Spate of Highly Publicized Tests : ‘Star Wars’: All-Out Push to Gain Funding

The thin-skinned old Titan 1, pressurized to explode and anchored to the ground, was no match for the advanced chemical laser beam fired from a short distance away. The beam burned a hole in the missile which, predictably, exploded.

A high-powered rifle would have done the same.

However, to Army Lt. Col. Leon T. DeLorme, spokesman for the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, the test last September was “a success.” At least that’s what DeLorme said when he issued a press release and picture announcing what the SDI director, Air Force Lt. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, called a “world-class breakthrough.”

Chemical Laser Downplayed

Two months later, however, the Administration quietly said that it no longer regarded chemical lasers as a promising component of SDI.

Like others in a recent spate of highly publicized weapons tests, the demonstration involving the Titan and the Navy’s mid-infrared advanced chemical laser (MIRACL) apparently was designed more to attract public support for “Star Wars” than to ward off Soviet missiles.

The rise and fall of the chemical laser illustrates the Administration’s all-out effort to make what most scientists believe is a decadelong research program show immediate, tangible results. “Star Wars” strategists, their critics claim, hope such results will induce Congress, which this year cut the President’s SDI funding request, to appropriate billions more for the program.

According to many scientists, this preoccupation with increased funding explains the recent rash of what Stanford University’s Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, who pioneered the linear accelerator, calls “the spectaculars.”

These, he argues, “are not breakthroughs; they retard the program rather than advance its science” by stressing experiments that are doable now at the expense of long-term research that might ultimately produce usable weapons.

Two such experiments were cited by SDI Director Abrahamson when he appeared before the Senate Armed Services subcommittee last October. Testifying on behalf of increased funding for his program, Abrahamson claimed that it had achieved “genuine breakthroughs” on space-based lasers and the so-called “rail gun,” a device that would use electromagnetic forces to shoot high-speed projectiles at missiles.

That same month, after Congress had cut his budget, Abrahamson announced that the rail gun and space-based lasers were being cut back or, as he phrased it, put “in a backup mode.” The implication was that if Congress provided more money, prospects for the rail gun would be revived.

SDI insiders, however, say the weapon has been de-emphasized not because of money problems but because of an inability to produce a projectile that could be fired at a constant speed. Physics, rather than congressional funding, has been the stumbling block.

‘By No Means a Weapon’

James Ionson, SDI’s director of Innovative Science and Technology and the man in charge of the rail gun, recently told The Times: “It is by no means a weapon. It’s not a gun; you can’t point it. It’s a basic physics research program to see what prospects exist.”

Nor is Congress the only intended audience for the “Star Wars” proponents’ publicity campaign. In early December, for example, Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger told the U.S. Armed Forces Radio in West Germany that “Star Wars” is “way ahead of where we thought we could be two or three years ago.”

Anti-Missile Shield

That same day, Weinberger told a conference of West German officials and industrialists that the United States might have the ability to deploy an anti-missile shield using ground-based laser weapons as early as the mid-1990s.

Weinberger referred to recent experiments in Hawaii when he said: “In the past we thought that a ground-based laser system would not be available until the turn of the century. This (Hawaii test) and other breakthroughs convince us that a ground-based laser missile-defense system with space-based elements may be feasible by the mid-1990s.”

The defense secretary waved U.S. defense money before the delegates in an ultimately successful effort to urge West German contractors to participate in “Star Wars” projects. “There are still several billion dollars yet to go . . . it is not too late,” he said.

Component in Trouble

Weinberger’s claims, like those of Abrahamson, raise a pressing question: Precisely how far along the road to development are the complex and exotic technologies that “Star Wars” would require? As The Times previously has reported, the most important “Star Wars” atomic component--the nuclear-pumped X-ray laser--is in deep trouble. In fact, leading government scientists, many of whom support SDI’s overall goals, now doubt that their colleagues working on the X-ray laser have ever even produced such a usable laser.

