dave yelled, grabbing the beer and sprinting past me. “Do you have car?” he called out over his shoulder as we hurried toward the back door.

We jumped in my powder-blue 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle and hurriedly escaped the scene of the crime. We raced through the streets of darkened early-morning Fort Worth until we were sure we weren’t being followed.

When we pulled over, I noticed Crazy Dave had a huge smile on his face. “Guess they didn’t have much of a sense of humor. By the way, my name is David—David Bennett,” he said, holding out his hand.

“I’m Jeemes—”

“James?”

“No, Jeemes,” I replied.

That was my first close call—it wouldn’t be the last—with Crazy Dave. 

Shack added an interesting postscript to the story I didn’t know. The RAs in Tom Brown Hall later recruited Crazy Dave to help them find the person responsible for the damage! Dave completed the ruse by spending several evenings in the commons area with them to find the culprit.

Shack and I exchanged several other stories about Crazy Dave as we sat in the Painted Horse. He remembered Crazy Dave’s heartfelt advice to a group of TCU freshmen. “In three years here, I’ve managed to break every rule of the college, and have never been caught,” he said, “and I expect each of you to do the same.” For some reason—perhaps because of his boyish looks or the fact that he was a superb and convincing liar—David was allowed to serve in an informal counseling role with incoming freshmen. It was like the fox being given an open door to the henhouse. Of course, Crazy Dave used this leverage to identify and prey on unsuspecting freshman, always the most beautiful girls.

Crazy Dave had a way with the college girls. He had boyish Texas good looks: a square jaw, a healthy mop of hair, and a pair of professor-looking spectacles that gave the appearance of more intelligence than he actually possessed. He was a charmer with his words and flashed just enough of a mischievous smile to disarm the most cautious young ladies. He had a marvelous sense of humor, was irreverent and rebelled against any trace of authority. In other words, the perfect catch for immature girls feeling their oats—and newfound independence—after high school. Almost always wearing blue jeans, his physique was slim and trim.

One of incoming frosh he managed to woo was Luann Claybaugh, a pretty and shapely young ballerina major whose father was some sort of corporate bigwig in Belgium. Luann fit right into our TCU Rat Pack; she willingly joined as a charter member—the fourth—of the TriPIs, along with Dave, Shack, and yours truly. We wore special TriPI sweatshirts to campus sports events, all designed to poke fun at the numerous Greek sororities and fraternities on campus. Somewhere, in a tub in storage, I still have a wonderful black-and-white picture of the four of us. I hope to post it on the wall of my den in the remodeled house in Springboro, Ohio.

Over the weeks after my first encounter with Crazy Dave, we had several memorable outings. One time, for example, he convinced me to drive to his favorite Texas-style restaurant to get his favorite dish—chicken-fried steak. We were the only ones in the restaurant, a rustic-looking dive with overhead fans to stir the hot air. When I cut into the battered veal steak beneath the gravy, two dead flies fell out. It killed my appetite but didn’t seem to bother Crazy Dave one bit.

Crazy Dave loved to party and drink. You could find him at the Daily Double (they once ran a four-for-one Happy Hour special and he ordered four bottles of Blue Nun wine) or the Rangoon Racquet Club (an upscale bar frequented by the likes of Priscilla Davis, the estranged wife of Cullen Davis, at one point the richest person ever tried for murder in the U.S.). Shack tells the story of how he was attracted by an attractive waitress at the Club—she had won the state title of “Miss Honeybee”—and introduced her to Dave during one of their outings. Within two weeks, the crazy one was dating her himself.

Dave—as a journalism major—scored a position with the campus newspaper. On one occasion we drove to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to report on the Razorbacks vs. Horned Frogs football game (both teams were in the old Southwest Conference at the time). The Frogs took it on the chin, as they often did during those years (in one sports column, the Dallas Morning News said of Jim Shofner, TCU’s then-head football coach, that if there was a Naïve Bowl, Shofner could coach both teams). He coached there from 1974-1976.

One Fall Saturday afternoon, for example, the top-ranked Texas Longhorns rolled into town led by their All-American running back Earl Campbell—the “Tyler Rose.” Crazy Dave was among those cheering the loudest for the visiting team to score a hundred points, just so we could say we were at the game. Texas eventually won 81-16. The game really wasn’t that close. The crazy one almost got all of us tossed from the stadium when he threw paper wads into the tubas of the UT marching band).

At any rate, during our venture to Arkansas, Dave got us press credentials so we could stand on the sidelines to watch the game up-close-and-personal. We even attended Frank Broyles postgame conference. All-in-all, a pretty neat experience.

Crazy Dave parlayed his position at the college newspaper to gain access to the press box at TCU’s Amon G. Carter Stadium, a huge structure built during the glory days of football legend Bob Lilly. Shack says he figured out how to “jimmy open” one of press box doors. He would sneak into the empty stadium, take the elevator to the press box that overlooked the football field below, and use a telephone there to place long-distance calls to Australia, running up hundreds of dollars in phone bills in the process (that was long before cellphones).

He never got caught.

At the time, I rented an apartment across the street from the stadium. I received a phone call late one night from Crazy Dave. “Listen close,” he said. Before long, I heard a series of explosions. He was pitching fire extinguishers off the roof of the press box onto the concrete parking lot hundreds of feet below. Then—in true Crazy Dave style—he vanished before the police helicopters with their searchlights appeared on the scene.

The last time I spent time with Crazy Dave was as memorable as my first encounter. At the time, I had taken a break from my graduate studies to teach at Oneida Baptist Institute, a small high school located in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. During a school break, I swung down through Knoxville and picked up my sister Debbie for the long drive to Texas. At the time, David—and his young wife, the daughter of the then-U.S. Ambassador to Mexico—were living in Austin, Texas. We arrived in time to celebrate the forthcoming Texas-Oklahoma showdown. Afterwards, I was exhausted and settled in for a full night’s rest. Debbie and I were laying on mats on the living room floor.

I had just drifted off to sleep when I felt David tugging on my shoulder. “Come on, the girls are asleep,” he whispered.

At the time, David was working for a local newspaper. He knew where all the good nightclubs were located. One, Antone’s, was widely regarded as Austin’s “home of the blues.” When we were there, it was a venue where the musicians would gather after their gigs in other parts of town, playing music until the early morning hours just for the sheer joy of it.

