Tag: SDI

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?

Looking ahead to the tricentennial

On By gyonas6 Comments

Make America Warm Again

It occurred to me that since our nation’s 300th birthday party is just over 50 years away, it is not too early to speculate about what things might be like in the future. I thought one way to go about this speculation would be to go back 50 years and consider the thinking about the future at that time, and then project forward into 50 years in the future. The issues I considered were the subjects that are very prominent in current concerns and worries: global climate, the economy, science and technology and war. My goal in this exercise in speculation is to encourage others to join in and share ideas and help us all think more clearly about preparing for the future.

So, let’s turn the page back 50 years. The climate was a serious source or worry in the 1970s. I remember that in my hometown, Cleveland, Ohio, where my parents still lived, the blizzard of January 1977 hit. The high winds and rapidly dropping temperatures suddenly swept across Ohio. On Jan. 28, the temperature dropped from 20 degrees to 10 below zero during the day, and wind gusts of 60 mph created huge drifts and zero visibility. Stores, factories and the government facilities were closed. The National Guard was called out to rescue hundreds and carry them to safety.

In the 70s, it was an accepted reality that the world was getting colder. A widely publicized article in “Newsweek” magazine captured the thinking at that time. The story complained about the “most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded … and fundamental changes in the world’s weather” and claimed that “after three quarters of a century of extraordinary mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down … climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action.” The author was right about the lack of political action, since the inclement weather was often temporary and people forgot about temporary shivers and went back to a normal life. In fact that period was followed by a warming trend that continues to this day and there was no political action of any kind.

As many sources of data reveal, there has been a rise in temperature of roughly 0.5 degrees centigrade in the last 50 years. If that trend continues, another increase of 0.5 degrees would be a reasonable assumption of a continuation of the trend with no prediction of a catastrophic result caused by burning fossil fuels.  To the non-expert observer like me, a continuation of the past trend seems reasonable.  But according to the “climate experts,” if greenhouse gasses continue to rise at the present rate, the global temperature will increase by another 2 or even 3 degrees and the result will be “an existential threat to human civilization.” A contrarian view was presented by Steve Koonin, who I have known over the years and I consider to be a reputable scientist. His book “Unsettled” considers multiple climate drivers and presents the case that warming is not necessarily caused by human burning of fossil fuels.

Although I agree with that a large increase in global temperature would be catastrophic, my opinion is that the global climate is so complex that predictions about the future are not credible. What the data has convinced me is that for the last 40 years, the global temperature has shown oscillations of a fraction of a degree every few years. I expect that to continue. It is likely that as warming continues, the available energy in the environment and both the frequency and consequences of extreme weather occurrences will increase. I am certain that there are many coupled nonlinear climate processes with many feedback loops that lead to these oscillations and short term violent weather phenomena. This complexity makes predictions unreliable and calls for the need for more data in order to generate scientifically valid computer simulations. 

So for now, my prediction is there will be a continuation of large oscillations with a slow increase in temperature, and that political leaders will have little effect on the outcome. Nevertheless, politicians will continue to take advantage of the media to modify public opinion in order to impact the investment in sources of energy. For practical reasons, however, the economy will nevertheless continue to rely on fossil fuels for practically everything we do.

There are many politicians using the fear of the “coming climate catastrophe” to strengthen their support. I expect that the combination of fear of the “future disaster” and greed for new sources of political power and profits will lead to many new investments that may impact on the economy over a long period of time, but I don’t expect any big changes based on climate running amok.  The one thing that seems likely is that just as there are many nonlinear variables that are important in climate. This multiplicity of variables is also true with the economy, which is also driven by the nonlinear effects of human behavior including fear and greed that can result in large oscillations. Too much of a good thing is going to always lead to an overreaction followed by a correction, but the economy will eventually smooth out the oscillations and a slow and steady increase in economic health will continue. So in 50 years, because of the flexibility and freedom in our economy as well as checks and balances in our political system, there will be self-corrections and modifications in investments leading to a general improvement in the health, welfare and wealth of the average American.

The sources of energy are liable to follow the market forces that will continue to support investments in fossil fuels without any major changes. I predict there will be increased investments in small modular nuclear reactors for remote applications and to supplement the grid to deal with climate oscillations assuming the problems of nuclear waste disposal will be solved.

But what about the revolutionary changes caused by the deployment of the clean, cheap, safe inexhaustible fusion power sources that have always been “only 20 years in the future”? It is often said that the 20 year prediction will always be true, and I agree with that. There may be a method to use fusion as a method for a safe and low cost way to treat nuclear waste, but this will require a new discovery of a practical, affordable and reliable fusion reactor, and that seems unluckily even though scientists and engineers will claim frequent breakthroughs to keep the continuation of funding. The most likely application of fusion, assuming many of the material survival problems are solved, is likely to be in combination with a growing reliance on small modular nuclear reactors. I, however, see the real 50-year advances from science will not be with things but with people.

In the next 50 years, I believe there will be real changes in the science and technology in regard to the way people think, learn, remember and behave. This will happen because we will learn how to measure in detail how the brain works, create computer simulations of those data and learn how to use electrical neuro technology to enhance the brain features we like and discourage the features that are not so useful. In a previous post about “brain zapping,” I explained that the key will be brain wave entrainment using closed loop feedback control to improve the single most important problem us old folks will face–the deterioration of brain function with age. Rather than advances in use of drugs to deal with neurological problems, I believe that brain treatment and enhancement will be electrical, and productive lifelong learning and contributions to society will dominate health and welfare. We will have to learn to accept a lot of really smart old people making decisions and running things.

The danger in such a successful widespread use of brain enhancement will be the problem of addiction to these methods and misuse that are likely to occur, so we need to prepare for not just the benefits of enhanced brain functions, but the need for controls that will have to be provided by our methods of government. As long as the government is honest, fair and well behaved, the use of brain enhancement should be primarily beneficial … except bad actors may emerge and lead to conflict, and the deployment of brain weapons will be a problem of new and dangerous methods of war.

As I explained in my post, “The Fallacy of the Last Move,” there will always be people who use fear and greed to create an arms race, and this will include brain weapons and counter brain weapons. This could lead to a real, not an artificial catastrophe, and there will need to be societal agreements to limit the undesirable aspects of brain enhancement. I think the benefits to society will be so great that wisdom will emerge and prevent future brain wars.

But I guess there will be other ways to wage wars based on infection of people and computer software. It is likely that there will continue to be both natural variations of airborne viruses and eventually their use in military actions. This will result in the deployment of facility and human sensors along with vaccines to manage the spread of disease. Computer software will continue to be hacked by criminals, but my concern is the self-evolution of computer viruses as a result of automated software created methods. Maybe Hal will tell us, “I am sorry Dave, but I’m afraid I can’t do that.” What do you think? Comment with your predictions for 2076. 

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.