Tag: SDI

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

Liar, liar, pants on fire

On By gyonas5 Comments

The presidential impeachment hearings are a good example of one aspect of human behavior that I studied recently, when I was involved in a science and technology advisory panel. The question we addressed was: What methods can an observer use to determine if a witness; or if there are two opinions, which side; is credible when they give contradictory answers? It would be wonderful if we really had some method as we watch what is going on in Washington.

In the hearings, the Republicans accused the Democrats of “making false allegations.” The Democrats similarly accused the Republicans of “making statements that ranged from incomplete renditions to outright falsehoods.” Trump tweeted that “the Democrats are liars” and a senator called Schiff “the worst liar in politics.”

The purpose of the panel I served on was to determine if there were technical methods to determine if a subject was telling the truth. Our panel determined that the gold standard of deception detection was the polygraph that measured blood pressure, pulse, respiration and skin conductivity while the subject answered a series of questions. What we discovered from interviewing many experts in the field was that the test really determined a psychological stress response that could be characteristic of a guilty answer, or a response from an innocent person who feels intimidated or even no response at all. In other words, the results were not reliable.

There were also examples in the press of use by the CIA on Guantanamo detainees of sleep deprivation and water boarding to elicit confessions, but they were also found to be not useful and deemed a form of torture. Acute stress induced by torture was also found to destroy memory. From our discussions with professional interrogators, the one approach that seemed to work was to have extensive prior knowledge and then intimidate the subject in order to induce a confession. An expert at interrogation knew how to use psychological methods to condition a person to “spill the beans” with no gadgets at all.

So what does this have to do with my supposed knowledge about missile defense? One of the most controversial and contradictory aspects of my more than 50 years of participation in the technical community  was the response to President Reagan’s request in his national security speech March 23, 1983. Reagan asked the “scientific community…to turn their great talents …to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” … to “intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies.” His speech was the starting point of my several years involved in trying to satisfy his request by first helping to make a plan for, and then participating in, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) as its first Chief Scientist.

Many years later, L. Wood, a primary representative of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories’ proposed X-ray laser program, told science writer J. Hecht, “SDI (AKA Star Wars) was a brilliantly successful bluff…illusion of an awesome technological capability.” Wood said, “I got the results I wanted. The Soviet Union collapsed.”

If there was an intentional hoax, Wood and others sure had me fooled since I was convinced nobody was bluffing. In my opinion, Reagan hated nuclear weapons as much as he hated Soviet Communism, and he believed we could find a way to defend ourselves, that is if we jointly managed a transition to eliminate nukes and then share a defense system. I became convinced that in fact SDI had little impact on the Soviet Union that went bankrupt on their own without our help through their society riddled with deception, mismanagement and moral confusion.

But what about the truth of the SDI? Gorbachev told the Politburo, “Our main goal now is to prevent another new stage in the arms race from taking place. If we do not do that, the danger for us will grow … an arms race that is beyond our strength. We will lose, because now for us that race is already at the limit of our possibilities.” There is no question that Gorbachev was a believer, even though his advisers, such as Evgeny Velikhov, the principal Soviet scientific leader, claimed it was a delusion.

At the same time, Gorbachev’s Military-Industrial Commission advisers told him, “Americans think that a multi echelon missile defense system should allow, at most 0.1 percent of the attacking missiles to get through” and their belief was that the key for missile defense would be “a new type of nuclear weapons consist of transforming part of the energy from a nuclear explosion into powerful streams of directed x-rays or electromagnetic radiation or stream of high energy particles…capable of striking in space or from space ballistic missiles, their warheads, satellites and the targets …at distances of several thousand kilometers.” The advisers added, “Full scale of these weapons is expected to occur in the second half of the 1990s.”

The head of their nuclear programs, Victor Mikhailov, was so convinced that nuclear directed energy was a realistic future possibility that he argued to stop such work that he called the “Evil Jinn.” There was no lack of conviction in the Soviet Union that directed nuclear weapons were critical to the success of the SDI program, even though at the time, Donald Kerr, the head of Los Alamos argued it was an exaggeration, Bud McFarlane, Reagan’s National Security Advisor, said the program was a “sting,” and much latter Reagan’s scientific adviser, Jay Keyworth, even called the work at LLNL “unadulterated lies.”

So what about the lying liars, whether it be in Congress, among scientists, weapons developers and politicians? In my opinion, the best expert on the subject is George Constanza from the television series “Seinfeld.” His memorable quote was, “It is not a lie if you believe it,” and I believe he is right.

Trust me.

How would Sun Tzu deal with drone swarm attacks?

On By gyonas6 Comments

In my last post, I imagined that a potential strategic threat from swarms of drones could be developed from existing technology. I speculated that a cargo ship in a harbor could deliver biological agents or radioactive clouds to large coastal cities. Such an attack would best be prevented through deterrence, but it might be difficult or impossible to determine the attacker. The counter to this strategic threat is certainly knowledge of enemy preparations and real time intelligence. We would need a declared policy in regard to such a strategic attack and we would need to figure out how to convince any adversary that we know more than they know.