Somehow David talked our way past the huge bouncer guarding the door.

He had a knack for doing that.

Inside, we shared a table with Stevie Ray Vaughn, the legendary Austin-based blues rock guitarist. He was wearing his trademark riverboat gambler’s hat with a feather protruding from the hatband. Dave had previously interviewed him for a newspaper article and the two had struck up a friendship. The table was littered with empty beer bottles and an ashtray running over with cigarette butts (and other remains). Then they invited Stevie Ray up to the stage. He stuck his cigarette in the strings close to the tuning pegs. For the next hour or so, the audience—me and Dave included—was treated to the best guitar playing imaginable. Stevie Ray also sang several blues songs.

Little did we know, sitting there at the table and watching him play that evening, that Stevie Ray would die in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin a few years later at the tender age of 35. He struggled with alcoholism and drug addictions, especially after his short-lived stardom, and, toward the end of his life, was in and out of rehabilitation centers.  His mainstream career lasted only seven years, but he is still regarded as one of the most influential musicians in the history of blues music and one of the greatest guitarists of all time.

I still enjoy listening to his music (with his band Double Trouble).

Do yourself a favor and download a few of his songs.

I have been privileged over the years to attend several big-name music concerts. But that evening’s music, and Stevie Ray’s impromptu guitar performance, was far-and-away the most enjoyable evening of live music I’ve ever experienced.

It was almost dusk by the time we got back to Dave’s apartment.

But what a night!

I’ve long since lost track of Crazy Dave. Shack and I would get snippets of his whereabouts after the TCU years: participating in an archeological dig in an Israeli kibbutz (he survived artillery shellings of the site—hiding under tables—only to be medically evacuated home because of a serious bout of appendicitis); a brief stint with a newspaper in New York City; expulsion because of his investigative journalism endeavors in Mexico (he was working on the behind-the-scenes story of rock star Selena’s death at one point); years working for the San Antonio Express-News; and from there he went to Colorado. Dave’s trail went cold after that.

As for me, like the prodigal son in scripture, God began steadily reeling me back in after a prolonged period of partying, softball, poker games, and emotional darkness. Although I’m not proud of running so far away from God during those Fort Worth days, I certainly don’t regret living through the experience. Indeed, Crazy Dave and my other friends in Fort Worth helped me keep my sanity during those years.

Of course, it should go without saying, that I would love to talk to Crazy Dave just one more time. I’m sure he has a boatload of stories to tell.

(Shack—thanks for sharing your stories with me).

“The [Collingridge] dilemma runs thus: ‘attempting to control a [new] technology is difficult … because during its early stages, when it can be controlled, not enough can be known about its harmful social consequences to warrant controlling its development; but by the time these consequences are apparent, control has become costly and slow.’”

                                                                       D. Collingridge[1]

“ChatGPT is six months old (reportedly the fastest growing consumer app in history), and it’s already starting to look outdated… language only models such as ChatGPT are now giving way to machines that can also process images, audio, and even sensory data from robots.” 

                                                                       Matteo Wang[2]

“In 40 years we created the PC, internet, mobile, cloud, and now the AI era. What will you create? Whatever it is, run after it like we did. Run, don’t walk. Either you are running for food, or you are running from becoming food.”

                                                                       Jensen Huang,

                                                                       CEO Nvidia[3]

         Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can sense that we are on the verge of being deluged by a technological tsunami—huge waves of artificial intelligence (AI) heading toward our personal beach with a gathering foam in the form of artificial general intelligence (AGI) at the crest on the next batch of waves to crash on the shore.

For the past few days, I have been visiting my former student KaLeigh Long and her exciting project to build the first large-scale cobalt refinery in the United States. Yesterday, we walked through the industrial plant where the pilot refinery will be built here in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. I have been spending time with KaLeigh and her staff, trying to get my arms around all the recent twists and turns that comes with being a start-up in the critical minerals sector. As I mentioned in a previous missive, the quest to build the refinery has all the energy of a political campaign.

At any rate, I had an enjoyable conversation with Joshua Horton, now in charge of securing feedstock materials, who has an engineering, missionary (in China), and project manager background. Later, I overheard him tell KaLeigh that he had used ChatGPT (Bard) to help him write a complex letter. As you can imagine, that kicked off a conversation about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the new generative AI models.

While we were still in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina—finishing our snowbirding days there—I was talking with a church friend of mine (Howard), who excitedly explained to me his creative search results using a newly purchased ChatGPT. I was impressed on both occasions. My friends’ search engine, like so many others these days, is really a large, natural language processing model, trained on incredibly large data sets and using neural networking programs, which mime intelligence by predicting what words are statistically likely to follow one another in a sentence. Both experiences illustrate one of the hidden dangers with Chatbot GPT: it quickly spits out eloquent, confident responses that often sound plausible and true, but the model was trained to predict the next word for a given input, not whether a fact is correct.[4]

Truthfulness is not a prerequisite for the new algorithms.

Things are moving so fast, however, that ChatGPT is already yesterday’s news.

And that is the big problem.

How do you slow the growth of an exponentially growing technology that holds unlimited prospects to help mankind, but at the same time, may carry seeds of mankind’s destruction? And if—IF—you could design a regulatory regime to put guardrails on the growth of this new technology, what would keep rogue hackers (or other hostile state-sponsored groups) from developing their own technologies outside the guardrails. 

That is the crux of the Collingridge dilemma.

Legislators in the United States and around the world are aware of the dilemma; they just cannot construct regulatory regimes in a timely manner to keep ahead of such fast-paced moving technologies. Early this week, for example, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced he was scheduling briefings for senators on artificial intelligence, including the first classified briefing on the topic, but the dates and times of the briefing will be announced later. Schumer had put forward an earlier plan to establish “rules” for AI, but the necessary approval by Congress and the White House could take months or more.[5]

That is only one of many examples.

But the one thing regulators do not have is more time.

