From this morning’s NYT, here. A nice quote from my former boss:
France A. Córdova, an astrophysicist and past director of the National Science Foundation, said the study of three-body phenomena in the natural sciences could nonetheless help reveal the military risks. “Things are changing very rapidly,” she said. “Anything that helps in understanding that is great.”
William J Broad New York Times, June 27, 2023
One of President Obama’s favorite science fiction novels was “The Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. So of course, I read it, and that’s how I learned about the complexity science side of three newtonian bodies interacting with one another (in the case of the novel it’s triple-star system). But I hadn’t thought about the issue in terms of nuclear arms control (China, Russia and the US). Broad’s idea here is that while things were relatively simple with the diad of the Cold War, nuclear deterrence will become less manageable as China builds out its ICBM force. To my mind, the whole premise is kind of moot, because we haven’t had a diad for some time. France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea come to mind right away. The point is: (which the article notes correctly) it isn’t the size of the missile force. Rather it’s the existence of the force itself. Nuclear weapons geopolitics has been multipolar for some time.
However, the idea that complexity science may have something profound to tell us about geopolitics *is* quite interesting. Within that framing, should we think of the relevant agents as Westphalian nation states (as in the game Diplomacy)? Or going along with Thomas Carlyle, are the agents the human leaders of those states?
Discoverers and Discoveries 