Tag: SDI guy

Truth versus Fiction

On By gyonas11 Comments

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more fun.

At the end of 2022 when Lawrence Livermore Laboratory achieved a major fusion breakthrough, my novel, The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. was already at the printers.  This struck me as amusing, since the book tells the story of a fictional clean energy breakthrough. In the novel, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory create a compact clean low-cost energy source using electron beams to trigger a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction that generates electromagnetic energy and then directly convert that into electricity.

Russia’s 1975 electron beam fusion reactor

The fictional breakthrough discovery is an accident that generates one thousand times more energetic output.  In addition to intended entertainment, my book’s basic messages are first that surprises happen in research when one’s imagination, creativity and enthusiasm is as important as careful well-founded analysis. My second theme is that discovery of new science is like a knife. A knife can be used to butter your bread or slit someone’s throat. Technology is a literal double-edged sword. I believe that there will always be applications of scientific achievements that are both civilian and military—that can be used for peaceful innovation or for weapons of war. I also believe that there will always be people who can invent and stimulate ideas as well as people who know how to stand in the way of progress. The path to scientific innovation often involves the sort of characters that appear in the pages of The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. 

I spent much of my career striving to achieve a breakthrough that could lead to clean, unlimited energy. Now, as an author I have created a fictional breakthrough that reaches that goal. So, naturally that begs the question—will scientists achieve that fusion goal in real life? When it comes to recent fusion breakthroughs, the rhetoric is exciting and invigorating. Examples of recent not too specific government fusion statements are “a game changer for efforts to achieve President Biden’s goal of a net-zero carbon economy,” and “new ways to power our homes and offices in future decades.” When I read such announcements, I cannot but help remembering Reagan’s Star Wars speech in 1983 that the goal of his missile defense program would make “nuclear weapons obsolete.” The outcome of the Reagan initiative was not technical but a strategic/political event that took place at Reykjavik Iceland in 1986 as told in my Potomac Institute article, It’s Laboratory or Goodbye.

Another famous president’s call for action was Kennedy’s 1962 challenge to “land a man on the moon” by 1970. In my first year as a grad student, after I listened to a detailed Caltech colloquium after the Kennedy speech, I was convinced that the technology was already well developed, the achievement was not that far off and a race with the Soviets would provide plenty of political support for the program. Kennedy’s words shaped public enthusiasm for the space program. Words can change the way people think about science. Words can change the way governments fund science.

This approach to imagining and planning for a very distant future suggested to me a story that begins with “it was dark and stormy night.” The story is about two cave men who sat in the cold, dark, dampness of their cave when a bolt of lightning struck and ignited for the first time in the history of human development, a pile of wet branches at the mouth of their cave. The pile of wet wood was ignited into a growing fire rather than just a thin whisk of smoke they had previously experienced.  One cave man could hardly believe that a lightning bolt could create a roaring fire in wet wood. He was astonished, warm, happy, and started to roast a small rodent on a stick, but the other, probably one of the first human engineers spoke up, “What if the lightning bolt ignited a new reaction that transformed the wood into new materials and created a way to make cheap, clean, inexhaustible energy?”

If you want to spend more time thinking about the scientific process, the quest for inexhaustible energy and the unavoidable connection between peaceful innovation and military applications, pick up a copy of The Dragon’s C.L.A.W. at your local bookstore or order online:

Fiction may be the answer

On By gyonas10 Comments

In 1985, the magazine “Science Digest” featured a debate between me and Hans Bethe, the 1967 Nobel Prize winner in physics and my former Cornell University undergraduate quantum mechanics physics professor. The question was whether President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, SDI, could be effective against nuclear tipped Soviet missiles. Bethe’s answer was a definite, “No.”

Bethe’s most persuasive argument was, “The entire system could never be tested under circumstances that were remotely realistic.” He did not wish to tackle the psychology of deterrence. He focused on the technical issues instead.

The United States was already living with the concept of mutually assured destruction, which I knew could not be tested either. I argued it was too soon to discuss the effectiveness of any hypothetical defense system. I believed a research program was justified and would be needed in order to influence the perception of a new and safer approach to strategic stability.