         ChatGPT and its cousins took the world by storm when launched in late November 2022. The new technology shortly received seals of global approval. New ChatGPT technologies were extolled by global elites gathering at Davos, Switzerland, for their annual World Economic Forum gathering in mid-January 2023. A couple weeks ago, ChatGPT and its cousins topped the agenda of discussions at secretive sessions of global business and political elites—the annual Bilderberg meetings—in Lisbon, Portugal. As usual, the meetings were held behind closed doors, under Chatham House rules, and hidden—for the most part—from the prying eyes of the media and the public.[6] Among the 130 participants from 23 countries: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (fresh off his congressional testimony in Washington D.C.), Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, DeepMind head Demis Hassabis, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, investor Peter Thiel, and a host of other luminaries.

         As usual, the elites are convinced they really know what is best for the rest of us. Especially when it comes to our technological futures.

I find three developments regarding this generative AI issue particularly worrisome. First, advances in recent days point to exponential growth over the days ahead. The true driver of the technology is bigger and faster semiconductor chips.[7] In late May 2023, the chipmaker Nvidia announced its new DGX GH200 AI supercomputer powered by 256 GH200 “Grace Hopper” Superchips. These chips will enable the next generation of generative AI applications thanks to bigger memory size (nearly 500 times the memory of previous chips) and larger scale model possibilities.[8] Interestingly enough, writing almost two decades ago I included a futuristic section in my novel where one of my protagonists—the CEO of a future megacorporation and the world’s leading inventor—demanded shares of Nvidia stock in exchange for a piece of his company. I wish I had bought stock in the company way back then.

“Sigh.”

The demand for Nvidia chips has driven the company’s stock up 174.7%,[9] with the advanced chips sold by some retailers at about $33,000 apiece. But stay tuned, chipmaker Intel has just announced (at a supercomputing conference in Germany) benchmarking tests on a new superchip—to be released in 2025—that will outperform chips made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.[10] We are living in the middle of a superchip war.

Today, the shortage of the kind of advanced chips that are the lifeblood of new generative AI systems also has set off a race to lock down computing power and find workarounds.[11] Industry insiders observe that an early version of ChatGPT required 10,000 graphic chips—updated versions may require five times as many hard-to-obtain chips. As one tech-savvy entrepreneur noted: “It’s like toilet paper during the pandemic,” or, according to Elon Musk (who is building his own OpenAI rival, X.AI), “GPUs at this point are considerably harder to get than drugs.”[12]

Chips are not only getting more powerful, but they are also getting smaller. In mid-February 2023, for example, Meta announced a new AI-powered language model called LLaMa-13B with claims it could outperform OpenAI’s GPT-3 model despite being “10 times smaller”; small enough to run locally on devices such as PCs or smartphones.[13]

The second worrisome development, in my view, is that in the aftermath of ChatGPT’s runaway success, calls to control the technology are increasingly hinting that a global centralized control regime may be the only answer. And that “Big Brother” mentality—and the willingness of global elites to consider it as a plausible solution to the problem—truly bothers me (not just for me, but on behalf of my children and grandchildren). For example, within the last three weeks, the leaders of OpenAI, the creator of the viral chatbot ChatGPT, in a statement published on a company website argued for an international regulatory body to reduce the “existential risk” posed by generative AI. They suggested an authority similar in nature to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world’s nuclear watchdog. Such a regulatory body, in their view, would be necessary “to inspect systems, require audits, test for compliance with safety standards, and place restrictions on degrees of deployment and levels of security.” [14]

Given the checkered track record of such international regulatory bodies, that fills me with confidence: I don’t know about you.

Thirdly, the aberrations that have emerged when ChatGPT and its cousins are manipulated to test the outer boundaries of capabilities or to exploit weaknesses, are downright spooky. If we turn back the clock a mere seven years—to 2016—when Microsoft unveiled Tay, we find a chatbox designed to engage with Twitter users to become smarter through “casual and playful conversation.”[15] Almost immediately, the chatbox went rogue with statements like “feminism is cancer,” “9/11 was an inside job,” and “Hitler was right.” Within hours, Microsoft suspended the account and officially shut it down two days after its launch.[16]

You would have thought the coders would have learned a valuable lesson.

Today, some researchers—especially security experts—are using “indirect prompt-injection attacks” to feed the AI system data from outside sources to make it behave in ways its creators didn’t intend and override the chatbot’s settings.[17] The results are downright scary.

In this vein, another friend of mine recently sent me the YouTube video of a fascinating discussion about the future of ChatGPT and other related technologies. The discussion focused on a recent article by Joe Allen (published, of course, on Substack) titled “Mental Jigsaw—How Chatbots Hack Your Brain.”[18] Responding to recent bizarre statements by AI chatbots—the new faces of human-machine symbiosis—including: Google’s LaMDA telling a researcher it’s afraid to die; Microsoft’s Bing bot saying it wants to kill people; and, a new chatbot telling a columnist for the New York Times (Kevin Roose) that it fantasized about “manufacturing a deadly virus, making people argue with each other until they kill each other, and stealing nuclear codes.”[19]

Allen’s article discusses three possibilities in explaining these odd statements by asking three broad questions. First, are the chatbots conscious? (That is, is artificial intelligence acquiring consciousness via digital complexity?) Second, are they just pretending to be conscious? (That is, are these inanimate bots exploiting our human bias toward anthromorphism) Or, third, and most troubling, are they possessed? (In Allen’s words, are they functioning as digital Ouija boards to channel demons).[20]    

Demons?

In our modern world?

Embodied in these sophisticated algorithms?

Jeemes, you must be going off the ledge by even including this possibility in a piece talking about our technological future.

Perhaps …

Most of you know that I have written several previous missives about artificial intelligence (AI) and the technological future facing my Christian grandchildren. Indeed, this dynamic is one of the basic storylines of my futuristic Christian-techno-thriller trilogy.

To be sure, sometimes I feel like a passenger trapped on a runaway techno-train that is racing (careening) down the tracks at exponentially faster speeds with an engineer up front that doesn’t even know where the train is going, how the engine really works, or why we are there in the first place.

Worst of all, I didn’t even buy a ticket to board the train!

There are, of course, some efforts to apply the brakes or at least slow the momentum of this runaway train before a catastrophic crash. Many feel that such efforts are too little, too late.

But what about future technologies? Can we design roadblocks and obstacles—or at least put a few cows on the tracks—to slow down runaway technologies over the horizon?

That, my friend, is the Collingridge Dilemma in a nutshell.

