Tag: Star Wars missile defense

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.

Are you kidding?

On By gyonas4 Comments

Are you kidding … nobody would believe that. You can’t be serious!

I am writing a sci/fi novel that tries to make a coherent fictional story somewhat based on the real history of death ray inventors and their inventions.  A portion of the true story is recounted in the book “Death Rays and Delusions” about my exploits as the chief scientist for Ronald Reagan’s SDI aka Star Wars program. My soon-to-be published novel, called “The Dragon’s CLAW” draws upon a real story that will cause the reader to exclaim, “Are you kidding… nobody would believe that. You can’t be serious.”

This totally true story begins with H G Wells’ 1897 “The War of the Worlds” that includes Martian invaders using infrared beams, or “the sword of heat,” that melt the metal weapons of the earth defenders. Hard to believe, but the primary space based laser weapon developed for the SDI program in the 1980s was a real sword of heat, an infrared laser called Miracle. It was going to be deployed in space and would have required miracles to ever be feasible. There is a famous picture of Ronald Reagan standing in front of a giant mock-up of the nonexistent laser weapon. But we were not alone in inventing miracles, and the Soviet Union developed their own version of a space based laser, and went far beyond a mock up. They even tried in 1986 to deploy parts of it on the world’s largest booster, Energia.

But let’s go back to the 1930s when the Serbian genius, Nikola Tesla, who probably should have, but did not receive the Nobel Prize for his electrical engineering inventions, designed a particle beam weapon that he claimed could defend the U.S. against “10000 enemy air planes at a distance of 250 miles.” It was not seriously pursued until after he died, and then after the start of WW II, the FBI seized his papers and asked MIT professor and Donald Trump’s uncle George to analyze them, but he saw nothing of value. As a footnote to this history, Donald claimed in 2020 that his uncle was a genius and “It’s in my blood. I’m smart.”

The idea of particle beam weapons, actually relativistic election beams, was resurrected in 1958 by ARPA, now called DARPA, to defend ships at sea and the entire U.S. against attacking reentry vehicles. The so called See Saw concept was to build giant electron beam accelerators that would generate beams that could bore a hole in the atmosphere and deliver a killing pulse to the attackers. The fatal flaw was that the beams whipped around like a giant high pressure fire hose, and sometimes even turned back and struck the accelerator.

The concept was dropped, but was replaced by an old Soviet idea from the 50s to use the electron beam to trap and accelerate ions to relativistic velocities. The collective forces of the electron beam would trap the ions that would reach billions of volt energies accelerated only over distances of meters. This Collective Ion Acceleration concept that we called the “CIA” would become a practical way to produce stable particle beams, and the intelligence community thought that the Soviets were up to their old tricks at an enigmatic facility at their nuclear test site in Kazakhstan.

The site was called a possible nuclear test site and its nickname was PNUTS. Satellite photos of the site became a mystery that attracted the attention of many U.S. physicists, some of whom thought it was a “CIA” facility, but most were sure that their own programs needed more funding because of what the Soviets were doing. The famous U.S. magazine “Aviation Week,” with the nickname Aviation Leak, because it often seemed to know real secrets, claimed it was a particle beam weapon facility. Indeed the head of the U.S. Air Force Intelligence organization went public in 1977 claiming the Soviets had made a breakthrough and their new weapon could neutralize our entire strategic deterrent.

The real CIA asked several accelerator physicists to stare at the somewhat blurry photos, to get help to solve the mystery, but eventually the intelligence community turned to remote viewers in a psychic phenomenon program called Stargate to visualize the goings on at this enigmatic facility. One of the viewers, who was given just the geographical coordinates, and without any help from any satellite photos, made a drawing of a giant crane that was moved on eight wheels over the facility. A friend of mine visited after the end of the Cold War, and sent me a photo of that crane.

Even though the use of PNUTS had nothing to do with beam weapons, its phony reputation allowed the Soviets to attract unknowing scientists to this god forsaken part of the world, only to be disappointed that it was only a nuclear rocket test facility. We also had such a program but canceled it because of environmental issues, but they continued for decades and just made the program invisible and a total enigma to us.

