The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 66

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The Kleinrock controversy is interesting because it shows that most of the Internet’s creators preferred—to use the metaphor of the Internet itself—a system of fully distributed credit. They instinctively isolated and routed around any node that tried to claim more significance than the others. The Internet was born of an ethos of creative collaboration and distributed decision making, and its founders liked to protect that heritage. It became ingrained in their personalities—and in the DNA of the Internet itself.

WAS IT NUKE-RELATED?

One of the commonly accepted narratives of the Internet is that it was built to survive a nuclear attack. This enrages many of its architects, including Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts, who insistently and repeatedly debunked this origin myth. However, like many of the innovations of the digital age, there were multiple causes and origins. Different players have different perspectives. Some who were higher in the chain of command than Taylor and Roberts, and who have more knowledge of why funding decisions were actually made, have begun to debunk the debunking. Let’s try to peel away the layers.

There is no doubt that when Paul Baran proposed a packet-switched network in his RAND reports, nuclear survivability was one of his rationales. “It was necessary to have a strategic system that could withstand a first attack and then be able to return the favor in kind,” he explained. “The problem was that we didn’t have a survivable communications system, and so Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missiles would take out the entire telephone-communication system.”⁷⁶ That led to an unstable hair-trigger situation; a nation was more likely to launch a preemptive strike if it feared that its communications and ability to respond would not survive an attack. “The origin of packet switching is very much Cold War,” he said. “I got very interested in the subject of how the hell you build a reliable command and control system.”⁷⁷ So in 1960 Baran set about devising “a communication network which will allow several hundred major communications stations to talk with one another after an enemy attack.”⁷⁸

That may have been Baran’s goal, but remember that he never convinced the Air Force to build such a system. Instead his concepts were adopted by Roberts and Taylor, who insisted that they were merely seeking to create a resource-sharing network for ARPA researchers, not one that would survive an attack. “People have been taking what Paul Baran wrote about a secure nuclear defense network and applying it to the ARPANET,” said Roberts. “Of course, they had nothing to do with each other. What I told Congress was that this was for the future of science in the world—the civilian world as well as the military—and the military would benefit just as much as the rest of the world. But it clearly wasn’t for military purposes. And I didn’t mention nuclear war.”⁷⁹ At one point Time magazine reported that the Internet had been built to assure communications after a nuclear attack, and Taylor wrote a letter to the editors correcting them. Time didn’t print it. “They sent me back a letter insisting that their sources were correct,” he recalled.⁸⁰

Time’s sources were higher in the chain of command than Taylor. Those who worked at ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office, which was responsible for the network project, may have sincerely believed that their project had nothing to do with nuclear survivability, but some of the higher-ups at ARPA believed that was, in fact, one of its critical missions. And that is how they convinced Congress to keep funding it.

Stephen Lukasik was the deputy director of ARPA from 1967 to 1970 and then director until 1975. In June 1968 he was able to get the formal authorization and appropriation for Roberts to proceed with building the network. That was just a few months after the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. Antiwar protests were at their height, and students had rioted at top universities. Defense Department money was not flowing freely to costly programs designed merely to allow collaboration among academic researchers. Senator Mike Mansfield and others had begun demanding that only projects directly relevant to a military mission get funding. “So in this environment,” Lukasik said, “I would have been hard pressed to plow a lot of money into the network just to improve the productivity of the researchers. That rationale would just not have been strong enough. What was strong enough was this idea that packet switching would be more survivable, more robust under damage to a network. . . . In a strategic situation—meaning a nuclear attack—the president could still communicate to the missile fields. So I can assure you, to the extent that I was signing the checks, which I was from 1967 on, I was signing them because that was the need I was convinced of.”⁸¹

In 2011 Lukasik was amused and somewhat annoyed by what had become the conventional dogma, that the ARPANET had not been built for strategic military reasons. So he wrote a piece entitled “Why the Arpanet Was Built,” which he circulated to colleagues. “ARPA’s existence and its sole purpose was to respond to new national security concerns,” he explained. “In the instant case it was the command and control of military forces, especially those deriving from the existence of nuclear weapons and deterring their use.”⁸²

This directly contradicted the statements of one of his predecessors as ARPA director, Charles Herzfeld, the Viennese refugee who approved Bob Taylor’s proposal of a time-sharing research network in 1965. “The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim,” Herzfeld insisted many years later. “To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA’s mission to do this.”⁸³

Two semiofficial histories authorized by ARPA come down on opposite sides. “It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war,” said the history written by the Internet Society. “This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study.”⁸⁴ On the other hand, the “Final Report” by the National Science Foundation in 1995 declared, “An outgrowth of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, the ARPANET’s packet-switching scheme was meant to provide reliable communications in the face of nuclear attack.”⁸⁵

So which view is correct? In this case, both are. For the academics and researchers who were actually building the network, it had only a peaceful purpose. For some of those who were overseeing and funding the project, especially in the Pentagon and Congress, it also had a military rationale. Stephen Crocker was a graduate student in the late 1960s who became integrally involved in coordinating how the ARPANET would be designed. He never considered nuclear survivability to be part of his mission. Yet when Lukasik sent around his 2011 paper, Crocker read it, smiled, and revised his thinking. “I was on top and you were on the bottom, so you really had no idea of what was going on and why we were doing it,” Lukasik told him. To which Crocker replied, with a dab of humor masking a dollop of wisdom, “I was on the bottom and you were on the top, so you had no idea of what was going on or what we were doing.”⁸⁶

As Crocker finally realized, “You can’t get all the guys involved to agree on why it was built.” Leonard Kleinrock, who had been his supervisor at UCLA, came to the same conclusion: “We will never know if nuclear survivability was the motivation. It was an unanswerable question. For me, there was no notion of a military rationale. But if you go up the chain of command, I am sure that some were saying that surviving a nuclear attack was a reason.”⁸⁷

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