[1] David Collingridge, The Social Control of Technology, Pinter: London, 1980, p. 19; a scholarly discussion of the so-called “Collingridge dilemma” can be found at Audley Genus and Andy Stirling, “Collingridge and the dilemma of control: Towards responsible and accountable innovation,” Research Policy, vol. 47, Issue 1, Feb. 2018, pp. 61-69.

[2] Matteo Wong, “ChatGPT is Already Obsolete,” The Atlantic, May 19, 2023.

[3] Luc Olinga, “Nvidia’s CEO Has an Urgent Warning for Anyone Resisting AI,” TheStreet, May 29, 2023. Huang made the remarks this month to graduates at the National Taiwan University (Taipei)

[4] Sharon Goldman, “ChatGPT launched six months ago. Its impact—and fallout—is just beginning,” VentureBeat, May 30, 2023.

[5] Doina Chiacu, “U.S. Senate leader schedules classified AI briefings,” (Technology), Reuters, Jun. 6, 2023.

[6] Karen Gilchrist, “A secretive annual meeting attended by the world’s elite has A.I. top of the agenda,” CNBC, May 18, 2023.  

[7] I addressed the geopolitical significance of advanced semiconductors in a previous missive. See, Jeemes Akers, “China’s Achilles Heel.,” late Sep. 2021.

[8] Tae Kim, “Nvidia’s New AI Supercomputer Is a Game Changer, Google, Meta, and Microsoft Will Be First Users,” Barron’s, May 29, 2023. The system will be released by the end of the year: the GDX GH200 will have 256 GPU’s (compared to 8 GPUs in the previous model; graphic processing units (GPUs) are used for gaming and AI calculations.

[9] “Will S&P 500 ETFs to Slump Ahead Except the Super Seven?” ZACKS, Jun. 7, 2023. Nvidia is considered one of tech’s “Super Seven”—with four having market caps of more than $1 trillion (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon—with Nvidia loitering close to that mark.

[10] Eric J. Savitz and Janet H. Cho, “Apple Strikes 5G Component Deal with Broadcom,” Barron’s, May 24, 2023.

[11] Deepa Seetharaman and Tom Dotan, “The AI Boom Runs on Chips, but It Can’t Get Enough,” The Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2023.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Benj Edwards, “Meta unveils a new large language model that can run on a single GPU,” ars technical, Feb. 24, 2023.

[14] Ellen Francis, “ChatGPT maker OpenAI calls for AI regulation, warning of ‘existential risk,’” The Washington Post, May 24, 2023.

[15] Chris Stokel-Walker, “The Race to contain AI Before We Reach Singularity,” Popular Mechanics, Jun-Jul 2023. (Under the general title “This Failed Chatbot Predicted a Disturbing AI Future.”)

[16] Ibid.

[17] Matt Burgess, “The Security Hole at the Heart of ChatGPT and Bing,” WIRED, May 25, 2023.

[18] Joe Allen, “Mental Jigsaw—How Chatbots Hack Your Brain,” Singularity Weekly, Feb. 21, 2023.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

“By the waters

  The waters

  Of Babylon

  We lay down and wept

  And wept

  For thee Zion”

                                                Song Babylon

                                                Don McLean

                                                1971[1]

“If and when Jerusalem acts militarily against Tehran to stop its nuclear ambitions, it will likely involve four different fronts, as Iranian-backed groups in Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza would immediately launch reprisal missile and rocket attacks on Israel. For now, however, only one thing is certain. Tehran has inserted the nuclear key into the gate lock of Armageddon and is beginning to twist it open.”

                                                  Mark Toth[2]

“Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, stated on Tuesday that if Iran continues to develop its nuclear program, Israel would have no choice but to stage a pre-emptive attack.”

                                                  Mohammad al-Kassim

                                                  The Jerusalem Post[3]

         In my college classes—at least once a semester, no matter which class I was teaching—I would try to engage my students in a discussion concerning the world’s five hottest trouble spots at the time. By “hot” I meant tensions that could easily break out into a broader war. Regardless of the year, or global circumstances, there was one constant “hot spot” that appeared on our top five list: a potential crisis in the Middle East involving the Jewish state of Israel.

In case you haven’t noticed, over the past few days, all potential contenders in the Middle East have ratcheted up their warlike rhetoric and more: Israeli military officials are openly threatening a military strike on Iran and, in an unusual move, publicly announced their ability to penetrate Iranian airspace; Hezbollah—Iran’s Shiite ally entrenched in Lebanon on Israel’s northern border—recently conducted computer simulated exercises targeting Israeli border settlements; Iranian officials at home and abroad continue to spew a constant stream of  bellicose threats against Israel and showing off new missiles; trouble continues to brew on the contested Temple Mount in Jerusalem; and Israeli aircraft periodically pound targets in Gaza and Syria in a tit-for-tat response to missile launches by numerous terrorist groups.[4]

I read an interesting article this morning that brought the issue of these building tensions in the Middle East—and my memory of those classroom discussions—to the forefront once again. The title caught my eye: “Is Iran unlocking the gates to Armageddon?”[5]

A catchy title for sure.

The article concerns a ticking clock decision approaching for Israeli politicians, policymakers, and war planners as Iran—its sworn enemy—moves ever closer to a weaponized nuclear program. The problem: in June 2022, Iran reportedly had amassed 95 pounds of highly enriched uranium (to a 60 percent purity level), well beyond the amount needed for a nuclear weapon. Since then, the Biden administration has (in my view) completely ignored Tehran’s weapons buildup, issued empty threats, and has tried to placate Israel with shallow promises.

What is the situation in the Middle East now? We have completely alienated Saudi Arabia and pushed them closer to China and Russia, allowed China to gain a diplomatic foothold in the region, let a Syrian dictator off the hook, and that does not include our bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan. But worst of all, Washington has basically turned a blind eye to recent weaponization efforts in Iran. Now, according to a February 2023 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the United Nations Security Council, Iran has amassed a stockpile of 193 pounds of enriched U-235 (enough for three full-scale atomic warheads), as well as demonstrating a capacity to enrich U-235 to 83.7 percent (and an ability to reach 90 percent).[6] It also is likely that Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, is helping Iran improve its nuclear weaponization program in exchange for the Tehran mullahs providing drones and other military equipment for use in Ukraine.

