Diplomacy & Crisis News

Peter Suciu

Security, Europe

The entire is a bizzare, Cold War-like fever dream.

Key Point:  Nuclear bomb drones sound scary and they are. But that is because they are more destabilizing than helpful.

The second Russian Navy submarine to serve as a basic carrier of the Poseidon nuclear-capable underwater drone will be floated out in late June, the state media reported. The Khabarovsk will reportedly be able to carry up to six Poseidon unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs).

"The Khabarovsk [Project 09852] will be floated out in late June at the earliest. There is no exact date so far," a source from the Russian defense industry told TASS.

Naval News, with data from Covert Shores, has described the new submarine as similar but smaller than the Project 955 "Borei" SSBN. The estimated length of the new submarine is about 120 meters compared to the 160 meters for the BOREI. In addition, it was noted that it is even possible that the submarines may share many components and even hull sections.

Khabarovsk, the lead boat of the Project 09851, is the first of four planned nuclear-powered submarines and it was laid down in 2014 with plans for it to be launched this year. The Khabarovsk-class boats should be capable of carrying weapons such as torpedoes, anti-ship and land attack missiles—and as these will be fitted with a nuclear reactor and pumpjet propulsion system should have unlimited range, while sea endurance will be limited only by food supplies.

The Poseidon is a unique UUV with a nuclear propulsion system and nuclear warhead, and it can operate as an autonomous nuclear torpedo with a nearly unlimited range. The Pentagon reports confirmed the existence of the UUV in 2016. It can reportedly carry a nuclear warhead with a blast yield of two megatons (MT), and it can reach underwater speeds of 108 knots—significantly faster than traditional torpedoes.

The weapon platform is capable of destroying enemy infrastructural facilities, aircraft carrier strike groups (CSG) and other targets. The Poseidon drones, along with other nuclear-power submarines, which act as the carriers for the weapons, make up part of Russia's so-called oceanic multipurpose system. A source in the Russian defense industry told TASS that the Poseidon drone is capable of destroying an enemy naval base or hit at an enemy's important coastal economic facilities—which could be read to include a city such as New York or Boston.

In the March 2018 state-of-the-nation address to both houses of the Russian parliament, President Vladimir Putin mentioned for the first time Russia's efforts to develop a nuclear-powered unmanned underwater vehicle that could carry both conventional and nuclear warheads.

The first basic carrier of the Poseidon was the Project 09852 special-purpose nuclear submarine Belgorod, which was floated in April of last year and which is expected to enter service with the Russian Navy this coming September. In addition to carrying the Poseidon, the Belgorod was developed to carry rescue deep-water drones.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com. This first appeared earlier in 2020 and is being reposted due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters

Robert Farley

History, Asia

Modern scholarship on the history of the CCP has demonstrated that Mao rarely, if ever, had complete control over the Party machinery. He struggled through his entire tenure against competitors, both bureaucratic and ideological.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Mao was the 'Great Helmsman' leading the Chinese revolution forward. However, he was far from the only revolutionary around, and was surrounded by other well-known leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. If he had died early on, one of them might have taken over - although some amount of chaos would have almost certainly followed.

For thirty-seven years, Mao Zedong occupied a singular position atop the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), governing organization of the world’s largest country. For over a dozen years, Mao had led the CCP through wilderness (literally), fighting off factional opponents, the armies of Chiang Kai Shek, and the invading forces of the Empire of Japan. In the next decades, Mao would put a deep imprint on the politics and history of China, rarely for the good.

Modern scholarship on the history of the CCP has demonstrated that Mao rarely, if ever, had complete control over the Party machinery. He struggled through his entire tenure against competitors, both bureaucratic and ideological. Many of the decisions Mao made had strong support from the rest of the CCP, and emerged more from consensus that from authoritarian diktat. Nevertheless, the CCP and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) bore the special imprint of Mao’s ideological conviction and genius for infighting.

What if Mao had died in 1949, shortly after the declaration of the existence of the People’s Republic of China? How might China’s domestic and foreign policy have fared in the absence of the Great Helmsman?

