Scientists and the long and winding road of research: Star Wars and Arrow
An article entitled “”Arrow can now fully protect against Iran” describes how Israel seems to have developed a promising anti-missile defense system.
Sounds good to me—if in fact it’s true. It may just be psych-ops bluster, of course, a way to say to Iran, “Don’t even think about developing nuclear weapons, because your efforts will be an expensive waste.”
The Arrow system may not be quite as good as the article indicates. Or, it may be exactly that good.
It takes me back to the time when Ronald Reagan was laughed at for proposing what critics referred to as “Star Wars,” a sort pie-in-the-sky (almost literally) dream of intercepting Russia’s missile system and ending the MADness of Mutually Assured Destruction. Reagan’s SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) was the much-mocked prototype of a system that, with many changes, is showing much promise for the US.
Why was it treated with such derision by most when first proposed? Part of that reaction was a subset of the mockery that greeted Reagan in general from liberals and the Left: he was stupid, ignorant, and simplistic, as opposed to their sophistication. They knew better; such a thing would never work.
But it also is probably true that many didn’t want it to work. And by making that statement I’m not accusing them of wanting America to be destroyed or Russia to win the Cold War (at least, not most of them). No, I think one reason they didn’t welcome the development of an effective way of defending against incoming missiles was fear that, if the technique were ever to be perfected, it might give our military license to launch an attack with impunity.
MAD made it difficult to even conceive of actually going ahead with the launch of an atomic weapon. The fear was that Star Wars would make the inconceivable doable—and even, perhaps, tempting. And, if the intercept system wasn’t as effective as it was claimed to be, the sense of protection it would have engendered would be a false one.
No; much better to let each nation believe there was no remedy, and that the first such launch would be the end of both nations.
Whatever the merits or lack thereof of that line of thinking, at any rate it is now officially obsolete. Although Russia is far from our friend, it’s not the relatively rational Russians or their vast arsenal of conventional nuclear weaponry with whom we are now dealing. It is the much less deterrable mullahs of Iran, or the rogue state North Korea, or a host of terrorist cells around the globe, eager to get their hands on the nuclear goods and cause a commotion.
One thing seems clear if one looks at the history of the objections to Star Wars, and that is that scientists are far from apolitical beasts. The well-known physicists Edward Teller and Hans Bethe squared off at the time on this issue as they had on so many others, in an old rivalry between the two. Bethe’s strange history was of doubting and/or opposing every single advance in atomic weaponry, even as he worked on many of them:
Bethe had been skeptical about the possibility of making a nuclear weapon from uranium (in fact, in the late 1930s, he had written a theoretical paper that argued against fission)……After the war, Bethe argued that a crash project for the hydrogen bomb should not be attempted, though after President Truman announced the beginning of such a crash project, and the outbreak of the Korean War, Bethe signed up and played a key role in the weapon’s development. Though he would see the project through to its end, in Bethe’s account he personally hoped that it would be impossible to create the hydrogen bomb.
Bethe doubted and opposed Star Wars as well in the 1980s, on practical and philosophical grounds:
Physicist Hans Bethe, who worked with Teller on both the atom bomb and the hydrogen bomb, both at Los Alamos, claimed a laser defense shield was unfeasible. He said that a defensive system was costly and difficult to build, but simple to destroy, and claimed that the Soviets could easily use thousands of decoys to overwhelm it during a nuclear attack. He believed that the only way to stop the threat of nuclear war was through diplomacy and dismissed the idea of a technical solution to the Cold War, saying that a defense shield could be viewed as threatening because it would limit or destroy Soviet offensive capabilities while leaving the American offense intact.
Here were two extremely eminent scientists, one pro and one con, whose differing opinions seemed to depend primarily on their politics rather than the science of the matter. Twas ever thus; science for the most part is no ivory tower immune from the squabblings of politics.
Their Cold War arguments have become outdated, anyway. The nuclear situation being far different today, the defenses that have been developed—such as Arrow—are accordingly quite different from the original proposals of the 80s, as well.
No one can predict the path scientific research will take. It’s an old conundrum: almost every invention and discovery is a double-edged sword with both good and bad applications, many if not most of them unforeseen at the outset. And once the genie is out of the bottle, it cannot be put back in—nor, as recent terrorist attempts to get nuclear weaponry demonstrate, can it be kept indefinitely from the hands of the enemy.
Scientists such as Bethe and others—men (and women) of the mind, wrestling with powerful and fascinating ideas that have unforeseen practical and strategic applications—felt (and feel) a completely understandable ambivalence, and even guilt, about what their minds and efforts have wrought. These scientists deal with those emotions in different ways. Some, such as Bethe, resolve to spend their lives engaging in an ultimately futile attempt to undo what they have already done.