Hence the uptick in activity and hostile rhetoric. Putting on my analyst’s hat for a second, it seems to me there are three possible explanations for what we are seeing today in the Middle East. First, things are just as they seem. The regional powers by their posturing are steadily drifting toward a costly regional conflict that threatens to draw in other outside powers (including the U.S.). This explanation, however, violates Jeemes Akers “first principle”—things are never as they seem.

Secondly, Israeli public spinmeisters are pulling out all stops to gather support from U.S. officials in a bid to forestall the need to conduct future military activity or a full-scale cyber-attack. At the present time, Israel has a clear technological advantage over its regional adversaries in terms of drones, AI,[7] swarms, high-precision weaponry, and—the ultimate ace up their sleeve—between 80-400 nuclear warheads sitting atop Jericho-class intercontinental range ballistic missiles.[8] But this window of advantage may be closing rapidly. Moreover, the widespread deployment of any of these systems would lead to unforeseen consequences. Perhaps, as an alternative explanation, the Israelis are just buying time before they strike with a vengeance at a future opportune moment.

A third possible explanation is that all parties in the region are engaged in a game of high stakes geopolitical poker, replete with sophisticated and complicated bluffing strategies.

I tend to favor the latter explanation.

To be sure, the Israelis can act in circumstances where they perceive an existential threat. On June 7, 1981, for example, Israel’s Air Force (IAF) conducted Operation Opera—also known as Operation Babylon—which destroyed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor located 17 kilometers (11 miles) southeast of Baghdad. The surprise attack was conducted by a flight of IAF F-16 fighter aircraft, with an escort of       F-15s, and took out the Osirak reactor deep inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Israel’s preventative strike, and Israeli government statements after the attack, established the so-called “Begin Doctrine,”[9] a foreign policy assertion upholding the Jewish state’s right to conduct such counter-proliferation strikes in the future to prevent regional enemies’ capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons.

The doctrine remains a central feature of Israeli security planning.

Using the Begin Doctrine on September 6, 2007, for example, Israeli aircraft hit a suspected nuclear reactor site located in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria (Operation Outside the Box or Operation Orchard).[10]   

Can Israel conduct such a pre-emptive aerial strike against Iranian nuclear facilities in today’s world? It would be much more difficult. In 1981, for example, Israel’s aircraft had to destroy a single target (a reactor being rebuilt) with a 2,000-mile round trip. IAF aircraft had the element of surprise. By contrast, to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program today, the aircraft (or drone swarms) would have to hit at least seven known nuclear sites with some of them located as far as 1,500 miles east of Tel Aviv, including Iran’s reported atomic test site in the Lutz Desert. Each of these sites are protected by Russian-provided surface-to-air missile sites and some of the locations—such as the Bushehr site—presumably have Russian technicians present. (The Osirak reactor only had a handful of French technicians on site).[11]

The Israeli strike in 1981 was followed by broad international condemnation and the diplomatic environment today, I would respectfully suggest, is far more hostile to the Jewish state.

In 1981, Israel’s Prime Minister could count on a mostly unified public consensus endorsing such a bold act. Today, Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu presides over a fractious political coalition amid widespread popular discontent.

Moreover, whereas Israel could count on U.S. support in 1981, they are far less certain of American backing for any such initiative today.

In 2010, Israel extended the Begin Doctrine to include digital pre-emptive measures. In this vein, during my history courses at the College of the Ozarks, I suggested that one of the true turning points of the post-Cold War era was the first use of a government-sponsored cyberweapon called Stuxnet.[12] The weapon was amazingly effective, both as a computer worm and rootkit to hide malicious files, it targeted foreign-made supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA) essential to centrifuges at Iranian nuclear facilities (reportedly destroying one-fifth of Iran’s centrifuges and setting back Tehran’s Iranian nuclear weapons program for years). Although neither country has publicly acknowledged their role in creating the weapon, it is generally recognized that it was the result of Operation Olympic Games—a joint U.S.-Israeli collaborative effort beginning as early as 2005.[13]

How did it work? At Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility the Iranian engineers saw screens that gave normal readouts even as the critical centrifuges were spinning to self-destruction.

They trusted their screens too much.

And the unintended consequences? Stuxnet succeeded in setting back Tehran’s nuclear program, but in its wake launched a string of global government investigations, international recriminations, Iranian revenge attacks and copy-cat malware programs like Duqu, Flame and others. In the years since, increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and ransomware attacks have become an accepted reality of modern-day life in the Middle East and elsewhere.

A Pandora’s technological box was opened. 

Since Stuxnet, we live in a different world.

I suspect that a future Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear program will have the same sort of wide-ranging unintended consequences that accompanied its strike on the Osirak reactor in 1981 and Stuxnet in 2010.

         But then again, it is an existential matter for Jerusalem.

         It is only one of many foreign policy considerations for us.

Stay tuned.   

[1] The lyrics are from McLean’s haunting lyrics on the best-selling American Pie album.

[2] Mark Toth, “Is Iran unlocking the gates of Armageddon?” THE HILL, (Opinion piece), May 25, 2023.

[3] Mohammad al-Kassim, “Mounting tensions between Israel, Iran herald possible military showdown,” The Jerusalem Post, May 25, 2023.

[4] Ibid.; Toth, “Is Iran unlocking the gates; and Julia Shapiro, “Iran shows off new ballistic missile,” THE HILL, May 25, 2023; among others.

[5] Toth, “Is Iran unlocking the gates.”

[6] Ibid.

[7] See, among others, Dan Williams, “Israel aims to be ‘AI superpower’, advance autonomous weapons,” Reuters, May 21, 2023. The article talks about state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries unveiling an autonomous intelligence-gathering submarine which had already completed “thousands of hours” of operations.

[8] Israel maintains a policy of “deliberate ambiguity,” never admitting or denying its possession of nuclear weapons. The “Samson Option” refers to Israel’s deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a “last resort’ against an invading enemy. See, among others, Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris, “Israeli nuclear weapons, 2014,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 70 (6):97-115.

[9] The doctrine—which traces its roots to Operation Damocles in the early 1960s—was enunciated by then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin following the attack, which he labeled an act of “anticipatory self-defense at its best.”