There was one area of technology development that concerned me––the requirement that the split-second events in a war would have to be managed by computer software. Back then I was basically Reagan’s Ray Gun Guy, and I did not know anything about testing software. Today, it looks like Bethe was right about the importance of testing. But there’s still something he missed.

Here’s where I think Bethe went astray: testing is all about technology, but deterrence is far more complicated. The vital issues in creating a credible deterrent are not just technology, but economics, social issues, political arrangements and psychology. I learned over the years that such problems really have no final solution, and continuing to pursue the answer often leads to alternating periods of hopeful optimism and depressing pessimism… and sometimes, but not always, real progress. My published opinion was that the outcome of the SDI program would “depend not only on the technology itself, but also on the extent to which the Soviet Union either agrees to mutual defense agreements and offense limitations…no definitive predictions of the outcome can be made.”

My feelings were ambivalent. I struggled to communicate the complexity of the issue to my scientific and political colleagues. I found it even more difficult to explain the questions surrounding SDI to the news media. But one person got it. He was a cartoonist.

In the 1980s, Berkeley Breathed, the cartoonist behind the series Bloom County, created a cartoon about me, the Chief Scientist of Reagan’s SDI, aka Star Wars program. He depicted me as a chubby penguin named Opus, who claimed that enormous sums of money would be needed to develop a “space defense gizmo.” When Opus learned that the unlimited money was not forthcoming, he screamed, “Physicists need Porsches too,” and then mused that maybe “the days of wines and roses are over.” Breathed understood the reality of my job.

I had been challenged with helping to put together a $25 billion, five-year plan for a research program to accomplish Reagan’s goal of “rendering nuclear weapons obsolete.” After the plan was finished and delivered to the Secretary of Defense, I wrote that even if the research was wildly successful, any workable missile defense would have to go along with a comprehensive arms control treaty that greatly reduced our own offensive capabilities as well as the threat. In spite of my published doubts, the following year I was asked by the newly chosen program’s manager, General James Abrahamson, to be his deputy and chief scientist. We brought together a distinguished advisory group including Edward Teller, the “father of the H bomb”, Bernard Schriever, retired four star general and the father of our nation’s first ballistic missiles that responded to the Soviet threat posed by Sputnik in 1957, Simon Ramo, the father of the engineering behind that first ballistic missile technology, Fred Seitz, former head of the National Academy of Sciences, and me.

During my two years in the Pentagon, I was faced not only with many serious detractors, but also with many incidents that could have been the source of high anxiety. I realized the contradictions, irony and exaggeration in the program were inescapable. I managed to approach the many stressful moments with humor that I often expressed in satirical memos and comments that were not always appreciated by my boss. But when dealing with complicated issues, there are no simple solutions. The best you can do is hang on to your sense of humor and keep trying to help other people understand your point of view.

As a cartoonist, Breathed understands that. His fictionalized depiction of the Star Wars dilemma summed up the situation succinctly. Reflecting on his cartoons years later, I wondered if perhaps Breathed had the answer to explaining the ambivalence that I faced during my time in the SDI program. In fact, the contradictory issues related to nuclear deterrence are something all scientists working in national defense face.

So, taking my inspiration from Breathed’s penguin, I have decided to try my hand at writing fiction. This spring, I will launch the first in a series of novels about the complex interaction between science and politics. Stay tuned for more information in future posts.

Beware of the swarm

On By gyonas6 Comments

Three years ago, I speculated in my blog that fairly low-tech unmanned aircraft, UAVs, or drones could defeat very expensive missile systems after a giant Saudi oil facility was attacked with high precision causing enough damage to reduce the global oil supply. Even though there was a missile defense system in place, the attack came from a swarm of small low-flying drones and cruise missiles that defeated the existing missile defense system.

I called for an increased emphasis on defense against this type of attack, and since then, there have been many worldwide new programs focused on developing this kind of threat as well as new defense systems. The recent Russian attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure and the Ukraine attacks against Russian air bases appear to be a demonstration of what I expected, namely a fundamental change in offense and defense.

