Hippo Dome Defense, for Example : Caltech Offers World ‘Star Warps’

Calling President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative an “impractical joke,” Caltech students last week awarded prizes for the most destabilizing, unworkable and obsolete space weapons systems.

Instead of building bombs, Greg Ojakangas said, peace could be achieved under a genetically engineered shield of helium-inflated pygmy hippos.

Or if that seemed a bit wishful, David Palmer suggested, the Earth could simply be split into its hemispheres, allowing continents to rotate effortlessly away, as if on a Lazy Susan, from a nuclear attack.

Such scenarios may not get too far at the Pentagon, but for the pranksters from Pasadena, they were good for first and second prizes in a contest aimed at satirizing the Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars,” defense plan.

A Difference in Cost

“Our proposals are no more ridiculous than the schemes actually being taken seriously by the government,” said Allan van Asselt, a graduate student and spokesman for the Space Weapons Study Group, which organized the event. “The difference is that our contest didn’t cost a trillion dollars, and we’ll be around to laugh about it after the ideas don’t work.”

The contest began on April Fools’ Day. Entrants were asked to present a technically and fiscally infeasible weapons system in the form of a Defense Department spending proposal.

The winning entry, for example, which envisions a lightweight strain of pygmy hippopotamus, proposes that a herd of LAUGHS (Lighter-than-Air Upside-down Grazing HippoS) be bred to form a ROOPH (Readily Operative Overhead Protection by Hippos), which would form an invulnerable defense shield.

Van Asselt predicted that the “Off-White Paper Contest” might ruffle some feathers, but said, “If you’re just being funny and someone gets annoyed, it makes them look pretty bad.”

Caltech, which has close ties with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a major researcher for military space programs, has taken a neutral stance on the Strategic Defense Initiative, said the college’s spokesman, Dennis Meredith.

“We prefer to remain a debating ground for all positions,” Meredith said, adding that he was unaware of any objections to the contest.

At the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, the official agency overseeing the research and development program in Washington, a spokesman said he was not familiar with the parodies, but added that he also supported a free exchange of opinion on the subject.

Critical Opinions

Last year, students from the Space Weapons Study Group gathered more than 500 signatures at Caltech, including those of six Nobel laureates, on a petition criticizing the Star Wars program as unworkable and wasteful of scientific resources. Twenty-eight of 46 members of the Caltech physics faculty also signed a pledge this year to refuse funding for Star Wars research.

“It’s much too serious to be a laughing matter,” said physics Prof. David Hitlin, circulator of the non-participation pledge. “But sometimes humor can make a point.”

Murray Gell-Mann, winner of a Nobel prize in physics, saying he had not reviewed any of the mock schemes, termed the Strategic Defense Initiative “like the National Enquirer; it’s its own caricature.”

Ingenuity Triumphs

Besides hovering hippopotamuses, other notable entries included a cardboard defense shield (“a strong and patriotic product”); a fleet of 100 million orbiting Chryslers (“Car Wars”); dispersal of the nation’s population among 22 million blimps (“no fixed targets”); and synthetic noses, patterned after Pinocchio’s, attached to the faces of all Strategic Defense Initiative directors (“a honker the size of a Dodger Dog will provide our legislators and the public with a not easily overlooked warning”).