In Depth

Cyber Security, the Nuclear Threat and You: Cassandra's Guide to the 21st Century

Richard Power interviews Martin Hellman and mulls nuclear risk

By Richard Power

Page 4

As Hellman further elucidated his thinking around the "fool's home run," I kept thinking back to a baseball player named Dave Kingman. In his 16 years in the Major Leagues, Kingman struck out 1,816 times in 6,677 at bats. But he hit 442 home runs, and walked 608 times (mostly people pitching around him). Every time Kingman stepped to the plate, you expected to see a home run. The strike-outs didn't matter. The low batting average didn't matter. Once you had seen one of his monstrous home runs (they often left the stadium completely, in a long, high arc), you just wanted to see another.

"Fool home runs don't come often. You swing at a lot of wild pitches, and you have to be foolish enough, after you have swung at ten or twenty of these pitches and each time ended up with egg on your face, to get just as excited at swinging at the tenth or the twentieth one, because if you are not excited you have no hope of taking it to its conclusion, and yet a priori, when you are confronted with it, it looks no better than all those that went nowhere."

He identifies two fool's home runs he has hit in his life so far.

The first of them led to the birth of public-key cryptography.

"When I first started working in cryptography in a serious way, around 1970, my colleagues uniformly told me I was crazy, foolish, to do so. 'The National Security Agency had a huge budget, we didn't know how big it was in those days, but it was multi-billion dollar budget, and had been working on it for a decade, even in 1970; how can you hope to discover something they do not already know?' The second argument was, 'If you do anything good, they will classify it?' I had an answer to the first question, I said, 'I don't care what they know. It is not available for commercial exploitation. Also, it is well-established who gets credit for discovering something, it is the first to publish, not the first to discover and keep secret.' Both arguments were valid. It was foolish to work on cryptography in 1970, and yet, in hind sight, you would have to say it was very wise to be foolish."

The second involved the great push toward nuclear disarmament and world peace at the end of the "Cold War."

"My wife and I had become involved with a group working on the nuclear weapons issue, which was in sharp focus at the time. There was a palpable concern about the world going up in smoke. & My wife and I had the privilege having some very deep relationships with Russian information theorists, who had been here on exchange visits, and I had gone there in 1973 and 1976. We had very honest political discussions. So in 1984 we went to the Soviet Union to try to get a dialogue going between the scientific communities on new equations for survival in the nuclear age. We knew it would be impossible to have them at a public level. So it was again a foolish thing to do. And yet, there must have been some guidance from a guardian angel or a muse to send us on this mission. A year later, in 1985, Gorbachev came to power, which I never would have predicted, and at first he did not seem that amazing, but within a year he had lifted censorship and encouraged free debate. So then it made sense to do the project, but if we had waited until that point to start it, it would have taken two more years to build the trust, relationships and understanding. By starting two years earlier when it made no sense, we were in the perfect position and we were able to get the book out in six months time, a book that called for radical change in our approach to national security. Gorbachev endorsed the book. We were in on history."