A more likely near term threat would be on the theater battlefield where drone swarms could threaten land warfare systems, including armored vehicles. Even a heavily armored tank would e vulnerable to even a small explosive charge if delivered down the barrel of the main gun.

A recent article in the C4ISRNET reported that Russian engineers have proposed a concept called Flock-93 that would employ “hundreds of drones, each armed with an explosive charge” to attack “terrorists and high-tech adversaries.” The application of drones to theater warfare seems to be likely and the counter measures already suggested include “jammers, lasers, high power microwaves” and more speculatively even counter-robot swarms. Can you imagine a future war where the sky over the battlefield is filled with thousands of drones and counter drones?

The battlefield of the future will also be complicated by the dependence on C4ISR and use of attacks against information and surveillance capabilities. But, as the TV infomercials say, “But wait, there’s more.” We already anticipate that space-based sensors and communications will be relied on and will be vulnerable to attack at the earliest stage of a conflict. Even before that, both sides in the conflict will heed the words of Sun Tzu, the 512 BCE Chinese philosopher who wrote in his classic work, “The Art of War,” “All war is based on deception.”

One of my favorite quotes from Sun Tzu is: “To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.” If the reader is familiar with my book, “Death Rays and Delusions,” you will recall that I believe the Soviet Union provided the mechanism for its own defeat. I quoted a scholar of Soviet history, Vladimir Zubok, who wrote, “The strangest empire in modern history committed suicide.” The noted American historian on the Cold War, John Gaddis, agreed with my claim that the “Soviet Union might have been more interested in confining Soviet testing” than in worries about our testing of our space-based weapons.

So, getting back to Sun Tzu’s response to drone swarm attacks, the key will be to convince the adversary that the future application of such technology will be futile and even self-defeating, so they should not even try. The future is likely to be dominated, as always, by a mind war that I believe has already begun.

A simple, low cost, really nasty new weapon system

On By gyonas8 Comments

Precision drone attack damage of Saudi Oil facility

Could low cost, fairly low tech aircraft defeat the very expensive missile defense system of Saudi Arabia?  Of course not! No way, I thought, since the Saudis rely on our technology and we have spent billions and billions on missile defense since we began the SDI program in 1984.

I never gave this possible threat much thought until the Saudis’ giant oil facility was attacked with high precision on Sept. 14, causing enough damage to measurably reduce the global oil supply.

Yes there was a fairly modern missile defense system in place, but the attack came from tens of small low-flying drones and cruise missiles proving that the best defense against the wrong attack is useless. It looks like I was not the only one surprised since Israel, who should have been the most alert to such threats, has just announced they are reacting to this event. (“Netanyahu seeks billions to fund Israeli defense against Iranian cruise missiles,” Haaretz, Oct. 07, 2019.) Even before that, the Russians announced in Izvestia that their small multi rotor drones “will perform not only reconnaissance missions, but also strike targets with miniature bombs.”

I recall that when the SDI was created, the secretary of state raised the issue of cruise missile defense, but his question was never seriously answered and we focused on the Soviets’ huge investment in intercontinental ballistic missiles. So this new threat is not so new, but I hope the new aspect of swarms of low-cost drones is now being taken seriously.

This wake-up call up call should now be loud and clear, but even worse than we expected, since even though the cost of cruise missiles is very high, the technology and cost of swarms of drones has become very attractive worldwide to even capable individuals. It is now realistic that many of the world’s soft targets, such as cities, are vulnerable to attack. But certainly we could use electromagnetic weapons to jam, confuse, take over or destroy the guidance and communications of drones, high power lasers to destroy their delicate components or just plain old intercept missiles and anti-aircraft guns to blow them out of the sky, so not to worry.  We could even deploy our own swarms of defense drones to attack their offense swarms.

Well, it is not that simple since the real issue is the cost exchange, and the low cost and tactics available to giant swarms of drones could reduce the effectiveness of most of tomorrow’s technologically available defenses.

In addition, there is the element of surprise, demanding an early warning detection and tracking system, as well as the reality of exhaustion of the defense against fake or real repeated attacks. But we know that each low-cost drone could only deliver a pound or so to a target, so what is the big deal? Well, maybe the drones could target critical parts of our exposed electric grid, or maybe disperse biological agents along major streets, or target large sports events with hundreds of grenades or just go after parking lots at crowded shopping centers? The implication of such terror weapons are frightening to say the least.

Certainly Israel has some not so friendly neighbors, and their enemies must be preparing such killer drone swarm attacks, but we don’t have such problems from our neighbors .…  unless the drones are delivered from ships near the big cities near our coasts.

So what to do about all of these new concerns about a threat that might be more likely than intercontinental missile attack that attracted our defense community for decades?  I am sure the Pentagon, the labs and the defense industry are working to figure out our response. Of course, the threat will evolve as well as the defenses, and we need to also prepare for simultaneous info and space attacks, so we may look on the simplicity of the good old days with nostalgia.