The MANIAC, page 11
To military strategists, game theory felt like a gift from the gods, because our work appeared to offer a rational way to play out and win wars. This delighted Johnny, who was by no means a pacifist, and he quickly answered when the world’s first “think tank,” the RAND Corporation, called on him to find military applications for our theory. Those devils at RAND revered him, and used game theory as if it were a modern oracle, over which Johnny presided like a babbling sibyl swept up in a trance. He was one of the first to openly advocate for a surprise nuclear attack against the Soviet Union, not because he hated communists (well, he did) but rather because he was convinced that it was the only way to prevent World War III. And our theory—or at least his interpretation of it—did back his thinking. “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” That’s what Johnny said to Life magazine, but behind his awful glibness lay his conviction that peace required that we rain nuclear hell down on the USSR before they could develop their own atomic bombs. The future he envisioned, once the nuclear fallout dissipated and the many millions dead were tallied and counted, was a long-lasting Pax Americana, a period of stability unlike the world had ever known, gained at the highest cost we have ever paid. I found his cold rationality the stuff of nightmares, but Johnny did not see it that way at all: if you looked at it logically using the models of game theory, he said, a nuclear first strike was not just the optimal solution, it was the only fully logical decision to make. But in 1949, things changed: just four years after the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USSR got the bomb, and by 1953 they had more than four hundred warheads, which meant that any nuclear strike by the US would be reciprocated. Johnny’s ideas, or some version of them, came to dominate the Cold War’s balance of terror. Faced with unsolvable dilemmas, the Pentagon, the CIA, RAND, and many other outfits began to play out increasingly complex war scenarios based on our theory. But when our equations—which were so clear and transparent when applied to harmless amusements such as poker—became tangled up with the struggles and politics of the nuclear age, they gave birth to an inescapable labyrinth that defies the imagination, triggering an atomic arms race between the western democracies and the countries that hid behind the Iron Curtain, a folly that almost inexorably led them to the delirious stalemate of Mutually Assured Destruction, where any aggression would be automatically met with the full atomic might of the aggressed, causing the obliteration of all parties. MAD called for long-range bombers carrying nuclear weapons to circle the globe twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, without ever landing; these airplanes were linked via a vast network to submarines that patrolled the abyss, loaded with atomic warheads, while thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles—which could fly from Washington to Moscow in less than thirty minutes—waited patiently for the trumpet call of the Apocalypse in deep, underground silos and fortified bunkers. This precarious equilibrium, this macabre game, never really ended, even after the Cold War did. Far too many of these weapons are still there, biding their time, watched over by flawed and aging mechanisms of control, preserved in steel sarcophagi like the long-dead bodies of the ancient pharaohs, ready and waiting for the life that begins with death. Taking all of this into consideration, it’s no wonder that Johnny was convinced that humankind would not survive the many wonders of industrial society, but I’m sure that if he were alive, he would be relieved by the fact that his worst nightmares have not come true, and that our theory of games blossomed far beyond the hothouse of politics and is used in everything from computer science and ecology to philosophy and biology, where our equations model how cancer cells grow, spread, and communicate. Some of our terminology has even seeped into common vernacular, with people referring to many aspects of social life as “zero-sum games.” And that just goes to show how it is almost impossible to foretell the consequences and applications of ideas and discoveries, and why it is so hard to properly judge even the realities that we have taken part in ourselves. Many people still believe that Mutually Assured Destruction helped prevent the Cold War from turning hot. But to me, it remains sinful and unforgivable, and serves as a personal reminder that neither the natural nor the social sciences are ever neutral, even if they aspire to be that way. Because I can’t help but recognize that Johnny—who proved the theorem at the heart of our work—was profoundly pessimistic, his vision of human beings was grim and cynical, and so his mind may have unwittingly tainted the equations that upheld our thinking with its own dark tinge. I myself suffer from a morbid sense of despair, and even now, decades after I worked with von Neumann, I still find myself questioning our central tenet: Is there really a rational course of action in every situation? Johnny proved it mathematically beyond a doubt, but only for two players with diametrically opposing goals. So there may be a vital flaw in our reasoning that any keen observer will immediately become aware of; namely, that the minimax theorem that underlies our entire framework presupposes perfectly rational and logical agents, agents who are interested only in winning, agents who pose a perfect understanding of the rules and a total recall of all their past moves, agents who also have a flawless awareness of the possible ramifications of their own actions, and of their opponents’ actions, at every single step of the game. The only person I ever met who was exactly like that was Johnny von Neumann. Normal people are not like that at all. Yes, they lie, they cheat, deceive, connive, and conspire, but they also cooperate, they can sacrifice themselves for others, or simply make decisions on a whim. Men and women follow their guts. They heed hunches and make careless mistakes. Life is so much more than a game. Its full wealth and complexity cannot be captured by equations, no matter how beautiful or perfectly balanced. And human beings are not the perfect poker players that we envisioned. They can be highly irrational, driven and swayed by their emotions, subject to all kinds of contradictions. And while this sparks off the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us, it is also a mercy, a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason.