[10] See, among others, Uzi Mahnaimi, “Israelis ‘blew apart Syrian nuclear cache,’” The Sunday Times (London), Sep. 16, 2007.

[11] Toth, “Is Iran unlocking.”

[12] Since the attack in 2010, Stuxnet has been extensively studied by numerous government cybersecurity experts and investigative journalists. See, among others, Kim Zetter, Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon, New York: Crown Publishing, 2014; Steve Kroft, “Stuxnet: Computer Worm opens new wave of warfare,” 60 Minutes (CBS), Mar 4, 2012; and Ralph Langer, “Ralph Langer: Cracking Stuxnet, a 21^st century cyber weapon, TED, Mar 2011. 

[13] “Confirmed: US and Israel created Stuxnet, lost control of it,” Ars Technica, Jun 2021; Ellen Nakashima, “Stuxnet was work of U.S. and Israeli experts, officials say,” The Washington Post, Jun 2, 2012.

“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than those you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”  

                                                                                Mark Twain       

“Land was created to provide a place for boats to visit.”

                                                                                Brooks Atkinson

“How inappropriate it is to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Sea.”

                                                                                Arthur C. Clarke

The cruise was not my idea.

It was Ima’s.

I finally gave in.

And so, last week, we took the long drive down to Port Canaveral, Florida, and boarded Disney’s newest—and one of the world’s biggest and most expensive to build—cruise ship, the Wish. It was my first cruise and Imogene’s second. We met three of my four sisters (Vicki, Patti—Trish—and Katy) aboard as well as Trish’s daughter Amy, and her two young children Sierra and Sawyer.

My sisters, by the way, are seasoned veterans of Disney cruises.

Despite my original reservations, I had a fantastic time.

When Disney stays within Walt’s original parameters of providing family-oriented entertainment, it is at its best: when it strays into the wilderness of political correctness and the “woke” maze, it suffers. On the cruise ship, it was Disney at its best.

Of course, you pay for the quality of Disney service. I do not know how much the cruise cost (Ima wrote the checks) and I don’t want to know. All I know is I enjoyed every second of the experience. 

My first impression of the Wish as we parked at the port was how immense it is! Disney’s newest addition to its cruise fleet of five is one of the world’s largest. The Wish is one of eleven cruise liners currently afloat that cost at least $1 billion to build.[1] The Wish, built in 2022 by Meyer Werft Shipyard in Papunburg, Germany, has a gross tonnage of 144,000, a length of 1,119 feet, and a capacity of 5,555.[2]

My fascination with large ships goes way back. As a child, my mom and dad would let me stay up late (one day a week) to watch a World War II-related black-and-white documentary. The show led to my passion for history. One of my favorite episodes was about the wartime sinking (actually scuttling) of the famous German battleship, Bismarck in late May 1941, during its only offensive (raiding) foray in the North Atlantic Sea. The warship, named after the legendary “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, was envisioned as an answer to a new French class of battleships and nominally fit within the tonnage limit imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty. Bismarck’s keel was laid down in July 1936, it was launched in February 1939 and commissioned in late August 1940. The Bismarck was Germany’s largest warship and displaced more than any other European battleship (over 50,000 tons when fully loaded). The ship’s length was 823 feet, 6 inches—much shorter and smaller, by the way, than today’s Wish.

About that same time, as some of you may remember, there was a popular song by Johnny Horton, “Sink the Bismarck,” with an unforgettable refrain: “The Germans had the biggest ship, they had the biggest guns. The Bismarck was the fastest ship that ever sailed the sea, on her deck were guns as big as steers and shells as big as trees.” (1960)

One of my favorite Revell plastic models was the Bismarck.

By now, many of you can guess how my mind works. The entire time I was aboard, I was thinking about a plot for a future novel set on a cruise liner. I wondered what it would be like to set my characters on a future Chinese cruise ship. When I got back to the room at the beach, one of the first things I did was a bit of research on the Chinese cruise industry. As it turns out, they are way behind the West in this area. Indeed, China is in the final construction phase of the country’s first domestically built cruise ship at the Shanghai Waigaoqiao Shipbuilding yard. Currently, only known by its hull number H1508, the cruise ship is being built for Adora Cruises, a newly launched brand from the joint venture between Carnival Corporation and China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC). Construction began in 2019.[3] Why has it taken so long? A recent article notes the problems Chinese shipbuilders have encountered: “cruise ships are among the most difficult and intricate vessels to build because of the vast range of systems involved. They require 20 times more man-hours to build than a typical Capesize bulker which is seen as one of the most basic shipbuilding products.”[4]

My second impression, once we were aboard the Wish, was how small but efficient our individual cabins were. Not an inch was wasted in the ergonomics planning (the process of designing or arranging workplaces, living spaces, or systems so they fit the people that use them). The bathroom consisted of a commode and sink; another compartment held a small tub, shower, and sink. There was just enough space for the bed, room to walk around it, closets, in-built refrigerator, a fold-out sofa, and drawers. Amazingly enough you never felt cramped.

Our cabin on the Wish eerily reminded me of the opening scenes of the dystopian novel by Ernest Cline, Ready Player One.[5] In the book, viewed by many futurists as a sneak preview of what the elites have in mind for the rest of us in the future, the protagonist teenager Wade Watts lives with his aunt in the cramped “stacks”—a poverty-stricken district in the 2040’s—where trailer homes have been piled on each other. As a result, the book’s characters escape this dismal reality by living (in avatars) in OASIS, a virtual reality alternative world.

What do I mean? We had the minimum space to live with a moderate degree of comfort, our food and other essential needs were provided, our information inflow was monitored and arranged, and our entertainment was orchestrated: throw in a government with an agenda and you have all the ingredients for absolute control. It has already been worked out.

“Sigh.”   

My third impression was garnered because of time spent outside on the cabin’s veranda: the absolute limitless nature of the ocean and the mind-blowing scene of clouds on the horizon. I am always amazed at God’s creation (and man’s effort to demean, deny, undercut, and counterfeit it). Enough said.

My fourth impression is that Disney is unparalleled when it comes to providing customer services, food, and entertainment. In addition to lavish sit-down meals, I particularly enjoyed the hamburgers, hot dogs and fries at Goofy’s Grill on the eleventh floor. We also attended three shows in the main theater: “Disney Seas the Adventure,” “The Little Mermaid” and “Disney’s Aladdin—A Musical Spectacular” (where the genie absolutely stole the show). Just as interesting as the stage action were two nearby sign language specialists.