There was one very serious U.S. directed energy program and that was the development of a nuclear explosion driven X-ray laser, but we were not the first to consider such nuclear powered weapons. The Soviets claimed that a “nuclear explosion creates a stream of metallic fragments of small mass that travel at more than 10 kilometers per second, and are capable of string targets in space, including warheads, with a direct hit. One underground test showed the potential plausibility of accelerating a small mass to high speeds.”

The Soviets also claimed that we were far ahead of them in development of nuclear powered weapons, and they could catch up with us in 10 years if we were slowed by an arms control agreement, but even the early advocates of this approach became discouraged after initial experiments. One of the early strong supporters who was Reagan’s chief scientific adviser, later called the directed nuclear weapons “unadulterated lies,” but I recall Edward Teller requesting an acceleration of the test program, and claimed “the president has already promised these additional funds … and do you really want me to go back to the president and say the money is not available?”

There were other mysteries during my SDI career like the claim by the editor of the biggest Arizona newspaper that the SDI radar facility in the Pacific was really the location of the alien space craft that we were back engineering, and that I was in cahoots with the aliens based on my studies as an undergrad at Cornell University. The editor suddenly departed from the scene when it was discovered that he was a fraud and had no experience that matched his phony uniform, trophies, and medals and the story of my alleged treachery never appeared, although I have a copy.

The particle beam quest was not dead, however, and use of electrons to neutralize ion beams was supported for several years by SDI as a space weapon. That program was canceled when support for SDI energy weapons drastically declined. After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. then proposed to develop a neutral beam accelerator in a joint U.S./Russia nuclear reactor powered space NPB program for planetary geology research.  The Pentagon then decided it was really interested in starting up a new NPB space weapon program and in 2018 announced it was planning a development program leading to a test in space in 2023. Then in 2019 without a lot of notice, the Pentagon announced it was not that interested in the NPB after all because it was too far off, but lasers, the original sword of heat from 1897, was now mature enough to move forward aggressively, and real advances in solid state lasers have energized an accelerated program.

One should not discount the inventiveness of energy weapon advocates, and yet another new weapon that is being supported is based on powerful microwave generators.  Some even claim that such weapons are the cause of the “Havana Syndrome” that messes with the minds of diplomats. Now after many claims of fear of foreign attackers, the CIA says that of “2000 U.S, officials in diplomat posts worldwide” who have claimed symptoms, most are not really from foreign attackers but from some sort of a natural malady. But what about the rest? A CIA panel of “experts” concluded some “small number of the cases …a plausible explanation is a directed pulsed radio frequency energy.”

Can you believe any of this? Well, the true story goes on. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but stay tuned for the fictionalized version, coming soon.

Multi-layer missile defense and the coronavirus

On By gyonas7 Comments

My suggested missile defense approach to defense against the coronavirus would require a layered defense involving a  futuristic breathalyzer and inhaler.

I assume the virus is mostly transmitted by droplets in coughs, but the problem of pneumonia is caused by virus in the lungs,  not the nose or throat.  So I suggest the first layer of defense would be to examine a person who tries to enter a previously sterilized facility through a secure positive pressure  revolving door. The interior of the revolving door would be sterilized to intercept any virus on the person.

The person would first blow into a breath analyzer that would capture the air from the lungs.  After a strong exhale into the collector, a breath analyzer would detect any virus in exhaled droplets. An as-yet-to-be-developed sensor could be an instant  laser induced fluorescence and spectral analyses.  I assume the fluorescence is unique, but this needs to be determined. This is similar to the mid course discrimination problem where we require an excellent ROC curve.

This sensor could be embodied in a miniaturized virus  breathalyzer including a miniature laser and light spectrum analyzer. If the sensor is very sensitive, but not very specific, an  RNA based very specific real time sensor  might  be necessary after the first  positive reading.

If the virus is detected, the next layer would trigger the intercept of the virus. This would be an inhaler function possibly attached to the analyzer that sprays a virus killing drug into the lungs. Such drugs have  already been demonstrated in vitro and are being tested in hospitals.

If the result is a true negative, the person is allowed to enter the already certified facility. The next layer is needed if the person is detected as a true positive, and after treatment with the inhaler,  entrance is prohibited by the door.

The next layer of defense begins with a GPS labeled  signal that is sent to the defense management computer. Information giving the detection and treatment  information then permits contact  tracking and follow up of the person.

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.