Lies and liars

On By gyonas10 Comments

My most popular blog post during the past three years has been about lying. I wondered why there was so much interest in that subject. Upon reflection, I have concluded that our preoccupation with lying stems from our inability to access factual information and sift through the vast piles of alternative facts. We are increasingly faced with mass communication that is filled with lies, counter lies and even more lies. So I guess my readers would like to know more about lying… assuming I tell them the truth.

In 1984, in my job as Chief Scientist for President Reagan’s Star Wars program, I learned about the evolution of misinformation. I continually faced the dilemma of representing a program that lacked a fact-based and timely technical foundation, but I advertised it realistically as a research program to uncover the facts. Congress, of course, was not so happy to fund an enigma that Reagan said was a sure thing. Meanwhile, I expressed a desire to answer the myriad serious questions provided that we received the $25 billion we said we needed. I estimated that it would be at least five years before we could say whether or not Reagan’s promises to protect all of us were true. Reagan really hated both nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union’s communism based government, and his logic was to somehow eliminate both of those things.

I have learned that at first most public officials in the world of politics, science, technology and medicine capture the trust of their political allies. Their claims are thought to be truths. Then their political detractors accuse them of telling outright lies, followed by denials and more accusations. Even the widely respected Dr. Fauci has now been accused of lying about wearing masks and recently about funding the Wuhan lab and has had to defend his case.

What I found then and over the years was that the true believers were not interested in considering any facts. I eventually learned that the Soviet military industrial complex was selling their own SDI, and Gorbachev had no choice but to go along with their ill-fated attempt to launch their own SDI killing Death Star called Polyus.  Their chief engineer and program leader believed their space-based laser could dominate space. The United States’ advocate of space control, Edward Teller, made similar claims about his pet project, the X-ray laser. Secretary of State George Shultz and Reagan’s White House scientific adviser had serious doubts. Were both the U.S. and Soviet leaders lying to their citizens?

Today, the most widely accused purveyor of doubtful claims is Donald Trump, but many believe Trump’s statements and claims. A majority of Republicans believe Trump really won the election but widespread voter fraud stole the election from him. His lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was apparently sincere in repeating Trump’s claims but he was disbarred from practicing law because the court said he was “knowingly making false statements.” A lawyer is not supposed to defend their client by misrepresenting the facts. Even as a technical adviser to the SDI program, I was warned by the legal staff at the SDI to never ever, ever lie to Congress under any circumstances, but also to not volunteer too much of the truth. My approach was to provide extensive technical information that the questioners would find confusing and dull.

When it comes to lying, it is also possible that the communicator actually may believe his claims are true. This may be the case with Giuliani. A person is not lying if that person believes their own claims. If the claim is a blatant factual falsehood and the audience is predisposed to believe it, then it will be repeated and embellished and become an even more outrageous lie that the true believers will repeat and often even invent nonexistent evidence to support the lie.

If the believer observes only the sources of information that are biased in one direction, then it is likely that the lie will get reinforced with no opportunity to consider contrary points of view. Once believers share the lie widely they will have their own self-images and reputations at stake and will ever more forcefully defend the lie, so that even doubters start to believe the blatant lie. The doubter can easily begin to wonder, “Well, maybe there could be something to this story after all, and maybe I was wrong to doubt the storyteller.” The key to convincing the doubters is to repeat the lie over and over again, and it seems that with enough repetition, the lie can become a belief.

My clarinet teacher once told me that the brain can be trained with enough repetition, and the only way to ever learn chromatic scales was to practice over and over again. She said this so often, I believed her, and accepted that it was only my lack of discipline that kept me from becoming the next Benny Goodman. So it seems that through forceful repetition, my brain was trained.

Big lies repeated frequently with no contradictory information have become widely accepted. This is damaging to our democracy—a form of government that demands free speech and informed decision making by an educated and intelligent population. Many of us make decisions without investigating the “rest of the story” as Paul Harvey, the radio commentator, used to say. The solution to this problem is to consider alternate points of view. Watch and read a variety of news sources from different perspectives. Give equal time to both CNN and Fox News. My wife argues that I do not practice what I am now preaching, and it will be really difficult, but I will try. Thomas Jefferson wrote that  a well-informed citizenry is a prerequisite to democracy. So, if you are worried about liars, lies and the people who believe them, stay informed, use your critical thinking skills and help expose falsehoods before they become accepted as facts.

