Some thirty years ago, the RAND Corporation, America's foremost Cold War think-tank, faced a strange strategic problem. How could the U.S. authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war?
Post-nuclear America would need a command-and-control network, linked from city to city, state to state, base to base. However, no matter how thoroughly that network was armored or protected, its switches and wiring would always be vulnerable to the impact of atomic bombs. A nuclear attack would destroy any conceivable network.
How would the network itself be commanded and controlled? Any…
