The Second Survivability Problem

The first survivability problem was nuclear. The second is machine speed.

Albert Wohlstetter's survivability problem asked whether the nuclear deterrent could survive a surprise first strike. The second asks whether command-and-control networks can survive a machine-speed first blow when software rules alone may not hold.

Machine-speed superior intelligence (SI) threat actors iterate cheap attacks faster than human judgment can respond. The attacker pays near-zero marginal cost per probe; the defender bears the full burden of evaluating and discarding it. Building on the argument that proof-of-work is a national-defense technology for physical power projection, this monograph joins proof-of-work to the deterrence canon of Wohlstetter, Schelling, and Brodie. It argues that proof-of-work cost imposition reproduces the structure of survivable deterrence that RAND worked out for the nuclear age. It argues that proof-of-work has been misfiled under commerce and finance (Title 15) and belongs under Title 10 as a non-lethal capability: Physical Cost-Imposition Architecture (PCIA), which posts a thermodynamic price floor at every gateway that demands it. An SI threat actor can optimize code and synthesize credentials instantly, but it cannot fabricate joules.

Written for senior national security leaders and congressional policymakers.

This book builds on Jason P. Lowery's Softwar (2023). Physical cost imposition, bitpower, digital antlers, and the benefit-to-cost ratio of attack (BCRA) are his ideas; the extensions are this book's.

About the author: Francis S. Bothwell holds the PhB, STB, and STL from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum) in Rome, where his licentiate thesis treated Resolutio et compositio in the moral science of S. Thomas Aquinas. He lived in Rome for fifteen years and taught Roman history there as an adjunct professor for DeSales University.