Reagan and Gorabchev leaving Reykjavik

1986 and 2020, Part Two

On By gyonas5 Comments

The new actor on the Soviet scene in 1986 was Mikhail Gorbachev. After the deaths of three Soviet leaders since 1982, Gorbachev became the new head of the Soviet Union in 1985. He immediately found that he was faced with managing total economic collapse and political chaos in competition with the most powerful Soviet force, their own military industrial complex. He seemed to be an idealist committed to open communication and restructuring and faced a never-ending collection of problems. He pressed on nevertheless with enthusiasm, optimism and charm.

One of Gorbachev’s first initiatives was to wage war against alcohol, which he believed was one of the reasons for the failure of the Soviet economy, but he only managed to cut off a major source of government income from the Soviet vodka monopoly. The alcohol kept coming, however, and the illegal vodka income then went instead to their own version of the Mafia. Soviet historian Vladimir Zubock described these events writing, “The Soviet socialist empire, perhaps the strangest empire in modern history committed suicide.”

Well, maybe Soviet suicide is a bit of an overstatement, but there really were enough serious troubles facing Gorbachev to cause at least a feeling of overwhelming depression. In April, the Chernobyl reactor disaster, the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, causing more than 300,000 people to be resettled, threw Gorbachev into a desperate lack of trust in Soviet technology. And there is more to this sad story. In September, the pride of the limited Soviet fleet of luxury cruise ships collided with a freighter in clear weather and hundreds of wealthy Soviet citizens died leading to a nation overcome by “pessimism and foreboding.”

Some people believe the superstition that bad things come in threes. The third blow struck in 1986 and it may have been the worst. The event was the sinking of a Soviet nuclear submarine, but that was not the first time that such a disaster happened. In 1968, the K129 nuclear missile carrying submarine sank to a depth of 5000 meters in the Pacific 2700 kilometers from Hawaii. After the Soviets failed to locate it, a U.S. ship found it, and an enormous, technically fantastic and very secret CIA program called Azorian tried to lift it, but it broke apart on the way up and it was never revealed publicly what we recovered. When remembering the history, it is easy to confuse 1968 with 1986 and K129 with K219, but let’s try to get it straight.

In October 1986, the K219, one of their ballistic missile submarine with 34 nuclear warheads, sank within 1000 kilometers of Bermuda, but this time there was no problem finding it since a trailing U.S. submarine was watching the disaster. At first, the Soviets blamed the disaster on a collision with our submarine Augusta, and I can imagine that Gorbachev, who was actively engaged in negotiating with Reagan to put a stop to any more high-tech competition with the U.S., was stunned when he got the message that the sub was on fire. I imagine he felt a sense of desperation and had given up on competing with the United States. In a bit of additional mystery, a Soviet deep water research probe found later that the sub was “sitting upright on the ocean floor with empty missile tubes dangling open.”

Gorbachev was in no mood to compete and was even prepared to give up all of the Soviet nuclear weapons. His only condition for mutual abolition of nukes was our agreement to “10 years of research in the laboratories within the treaty” and he made it clear ‘it’s laboratory or goodbye.” I think he did not want the Soviet “death star” to be launched and he knew he could not put a stop to his own aerospace industry enthusiasts creating a new weapons race unless we first agreed to keep our program out of space. So my argument not accepted by the real experts, is that he was more worried about the SDIsky than the SDI.

Maybe he thought he could turn around the course of economic and technological history in 10 years, but Reagan would not go along, even though he hated nukes. The problem was that he believed we were ready and able to deploy defenses, which of course was false. In my opinion, the Soviet Union was on the way out even without our “help” because of its moral decay and mismanaged economic and political institutions. A nuclear agreement might have helped us deal with the global spread of nuclear weapons and maybe even contributed to an economic turnaround for the failing Soviets. Instead, the world still has more than enough nukes to go around, including North Korea. In addition, there is the growing capability of Iranian program, even without their “top nuclear scientist.” Well, some things don’t change and space-based lasers are still far off in the future.