Ideology and Factionalism:

For better or worse, Mao Zedong supplied a strong ideological foundation for the existence of the CCP, and for its provision of single-party control over the PRC. This melded a modified form of Marxist economic doctrine with Soviet state Leninism, leavened by a strong dose of anti-colonial thought. This ideological foundation, and the cult of personality that the CCP established around Mao, helped provide unity for the party and the state throughout the PRC’s early years, allowing it to weather such crises as the Korean War, the ongoing challenge of the survival of Chiang Kai Shek’s regime on Taiwan, and the Sino-Soviet Split. It also helped drive crises, including the Great Leap Forward, the aforementioned split with the USSR and the Cultural Revolution.

But Mao Zedong was far from the only important figure in the CCP in 1949. The struggle against Chiang and the Japanese had given many prominent commanders and administrators the chance to prove their worth. Other major political players in 1949 included Peng Dehuai, senior PLA commander; Liu Shaoqi, a key theorist and administrator; Zhou Enlai, Mao’s long-time right-hand man; Lin Biao, another senior commander and close confidant of Mao; Zhu De, founder of the PLA; Gao Gang, Bo Yibo, and Chen Yun, chief economic administrators; Deng Xiaoping, protégé of Liu Shaoqi, and Yang Shangkun, military and political leader during the Revolution.

Mao’s prominence among this group played an important role in stifling infighting; he could command sufficient legitimacy inside and outside the party that the other major players remained in check. It is unlikely that any other figure in the PRC could have provided the same degree of prestige and ideological heft. This would have made it difficult, at least in the early going, to pursue a “cult of personality” state-building strategy.

In Mao’s absence, the factions that formed around these prominent figures (and others) might have descended into open combat with one another. As is often the case with revolutionary insurgencies, the Chinese Communist Party was riven with factionalism even as it took power in Beijing in 1949. Different components of the People’s Liberation Army had fought entirely different wars, in different areas, with different tactics and organizational structures.

Powerbrokers within the CCP commanded the allegiance of portions of the PLA, which provided them with security from factional conflict. Without Mao to keep them in check, the PLA itself might have become embroiled in political infighting. Moreover, the USSR (which had substantial influence in the 1950s) might have decided to support one faction or another, leading to even more fighting.

Domestic Policy:

Mao Zedong was the primary driver behind the Great Leap Forward, a project designed to spur industrialization but that instead resulted in massive famine. Mao wasn’t alone; much of the rest of the CCP supported, or at least acquiesced, in the project. However, Mao’s idiosyncratic views on expertise, and his faith in the power of the peasantry, made the Great Leap much worse than it otherwise might have been. In the end, millions died in a campaign that Liu Shaoqi himself declared resulted from “70% human error.” The Great Leap also resulted in the purging of Peng Dehuai (critic of Mao), and the sidelining of Mao from the day-to-day domestic decision-making process. Under the guidance of Liu Shaoqi or similar figure, China would likely not have embarked on such a risky, dangerous course towards modernization, and millions might have lived.

The sidelining of Mao after the Great Leap Forward helped set the stage for the next great upheaval. The Cultural Revolution did not spring fully formed from the mind of Mao Zedong, but he did drive most of its main elements, and the ideological brew it created benefitted Mao at the expense of his competitors. Mao fueled the sense of ideological resentment among a younger generation of Chinese students in order to break the back of the parts of the CCP that opposed him and that, in the early 1960s, had worked hard to sideline him. The impact was dreadful in nearly every way imaginable; millions died, Chinese state capacity atrophied, science and innovation slowed, and the PRC withdrew from the international community. While some of the underlying tensions in China would have existed even without Mao, he played a key role in activating those tensions, and creating a political disaster of epic proportions. Without Mao, China might not have lost an entire decade of economic, social, and technical progress.

Foreign Relations:

The PRC stood in precarious position in the wake of its declaration. The Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai Shek, remained in existence on Formosa, with the United States acting as apparent security guarantor. The Soviet Union offered ideological, military, and economic support, but at the price of full alignment. For a decade, the PRC took this deal. The Soviets supplied support for Chinese military operations in Korea, and helped lay the foundation for the PRC’s military-industrial complex. The Soviets also helped jumpstart China’s nuclear weapons program.

In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev’s turn against Stalin’s cult of personality cut hard into Mao’s own ideological foundation. Tensions increased as China and the USSR pursued divergent approaches to confrontation with the West; Mao preferred taking risks, while Khrushchev wanted to play it safe. Mao had managed to maintain control over the greater part of the foreign policy apparatus of the PRC, giving him ample space to carry out a feud with the USSR. While other voices within China also resented the Soviets, Mao’s ideological convictions, along with his special role at the top of the CCP, helped poison Sino-Soviet relations and bring about a dramatic split between the two countries.