I pointed out in my post that swarms of such weapons to surprise and exhaust even the most competent defenses could mark a radical change in warfighting. I wrote that “drones could target critical parts of the exposed grid, disperse biological agents, target crowds at sports events, or even parking lots of shopping centers.” Unfortunately, my worst fears have come to pass with the Russians targeting the cities and critical infrastructure of Ukraine. Now Ukraine has struck back, and the nastiness is only going to be even nastier with more attacks from both sides. The balloon has gone up. But wait there’s more. The latest Ukraine innovation is drone killer boats backed up by flying drones to find and strike targets at sea. So the air, sea, and space application of killer drones is going to be the new way of war. But where there are new weapons, there are certain to be new counter-weapons.

With the development of fiber laser weapons with a power level of tens to hundreds of kilowatts, a realistic defense against drone swarms is possible if the tracking, pointing, and fire control system works reliably, and if the power supply is of an ample duration, and if enough of such defense system could become an affordable deployment … and of course, the weather cooperates. Boeing has created “an anti-drone death ray truck” that may defeat the ifs, but there are a lot of ifs and as usual, the offense is already a step ahead of the defense.

What about those new all-weather high-power microwave weapons such as the Ratheon Phaser to attack the controls and brains of the drones so that they become dumb rocks instead of brilliant pebbles?  High-power microwave weapons are being developed by many countries and they will be important.  This will be a story of brains versus beams, and the details will be written as the old game of offense versus defense is repeated again and again. In any case, there is no question that the game has begun and when new technology is created, people will find a way to apply that technology to warfighting.

An eventual development could be the proliferation of low-cost killer drones, and they could become the weapon of choice for ground forces, law enforcement, and maybe terrorists or even your neighborhood crazy guys who already are using weapons developed for the military. It is likely that such killer drones will initially be under the control of an operator, but quite possibly in a few years, they will be employed using artificial intelligence to search out and target predetermined targets when they are recognized by the smart sensor on the killer drones.

Survival of soldiers and military surface systems is possible if they can move, hide, defend, and shoot back, but there is not going to be a so-called “last move” in this contest of energy weapons versus drones. There may have to be an eventual change in the tactics of all surface warfare. It could be just too dangerous for high-value targets to try to survive above ground.  Maybe survival would be achieved by deploying in tunnels and caves. But what about drone swarms used by terrorists against civilian targets?  A logical step would be to ban such weapons, but we have not done this with assault rifles. Instead, children are trained to respond to an active shooter in their schools. I wonder if children will have to return to “duck and cover” when sensors detect a killer drone swarm approaching their playground?

Russian Scientist Reveals Secret of H Bomb Part Three

On By gyonas8 Comments

In 1977, our Sandia team responded to the competition with Russia with our own claim of successful e beam driven fusion only one year after Rudakov’s announcement. Our concept was called “magnetic thermal insulation,” and our experimental result called “the Phi target” was announced to have produced a similar number of neutrons as the Rudakov claim one year earlier. The basic idea was not amenable to simple analysis, since it involved extremely complex physics of the plasma stability of thermal insulation. At our annual review from the government and outside experts we learned it was not favorable to the plasma physics theory community, but is in fact a key attribute of today’s Sandia inertial confinement fusion program. We made no mention of the so-called Rudakov secret target, and both groups went different directions. An article in “Physics Today” helped to excite the feeling of competition between the two groups with a title: “Sandia and Kurchatov groups claim beam fusion” and we were happy to receive continuing funding, in no small part due to the “help” from our Russian friends.

Those of us with weapons clearances were sworn to protect the radiation drive concept, but this left room for speculation by the media. For instance one story claimed, “The Soviets are nearing a breakthrough in developing nuclear weapons 100 times more powerful than the largest current weapon–a gigaton hydrogen bomb–a doomsday bomb that could destroy the world in one blow.” Two prominent U.S. weapons physicists argued in private over whether to acknowledge the revealed concept and eventually the weapons community acknowledged that there was no longer a secret to protect. Both countries were off and running in a race to be the first to prove the concept that was called the hohlraum secret, except by then the very concept of radiation coupling to a fusion target had disappeared from any public discussion, and the concept no longer seemed to exist in the Soviet Union, or at least no more was said about it. 