But maybe there are lessons to be learned from the events of 2020 and we won’t have to make the Soviet mistakes. The world has seen plenty of surprising and horrible recent catastrophes, but there is reason. I had hoped that our new United States president would not be faced with the same sort of economic, political and social mess that confronted Gorbachev only 34 years ago. Maybe, I thought, we can solve some of our own economic and public health problems, and figure out a way to just “learn to get along” both within our borders and with our adversaries in other countries. That is, before Jan. 6, 2021, in the words of FDR, “a day which will live in infamy” that has exposed our own socio-political frailty.

My view was even becoming optimistic after the presidential election, until I realized that many of the governance problems that Gorbachev faced, are looming in our own future. Possibly we cannot avoid the seemingly inevitable repeat of wide spread self-destructive decision making of nations under stress. It seems that a nation cannot easily avoid reacting poorly to its history of traumatic events, but I hope we have learned our lessons.

Oh, one more thing about history. And that is what happened a few months before Beckurts was murdered. He and I had a very nice meeting to talk about German involvement in the SDI. My goal was to get him to agree to a contract that would support our program. Over lunch in an elegant German restaurant, he explained to me in no uncertain terms that his company did not support the SDI and had no intention of participating.

Car accident

1986 and 2020, Part 1

On By gyonasLeave a comment

Karl Beckurts“High-tech research director and driver slain by bomb.”  Sound familiar? You probably think it just happened in Iran. Actually this happened in Bonn, and the headline was from the July 10, 1986, New York Times. You probably confused it with the very similar November 2020 New York Times headline that read, “Iran’s top nuclear scientist killed in ambush.” So, history repeats itself, but we really do not learn that much from history since we tend to forget. Let’s try to remember.

The 1986 story went on to explain that “a remote control bomb killed the research director, Karl Heinz Beckurts, of West Germany’s largest electronics company and his driver today.” The article reported that a “seven page letter found near the site of the bombing and signed by the Red Army Faction said he “had been killed because “he supported the U.S. space-based missile defense program.” This supposed setback to our program was one of many events that should be understood when trying to understand the real history of 1986 that, in my view, marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.

At the same time that the KGB was trying to stop us, the Soviet Union’s military industrial complex was preparing to launch the world’s biggest booster, Energia, carrying a 100 ton demonstration test bed for components of the world’s first space based laser. This was a critical part of their plan for a battle station that would allow them to dominate space and prevent us from achieving any missile defense capability. This dramatic space experiment is in my opinion the best evidence that the Soviet military industrial complex took the strategy of competing with our SDI program seriously.

But why was Germany even involved in our SDI program? In March 1985, the president and the secretary of defense decided that we should make our program an international effort to involve and protect not just the U.S. but “everybody.” Some questioned this. Global defense against whom, the alien invaders? Vice President Bush was assigned the job of visiting each of our allied leaders and getting them to sign up to support our program. I was asked in May 1985 to go with Bush, in my role as the SDI Chief Scientist, to provide background technology advice and information. I met with him to prepare. I had dinner at his house, and even bought a new suit for the trip.

I could tell Bush, one of the most reasonable people I met in Washington, was not particularly enthusiastic about the SDI and he told me the whole allied involvement thing “would not be prudent,” but he was ready to go make deals anyway. He may have talked to Secretary of State George Shultz, who thought the whole thing was unrealistic. Nevertheless, Bush was always loyal to Reagan and he was ready to take me along. I was very excited about going for a ride with the vice president on Air Force II, and tagging along when he met with heads of state. I knew Bush wanted to make light of this whole thing, and was not that enthusiastic about my participation.

But it never happened. The next month, TWA 847 was high jacked, and the event made the cover of Time magazine. Reagan said forget about SDI for now, and told Bush to focus on terrorism instead of SDI. As a result, my big adventure was called off the week before we were about to leave. When I told my boss the bad news, he could barely hide his lack of sympathy for my disappointment. 

