Scientists Scramble : ‘Star Wars’: A Program in Disarray

Secretary of State George P. Shultz was perplexed and turned to the aerospace executive next to him to ask what the President was talking about. Shultz said the President’s plan sounded worrisome. The executive wasn’t quite sure just what the President had in mind, but he assured Shultz that it would never get off the ground.

They were guests at a hastily arranged and secret White House dinner gathering of about 50 top government officials, weapons contractors and scientists dramatically summoned on very short notice from throughout the country to be briefed on a speech the President would soon be making to the nation.

Between their main course and dessert, the President left them to face the television cameras to speak of “changing the course of human history” with a bold new program aimed at rendering “nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

A scientist in attendance that night reports that most of his colleagues were stunned by the President’s pitch, “except Edward (Teller)--he was just beaming. This is his baby. He’s been pushing defense for years, but everybody else I talked to thought the speech was just off the wall.”

So it went, back in March of 1983, when Reagan--in what is most commonly referred to as his “Star Wars” speech--proposed building a defensive system that would protect the United States against attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles. It was a flyer, a gambit, an impulse totally outside mainstream thinking on national defense. There was even something pixieish about how the President just stuck it into the end of a speech calling for more spending on offensive nuclear weapons, such as the MX missile.

“I’ve been having this idea,” the President explained at a press conference a few days after the speech. “It’s been kicking around in my mind for some time here recently. . . . And since we don’t know how long it will take . . . we have to start.”

Program in Disarray

Now, the whole world is discussing what is officially termed the President’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a name that suggests a carefully conceived, well-thought-out and meticulously planned proposal. It is none of those things, and Administration insiders concede that the program it spawned is in disarray.

“There was no one in the Administration who had thought through the consequences,” a key White House scientific consultant told The Times, “and so it was natural when that bombshell hit for people to scramble around and figure out what they are going to do next.”

The consultant, who requested anonymity, still works on the project but expressed concern that the office set up in the Administration to run this program is “in a shambles . . . everyone’s scrambling for contracts, but it’s not at all clear what we’re after.”

But shambles or not, “Star Wars” has become a major fact of life in the nuclear arms race. Last week, a senior White House official said Reagan plans to make his initiative the focus of next month’s summit meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The President reportedly will attempt to shift the discussion away from traditional arms control and onto defensive strategy. The senior official was quoted as saying Reagan will tell the Soviets that “there is a new technology that may give us a new way of doing things better.”

Both sides agree that efforts to construct defensive weapons are a serious obstacle to reaching agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty, a ban on weapons in space and perhaps any arms control at all. In his news conference last Tuesday, the President said he would not halt development and testing of a “Star Wars” system in exchange for deep cuts in the number of Soviet offensive missiles.

Subject Not Certain

However, despite its immediate impact, one point about the “Star Wars” debate can be made bluntly: Neither side seems to know exactly what they are talking about. As yet, neither superpower has even the recognizable beginnings of a defensive system that could render nuclear weapons “impotent” as the President has proposed.

Most experts agree that this particular goal will never be met. Thus, most proponents of SDI are resigned to accomplishing something far less significant, and the talk in the trade is now most often about new anti-satellite weapons or some increased measure of protection for missile silos. And even “Star Wars” ’ most enthusiastic boosters never claimed that the system could thwart attack by nuclear-armed cruise missiles, manned bombers or low-trajectory missiles.

However, that night in March, Reagan clearly had more in mind. For years before he became President, he had been getting enthusiastic briefings from members of the political right--such as physicist Edward Teller and retired Army Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham--urging development of a defensive shield to protect America against incoming missiles. Theoretically, this shield would protect civilians, as well as missile silos.

Opposed Treaty

Like Teller, Graham and other members of their circle, Reagan had opposed the Richard M. Nixon Administration’s treaty with the Soviets limiting deployment of anti-ballistic missiles and other defensive systems. Like them, Reagan looks with dark suspicion upon what they all see as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty’s aftermath--an unwarranted Soviet buildup permitted by the flawed Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (SALT) negotiated by the Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations.

In the months preceding the President’s speech, this lobbying had intensified, buttressed by selective leaks to the media about alleged technological breakthroughs. But few members of the defense Establishment--Republicans or Democrats--were converted to the concept of defensive shields.

In fact, according to White House insiders, the President deliberately avoided the normal channels for clearing a new defense program because he anticipated that his government’s own experts would summarily reject the proposal. Reagan wrote the relevant portions of the speech himself, while at Camp David, consulting only Robert C. McFarlane, his national security adviser, and George A. Keyworth II, his chief science adviser.

Joint Chiefs Not Consulted

No advice concerning the speech was asked for or received from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the State or Defense departments. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, who was traveling in Europe the week of the speech, had to be told by phone that something big was up.