What, then, can be said of “Star Wars” non-nuclear components? After extensive interviews with leading scientists, many of whom are actually conducting government-funded research on SDI, the picture that emerges is mixed. While some promising avenues of inquiry have opened, very few scientists on either side of the “Star Wars” debate share the buoyant optimism of Weinberger and Abrahamson.

‘Barriers ... Crumbled’

Take, for instance, last June’s highly publicized Hawaiian experiment to which the defense secretary referred. Weinberger told the West Germans: “The barriers that we thought would be high have crumbled. For example, we can now apparently remove the various disintegrating effects of the atmosphere on a laser beam. This disposes of one of the common sneers about SDI, that it only works in good weather.”

In that experiment, a low-intensity laser beam directed from a site in Hawaii bounced off a reflector installed on the space shuttle Discovery. More than 10 years ago, however, a similar low-intensity laser was bounced off a reflector planted by astronauts on the moon. Neither experiment demonstrated that a laser will work in bad weather, as Weinberger suggested. The water particles in clouds absorb the light of all existing lasers.

The night of the shuttle experiment, William A. Barletta, who directs the free-electron laser program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told The Times that he learned of the experiment from a radio news report and thought it had little to do with the much more difficult problems his project must solve before it produces a working weapon.

The SDI organization has booked another laser test on a future space shuttle mission. That experiment also will utilize the resources of the European-built Spacelab module.

“Aside from its technical objectives,” Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine reported, “the SDI/Spacelab mission is designed to show that the SDI project can produce significant results while building momentum to justify long-term continuation of the multibillion-dollar research effort.”

Achievements Sought

Aviation Week is closely attuned to the thinking of the defense industry and was reflecting a widespread feeling that SDI needs some striking achievements soon, lest the next Administration dismiss the program as a figment of the previous President’s imagination.

Few informed critics disagree with Abrahamson’s assertion that interesting and, in many cases, impressive science and engineering work has been done on defensive weapons over the last decade. These critics, however, also charge that such progress has had little to do with the publicized “successes” of “Star Wars.”

Much of the work had been going on before the President’s March, 1983, speech calling for a new effort on defensive weapons. The MIRACL laser, for example, already had been developed by TRW as a short-range weapon to protect the Navy’s ships from cruise missiles and enemy aircraft. It simply was recycled for “Star Wars.”

Similarly, when a non-nuclear projectile, often referred to as a “smart rock,” destroyed a missile in flight in June, 1984, the successful intercept was presented as an SDI achievement.

However, the test, which followed three failures, was the result of a long, ongoing Army program to provide point defense of missile silos. The purpose of the exercise--called the Homing Overlay Experiment (HOE)--was to demonstrate that this could be done with non-nuclear projectiles, as opposed to the nuclear-armed Spartan interceptor that had been the mainstay of the old ABM program.

‘Smart Rock’ Experiment

Robert M. Bowman, who was formerly the director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the Air Force, argues that the “smart rock” experiment succeeded despite the new SDI program, which diverted funds originally destined for HOE.

He also contends that HOE’s success shows that protection of U.S. missiles in their silos does not require SDI. Point defense of America’s main missile field in the North Plains is permitted under the ABM treaty and does not require a crash program in new technology.

Still another example of SDI’s appropriation of ongoing research occurred last November, when Abrahamson exhibited a photograph of a shattered Soviet SS-18 mock-up, which he claimed had been destroyed by pellets fired from a rail gun. That night’s network news aired government-issued film clips of the successful experiment.

However, science writer William J. Broad subsequently reported in the New York Times that in a later, smaller press briefing, Abrahamson “revealed that the damage had not actually been done by an electromagnetic rail gun but by a hardened projectile fired from an air gun, a technology much less futuristic. The modern air gun was developed in France in the early 18th Century.”

‘Light Gas Gun’

Technically, it was a “light gas gun” that did the firing, a more modern cousin of the 18th-Century air gun, but hardly a rail gun or other futuristic weapon.