Secretary of Defense Weinberger still wanted to get foreign programs going, if for no other reason than to help persuade Congress to increase our budget for the next year to $3.7 billion instead of their plan that was for “only” $2.7 billion. At that time we were having considerable trouble with finding worthwhile ways to spend our funding, and the lower level of funding was plenty. Nevertheless this program was the proud invention of the president, and we had to do what we could to make it real. So I was tasked by the program director, General Abrahamson, to explore arrangements with technical leaders of our allies to join us in the program at our expense.

We knew that the Soviets were really unhappy about our getting political support from others in the controversial program and they wanted to drive a wedge between us and our friends. Although there were not many foreign leaders really interested in working on our program, particularly the French president, Francois Mitterrand, who was insulted that Reagan would consider treating them as “le subcontracteurs,” and he refused to go along. Instead, Mitterrand started his own multi nation high-tech program, Eureka. There was one country that did take us seriously because they wanted their own defense against the missiles from their neighbors. That country was Israel.

The Soviets did not want the Germans to get contracts from us and help us compete with them technically and politically. More importantly, they had their own SDI program, or to be more exact, their anti SDI program. We later found out that in 1985 the Soviets had embarked on a crash program of their own to get their laser weapon in space first. This was to be the crowning achievement of their space weapon program, to” Sputnik” us again like they did in 1957. They scraped together bits and pieces from other programs and made a desperate attempt to get a high power laser into space.

Meanwhile, back at the Pentagon, our program was not moving ahead aggressively toward any sort of space deployment since we would need an enormous lift capability for our admittedly early stage development of a chemical laser that we were testing in New Mexico. There were also many beam weapon approaches being pursued including deploying a free electron laser on the ground and bouncing beams around the world from mirrors in space. Unfortunately, our shuttle was not available after the explosion in January, and the entire shuttle fleet was to be grounded for the next three years. But wait, there’s more to this story of 1986 to be told in my next blog post.

past, present future signs

Schools need multi-layer COVID defense

On By gyonas6 Comments

In my April blog post, I suggested a multi-layer defense against the COVID-19 pandemic that is plaguing the world, and since then, the response has been inadequate. That is, except for the miraculous development of vaccines, which should hopefully in the near term greatly improve our survival and return our normal lives if used as the first layer of defense.

As the second layer, I proposed an approach that involved a virus detection breath analyzer at the portal to a virus free facility.  The device would instantly detect a potential spreader of the disease, prevent the entry and preserve the safety of the occupants. I am not aware of any progress toward such a sensor, but I am optimistic that such a sensor will eventually be developed. Nevertheless, we have learned that such viruses mutate and others will appear and I suggest we will need to develop and deploy methods to protect all indoor facilities in the future, and the most immediate need is to open our schools.

We all want the kids to be able to go back to school, interact with their class mates and their  teachers, but instead they are sitting at home staring at a computer, which is admittedly likely to be increasingly the route to education. Nevertheless, in-person learning will still be necessary for at least part of all  educational experiences. We are told by the epidemiologists that the primary problem with indoor education is the danger of becoming infected by sharing  other  people’s air. In my April post on multi layer virus defense, the last defense layer for schools has to be virus free air in the class room. A major modification of the ventilation in schools including HEPA filters would certainly help, but that might be impractical or  prohibitively expensive particularly in older construction. So a reasonable near term approach would be the use in each class room of a portable air purifier using a HEPA filter that includes a sensitive and specific sensor to detect a virus in the intake air flow. The sensor could set off an alarm when detecting a virus and would require putting on masks and evacuating the room.

Several months ago, I suggested, based on published  reviews of virus detectors,  a real time bio/optical virus sensor that would be both specific and sensitive, and I am sure that many researchers are pursuing this approach as well as many other virus detectors.  Even with successful near term development of vaccines, and eventually portal monitors, schools will still need air purifiers and virus warning systems, as common as today’s smoke detectors and fire suppression systems in all clas rooms. In my opinion, the system engineering, manufacturing and deployment of smart air purifiers in classrooms should be given the highest  priority.