Perhaps it is worth noting at this point that there were a couple circumstances that prevented me from enjoying the cruise experience to its fullest. The week before boarding the Wish, I somehow contracted a major sinus infection that left me hacking, wheezing, and sneezing the entire time we were at sea. In addition, a couple days before the cruise, while I was running on the beach, I seriously tweaked my knee; as a result, I limped—carrying my one leg like Chester on Gunsmoke—the entire cruise. The combined one-two punch of sickness and a leg injury kept me aboard the ship during our port calls at Nassau in the Bahamas as well as a day of play on Disney’s proprietary island in the Caribbean.

I thank Ima, and my sisters, for putting up with me.     

Finally, as I think back on the cruise, one of my biggest surprises was what it wasn’t. If I had projected, 5-8 years ago, and based on my belief in the exponential change rate of future technology, I would have quite honestly expected more whiz-bang stuff out of the world’s newest, one billion-dollar-plus cruise ship. Internet service was only available to those who paid for it; in-room television service was limited and the screen saver (of the Wish sailing through calm seas) featured only an occasional flyover by a Star Wars craft and a Spiderman flyby. There was no virtual reality to speak of, no humanoid robots cleaning rooms or serving meals, and very little evidence of AI-enhanced accouterments.

For some reason, I expected more of that.

As Timothy Lee notes in his sobering message to future technologists, “Software Didn’t Eat the World: A.I. Won’t Either”:   “Many people now learn foreign languages using Duolingo or watch educational videos on YouTube. But people largely go the same schools and hospitals they did 10 or 20 years ago.”[6] I suspect the same truth applies to those who take cruises.

My mom, before she passed away, loved to go on Disney cruises with my sisters: she loved the human, personal touch provided by crew members serving meals and cleaning the rooms; she loved soaking in the vastness of the ocean waves and incredible cloud formations while sitting on the veranda; she loved spending intimate time with family; she loved dressing up for “Pirate’s Night”; she loved visiting exotic island locals and the live on-board musical productions. She loved being with people; and laughing with, and at, them. In large part, those are the same motivations that have drawn adventurers to board cruise ships for generations. I’m not sure advancing technology will ever really change that.

Having said that, however, there are some interesting techno-wrinkles on the horizon. I read recently, for example, about the upcoming three-year, round-the-world voyage of Ms. Sharon Lane, a 75-year-old retired schoolteacher, aboard the MV Gemini. To afford the trip, she has opted for one of the cheapest rooms on board—a “virtual inside” room—a 130-square-foot-cabin with no window, with a surround screen that will broadcast live footage from outside the ship.[7] 

There you have it! I can’t wait for our next cruise!

[1] J. Souza, “$1 Billion Club: Most Expensive Cruise Ships Ever Built,” CruiseFever, Nov. 17, 2022. The record for being the most expensive cruise ship ever built now belongs to Alure of the Seas, built by STX Europe Turku Shipyard of Finland from 2007 to 2010 at a cost of $1.43 billion.

[2] For those of you interested, YouTube has a number of documentaries—including one by National Geographic—on the construction of the Wish.

[3] “China Begins 120-Day Countdown to Launch of Domestic Cruise Ship,” The Maritime Executive,   Feb. 16, 2023.

[4] Ibid. The “Capesize” is the largest class of bulkship used to carry a variety of materials; it is so named because they are too large to pass through the Panama Canal and must go around the Cape of Good Hope. 

[5] Ernst Cline, Ready Player One, Crown Publishing, 2011.

[6] Timothy B. Lee, “Software Didn’t Eat the World: A.I. Won’t Either,” SLATE, Apr, 24, 2023.

[7] Francesca Street, “She signed up to live on a cruise ship for three years. Here’s why,” CNN, Apr. 22, 2023. The “Life at Sea Cruise” cruise departs Istanbul this November, will stop at 375 ports, including 208 overnight stays, with stops ranging from Antarctica, China, India and Australia. The cost? Cheapest rooms, such as the one for Ms. Lane, runs about $30,000 per year.

“Across the globe, there are more than 400 cables running along the seafloor, carrying over 95% of all international internet traffic … These data conduits, which transmit everything from emails and banking transactions to military secrets, are vulnerable to sabotage attacks and espionage …”

                                        Joe Brock

                                        “U.S. and China wage war beneath the waves”[1]

“Undersea cables are a ‘surveillance gold mine’ for the world’s intelligence agencies … When we talk about U.S.-China tech competition, when we talk about espionage and the capture of data, submarine cables are involved in every aspect of those rising geopolitical tensions.”

                                         Justin Sherman[2]

“It’s like each side is arming itself with bandwidth …”

                                        Unnamed telecom executive[3]

         As I mentioned on frequent occasions to my former college students—as well as in more recent previous missives—today, the United States and its allies are arrayed against an opposing coalition of anti-democratic governments including China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, in an actively unfolding war in the shadows. One of the more interesting theaters of this techno-secretive war is unfolding on the world’s ocean floors.

         In today’s world, many of us remain transfixed on the more obvious (and superficial) aspects of this competition. From the recent visit of China’s President Xi Jinping to meet with Putin in Russia, to the increasingly sophisticated drones and weaponry used in the Ukrainian conflict (now well over 400 days old); from diplomatic somersaults in the Middle East and violence on the Temple Mount, to Israeli airstrikes in Gaza and Lebanon; mass street protests in Paris; Pyongyang’s threat to launch more missiles over Japan; from the highly publicized testimony of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on Capitol Hill to the carefully orchestrated counter-visit of Apple’s CEO Tim Cook to China; from the increasing global centralization of regional and Central Banks in the wake of recent bank failures; and, even perhaps, the rash of weather-related emergencies.                                                                    

         With all this, and the distracting media circus surrounding Trump’s indictments, maybe you haven’t noticed what’s going on underneath the waters.

You’re not the only one.

