SDI Weapons and Education

As as physicist, business executive, former Congressional Science Fellow of the American Physical Society, and holder of an SDI weapon patent, I cannot allow the absurdities promulgated by Roger Scruton to go unchallenged (“Let’s Produce More Patriots, Not Peaceniks,” Column Right, Commentary, Jan. 29).

Scruton seems totally ignorant of the SDI program. SDI, as promulgated by President Reagan, was designed to stop a first strike from the Soviet Union. To this end, its primary components were to be space-based weapons that could destroy Soviet ballistic missiles before they could release their multiple warheads, i.e., during their boost phase. The Patriot missile system destroys warheads during their descent onto the target, a technology that was developed long before SDI as part of the ABM program.

The SDI program was subject to attacks from the scientific community as a program to defend against a Soviet first strike for sound technical reasons:

1) The space-based assets of the system could not be protected.

2) The target acquisition and control system would be far too complex.

3) There is no way to adequately test such a system.

4) It would not be able to destroy cruise missiles or most submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

5) It is not cost-effective; the Soviets could build missiles faster and cheaper than SDI could increase its capability to destroy them.

I suppose Scruton wants to destroy the public education system so that we will be technically illiterate--and therefore accept his lame excuses to support SDI. I must wonder who he expects to build such a system if public education is eliminated. Or, perhaps what Scruton is really saying is that the public education system should be eliminated because it produces people who do not share his views. In either case, he seems to have made a strong argument for increasing, rather than decreasing, funding for public education.

JAMES R. TREGLIO

San Diego