PAPER AND COMMUNICATION WITHOUT IT, ELEMENTS BEYOND URANIUM, THE PHYSICAL CAPACITY OF MAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200610009-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 27, 2004
• Sequence Number: 9
• Publication Date: April 1, 1979
• Content Type: NSPR

STAT
Approved For R 6X/WA/ A 8-013
Article appeared April 1979
on page 37 -42
BOOKS
Paper and communication without it, elements
beyond. uranium, the physical capacity of man
by Philip Morrison
p APER BASICS: FORESTRY, MANUFAC- of up to 30 miles per hour. The dandy
TURE, SELECTION, PURCHASING, roll, with a texture of fine wire mesh,
MATHEMATICS AND METRICS, RE- smooths and squeezes the web and may
CYCLING, by David Saltman. Van Nos- impress a watermark. Up and down
trand Reinhold . Company ($10.85). around heated drying drums the paper
TOWARD PAPERLESS INFORMATION SYS- flows in clouds of steam; at the dry end
TEMS, by F. W. Lancaster. Academic the sheet still contains about 5 percent
Press ($13.50). Every year enough water; drier paper becomes brittle. Siz-
newsprint is made in the U.S. to paper ings, coatings and smoothing rolls fin-
over the. states of the Northeast. As ish the paper and cutters slit the rolls to
much again is made in all the other width. Sheet-cutting and packaging ma-
forms of that material, which has linked chines may come as a last step. Mills are
author to, reader for many centuries, mass-producers; they like to think of
since its invention by the Chinese during shipments by the carload, a nominal 20-
the epoch of-the Roman emperors. To- ton minimum. A ton of paper is the yield
day most paper is made from wood fi- of a couple of cords of wood, a ton and a
bers; the better grades also contain cot- half of coal, half a ton of bulk chemicals
ton fibers, not so much from the rags such as lime, clay and sulfur, and a cou-
of yesteryear as from cutoffs discarded pie of hundred tons of fresh water.
during the manufacture of new cotton We all know some of the conventional
goods. This magazine page is a coated. grades: bond, offset, coated book, news-
stock, several layers of clay filler and print and tablet paper, and thicker stuffs
white pigment having been rolled onto such as bristol and tag,- the file-folder
the moving web during its passage from material. A campaign for exceedingly
a wet slurry to a shippable roll; the pa- lightweight opaque coated papers suited
per's wood content is mostly softwood for fast color printing in large-circula-
fibers several millimeters long, with tion magazines has now gone about to
some dense, shorter hardwood fibers for its limit, the weight of the paper having
filler, all prepared by chemically cook- dropped a third below the old standard
ing out the lignin fraction of the wood. in the past several years.
Newsprint runs three-fourths or more, About half of Paper Basics is a primer
mechanically ground pulp; the fibers are of paper technology consisting of such
crushed under a four-foot-wide grinding background material: the rest is a know-
stone that turns logs into pulp under a ing guide to the paper market. David
deluge of water. The newsprint yield is Saltman is an old hand in the New York
high, because such pulp contains most printers' world, and his concern to help
of the wood, the lignin as well as the the buyer of paper is manifest in de-
cellulose. tailed accounts of just how to reckon
Papermaking has an air of the heroic. your needs (do not forget an allowance
Trees are pretty big as raw material, so for spoilage) and how to deal with the
that cutting and transport has always jobbers who subdivide and pass along
Look away from the loggers.' the
smoking mills, the tense bargaining of
{ Manhattan. In Toward Paperless Infor-
} mation Systems there sounds a voice in
prophecy. that of a University of Illinois
student of information systems in the
large. He sets out a forecast: the end of
ink on paper, apart from news and en-
tertainment. Why produce, ship and
store forever. on ten thousand shelves
multiplicate, acres of symbols when
those symbols can be summoned by mi-
crowave and cable at any place and at
the very moment the reader needs them?
The shelves, worldwide, turn into one
prodigious central file that is quickly at
the disposal of all. What our seer says
is not, however, the result of plausible
analysis alone, or even of forecasts -by
extrapolation and analogy.
L "In 1972," he writes. "I discovered
that the defense-intelligence community
in the United States was already moving
rather rapidly towards fully electronic
systems" -for "the dissemination, stor-
age, and retrieval of intelligence infor-
mation." He challenges our attention
"in the role of provocateur," as one who
has newly come to see that what the .
