Proofiness - Charles Seife [94]
mb = 4.45 + 0.75 × log(Y)
This means that a 6.0 earthquake in Russia would be caused by a bomb of about 100 kilotons, rather than the nearly 400-kiloton whopper that would produce the same-sized temblor in Nevada.
The alleged Soviet violations of the Threshold Test Ban Treaty were a result of deliberately using the wrong equation to calculate the yield. In the late Nixon administration, a group of Pentagon hard-liners opposed to arms control deals with the Soviet Union began to manufacture evidence that the Russians were violating the treaty. “People started circulating calculations of yield based upon the Nevada curve,” which artificially inflated the apparent size of Soviet explosions, says Fred Lamb, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Of course, some explosions seemed to be in violation of the treaty, and this caused people to go crazy.” Even though scientists complained that the numbers were wrong and that the “violations” were nonsense, they were ignored. “It became clear to me that [the false numbers] were being used by people opposed to arms control agreements in general,” Lamb says.
The matter came to a head in the Reagan administration. Officials within the Pentagon, particularly the hawkish assistant secretary for international security policy, pressed President Reagan to make louder and louder complaints about the Soviet Union cheating on nuclear treaties.88 Behind the scenes, a handful of seismologists and physicists were trying to get the administration to use the correct equation and to stop making false claims, but the Pentagon quashed their reports, and the assistant secretary launched a vicious attack on the scientists who were trying to get the truth to come out. “[He] actually accused seismologists of being communists and Soviet sympathizers,” says Lamb. And, in the meantime, the false allegations against the Soviet Union continued unhindered.
In 1985, Reagan went to Congress with a formal accusation: “Soviet nuclear testing activities for a number of tests constitute a likely violation of legal obligations under the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1974.” And he harped on it year after year, never relenting on his false accusations. “As evidence continued to accumulate, as the arguments were knocked away one by one, the administration still made a case for a ‘likely violation,’” says Columbia University geophysicist Paul Richards. (A joint experiment in 1988 where Americans were allowed to measure a Russian test yield directly proved beyond any doubt that the seismologists were correct all along. The second equation was correct, and the Soviets hadn’t violated the treaty.)
Yet the lie was effective propaganda. It gave hard-liners a justification for rejecting peaceful overtures from the Soviet Union, and the dream of a comprehensive test ban treaty—a moratorium on all nuclear testing—was delayed for more than a decade. It only came to be in 1996, during the Clinton administration. Though the president signed the treaty, Democrats had since lost control of Congress, and the Republican Senate refused to ratify it. As a result, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty remains in legal limbo unto this day.
The accusations were a diabolical piece of propaganda. A subtle bit of proofiness allowed America to bear false witness against our Soviet adversaries. It’s a classic pattern; indeed, the whole episode looks quite similar to the propaganda that led to the Iraq war. Hawkish government officials, very much like the assistant secretary for international security policy, leaked phony information to a New York Times reporter, who then used the newspaper as a platform for self-serving propaganda. It’s chilling to realize just how similar the episode was.
The hawkish assistant secretary for international security policy was a neoconservative gentleman named Richard Perle. And the Times reporter? Judith Miller.
Proofiness is toxic to a democracy, because numbers have a hold on us. They are powerful—almost mystical. Because we think that numbers represent truth,