Proofiness - Charles Seife [93]
However, masters of propaganda know that proofiness is arguably the best weapon in their arsenal. It’s subtle. If the proofiness is manufactured by an expert, it can be very hard to discover. A wellcrafted number deployed in precisely the right manner can move American—and world—opinion in a favorable direction. And it’s extremely hard to combat, especially if there aren’t enough data to prove that the number is fake. A smart proofiness-based propaganda campaign can remain effective for decades. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, a group of hard-liners in the Pentagon was responsible for an extremely crafty propaganda offensive based upon a choice piece of proofiness, one that all but obliterated a Democratic push for a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union.
On July 20, 1982, the front page of the New York Times contained the surprising story that the United States was abandoning nuclear treaty talks with Russia. It was a carefully controlled leak; government officials had contacted a Times reporter to break the news to the world and to explain the rationale for what might seem like a bellicose act. The next day, a follow-up story in the Times explained the administration’s position: the Soviet Union was probably cheating on a prior nuclear treaty, so there was no point to signing a new agreement. The accusation was quite specific; an unnamed government official was accusing the Soviet Union of likely violating the Threshold Test Ban Treaty, which dictated that nuclear tests could be no larger than 150 kilotons—about ten times the size of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. “On several occasions seismic signals from the Soviet Union have been of sufficient magnitude to call into question Soviet compliance with the threshold of 150 kilotons,” the (unnamed) official told the Times reporter. Within a few days, the rhetoric got a little stronger. The Times repeated one (again unnamed) government official’s assertion that “several” Soviet tests “had been estimated at 300 kilotons.” These accusations were specific and credible, and they were devastating to Democratic hopes of signing a comprehensive test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. They were also utterly false. The accusations were a tricky bit of proofiness in an obscure equation used to estimate the size of nuclear blasts.
It’s a really tough task to figure out the size of an underground blast halfway around the world. The best method is to listen with seismographs—the same instruments that detect earthquakes—and from the violence of the shaking, you can get a rough estimate of how big an underground blast might be. Over the years, geologists got pretty good at making these estimates. After observing many experiments, they came up with an excellent equation for calculating the yield of a nuclear weapon detonated at the Nevada Test Site based upon how violently the earth shook:
mb = 3.92 + 0.81 × log(Y)
where mb is the Richter scale of the earthquake caused by the test and Y is the yield of the nuclear explosive in kilotons. This was how the government used to calculate the yield of nuclear tests in the Soviet Union. Based upon the violence of the earthquakes, the Reagan administration concluded that the Russians were detonating 300-kiloton bombs, in direct violation of the treaty.
The only problem was that the equation was wrong. The precise shape of the equation depends on a lot of factors, particularly the geology of the site where the blast occurs. A blast in hard bedrock will shake the earth much more than the same-sized explosion in loose, silty soil. Similarly, seismographs will have an easier time picking up an explosion in a geologically stable region than in an active region that’s crisscrossed by faults. Nevada is the latter; it is in a relatively active region of the earth with loose tuff and alluvial soils, while the Semipalatinsk test site in the Soviet Union is in hard basaltic rock in a relatively stable region of the planet. As a result, the Russian equation had a similar form, but it was calibrated somewhat differently from the