All of this suggests that the President’s impulsive proposal was a response to something other than strategic or technical necessity. That impression was confirmed by Gerold Yonas, the project’s chief scientist and acting deputy director, who recalled that, during those months, the White House felt increasingly under siege:

“The opposition to MX and the freeze movement were very close to succeeding; (there was) the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter, which at one point said nuclear weapons were immoral. All of us working in the weapons game were aware of that whole business, including the anti-nuclear movement in Europe. There was a lot of frustration.”

According to Yonas, there also was concern over public response to the television movie “The Day After,” which graphically portrayed the effects of nuclear war.

The factors Yonas cited have all but faded from the scene, and even critics now concede that “Star Wars” has been an enormous political achievement for the President, permitting him to capture the moral high ground at a time when his defense buildup was under increasing attack.

While “Star Wars” the speech was an immediate political success, even SDI proponents agree that “Star Wars” the program has proved at best to be vague and contradictory.

The speech was a mixture of “hope and hype” says George C. Smith, an expert on nuclear war fighting at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory--one of two facilities where America’s nuclear weapons are developed--and a strong critic of the program. “The hope is getting rid of nuclear weapons, which we all want. The hype is thinking it can be done with these new exotic weapons.”

What originally caught the public’s imagination was the President’s notion of an umbrella that could prevent nuclear missiles from hitting this country’s population as well as its military targets.

Offer of Security

“Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. . . .” Reagan said that night. “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”

As James R. Schlesinger, who served as defense secretary in two previous Republican administrations and as an arms control adviser to this one, said recently, “The heart of that speech was the promise that some day, American cities might be safe from nuclear attack. . . . That is the political appeal. That is what the American public hopes is going to occur. . . .(But there is) no realistic hope that we will be able ever again to protect American cities.”

The President himself soon learned that there was hardly anyone around who thought such a goal realistic in the foreseeable future.

Certainly not William Perry, a hard-liner who, as undersecretary of defense in the Carter Administration, presided over a $1-billion-per-year defensive weapons research program. “I was incredulous,” Perry told The Times. “My first question was who in the world was advising him (Reagan) on this. It’s a very attractive idea. Too bad it’s a fantasy.” Perry added that “there were no breakthroughs in technology nor, in my opinion, in the (Soviet) threat” to warrant an expanded SDI program.

That view was echoed by Richard D. Delauer, Reagan’s former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. “They were going to make nuclear weapons obsolete,” Delauer said. “But those of us who knew what was really going on couldn’t support that.”

“Nobody believes in 100% leak-proof defense,” SDI chief scientist Yonas told The Times. “Nobody believes in 100% anything that’s ever worked on military systems.”

His view was echoed by another SDI proponent, Paul S. Brown, Livermore’s assistant associate director for arms control: “When you consider what the President intended, which was a leakproof umbrella,” Brown said, “I think that that’s something that very few scientists think is going to be possible.”

Yet there has been no shortage of scientists lining up to attempt the impossible. The SDI office recently reported that it has a stack of 1,000 proposals from universities hoping to work on “Star Wars.” Major aerospace contractors already have been given substantial commitments for research.

Even SDI’s critics have doubts about halting a program that has developed such a substantial constituency of scientists and contractors. “There’s a tipping point on any weapons system,” notes physicist Sidney D. Drell, deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. “Once a certain amount of money is committed, even if the weapon makes no sense, it’s not going to be easy to change course.

“What’s happening now is that all of the industries and many scientists are being brought into this, and that creates a constituency of support that, up the road, becomes impossible to turn off.”

The Soviets’ shrill criticism of “Star Wars,” which Drell regards as hypocritical in light of similar programs in that country, has also served to confuse the debate.

“Once the Russians started bleeding so much about this, it made it easy to lump criticism of SDI with being soft on the Russians, which I am not,” Drell said. “This is just not a good way to defend the country. There are better, more workable and cheaper ways to improve our defenses. In fact, it’s distracting us from real problems we have on defense.”

One of the most distracting things about SDI is that even its most fervent proponents are divided over what they are proposing.

Even before the President’s speech, for example, Teller and Graham--who had influenced Reagan to make his proposal--had fallen out over just what it meant. Teller had resigned from the advisory board of Graham’s High Frontiers organization, which lobbies for defensive weapons, because they are committed to diametrically opposed solutions to the problem.

Swift, Relatively Cheap

Graham and his group favor using what he claims is existing, off-the-shelf technology that could be deployed rather swiftly and relatively cheaply. Graham also looks to non-nuclear weapons.

Teller, on the other hand, favors a massive, high-tech research program that would take at least a decade, require massive funding and feature work on a device called a nuclear pumped X-ray laser under his sponsorship at Livermore.

Reagan’s speech appeared to favor Teller’s approach in stressing the long-term research aspect of the program. But a month later, reports from the White House indicated that the program was to be non-nuclear, which would cut out Teller’s pet project.

Nor was the matter made any clearer earlier this year, when Energy Secretary John S. Herrington, whose department funds Livermore, issued a joint statement with Weinberger stating that the program would be non-nuclear, although research on the nuclear part would continue as a backup if all else failed.