SDI has had some scientific successes, such as the free-electron laser being developed at Livermore. Actual progress on the weapon is a matter of the highest classification. As the fortunes of the X-ray laser have declined, Livermore officials have begun to emphasize the free-electron program, which is also under their supervision.

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal last spring, Livermore physicist Lowell Wood--a protege of “Star Wars” scientific godfather Edward Teller--predicted that the free-electron laser would achieve “peak power levels approaching a million megawatts within a few years.” That would make it an enormously powerful laser.

Wood went on to claim that the Livermore free-electron laser “very recently has generated peak power levels over 1,000 megawatts.”

Wood, however, is not directly involved with the free-electron program, which has been widely praised for having pursued high-quality scientific research free of the political overtones that have colored the debate over the X-ray laser, in whose development Wood has had a hand.

Several informed observers say that Wood’s figures are just wrong and much exaggerate the free-electron program’s progress, but that classification rules prevent them from supplying accurate data.

Considerable Consternation

Wood’s Wall Street Journal disclosures engendered considerable consternation among some at Livermore who are involved with the free-electron device. In a letter dated June 4, 1985, physicist Andrew M. Sessler, who works on the free-electron laser project, wrote to Livermore’s director, Roger E. Batzel, to complain of Wood’s Wall Street Journal letter.

In Sessler’s letter, obtained by The Times, he noted that Wood “is not a member of our group, nor has he been involved with our experiment at all. Furthermore, he did not talk with either of the two principal investigators, or with our lead experimentalist, prior to sending off this letter.”

Sessler went on to make a larger point about the use and misuse of classification guidelines: “We have been told that because of security restrictions we cannot talk about our experimental results. We have not been allowed, either, to publish our work. . . . (An abstract on this year’s work was not released.) Can I now talk freely about the experiment? Can we now publish our results? . . . Most importantly, was Wood’s action conscionable?”

Others More Tentative

While Wood tends to minimize the difficulty of turning the free-electron laser experiment into a usable weapon, others who are connected with the program are much more tentative in their assessment.

A powerful laser may be developed but it would require an enormous installation. The Livermore experiment involves an accelerator as long as a football field and a massive energy supply. And because the free-electron laser, too, could be blocked by clouds, many would have to be built in a variety of locations to ensure that enough would have clear skies overhead on the day of battle.

But the basic limitation of the free-electron and other ground-based lasers has less to do with their ability to pass through the atmosphere and far more to do with their dependence on huge, complex space-based mirrors, which would deflect the laser beam from the earth to the target. If such mirrors could be built and deployed, they would be vulnerable to crippling attack by nothing more complicated than a cup of oil or a handful of nails tossed into nearby space. No breakthroughs have been reported in this vital area.

The SDI office has, in the words of its chief scientist Gerold Yonas, “upselected” another futuristic weapon, the neutral particle beam. This weapon, under development at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is now expected to play an effective role in differentiating between enemy warheads and decoys in space.

Long Way From Deployment

However, one top White House science consultant, who is very high on the prospects of the neutral particle beam, warns that the United States is a long way from deploying one.

“No one has done these things; no one has put a neutral particle beam in space and shot anything,” he noted.

What has occurred to date is an experiment at Los Alamos this last September in which particle beam pulses were successfully guided through an 11-foot pipe.

“There is no question that you can make a beam,” said Panofsky, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and an SDI critic. But he argues that to make a weapon requires placing a huge, vulnerable accelerator on a satellite in space. Even if it worked, such a device might easily be destroyed by a determined enemy.

At a recent conference in Albuquerque, Stephen D. Rockwood, the director of the SDI program at Los Alamos, defended the feasibility of the neutral particle beam weapon by arguing that there has been a reduction in the size of the front end of the accelerator thanks to a Soviet invention openly shared with U.S. scientists who visited Soviet colleagues.