Eugene Wigner
The Hungarian Horsemen of the Apocalypse
People now think, looking back at what we did, that we were all monsters and madmen, because how could we bring forth those demons into the world, how could we play around with such terrible forces, forces that could very well wipe us from the face of the Earth, or send us back to a time before reason, when the only fire we knew was sparked by the lightning that angry gods hurled down at us as we trembled in our caves. A dirty little secret that almost all of us share, but that hardly anyone speaks aloud, is that what drew us in, what made us fashion those weapons, was not the desire for power or wealth, fame, or glory, but the sheer thrill of the science involved. It was too much to resist. The extremities of pressure and temperature created by the nuclear chain reaction, the rarefied physics, the colossal release of energy . . . it was unlike anything we had ever known. The hydrodynamics of the shock and blast waves, or that awesome light that almost blinded us, had never been seen before by human eyes. We were discovering something that not even God had created before us. Because those conditions hadn’t existed elsewhere in the universe; fission is commonplace in the heart of stars or massive celestial engines, but we achieved it inside a little sphere of metal, just a meter and a half in diameter, holding an even tinier core of just six kilograms of plutonium nestled within. It still amazes me that we could do something like that. So it wasn’t just the frantic race to beat the Nazis (and later the Russians, and then the Chinese, and so on and so forth till the world’s end), it was the joy of thinking the unthinkable and doing the impossible, pushing past all human limits by burning Prometheus’s gift to its utmost incandescence.
We, the Martians, played an oversized role in the American nuclear program. It’s what they called us after a joke Fermi made when someone asked him whether extraterrestrials were real: “Of course they are, and they already live among us. They just call themselves Hungarians.” We seemed alien to them. And perhaps we were. Because how could such a little country—surrounded as it was by enemies on all sides and torn between rival empires—produce so many extraordinary scientists in so little time? Leo Szilard thought up the nuclear chain reaction that led to the atomic bomb while he was crossing a street in London, in 1933, and he patented the first nuclear reactor; von Kármán was a virtuoso when it came to supersonic flight and rocket propulsion, so he was key to the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles; I led a group that designed the nuclear reactors needed to convert uranium into weapons-grade plutonium; while Teller has the distinction (not unmerited though exaggerated) of being considered the father of that death-god destroyer of worlds, the hydrogen bomb; so naturally Jancsi—who was the most alien of the lot—came up with his own sardonic name for us: the Hungarian Horsemen of the Apocalypse. He believed that our country’s outstanding intellectual achievements were not a product of history or chance, or any kind of government initiative, but due to something stranger and more fundamental: a pressure on the whole society of that part of Central Europe, a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of either producing the unusual or facing extinction. Once, when he and I were discussing his theories of nuclear deterrence, he asked me if I knew what had remained inside Pandora’s box after she had opened it and let out all the evils and ills into the world. “Right there,” he said, “at the bottom of the jar—because it was a large urn or a jar, you know, not a box at all—right there, waiting quietly and obediently was Elpis, which most people like to regard as the daimona of hope and counterpart to Moros, the spirit of doom, but to me, a better and more precise translation of her name and of her nature would be our concept of expectation. Because we don’t know what comes after evil, do we? And sometimes the deadliest things, those that hold enough power to destroy us, can become, given time, the instruments of our salvation.” I asked him why the gods would let out all the hurts, pains, illnesses, and iniquities to roam free while keeping hope trapped behind the lid of the jar. He winked and said that it was because they know things that we can never know. That is exactly how I feel about him, and the reason why I have always resisted condemning Jancsi, or judging him too harshly, because I believe that a mind like his—one of inexorable logic—must have made him understand and accept many things that most of us do not even want to acknowledge, and cannot begin to comprehend. He did not see the way the rest of us do, and this colored many of his moral judgments. With his Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, for example, he wasn’t trying to fight a war, or beat the casino, or finally win a game of poker; he was aiming at nothing less than the complete mathematization of human motivation, he was trying to capture some part of mankind’s soul with mathematics, and I think that, to a large extent, he succeeded in setting down the rules by which people make choices, economic and otherwise. So