Emphasis on Deterrence

More significant is the Administration’s broad retreat on the stated purposes of the program. The emphasis now is increasingly on adding to deterrence rather than replacing it as a national strategy. In the process, the Strategic Defense Initiative has come to look more and more like an expanded ABM program.

Abandoning the goal of a nuclear shield could prove politically costly. Some erosion of public support for the project was indicated in July’s ABC News/Washington Post poll, which reported that 53% of those questioned oppose SDI, while 41% approve of it. When asked if they would support SDI if it turns out to violate the ABM treaty, only 26% said yes, while 66% were in opposition.

Confused though the program’s objectives may be, the Administration plans to spend $26 billion on it over the next five years. During the program’s first year, the money could not be spent fast enough to use up the yearly appropriation.

The size of such funding requests comes as no surprise to Delauer, who until recently was Weinberger’s top assistant on weapons technology. He is a weary veteran of lobbying efforts by Teller, Graham and other proponents of a crash program on SDI, and he feels that they seriously underestimate the cost of eventually deploying a system.

“Everybody still underestimates the cost. The secretary (Weinberger) gets mad at me about that. I was never against SDI. I just said it was going to cost a lot of money, and it wasn’t going to do what everybody thought. But I didn’t think it had to.”

Delauer’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee produced the $26-billion price tag for the program over the next five years, a figure that Delauer now says he just pulled out of the air, although it was used by the Administration as a realistic projection.

As Delauer remembers it, his improvisation came under pressure from the Senate committee’s ranking Democratic member: “I tried to figure out what the hell we’re talking about. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) wanted a number and kept insisting on having a number . . . OK . . . first year was $2.4 billion, and I figure, OK, best we could handle is maybe a 20%-25% per year growth.

“It’s not small potatoes,” ventured Delauer with the air of one accustomed to shopping markets where items are routinely rounded out to the nearest million and sometimes billion for convenience of calculation. Moreover, he emphasizes that his cost estimates are for research only and have nothing to do with the expense of actually deploying a “Star Wars” system, if one eventually is developed.

Serious proponents of SDI tend to promise nothing and instead focus on the desirability of research. After all, something may work, they say, and anyway, we have to be certain that the Soviets do not surpass us with any surprise successes.

In this scenario, all problems raised by the program’s critics become opportunities for research. What has been called the technological imperative for change has driven all modern weapons programs, but it is particularly powerful in pushing SDI because the science and engineering involved are so complicated and undeveloped.

Sense of Adventure

William Lowell Morgan, a Livermore physicist working on the X-ray laser weapon, has grave doubts about the possibility and wisdom of deploying SDI but concedes that the science is “very interesting.” This is particularly true in comparison to “just going on building warheads for missiles, which had gotten very predictable and boring.”

While the vast majority of the project’s scientific proponents tend to be similarly cautious in their hopes, a sense of adventure often seems to overwhelm them.

Yonas, for example, was somewhat euphoric as he ticked off the proposal’s challenges: “Look, we don’t have a guarantee at this point. This is still a risky venture. And we’re going to continue to bill it as a research program. . . . There’s an awful lot of program breakthroughs we have to make if we’re going to do it.

“What we’re doing in the SDI,” Yonas concluded, “is trying to make the 21st Century happen a lot faster than it would have ordinarily. We’re going to pull it forward by making a technology thrust.”

Yonas would not rule out any of the techniques that have been proposed, except to note lightly that “we’ve dropped all emphasis on the crossbow--trying to pull that string tight is really a bitch, particularly when you’re under attack.”

One hears jokes like that all the time from proponents and critics of the program, suggesting that they are not quite sure what they are looking for, but it’s fun getting there.

“I think that the great majority of the lab’s technical people view the President’s speech as somewhat off the wall and the programs being proposed as being, in the end, intrinsically rather foolish,” notes Livermore physicist Hugh E. DeWitt. “But, obviously, the lab is benefiting right now and will continue to benefit, and everybody’s rather happy with the marvelous new work.”

Computer Scientist Quit

However, other scientists have resisted the temptation. In June, computer scientist David L. Parnas quit an appointment that paid him $1,000 a day for service on a high-level advisory panel convened by the SDI organization to evaluate the computer part of the system’s battle management.

“Most of the money spent will be wasted; we wouldn’t trust the system if we did build it,” charged Parnas, a professor who previously worked full-time at the Naval Research Laboratory on computer applications to weapons systems.

Parnas said he had no ideological objection to the defensive weapons program but had concluded that a computer program of such complexity and accuracy could not be completed.

Citing the challenge of the President’s speech asking scientists to work toward making nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete, Parnas wrote to the SDI organization, “It is our duty, as scientists and engineers, to reply that we have no technological magic that will accomplish that. The President and the public should know that.”

Parnas, who will continue with the Navy on other weapons, conceded in his report that “I am quite certain that you will be able to find software experts who disagree with my conclusions.” He also noted that other scientists and defense contractors see SDI as a “pot of gold just waiting to be tapped.”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.