Tag: war in space

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.

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.

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.

 

Brilliant pebbles

Space is a dangerous place.

On By gyonas3 Comments

The trouble with good ideas…

Brilliant pebbles are a really good idea, at least some scientists think so. No one doubts that the technology exists now to deploy thousands of small missiles (called brilliant pebbles) permanently orbiting the planet. These missiles coupled to an extensive space based satellite sensor constellation could automatically go after and intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles shortly after they lift off in their very visible boost phase. Burning boosters are very vulnerable to a high velocity collision with even a light object, and the boosters would come crashing down together with their lethal payloads possibly not even far from their launch area. Assuming that the sensors are operational and not spoofed, the automated decision process is reliable and most of the so called pebbles are in good working order, this low earth orbiting cloud of defensive missiles would greatly contribute to our defense against the ever greater proliferation of ballistic missiles and some of these might even have nuke payloads.

Some cost estimates of this defense investment do not seem unreasonable … but wait for the rest of the story. Any competent adversary who had counted on achieving a convincing threat would not be so happy with our deployment and would know far in advance about our plans and observe our deployment process. They might complain about our “militarization of space” and even threaten to put a stop to our bad behavior before we got too far into our plan. They might even do something nasty just to get our attention, and they might even use anti-satellite methods to harass and even destroy our early deployments. They might even start deploying their own missile constellation to tag along closely with our defensive missiles, and we might tell them to stop that and ask them to back off.  If we hurry up and get going before they can do too much, we could get our convincing defensive capability in place and declare our ownership of space and not allow further deployments of means to attack our purely defensive missiles. They might then turn their military investments to high power lasers on the ground that could over a period of time harass, blind and destroy our missiles and sensors. It turns out that low earth space orbits can be a very dangerous place if ground based high power lasers exist, but wait there are clouds that could get in the way, so they might not have the freedom of action they desire.

Another approach to laser deployment could be on high altitude aircraft that could operate above the clouds and conveniently track and shoot up at satellites. The laser power supplies would be chemicals that would have to be replenished, but there could be multiple aircraft, and the adversary could take their time to mess up our deployment. But wait there would be more to this story since we could attack the large, slow and vulnerable aircraft with our advanced fighter planes and their lasers that shoot toward satellites would provide them with no protection, so they might use their own advanced fighter planes to attack ours. By then we might have our own high power lasers on our fighter planes and we could defeat their lower power lasers, while they try to use their anti-satellite missiles against our purely defensive pebbles.

But wait, they might not be ready to start a space/air shooting war and instead attack our extensive but very vulnerable electric grid using their cyber weapons, which would trigger our own cyber-attack on their command, control, communications, intelligence (c3i). They might then try to destroy our c3i so we would no longer be able to manage the rapidly deteriorating chaos of our purely defensive pebbles. Somebody might even try to nuke somebody, or maybe their terrorist buddies could dump biological agents in a few of our cities, since nobody is managing the chaos, and things might get really messy real fast. Oh well, brilliant pebbles seemed like a good idea.