Central Intelligence Agency and its con-
tractors have done points the way to the
natural evolution of professional com-
munications in general.
By'1981, after a decade of trial and
growth, the full system called SAFE-
forget the awkward rationalization of
the acronym-should be working at CIA
headquarters in Langley. Va. Each of
the 2,000 professional production ana-
lysts who make up tle Jearned:_a=_of
that oracular agenc will have a console
been a heavy task. Today a tall tree can those mill-made carloads. Although the
be seized by the jaws of a hydraulic die- book is not always as complete as a
sel, dinosaur on huge tires, its limbs can' reader could wish with respect to pro-
be sheared off, its top clipped and its duction hows and whys, it is nonetheless
trunk cut to four-foot lengths in a min- quick with the common sense of a com-
ute or so. Another kind of machine can plicated marketplace. The technically
instead lift and swallow an entire tree literate have some obligation to under-
and then spew wood chips, bark and all, stand at least the simple basics of our
into a truck waiting at the output end. one hard-copy medium; here is an en-
The pulp is carefully bleached and try. (Recycling is a real enthusiasm of
at hand. Doubled viewing screen and
keyboard are the bare essentials: close
by will be a printer, and "regionally"
there will be a microfilm viewer-printer.
The task of an analyst is to contribute to
reports--either frequent ones, journalis-
tic in length and timing, or more com-
plete ones on matters of durable in-
terest. The coverage is worldwide and
includes economic, military, industrial,
political and biographical topics, and
more. The emphasis is policy-directed,
more on current concerns and the near
future than on the past, the eternal or the 1r
,
ly draining sheet of gulp along at speeds world of ~a sr.) eventual. Into the agency pour "mes-
Approved For Release 2004/'10/13 : CIA-RDP88-0135OR000200610009-8
prepared until finally it is delivered as this author's. Clear-cutting the forest,
a slurry (99 percent or more water) to wherever the slope admits, appeals to
a big moving wire mesh, the fourdrini- him more than the preservation of wil-
which is plainly all loss to the I
er that vibrates as it carries the steadi- derness
COmm"1'3
 ,a.
Approved For Release 2004/10/13
sages," about 6,000 or 8,000 a day.
Two-thirds of them arrive by teletype
(the "electricals"); the rest come on pa-
per. They include newspaper clippings,
the recordings of foreign broadcasts and
the cables of diplomatic and military
Once SAFE comes, the analyst will
begin the day with a "mail scan." Fol-
lowing his standing orders, or "interest
profile," the screen will bring to his at-
tention messages that have been com-
purer-screened by key-word combina-
tions, with these tentative computer as-
signments overseen by human decisions.
Half of the messages are standard items
that are always sent to the appropriate
people, and almost 40 percent more are
distributed ad hoc by the computer-
human combination. The message text
need be stored only once. The 28 million
paper copies now sent around each year
will drop greatly in number; each ana-
lyst will call up what he wants, examine
either extracts of the document or the
whole of it, cancel his address from the
item or reroute it. He can,pearch a mail
file for recent items; that is, for a few
days he can search the very text itself.
Later on the message is downgraded to
a text file that can be searched by vari-
ous indexing schemes, but not by every
word. Finally the analyst can use the
microforms. These will offer not only
the nonelectrical messages but also the
older and more general materials. The
microform store can be called up auto-
matically by its indicators and can be
displayed nearby for his use.
All of this is mail and library, so to
speak, but every analyst can also build
his own files. Into these he puts any
item, indexed as he chooses, with stan-
dard information already included (date;
source and so on). His tags will be his
own. accessible to no one else and as .
varied as he wishes. He can mark key
words with a light pen for inclusion in
his index; he can add comments, which
will come up with the document when-
ever he calls for it, both of them being
displayed on the divided screen simul-
taneously. All searches are interactive;
some files will be kept by groups or
by offices rather- than by individuals.
Through special terminals where expert
help is available the analyst can gain ac-_
cess to external digital files of informa-
tion such as that of The New York Times
and various medical and legal data bas-
es. (What he will not have is access to
any high-quality images. For quite some
time these digital systems will not work
for photography or for color.) He can
compute, edit and release his work to
add to the message stream directed to
those he seeks to reach. With that action
the system closes on itself.
: CIA-RDP88-0135OR000200610009-8
Secrecy and resilience against break-
downs (by redundancy of equipment
and by distribution of many functions
among minicomputers throughout the
network) appear to be attainable. The
system promises to save money (a handy
sum. in paper shredders alone, one imag-
ines) and above all to produce a "more
thoroughly and swiftly informed intelli-
gence community."