The technical problem we both faced became how to get enough energy into the hohlraum fast enough to do the job. Our simple calculations showed that would require 1000 TW, and that was almost inconceivable. We thought maybe the combination of radiation drive and magnetic thermal insulation might permit ignition at 100 TW.  At an international fusion conference in 1975, Rudakov had already published a concept for an e beam fusion reactor and the e beam was certainly not in the 1000 TW class.  Rudakov was not alone in rather wild extrapolation, since in 1974 we had already applied for a U.S. patent on an e beam fusion reactor concept and the patent was award in 1975 and expired in 1992, so I never got any royalties. I did publish a “Scientific American” article in 1978 entitled “Fusion Power with Particle Beams” and similar to the continuing saga of fusion “breakthroughs” claimed frequently, success was only 20 years away. 

By 1979, the Soviets announced that they were operating the first module of their machine called Angara 5, and they claimed as reported in “Pravda,” “When it is completed we hope to obtain a controlled thermonuclear reaction…producing more energy than it consumes … demonstrate that an industrial pilot plant can be built.” The “New York Times” picked up the story with a front page article “Soviet Reports Major Step toward a Fusion Plant.” The article went on to say the similar facility at Sandia is expected to start operation in a year and cited “the middle 1980s as a possible time when researchers may achieve a breakeven point … and another before a fusion reactor produces more power than it uses, opening the way for the production of a useful energy source.”

In 1981, the U.S. Department of Energy advertised their inertial confinement fusion program as proceeding toward a 1987 goal when, “ignition experiments at Sandia and at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, provided a simultaneous evaluation of trade-offs between lasers and particle beam drivers.” The Kurchatov group continued to innovate ideas for electron beams, and our group changed the focused beam approach from electrons to ions that could provide a more certain method to heat a thin shell. We pressed ahead with construction plans. Our timing for the change to ions was rather fortunate, because the Department of Energy had already decided our electron beam approach was a dead end, but I convinced the head of energy research that I was also “negative on electrons and positive about ions.” The race was on, and the participants believed the outcome was certain to be resolved in only a few more years.

By 1983, Rudakov’s group was silent about any more hohlraum ideas, and for the next 10 years I was not involved in the Sandia program.  After Ronald Reagan’s famous speech on March 23, 1983, to embark on a fundamental change in our strategic weapons investments from offense to defense, I was asked by former Los Alamos lab director Harold Agnew to work for three months with a team of experts from the labs and industry to put together a five-year Pentagon directed energy weapon plan. One concept was that a low altitude space-based constellation of powerful chemical lasers could attack and destroy the giant SS 18 boosters as they slowly rose above the atmosphere. There were many other concepts that were “imaginative.” After only a short time, Agnew told me he had become convinced there was “no pony in that pile of horse droppings,” and he became uninvolved in the process. 

We did complete a plan that we delivered to the president in the fall of 1983, and it became part of the $25 billion five-year proposal that went to the congress and Secretary of Defense Weinberger was dedicated to make it a reality. By then I was sure the entire venture was going nowhere, but the president had decided that missile defense could make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” and few people realized that he hated nuclear weapons as much as he disliked Soviet communism.  A few months later, I was chosen by General James Abrahamson as his acting deputy and the Chief Scientist for Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, AKA Star Wars program, with an assignment to help make the president’s vision a reality. 

Much of my two years in the Pentagon involved defending the program that I claimed was research to resolve the enormous number of questions about technology that the president claimed was almost ready for deployment. He repeatedly said he wanted to share everything we learned with the Russians if they would agree with us to give up all our nuclear weapons.  The scientific community, including many of the people I had worked with, were inclined to accept Agnew’s opinion, but one MIT professor advocated that we keep very secret anything we learned of value, but that we share everything that did not work. It seemed to me two years later that the technology was no closer than when we had started. The advances in offensive countermeasures moved ahead much more rapidly than the defense technologies. There were, however, actually two true believers that did remain, and one was the Ronald Reagan and the other was Mikhail Gorbachev, but that is yet a different story I published in an article entitled “Its Laboratory or Goodbye.”

