COLUMN ONE : Turning Swords to Scientific Plowshares : Once-secret military hardware is a potential windfall for civilian researchers. The toughest part is finding money to convert the high-tech gear to peaceful uses.
In darkness, two men in orange spacesuits trudge across the Mojave salt flats to take their seats in the cockpit of a spectral SR-71. Sitting on the Tarmac, the supersonic spy plane is blacker than a moonless midnight.
A dozen civilian technicians in jeans and T-shirts tinker with the temperamental aircraft, as rivulets of jet fuel stream like sweat off its wings and angular fuselage.
It is a pre-dawn scene that could be drawn from the secret annals of the Cold War.
There are no Air Force blue-suiters in evidence, however, no armed MPs or tight-lipped military spooks. Overseeing the operation is a young civilian astronomer in faded Guess jeans and a white cowboy shirt, her waist-length brown hair held out of her eyes by sunglasses pushed up on her forehead.
The stealthy craft is bound not for forbidden airspace over Russia or North Korea, but for the stratosphere above Los Angeles, where UCLA researchers will use its unique high-altitude capabilities to calibrate sensors designed to monitor the health of Earth’s atmosphere.
The mission is one small symbol of a fundamental change transforming the conduct of science in the United States after the Cold War.
A receding tide of defense funding has exposed an unexpected peace dividend: a windfall of laboratory facilities, once-secret apparatus, and sophisticated technology, like the SR-71, developed to bolster the military in the decades of conflict with the Soviet Union.
As the threat of nuclear annihilation appears to subside, scientists like Jacklyn R. Green, the planetary astronomer in charge of the recent NASA-sponsored SR-71 flight, are scrambling to salvage such swords of high technology and convert them into tools of basic, civilian research. It is a daunting task to even locate such technological treasures, and--in an era of shrinking federal research dollars--harder still to find the money to operate them.
“It is our inheritance from the Cold War,” she said. “We own it. Our parents’ generation paid dearly for it. It is a national resource.”
Green, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is at the forefront of those who are finding useful scientific work for Cold War hardware forced into retirement.
The Defense Department retired its SR-71 fleet--the world’s fastest and highest-flying production aircraft--in 1990. Green learned of the surplus planes by chance over lunch one day and immediately volunteered to comb the scientific community for experiments suitable for the supersonic craft.
“It is a solution looking for a problem,” Green said of the sleek craft silhouetted in the desert dawn.
Green and SR-71 project manager David T. Lux at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center now have the use of three SR-71s along with dozens of spare engines, hundreds of special 22-ply tires and other unique spare parts worth about $1 billion.
They also collected a cache of Thor ICBM missiles the military can no longer store and, most recently, claimed a set of supersonic Mach-3 drones designed for especially hazardous surveillance missions over Siberia and China. The Air Force had intended to donate the once-secret drones to a museum.
Other scientists also are claiming their Cold War patrimony.
At the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, marine seismologist John Orcutt is using a once-top-secret global network of hydrophones--originally designed to track the signature swish of enemy ship propellers--to eavesdrop on undersea earthquakes. In Newport, Ore., geophysicist Christopher G. Fox tunes in to the raucous clatter of underwater volcanoes off the coast of Oregon and Northern California with the same U.S. Navy network, called the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS).
At Caltech, Thomas Ahrens employs a mammoth Star Wars laser to investigate the chemistry of giant meteor impacts on ancient Earth. At the Livermore National Laboratory, research engineer Stephen Azevedo is using ultra-sensitive imaging equipment, designed to find flaws in ballistic missile interceptors, to “candle” fossilized dinosaur eggs.
Physicist Thomas M. Georges is tracking Atlantic hurricanes with a $1.5-billion early warning radar near Moscow, Me., designed originally to detect incoming Soviet bombers and cruise missiles. The Air Force spent 25 years and almost $2 billion developing the unusual “over-the-horizon” radar system, which can monitor 50 million square miles of ocean. Georges relays his minute-by-minute radar reports to the National Hurricane Center.
Marine researchers and geophysicists even are trying to claim a Navy nuclear attack submarine for use as a full-time civilian research vessel. The Navy plans to decommission its entire fleet of Sturgeon-class attack submarines in the coming decade.
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These civilian scientists, however, are uncovering a wealth of military research tools at a time when they can least afford them. For the first time in 50 years, the federal government and the scientific community it nourishes face shrinking budgets.
If surplus military technology is more plentiful, the money to sustain it for peacetime purposes is not, experts say.
For instance, earlier this month the Air Force turned off the Maine radar that Georges uses. Only the intervention of four U.S. senators persuaded the Defense Department to turn it back on several days later.