Ten years later, Mao would override many of the rest of the senior leadership (Lin Biao, longtime confidant, died under suspicious circumstances) to seek an opening with the United States. This decision, which permanently detached China from the increasingly moribund USSR and paved the way for opening the PRC’s economy and society, remains Mao’s most meaningful positive contribution to China’s success. Without Mao, the PRC might have pursued Lin Biao’s preferred policy of re-engaging with the Soviet Union.

Parting Thoughts:

China would have struggled to emerge from civil war and its agrarian roots regardless of who guided the ship of state. The establishment of the cult of personality around Mao undoubtedly helped prevent some nasty conflicts between the leaders of the CCP, and assured a degree of unity against foreign foes. But it also gave Mao Zedong, a man with a special talent for human misery, the ability to guide the destinies of hundreds of millions of people for several decades.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat. This article first appeared in 2016.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

The British novelist didn’t just write about the world of intelligence. He changed it forever.

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Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro d’hiver 2020-2021 de Politique étrangère (n° 4/2020). Jean-Christophe Noël, chercheur associé au Centre des études de sécurité de l’Ifri, propose une analyse de l’ouvrage de Stuart Russell, Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control (Viking Press, 2019, 352 pages).

La principale question posée par Human Compatible est de savoir comment les hommes pourraient garder le contrôle sur une super Intelligence artificielle (IA), c’est-à-dire sur une machine possédant un niveau d’intelligence supérieur aux êtres humains les plus brillants, pour éviter qu’elle ne provoque les pires désastres. L’enquête menée sert également de prétexte pour présenter des réflexions plus générales sur l’Intelligence artificielle.

Stuart Russell est une personnalité reconnue dans le monde de l’IA. Professeur de sciences informatiques à l’université de Berkeley, il a déjà publié Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, qui constitue un des principaux livres de référence sur l’IA, et qui en est à sa quatrième édition depuis sa sortie de 1995.

Dans son nouveau livre, Stuart Russell s’étonne du manque d’intérêt général sur l’émergence possible d’une super IA. Après tout, écrit-il, si nous détections un grand astéroïde dont la trajectoire croiserait celle de la Terre en 2069, nous ne nous demanderions pas s’il serait prématuré de s’en inquiéter. Or l’éclosion d’une super intelligence est envisageable, selon l’auteur, dans des délais qui pourraient être bien plus proches qu’on ne croit. Alors, que faire ?

Pour répondre à cette question, l’auteur décompose son livre en trois parties. Les premiers chapitres décrivent l’histoire de l’IA et proposent quelques réflexions sur son évolution future. Les capacités et les limites des systèmes actuels sont notamment décrites.

La deuxième partie traite des problèmes qui apparaissent dès lors qu’une machine dispose d’une part d’« intelligence ». Le quatrième chapitre est notamment consacré aux risques qui se dessinent avec l’importance toujours plus grande prise par les machines dans des domaines aussi variés que la surveillance, les armes automatisées ou le monde du travail.

La troisième et dernière partie propose des solutions originales pour imaginer un fonctionnement favorable et vertueux d’une super IA pour les hommes. Se fondant sur les principes de l’utilitarisme, Russell affirme que le seul but d’une IA doit être de maximiser la réalisation des préférences humaines. Elle doit cependant ignorer la nature de ces préférences et observer le comportement des hommes pour s’en inspirer et fixer son modèle. La machine dépendra ainsi étroitement des êtres humains pour son fonctionnement.

Ce livre suscite quelques interrogations. Les arguments justifiant l’émergence de la super IA manquent parfois de force. Le problème de la conscience des machines est par ailleurs mis de côté, l’auteur soulignant l’ignorance générale sur ce sujet, puis clôturant brutalement la discussion. Certains pourront enfin préférer privilégier la transparence ou la surveillance des programmes informatiques pour réduire l’autonomie des machines, plutôt qu’une pensée utilitariste, qui peut manquer de convaincre des experts peu sensibles à ses préceptes.

Il n’en reste pas moins que l’ouvrage de Stuart Russell est passionnant. Sa lecture stimulera sans nul doute ses lecteurs, qu’ils évoluent dans le secteur de l’IA ou qu’ils en découvrent seulement les fondements.

Jean-Christophe Noël

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