In a recent missive I mentioned the international intrigue surrounding the intentional underwater sabotage involving the two Nord Stream pipelines.[4] The mystery continues to unfold.[5]

Today, in another part of the world, there is an “intensifying tech war between Beijing and Washington,” waged underseas that “risks tearing the fabric of the internet.”[6] What is happening? China’s state-owned telecom firms are now developing an extensive undersea fiber-optic internet cable to link Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Known as EMA (Europe-Middle East-Asia), the proposed cable would link Hong Kong, Hainan, Singapore, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and France, according to people knowledgeable of the plan.[7] The project would receive subsidies from the Chinese state.

The proposed EMA is in direct response to last month’s successful U.S. government effort—the last of several in the past four years—to thwart Chinese companies from participating in a number of undersea cable projects.[8] Another massive cable project, constructed by the U.S. firm SubCom LLC, is called SeaMeWe-6 and also connects Singapore to France (via Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and several other countries along the way).[9]   

Why this underwater competition?

At one level, there is Washington’s growing concern about Beijing’s eavesdropping on internet data[10] and its subsea espionage capabilities. Washington’s tech officials are also concerned about China’s strategic tech gains: the project would create a super-fast new connection between China and the rest of the world, as well as giving China’s state-backed telecom carriers greater reach and protection in the event they are excluded from future U.S.-backed cables.[11]

How has China responded? According to a statement released by the Chinese Foreign Ministry: “The U.S. should stop fabricating and spreading rumors about so-called ‘data surveillance activities’ and stop slandering and smearing Chinese companies.”[12]

As a result, we are rapidly approaching a point where countries will have to decide: “It seems we are headed down a road where there will be a U.S.-led internet and a Chinese-led internet ecosystem,” says Timothy Heath, a defense researcher at the RAND Corporation.”[13]

“Sigh.” 

At a deeper level (pardon the pun) the competition is but the latest iteration of an ongoing tech war in the shadows.

From a historian’s perspective, all of this is hardly new. Among the opening gambits of this underwater technological game of chess—or is it Go?—in the shadows dates back, at least, to the 1970’s and Operation “Ivy Bells.”[14] The story involves a joint mission, at the height of the Cold War, by the U.S. Navy, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines in the Sea of Okhotsk. Divers from a specially equipped submarine, USS Halibut (SSN 587), left their decompression chamber, found a five-inch diameter cable in the frigid waters 400 feet below, and installed a 20-foot-long listening cable.[15]

We only know the details of the operation because of an act of treason. Ronald W. Pelton, a former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst, was convicted in 1986 of selling secrets to the Soviets in one of the most damaging intelligence breaches of the Cold War.[16] (Pelton died of cancer in September 2022, at the age of 80, in a nursing home in Frederick, Maryland.) Pelton grew up in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and spent four years in the Air Force in the 1960s, learned Russian in the language school in Bloomington, Indiana and afterwards became a cryptologic technician with NSA.

Less than a decade later, at the height of the Vietnam War, my Chinese linguist friends and I attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and received many of the same clearances and much of the same training as Pelton.

Loyalty to one’s country is a choice.

And an honor.

At any rate, Pelton, in his mid-40’s at the time, approached officials at the Soviet embassy in early 1980, (he had resigned his NSA job in July 1979 after declaring personal bankruptcy) offering them his knowledge of NSA operations in exchange for $35,000. From 1980 through 1983, Pelton met twice in Vienna with Anatoly Slavnov, a KGB intelligence officer. Pelton’s espionage may have gone unnoticed except for the KGB defector Vitaly Yurchenko who provided details that led the FBI to Pelton.[17]

$35,000.

Doesn’t seem like much to sell out your country, does it?

I wonder what it would take today?

At the time, U.S. intelligence sources said Pelton’s betrayal was one of the “gravest intelligence losses to the Soviet Union.”[18] Pelton’s information passed to the Soviets compromised a costly, long running, and highly successful U.S. underseas operation that used sophisticated technology to intercept Soviet naval communications.[19]

In short, obtaining data from underwater cables.

Only later did U.S. authorities discover that a high-tech device used in the operation fell into Soviet hands. The original tap discovered by the Soviets was placed on exhibit at the then-KGB museum in Moscow.

The information uncovered during Pelton’s public trial in the U.S. was so sensitive that then-Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William J. Casey threatened prosecution of The Washington Post (under a never used 1950 law against news organizations) by the Department of Justice if details were released. The newspaper delayed running the story for almost three weeks.[20]  

I wonder what types of Operation Ivy Bells missions are on the drawing books today?

[1] Joe Brock, “U.S. and China wage war beneath the waves—over internet cables,” Reuters, Mar. 24, 2023.

[2] Justin Sherman is a fellow at the Washington D.C.-based Cyber Statecraft Initiative of the Atlantic Council. Quote is cited in Brock, “U.S. and China wage war.”

[3] Quote appears in Joe Brock, “Exclusive—China plans $500 million subsea internet cable to rival U.S.-backed project,” Reuters, Apr. 6, 2023.

[4] Akers, “Wading Into The Nord Stream Pipeline Controversy,” (missive), Mar. 2023.

[5] See, for example, Johan Ahlader, “State actor involvement in Nord Stream pipeline attacks is ‘main scenario’, says Swedish investigator, Reuters, Apr. 6, 2023; and, “Suspicions Multiply as Nord Stream Sabotage Remains Unsolved,” DNYUZ, Apr. 7, 2023.

[6] Joe Brock, “Exclusive—China plans.”

[7] Ibid.

[8] Brock, “U.S. and China wage war.”

[9] Ibid, and Brock, “Exclusive—China plans.”

[10] Brock, “Exclusive—China plans.”

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] The decision making around such operations during the Casey years are covered in Bob Woodward’s book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, (Simon & Schuster, reissue 2005). I can’t speak to the book’s other sections, but it has good coverage of Operation Ivy Bells based on Woodward’s coverage of the Pelton trial.

[15] “The Mission Behind Operation Ivy Bells and How It Was Discovered,” Military.com, (n.d.)

[16] Emily Langer, “Ronald Pelton, spy convicted of selling secrets to the Soviets, dies at 80,” The Washington Post, Sep. 16, 2022.

[17] Bob Woodward, et.al., “Eavesdropping System Betrayed,” The Washington Post, May 21, 1986.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] At the time, President Ronald Reagan—and a number of other leading security officials—urged Katherine Graham, then-chairman of the board of The Washington Post, to delay publication because the information could damage national security. My, how times have changed.