About the password-protected bullets, reader NS says...

Bizarre... Permissive action links (PALs) are the controls embedded (literally -- they're inside the warhead containment barrier) into nuclear weapons to prevent their accidental or unauthorised use.
Whatever you think of the morals of the weapons themselves, the command and control mechanism has had a 0% failure of negative control (e.g. no
accidental detonations) for over 50 years, which given the worldwide count of warheads is an impressive record. Whether there have been
positive control failures (e.g. failure of a detonation that was properly authorised) are unknown but are very likely to also be zero.

Kuhn, who is a *really* bright bloke, is seriously contemplating adding such controls to individual bullets...

Yeah, that'll work. First there's the cost. Then there's the positive control issue; you need to be really, *really* sure that the system won't fail when the trigger's pulled. For nukes you can afford to spend a shitload of money in the design and construction of each individual PAL to do this (it's actually a fascinating topic; a lot of nanotech research went into PAL design). For conventional ammunition, no chance.

This isn't just a theoretical issue either; many modern "IFF" systems don't prevent the targetting of friendly forces, they warn against it.
And again, the budget for a missile IFF system is much higher than that of a rifle round...

Finally, what problem is it trying to solve? The majority of unlawful killings in combat are committed due to misidentification or tactical
confusion rather than malice. The use of PALs in nukes prevents unauthorised individuals, such as submarine commanders, "missilemen" in silos or terrorists from detonating the weapons (although this applied at varying degrees through history; at one stage all the Minuteman PAL codes were set to 000000 as SAC were too worried about the risk of losing the codes in a crisis), and also prevents accidental detonation in the event of fire, conventional explosion etc. But in small arms combat, you can't possibly have a command chain that will react fast enough to authorise the use of *individual* rounds. You'll say "squad X
is authorised to fire" and leave the individual decisions to them.

It seems to me that the money could be much better spent, for example on training, better intel and much clearer and appropriate rules of engagement for combat personnel. Technology is not going to fix this problem any time soon...

Posted by: Noah Shachtman at June 28, 2006 11:44 AM