After I left the Pentagon, and after a three years trying to manage defense contracts at a private sector defense contractor, I conclusively demonstrated my inability to manage cash flow. When I learned that Al Narath, who had hired me at Sandia in 1972 had returned to Sandia after a stay at Bell Labs, I decided to rejoin him at Sandia. Eventually I was reassigned back to the fusion program, and Narath, who had supported me in my early quest based on the promise of pulsed power engineering 20 years earlier, was becoming “a bit impatient.” Our work at Sandia had gone from the initial electron beam work in 1972, then on to EBFA, to the transition to ion beams on PBFA I, then the larger PBFA II that fired its first shot in 1985. The pulsed power technology was a success, but the problem was that the ion beam generation and focusing research was in a rut, and now a miracle was needed to get to 100TW and even the more daunting challenge of 1000TW.

Then the brilliant discovery involving many very creative scientists at several labs was that a pulsed power driven Z pinch could produce levels of radiation above 100 TW to drive a fusion capsule. The basic idea of the Z pinch is to slowly build up the power in a magnetic field that compresses and heats a plasma that implodes to high density and temperature, and then becomes a powerful source of radiation as it collapses on itself. The PBFA II sign came down, and the machined was renamed Z. The ion beam approach was discontinued in a burst of enthusiasm for the new way ahead.

After the demonstration of what I claimed was “the most powerful X-ray source in the world,” my marketing juices were flowing again. I proposed to use a two sided Z pinch hohlraum concept with an even larger machine I called X-1 that probably would require a $1 billion investment.  I advertised this idea in 1998 in my second “Scientific American” article entitled “Fusion and the Z Pinch” 20 years after my first installment in that magazine article on particle beam fusion.

The basic idea was to employ two identical Z pinches to drive a hohlraum at radiation power levels approaching 1000TW and with a pulse duration of 10 billionths of a second that could deliver 10 million joules to a target. That appeared from calculations to be the right amount of energy to ignite fusion burning and obtain high output gain. I was convinced we could reach our goal before the laser program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory could get there, but that competition did not make the Department of Energy happy since they had already decided that the National Ignition Fusion (NIF) laser approach was the right way as they brilliantly demonstrated last year, over 20 years after they convinced the DOE that I was wrong, as they achieved fusion burn demonstrated with NIF and two sided irradiation using 192 laser beams delivering almost 2 million joules to the hohlraum. 

My marketing activity, however, resulted in my permanent removal by DOE from the program in 1998. My Russian friend also departed from their ICF program and he left the Kurchatov Institute and immigrated to the United States. His colleague Valentine Smirnov became the head of the Russian program that was concentrating on the Z pinch approach. The Sandia pulsed power program continued and prospered without my further interference, with an upgrade leading to improvement in machine performance and diagnostics leading to several scientific discoveries related to materials at extreme temperatures and pressures.

Now the Sandia program has changed course again and is focusing on a new concept called MagLIF for ignition based on a Z pinch to implode a magnetic thermally insulated and laser preheated cylindrical target. Ironically, the use of magnetic insulation in a pulsed power driven target was what I had proposed with electron beams in the Phi target. 

The hohlraum is essential to the NIF laser fusion approach, but is no longer part of the chosen concept at Sandia.  I would, however, not be surprised if the advantages of trapped and symmetric radiation-driven implosion may be reinvented someday, possibly in China.  The history of foreign competition seems to be repeating itself as the Chinese have claimed to be building a machine “20 times more powerful than Z,” which is probably an exaggeration, but I am sure it will be in the 1000TW range–that is if it really is funded. Their publications demonstrate a thorough knowledge and ability to harness the needed modern pulsed power technology. 

It has been 25 years since the Sandia approach became the use of the Z pinch, and to celebrate that event, the seven Sandia pulsed power directors who have provided leadership for the pulsed power science program since 1978, came together last year to share their memories and provide the incentive to continue the journey on a path I started over 50 years ago. The advance of science and technology continues, but sadly it seems that human behavior has not improved that much. It seems now that Reagan and Gorbachev had a rather good idea about eliminating nuclear weapons after all.