Paul Baran, the Anti-Strangelove

The computing visionary (1926-2011) imagined the Internet to save the world from nuclear annihilation

By Brendan Greeley

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(Corrects Baran's date of death.)

In 1960, the Rand Corp. published a 24-page paper, opaquely titled "Reliable Digital Communications Systems Using Unreliable Network Repeater Nodes." The paper came as a response to a problem that was vexing the U.S. Air Force: How could the President send orders to the commanders of his missile silos after a first strike by the Soviets? Thirty years later, in an oral history with the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota, the paper's author, Paul Baran, explained that his intention was to prevent the U.S. from launching a preemptive attack. He saw the arms race as a dangerous test of game theory: A country worried about the survival of its command and control system was a country with a jittery trigger finger. Baran, who died on Mar. 26, imagined the Internet in order to save the world from nuclear annihilation.

He would demur, of course; he liked to say of technological progress that Peter and Paul each laid stones that became a cathedral. But his metaphor suggests a less modest truth, that he stood among the holy few government-funded academics who created the Internet. And the lessons of his academic work—though with his master's in engineering, he protested that his wife, not he, was the only Dr. Baran—still inform how we think about and manage the Internet today.

Baran opened his Rand paper by considering the day after the bombs fell. "Plan to minimize potential destruction and to do all those things necessary," he wrote, "to permit the survivors of the holocaust to shuck their ashes and reconstruct the economy swiftly." We now have think tanks and consulting firms; in the beginning there was Rand—and only Rand could have produced that line. World War II had proved the value of bringing scientists together to solve problems, and in 1946, Douglas Aircraft put a group of thinkers in a building in downtown Santa Monica, Calif., under a single yearly contract from the Air Force to think the unthinkable. In Paul Baran's day, the people of Rand Corp. loomed, brainy and calculating, in American movies and song.

They wore white shirts with skinny ties and used a slide rule called the "Rand bomb damage effect calculator" to estimate megadeaths. They also sat in beanbag chairs and rattan lawn furniture. They built a tunnel underneath the Pacific Coast Highway to the beach. The futurist Herman Kahn, one of the models for the character of Dr. Strangelove, worked there. So did Daniel Ellsberg, who in a crisis of conscience in the early 1970s leaked much of his Vietnam War work at Rand—a trove that became known as the Pentagon Papers. Rand's one-client business gave it a purpose, but the nature of its contract with the Air Force also gave it an extraordinary amount of freedom to pursue strange ideas. James Thomson, Rand's current president, says people used to say at the company that the Air Force "threw money over the transom to see what came out the door." Rand employees chose what they wanted to work on; Baran picked the survival of networks.

He started by abandoning the idea of perfection. AT&T; (T), then the country's telephone monopoly, designed its network to make the most efficient use of every element. Yet the system's centralized structure left it vulnerable to attack. Baran assumed that, in the event of a nuclear war, any single point—or "node"—in a communications network carried a high probability of failure. He proposed extra capacity, and an architecture that "makes itself content with the assured operation of a certain fraction of the network."

Then he hied to the living room couch. He posited that if he absolutely had to catch the cowboys-and-cardsharps television show Maverick, he might buy a second TV. If each TV had a 0.001 percent chance of failure, there was a 0.000001 percent chance that he would miss his show. To make his theory more relevant, he asked the reader to imagine his network as members of Congress voting from their home offices. He would measure success by imagining an attack and comparing the number of surviving congressmen to the number of survivors able to talk to each other. Then, as they also learned to do at Rand, he ran scenarios.