Significance Discounted

But Panofsky, who is one of the scientists who first learned this technique on one such visit, discounts its significance. “It’s merely a detail,” he said, holding up a picture of an accelerator to make his point that the front end represents a small fraction of the overall size of the device.

Rockwood remains sanguine about the ability of his team to further reduce the size of a particle beam weapon, but he readily agrees that it will, at best, play a partial role in an overall defense.

And, like all other space-based components of the proposed “Star Wars” system, particle beams would require a powerful orbiting energy source to fuel their efforts. To date, the largest power generator lifted into space was aboard the Skylab vehicle launched in 1973; it provided 12 kilowatts. But, according to Air Force Col. George Hess, SDI’s director for Survivability, Lethality and Key Technologies, the proposed weapons would require peak power levels in the 100 to 300 megawatt range.

“You cannot realistically supply that kind of power with anything other than some type of nuclear reactor system,” Hess recently told the engineering magazine Spectrum. “Sooner or later, we’re going to have to face the problem of public acceptance of the presence of nuclear reactors in space.”

This is a potentially awkward admission about a program that President Reagan has, from the start, insisted would be non-nuclear.

Joint Venture

Hess is in charge of the SP-100 project, a joint venture of SDI, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy, whose aim is to develop 100 kilowatt to 1 megawatt nuclear reactors for space deployment and to test such a reactor on the ground by 1991. The SDI organization reported to Congress this year that these new nuclear reactors will be required for space missions in the early 1990s.

Increasingly, the SDI planners’ attention has turned from futuristic new technologies to more conventional rockets, including kinetic-energy kill weapons, which chief SDI scientist Yonas told The Times are high on his list.

Refined for Direct Impact

Such weapons have existed for decades as part of the ongoing ballistic missile defense program. Originally, they were small, nuclear-tipped rockets intended to explode near enough to destroy incoming Soviet missiles aimed at U.S. missile fields. Recently, they have been refined to home in for a direct impact rather than employing a nuclear explosion. The HOE was a test of just such a device and the recent successful anti-satellite experiment was another.

The problem with these kinetic energy weapons, though, is that their relative slowness makes them unlikely weapons for intercepting Soviet missiles while they still are in the vulnerable boost phase. If, as seems likely, the Soviets develop an MX-type missile, the boost phase would be completed in just two minutes.

2 Minutes a Short Time

Thus, a “Star Wars” system would have to have a sensor that would detect the firing of Soviet missiles and alert centralized computers, which then make a decision to aim and shoot the “smart rock.” Most experts consider two minutes a forbiddingly short time to do all of that.

According to sources within the SDI organization, much progress has been made in sensor technology. But no such claims have been made for the computer software that remains to be developed if “Star Wars” is ever to function.

In fact, some SDI critics charge that too much emphasis has been put on the “kill mechanisms” and too little on the overall coordination of the system.

“All this attention on finding the bullet to destroy the target,” physicist Sidney D. Drell notes, “is the easy part.”

‘Wouldn’t Trust It’

The hard part, argues Drell, an SDI critic who is president-elect of the American Physical Society, “is trying to gather reliable information on the movements of enemy warheads that are disguised, fortified, mixed with decoys, capable of evasive action, and feeding that information into your computers to differentiate the real from the fake, then sending instructions of minute shifts in battle mirrors, firing rockets, exploding X-rays, you name it. We just don’t know where to begin to develop that software, and wouldn’t trust it if we had it.”

One response of SDI officials to such criticism is to stress that the system will be multilayered, with built-in redundancy, allowing for failures in some weapons or computers.

Last month, the SDI organization told reporters that current thinking leaned in the direction of a “complex, seven-layer system that would consist of thousands of space satellites with weapons intended to furnish a nearly perfect nationwide shield.”

A key White House science adviser, when asked to comment on that scheme, termed it “absurd” because “this is a never-never land that begs all of the problems we must deal with. We still don’t have a single workable weapon that can shoot down a single uncooperative missile. So what good is it to talk about seven layers of weapons that don’t exist and maybe never will?”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.