perhaps the embers of the fire that Hilbert had kindled in him, his grand hope to arrest the chaotic spinning of this world, were not completely extinguished. I could also be deluding myself in that respect. Maybe he had no lofty goals at all. Maybe he was merely enjoying himself irresponsibly, as he always did. Virginia Davis thought as much. She was a fabulous textile artist married to Martin Davis, one of the dullest mathematicians I ever met, a logician who worshipped Jancsi and would follow him around the institute like those unfortunate ducklings who, having been separated from their mothers, imprint on the oddest things, like a car, or a dog, or even a human being, and then behave like another species for their entire lives. Martin would always hang around Jancsi and laugh too loudly at his jokes, but one time, when Klari had asked us all over for dinner and Janos was explaining the intricacies of nuclear diplomacy and the “Dead Hand” (a fully autonomous weapons control system that he believed the Russians were developing, and that would retaliate against any American attack with an automatic response that needed next to no human involvement at all), he said that the nuclear arms race, while clearly wicked and dangerous, had accelerated the development of certain completely unconnected areas of science a thousandfold. Virginia was livid. She got up from her seat, grabbed her coat, and said that it was reckless men like Jancsi, who could not think past mathematics and see the real world inhabited by real human beings, who would be the death of us all. Didn’t we realize where the power of the atom was taking us? Did we not see what the hydrogen bomb could do? We were all shocked, but Jancsi didn’t even blink. He downed his scotch and, before Virginia dragged her whimpering husband out the door, told her, “I’m thinking about something much more important than bombs, my dear. I’m thinking about computers.”
In 1946, von Neumann promised the United States military that he would build them a computer powerful enough to handle the intricate calculations needed for the hydrogen bomb. All he asked for in return was to freely dispose of any computing time left over from the bomb calculations, and to dedicate it to whatever he desired.
Julian Bigelow
Singed hair and burned whiskers
This was still highly classified information.
But I mentioned it to Johnny von Neumann.
“We’re running ballistic calculations on a machine. Making range tables for the artillery boys. Can do three hundred multiplications a second.”
Jumped as if I’d stuck a cherry bomb up his ass.
* * *
I was coming home from the military base—Aberdeen Proving Ground—saw him on the railroad platform. He was a regular there, a highly valued weapons expert, but we’d never met before.
Demanded I show it to him.
Borrowed the phone at the train station.
Simply had to see the machine for himself.
* * *
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
ENIAC.
World’s first digital general-purpose computer.
A real leviathan.
Used up an entire floor at the Moore School in Philly.
Hundred feet long.
Ten feet high.
Three feet deep.
And more than thirty tons.
Vacuum tubes, crystal diodes, relays, resistors, and capacitors.
With five million hand-soldered joints.
A hundred twenty degrees in the control room when it was running.
Used so much power it gave rise to an apocryphal story: the lights of Philadelphia dimmed when we turned it on.
Bullshit.
What it could do was twenty hours of human work in thirty seconds.
* * *
The thing about the ENIAC was that you could actually see the calculations taking place.
You could walk inside it and watch the bits flipping.
Nobody was quick enough to keep up with the numbers. Not in real time anyway.
But Johnny was.
I remember him there, standing silent within the computation, staring at the lights flashing in front of his eyes.
One machine thinking inside of another.
Hired me the next day. Told me we were going to build a better one at the Institute for Advanced Study.
So I jumped on a train.
* * *
Turned out nobody wanted us there.
The mathematicians were disgusted.
Dirty men with dirty fingers would pollute their hallowed environment.
“Engineers in my wing? Over my dead body!”
Senior paleontologist said that.
No kidding.
’Cause we actually soldered things, burned our hands, while they would just roam around like dinosaurs with their heads in the clouds trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe.
We?
We were building something.
Something that would change their world.
And they despised us for it.
* * *
There was no room for us.
We wound up in the office that was meant for Gödel’s secretary.
’Cause he never had one. Never needed one. Only published one paper every ten years or so.
Still, wonderful coincidence.
’Cause his work lies at the base of all computer science . . .
We made our plans in there but we couldn’t build it, not in that room.
So we moved down.
Where?
Basement, of course.
* * *
It’s hard to overestimate the importance of what we did.
Our computer wasn’t the first.
Wasn’t even the third.
But it was a stored-program computer.
And the one that everyone copied.
We published and made public every step of the process.
So it was cloned in 1,500 places around the world.
It became the blueprint.
