‘Star Wars’: a Scientific Dud : In a Highly Technical Way, Experts Peel Off SDI’s Mythology
“I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” Ronald Reagan issued that call on March 23, 1983. Last week the scientific community responded.
A study group of the most eminent members of the scientific community, given full access to the deepest secrets of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, has made its report to its sponsor, the American Physical Society, and to the American people and their government.
That report is as heavy as lead, as cold as ice and as explosive as plutonium. In more than 400 pages, densely packed with Greek letters and mathematical formulas, the report acts as a flensing knife to peel the mythology of “Star Wars” away from the reality of the Strategic Defense Initiative. When my colleagues finished their work, there was little meat left on the SDI skeleton; indeed, there was little skeleton.
A quote from their conclusions:
” . . . the Study Group finds significant gaps in the scientific and technical understanding of many issues.
“At present there is insufficient information to decide whether the required extrapolations (to useful weapons) can or cannot be achieved . . . .
“The important issues of overall system integration and effectiveness depend critically upon information that, to our knowledge, does not yet exist.”
In ordinary terms that means:
--Nobody knows how to build directed-energy defenses.
--Nobody knows if it will ever be possible to build directed-energy defenses.
--And there are important areas in which we do not even know the right questions to ask.
The study group estimated that it will require at least 10 more years of painstaking, and very patient, research to advance our knowledge of the field to the next level. Only then might experts make a reasonable decision about proceeding--not to deployment, but only to the engineering development of systems that might or might not become weapons.
The Physical Society study was enormously detailed; unlike others done by independent groups, it faced the hardest questions, and answered them with information provided directly by the SDI organization and its contractors.
The panel members were not critics of defense. Every member either works for the Departments of Defense or Energy as a consultant, for one of their contractors or for a nuclear-weapons laboratory. Top-level security clearances were a requirement for membership because the co-chairmen--Nicolaas Bloembergen of Harvard, a Nobel laureate, and Kumar Patel of Bell Laboratories--knew that without free access to the classified world they could not fairly judge Star Wars technologies. Understandably, much information on the details of such research remains secret, but the secret material deleted from the report would change none of the conclusions.
The Physical Society study is very skeptical about the utility of the X-ray laser--a beam weapon powered by a hydrogen bomb, which is supposed to send out an intense pulse of X-rays that could destroy a missile.
In a prepared response, the SDI organization asserted that “the X-ray laser could be placed in ground-based interceptors that pop up to engage missiles early in their trajectory phases.” But in a symposium sponsored by the School of Public Affairs of the University of Maryland on April 21, Louis Marquet, deputy director of the SDIO for technology, said that the X-ray laser could not provide a ground-based boost-phase defense. Indeed, in his prepared remarks Marquet said that SDI had still not found a way to deploy a pop-up defense, anywhere.
Some Star Wars scientists say that they have made major improvements since the Physical Society’s report was completed, that the study is out of date. True, some laser powers have increased during the nearly eight months that SDIO and the Defense Department held up publication of the study. Since the SDIO budget exceeds that of the National Science Foundation, it would be remarkable if no results had been achieved.
But the report points out that even the most promising hardware needs to improve by “orders of magnitude.” An order of magnitude is a full factor of 10, and most directed-energy devices, the hypertech beam weapons of Star Wars, fall short of weapons levels by factors of 10,000 or 100,000. SDIO reports recent progress of more than a factor of 10 in the least mature technologies; even that is not surprising. When new ideas are carried forward, the first factor of 10 is usually easy to reach, as I remember from my days in the laboratory. Then the slogging gets hard indeed.
Although the Physical Society did not ask its committee to study kinetic kill systems proposed for premature deployment, much of the report pertains directly to such systems. Any system must be able to tell real targets from decoys--a careful reading of the report makes it clear that using neutral particle beams for “interactive discrimination” will be a formidable task--one for which the hardware does not exist, even in principle. And in the presence of the unknown environment presented by the many nuclear weapons used to attack the defense system, even interactive discrimination will probably fail. The study group held out little hope that any other techniques have a chance of working.
Finally, any system in space must survive attacks by the aggressor. Even should hypertech weapons work, they will be effective against satellites, but at power levels far below those needed to destroy missiles. And they could be knocked out by shotgun pellets and rockets built in the 1970s.
The report to the American Physical Society is tough reading, uncomfortable reading in the White House. Its conclusions, appropriately phrased in the dry language of physics, are that the supporters of hypertech strategic defense do not know how to build weapons that work, that those who support lower-technology weapons do not know how to make them work, or even how to make ones that can survive a Soviet attack. In short, the report demonstrates conclusively that any move to build missile defenses cannot be supported on scientific, technical or engineering grounds.
That is the scientific community’s response to the President’s wish.