A paperless world for all. scientific
and technical communication is pre-
sented in scenario form in the last chap-
ters of this book. Based on the recent
literature and on the CIA experience
and plans, the picture includes the eco-
nomic rationale, the technical and spe-
cial problems of implementation and
the role of the future library, all as of
the millennial year 2000. Every research l
worker her terminal, certainly (and per-`
haps another one at home), keyboard,'
screen and so on. There she can write,
and send letters, reports and preprints,
and also receive them. "Virtual jour-
nals" will come regularly, edited, refer-
eed, with familiar names and standards,
but all by way of the screen. The re-
searcher can skim or read carefully. 4!
personal file _will include' an electron;-
ic notebook for recording research in
progress as informally as the user choos-
es. Editing programs will facilitate the
preparation of more formal reports at
every level up to full publication. Drafts
might be sent out'for the comments of
Of course, the on-line capabilities
would include all kinds of reference
books, bibliographies, indexes and simi-
lar tools. 'Just as journals will become
virtual, so libraries will be without
walls. Familiar colleagues-the "invisi-
ble colleges" of science-will be easy to
reach by message or even in conversa-
tion. Billing for all of this would be on a
pay-as-you-go basis, for items actually
used or services examined. A search
could widen from simple and local files
to unique national sources according to
need and expense. Personal files would
accumulate from all of this, holding or
disposing of whatever the user chose.'
Any portion of such informal stores
could be available to particular users or
to entire groups. The network foreseen
is flexible, widespread and even world-
wide. Its architecture might somewhat
resemble the CIA example. All that CIA
urgency seems less than a good mod-
el for much of science, which has a far
longer attention span.
Is it feasible? The memory needed for
all world journals is about 1013 bits of i
on-line storage each year, a couple of
million dollars' worth a year with laser
memories (it says here). An estimate
(made by an English author in 1977)
suggests that an investment of $2 billion
would place a world electronic journal
system in full operation, with a cost per f
year equal to the present cost `of jour-
nals, mainly for the mass provision. of
workable terminals; of course.
Will we enter the paperl.ess world?
The roles of publishers, journals and re-
search libraries would all change, and
capital demands would be heavy. Carr
research workers themselves adapt?
The author thinks so, the more since the
CIA professionals were won over by the
benefits demonstrated for their system.
And it is not we old fogies who must be
served but.the new generation. They are
used to screens.
Certainly paper will not vanish.
Books are marvels of easy access, and
notebooks even more so. (One would
like to know the results of an inventory
of the paper actually on hand at Langley
in 1984.) There is opened a vision of
terrible homogeneity and overload. Ad-
vertisements, letters-from dear friends
with good news, first-rate papers, non-
sense, long catalogues of data to be used
only years after receipt-all pour in, all
look just the same, with no cues to mem-
ory save the digital labels themselves.
No familiar bulk or cover would mark
the journal, the book or the long-expect-
ed reprint. Will textual memory work
well enough? The graphic arts have
practical value: visual aesthetics is not
separate from thought. A notebook
without graphs and sketches may suit I~I
a historian, but it would not suit a sci-
Computer output today is ugly
eptist.
stuff, hardly readable. Better graphics is
essential, and something more than a
keyboard input. Will those mass-pro-
terminals be good enough? Vi-
duction
sual images of quality will be seriously
limited. We see how television brings us
its murder and. merriment, hard data
and sheer fantasy, all of it in one tiny
size in the same place in the same room,
flat, miscolored and flickering-unreal
images.
Alan Turing was surely right in princi-
ple: the digit maps all knowledge. Thel
human brain has not evolved so, howev-1
er. It enjoys many channels of input, and,
cross-correlation is a sovereign mental
technique. Sensory dilution is a real dan-
ger; so is the extreme centralization o
stores. Multiplicity has always offered
protection: a single store will not save
knowledge in the long pull.
Still,, some of all of this will surely
come to pass.- The economics of sym-
bols ensures it. Once long ago the
learned must have complained. What,
write down those verses? A book is far
too thin a version of Homer's verse:
the living bard is individual, his song
a beauty; And yet for millenniums we
have been able to take joy from mere ink
Approved For Release 2004/10/13: CIA-RDP88-01350R00000- 6"I things flow.
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