Vermelding onderdeel organisatie

April 13, 2023

1

Nanotech, Innovation, and SecurityThe case for openness

SPT 2011, Denton, TX

David Koepsell, Kateřina Staňková

Delft University of Technology

April 13, 2023 2

Threats from emerging technologies

• States have sought to balance need for open inquiry with fears of proliferating “dual use” technologies

• Two underlying, uncontroversial assumptions:• Science requires openness, • but deadly technologies threaten peace and

must be contained

April 13, 2023 3

Threats from emerging technologies

• Science does require openness, but• do deadly technologies threaten peace and

must they be contained?• Must we accept the assumption that

containment is• Moral, and• Effective?

April 13, 2023 4

Threats from emerging technologies

• Current strategies of containment are built on cold-war reaction to spread of nuclear technologies

• The US, having perfected, used and then failing to contain the technology then seeks international sturctures to criminalize its materials and development by non-nuclear states

Containment is immoral

• States holding WMD demand other states comply with non-proliferation

• This is a form of blackmail, essentially, as the WMD possessors, while promising to reduce their weapons over time have never promised to eliminate their stores.

• Possessory states lack the moral authority to demand compliance with non-proliferation regimes

April 13, 2023 5

Containment is immoral

• Containment assumes that those in possession of weapons are ethically privileged

• Containment may also impede or hinder legitimate research by erecting barriers that make that research costly or impractical.

• Privileged nations holding potentially dangerous technology write the rules. This raises issues of distributive justice.

April 13, 2023 6

Containment is ineffective

• States seeking WMD do best to pursue their research in secret, and then emerge with a functioning program only to blackmail other nations on the promise of abandoning their weapons program in exchange for aid, or other reward

• New WMD will be even easier to conceal, and verification protocols and success will become even harder

April 13, 2023 7

April 13, 2023 8

Cold War MAD strategy

• Assumes: A first strike must not be capable of preventing a retaliatory second strike or else mutual destruction is not assured. In this case, a state would have nothing to lose with a first strike; or might try to preempt the development of an opponent's second-strike capability with a first strike (i.e., decapitation strike).

April 13, 2023 9

Cold War MAD strategy

• To avoid this, countries may design their nuclear forces to make decapitation strikes almost impossible, by dispersing launchers over wide areas and using a combination of sea-based, air-based, underground, and mobile land-based launchers.

• Also resulted in mixed strategy (destabilizing) like MIRVs and ABMs

April 13, 2023 10

Cold War MAD strategy

• This assumption leads to a bi-polar, multi-strategy arms race (in bi-polar world). This assumption also makes N-player (N>2) games more stable.

• Retaliatory strikes by N-players decrease potential for effective first strikes with dispersal of weapons among states.

• Nash equilibrium of cold-war (essentially 2-player) standoff is demonstrably less stable than N-player standoff

April 13, 2023 11

Containment is also risky…

• Isn’t it risky to allow proliferation beyond a few, responsible states?

• Game-theoretic approach to the problem.• Cold War strategies were devised through

applying game theory, but it was a two-player game

• N-person games show that 2-person game is more risky…

April 13, 2023 12

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

• an N-person noncooperative game with countries as players, defined by: • set of players • decision variable for each player • represents “to not attack”• represents “to attack with full force”

• objective function for each player (to be maximized) , dependent on expected decisions of the others:

April 13, 2023 13

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

• Structure of the objective function for player i :

• - profit from attacking• - costs to develop and use weapons• - costs that country

$i$ expects to pay for attacking ("punishment'')

April 13, 2023 14

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

• profit from attacking

- increasing with- zero for - concave with (“risk

averse”)

- impact factor of the attack

April 13, 2023 15

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

• costs to develop and use the weapons

- increasing with- zero for

- importance factor of the attack costs

April 13, 2023 16

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

• “punishment”

- zero if no attack takes place, increasing with attack force - expected risk-aversion of other players

- expected strength of the punishment from j

April 13, 2023 17

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

The profit for i is then

To simplify the analysis, we assume: Player i does not distinguish between other players. Therefore, the expected punishment actiondoes not differ for individual countries.

April 13, 2023 18

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

Then it can be shown that if , (1)i.e., if the punishment strength is bigger than the surplus of player i from attacking (defined as a difference between impact factor of the attack minus costs of the attack),player i will choose , i.e. to not attack.

Normalized version of (1) with respect to the number of weapons is

April 13, 2023 19

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

LemmaIf , resp. (normalized version) for each , then constitutes a Nash equilibrium of the game.

Please note that higher the number N is, higher chance that holds, as all other parameters are fixed a priori.

Game-theoretic formulation of the problem

• I f the red curve is above the green curve player i will attack

• Occurrence of such event decreases with increasing N, also for a nontrivial situation

conclusions

• It is in fact less risky to allow proliferation because the costs of a first strike increase monotonically with respect to the number of states with weapons.

• Multi-polar strategies become more limited. As opposed to cold-war stalemate,which actually resulted in arms-race and mixed-strategies, a free market in weapons, and unlimited number of states with weapons, results in greater stability.

conclusions

• This does nothing to prevent terrorism, but we assume that terrorism will occur anyway.

• Non-proliferation regimes apply mostly to states, as nothing except good intelligence work can locate and try to prevent terrorist use of WMD

• Free, open, and hopefully transparent work on development of next-generation WMD will be consistent with ethos of science, and ultimately less risky than attempts to stifle proliferation.