Nine federal laboratories and a consortium of about 60 scientists have now developed projects to keep the radar system gainfully employed, ranging from weather forecasting and studies of ocean waves to investigations of solar magnetic storms. So far they cannot find the $4 million a month to operate it, though a federal committee now is looking at ways to keep the radar operating permanently as a research facility. Its expenses are being paid temporarily with money earmarked for drug surveillance operations.
Much of the surplus defense equipment, like the SR-71, is still so novel that it has yet to prove its utility to civilian funding agencies.
While NASA has budgeted $3 million a year to conduct sonic boom tests and other aeronautical research with the craft, Green must hustle to find ways for scientists like the UCLA physics team to fly their experiments for free.
“What we have at this point is shoestring research,” Green said. “We have to do this more and more because the science budget is dwindling.”
Beyond budgetary problems, experts say, the conversion of scientific resources is further hampered by a lingering Cold War mentality. Researchers who want to take advantage of the Pentagon’s surplus scientific resources often must rely on goodwill and the rumor mill. At best there may be an announcement on a property list or a telephone call from a friendly military program manager.
Some facilities are still so secret that outsiders may never even learn of their existence until after they have been junked.
For many scientists, the most valuable resources are those that are still official secrets.
Many potentially useful Defense Department systems come under the umbrella of “national technical means”--the top-secret devices that the United States has employed to keep surreptitious tabs on its friends and enemies, according to scientists involved in defense projects.
Much of the equipment is managed by agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office, which, at the height of the Cold War, was itself too secret to even mention publicly. Defense experts say intelligence agencies face a special dilemma in declassifying or discarding surveillance satellites or the sophisticated sensors used to spy on foreign countries.
They must weigh whether the equipment can easily be turned against the United States, the experts said.
At the request of the government, a group of 70 scientists is formally evaluating the fate of some secret systems. Their deliberations are classified, as is the panel’s formal report, which was completed six months ago. It is not certain whether the Defense Department and intelligence agencies will follow any of its recommendations. Nor is there any guarantee civilian funding will be available.
“This is a very systematic effort that has been under way for two years, looking at everything that national security agencies manage,” said Gordon J. MacDonald, an international affairs expert at UC San Diego who is chairman of the group.
“We are trying to determine what data and what systems, developed for other purposes, can be used to study the Earth and environmental issues,” he said. MacDonald, a geophysicist who studies climate change, has straddled the line between open scientific research and secret projects for most of his career.
One small example of a once-secret system that could find new utility as a civilian research tool is a jet bomber outfitted with an array of electronic sensors for surveillance work, he said. Scientists now have shown it can be used to gather data about “greenhouse” gases, such as water vapor, in the upper atmosphere. On Thursday, the Air Force donated the aircraft to the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
Given the scale of the resources up for grabs, however, such official efforts are rare, experts said. Salvage operations most often coalesce around a scientist’s outrage at seeing the opportunity of a lifetime slip away.
Capt. Robert Smart has spent the past year handling all military technology conversion for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is pursuing Pentagon castoffs like the Air Force radar system more aggressively than any other federal agency. “As far as any organized clearinghouse or anything, there is none,” he said.
The most effective thing he can do is “talk to people and keep my ear to the ground.” So far, he has been approached independently by 20 different military laboratories anxious to preserve research capabilities that are about to be abandoned.
John Orcutt also has had his ear to the ground. Now director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at Scripps, Orcutt had coveted the Navy’s extensive SOSUS undersea surveillance system for decades before the Defense Department declassified it. He learned of it as an operations officer aboard a Navy ballistic missile submarine during the Vietnam War, where he used it to play underwater cat-and-mouse with Soviet opponents.
“I knew about it at a time when you couldn’t say the word,” he said. “The idea of using it for scientific purposes was ridiculous.”
Until 1989, the $16-billion network was one of the country’s most closely guarded secrets. The skein of 1,000 sensitive underwater microphones, encompassing the Atlantic and the Pacific, is linked by about 30,000 miles of cables. A map of the listening arrays is still an official secret.
Orcutt built his own undersea earthquake sensors for years, knowing full well that locked behind a wall of secrecy was a worldwide system that dwarfed any research apparatus he could construct on his own.
“It is our telescope on the oceans,” Orcutt said. “It is potentially a revolutionary tool. The payoff from having access to that kind of data for scientific uses is potentially enormous.”
Only about 10 scientists have regular access to the SOSUS system today for civilian research projects, in part because a security clearance is still needed to use the data. They acquired the proper clearances in the course of other military projects. There are about a thousand scientists, however, who might benefit from the system, if only the Navy would relax its secrecy rules enough to allow anyone to publish a detailed description of what the system can do, a committee of scientists complained.
When a military system does find new life in civilian hands, the Defense Department gets more than gratitude in return. A discreet Pentagon agenda can still be served.
Whenever the civilian SR-71 flies, project officials note, the Air Force Space Command uses the elusive high-speed aircraft to calibrate its infrared surveillance satellites and missile detection capabilities. The civilian program, they add, also preserves the skilled personnel and irreplaceable expertise required to operate a craft that is more rocket than conventional fighter jet against a day when it again might be pressed into military service.
Indeed, Congress in August set aside $100 million to reactivate the SR-71 as an operational spy plane because it can make surprise inspection flights over any given site. The plane could take off from Edwards, gather photographs and radar imagery of all North Korea’s nuclear sites, and be back on the ground five hours later, defense officials said.
At the same time, whenever civilian marine biologists use the Navy undersea sonar system to track California blue whales or monitor undersea earthquakes, they are helping to preserve a unique national security network the Defense Department no longer has the money to maintain. The Navy’s annual budget to run the system has dropped from $335 million in 1991 to an expected $60 million next year.
The SOSUS system, experts said, can serve not only as an invaluable research aid, but its unique ability to monitor subtle undersea seismic tremors makes it an irreplaceable tool for detecting clandestine nuclear tests.
Only the efforts of a few scientists kept key listening posts in Bermuda and Iceland from being shut down summarily earlier this year. Other segments of the extensive sea-floor monitoring system had already been destroyed.
“The Navy doesn’t just turn it off,” said Fox at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. “They blow it up. There are arrays that have already been abandoned.”
Federal officials and scientists are now studying ways to use the system for non-military research such as undersea geology and marine mammal studies, as well as for nuclear test ban verification. They also are looking at whether it can be useful in the war on drugs, by tracking drug runners, and in the effort to police commercial fishing, by locating illegal drift-net fishing.
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In some cases, the Pentagon has no hope of retaining its high-tech resources and is simply going out of business as gracefully as possible.
Since the Star Wars program was canceled, for example, the largest and most powerful experimental laser in the United States has been begging for customers.
The million-watt near-infrared laser, known as MIRACL, was designed originally as a prototype of directed energy weapons that might one day be used to defend ships from incoming cruise missiles or to shoot down enemy satellites.
Barred from testing it against any objects in space, the U.S. Army Space and Strategic Defense Command is shutting down the $800-million laser test facility--but not before conducting an unusual fire sale.
For a limited time, any suitable civilian experimenter can use the raw sustained power of the laser to heat samples to more than 36,000 degrees Centigrade for just $1,440 per blast.
Many scientists, however, cannot afford the discounts or even the occasional gift.
Last spring, Michael E. Field, chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pacific marine geology branch, could barely contain his glee when the Pentagon donated a surplus $40-million vessel for his ocean research program.
The 2,000-ton ship, originally designed to tow mile-long cables studded with sensitive hydrophones able to pick up the whispers of Soviet submarines sliding through the water, was twice as large as the largest ocean-going research laboratory in the Survey’s service. It was one of several ships, all built since 1989, that the Navy turned over to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“We want to make it one of the most versatile oceanographic vessels in the country,” Field said when the craft docked in Redwood City last spring.
But now the Worthy, as the converted craft was to be christened, is headed for mothballs.
Field could not find the $2.5 million for the winches, computers and other sampling gear needed to turn the Worthy into a laboratory.
“This was was going to be one of the swords turned into plowshares,” Field said recently. “Now we are making plans to deactivate the ship.”
The Pentagon’s largess, he said, had been undercut by rising operating costs and fixed budgets in his own agency, and years of inflation.
In a lament his military counterparts know now by heart, Field added: “Funding in all government circles is restricted. Budgets are tight. People have to make choices about every dollar spent. What would have been easily doable three years ago is no longer feasible.”
New Uses for Old Weapons
U.S. scientists are turning warships, “Star Wars” lasers, and once-secret surveillance systems into tools of civilian research as fast as the Pentagon can throw the equipment on the Cold War scrapheap. But few civilian research programs can afford them. Here are two of the military systems that scientists are working to salvage.
Air Force Over-the-Horizon Defense Radar
Where: Moscow, Me.; Rimrock Lake, Calif.
Development cost: $1.8 billion
Designed to: Watch for incoming cruise missiles and bombers
Now being used: To Track hurricanes
Status: Under review
Navy Sound Surveillance System
Where: Atlantic and Pacific oceans
Development cost: $16 billion
Designed To: Track Soviet missile-bearing submarines
Now being used: To study undersea volcanoes and earthquakes, and track whales
Status: Under review
By triangulating the signals picked up by sounds surveillance system, researchers can figure out the precise location of whales and follow them for months.
Minke Whale Detections
January 1993: 295
February 1993: 451
March 1993: 853
April 1993: 387