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Probably the larger fear from SDI wasn’t that we would launch, but that if it worked the Russians would preemptively launch before the system came online. That they would figure the slight chance of winning was better than than no chance and relying on the US to not launch.
If you also recall most of the left and liberals of that day felt that Reagan’s attitude of “fight to win” instead of “play for stalemate” would precipitate a full scale war and that the SDI was a large part of the fight to win. I rather suspect most of the opposition stemmed from that attitude.
Even today it is amusing to hear the people who run “The Doomsday Clock” talk about it. That if it wasn’t for their careful ministrations in adjusting the clock we would all have been killed during Reagan’s term.
There are many parallels today, mostly by the same people or same groups.
I think you’re mistaken that the Left opposed SDI solely out of a desire to keep America’s military in check. I think they _did_ want the US vulnerable to Soviet attack, precisely because a great many of them _did_ want the Communists to win the Cold War. Then, as now, the Left is motivated by seething hatred of America and all it stands for. Anything which helps our enemies is Good in their book, and anything which helps us is Bad. SDI was a powerful weapon for America and freedom: therefore it was Bad and had to be stopped with lies, propaganda, and political machinations.
I think part of Reagan’s genius was exposing the contradictions between what the Left said (“we want peace!”) and what they did (prefer the suicide pact of MAD to deploying an SDI system).
The great struggle of the past half-century has been the battle of the West’s Left against Western civilization. Soviet Communism was just one tool, and when it broke they discarded it. Now they’ve taken Islam as a new weapon. The war goes on.
strcpy:
There is a difference between then and now. The Soviets were sitting on top of thousands of nukes, not stopping 1% of then would mean lots of disaster. And a 99% success rate is rare in any endeavor.
On the other hand, when you have the situation in which there are many more antimissiles than missiles, the math turns around. Even with a relatively low efficiency, you do stand a good chance to be practically invulnerable…with enough Patriots fired – say three or four – an 80% success rate means that you have a 99% chance of dropping the incoming.
Ironically enough, Iran may be putting its own head in a noose. After they fire off their ten missiles…presuming they can ever get the capacity to fire a large salvo, they are left with their pants down as the counter-battery fire starts. This will be bad enough if the Little Satan shoots its 50-60 off, but if the Big Satan joins in the fun, there’ll be a big hunks of green colored glass in select desert spots.
It’s OK to run the antiquated Doomsday Clock if it amuses you, but kick back and do some realistic calculations before you get too excited over a “grandfathered” concept.
There were a few geostrategic reasons not to use SDI, among them the possibility that it might spook the sovs into shooting before it came on line.
However, I am now aware that any of the opponents used such an argument. For most of them, the sovs were the good guys and to suggest they might do something wrong was simply not an option.
I had a year in Air Defense–Nike Hercules–and was able to follow the debate and even went to a number of events scheduled to discuss the issue.
It was not a matter of practicality, but of visceral rejection of the US’ being able to defend itself.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘way back, said they’d priced the thing out. They were off by a factor of fourteen, which scientists never, ever are. To their credit, they withdrew the estimate immediately, but the talking heads used if for a long time.
Recently read a book called “Junk Science” which was, in its first half, pretty good. But when the guy got into manned missions to Mars and missile defense, he went from scientist to advocate. His view, to the extent he was actually telling us what he really thought, was that, since we can’t do it perfectly now with the technology we have–that was several years ago–we must stop trying to achieve it.
Hard to read that as anything else but not wanting it to be possible.
Talked to a church group who objected on the ostensible grounds that nobody knew how much it cost. I asked for a list of other things they objected to on the grounds nobody knew how much the ultimate cost would be. Nada.
Talked to a scientist who was active against SDI. His view was that it would be destabilizing. So I asked him if he’d be concerned about destabilization if the sovs had it. Nope.
Then there was all the lying about the sovs’ ABM battle management radar at Krasnoyarsk. Nope. Satellite control only. We, on the other hand…..horrors, were busting the ABM treaty which said we shouldn’t have such radars except on the periphery of the country. One of ours was in Greenland and the other in the UK. Seems kind of peripheral. But the libs said that was illegal, while Krasnoyarsk was fine. I think the intel guys called it The Chicken Coop or some such. Ideally sited to manage an ABM fight.
You could tell it was nothing to do with the facts when, having explained my background, the argument went from “facts” to ad hominems.
I followed that argument closely for some time and I have to say that anybody I thought was being remotely honest was doing so because of being totally, completely, utterly ignorant. There were a few people so stupid they didn’t know how stupid they were. But the rest were lying.
Ole Charlie.
The numbers the sovs had was a concern. But the sovs’ problem with a first strike was making sure they killed our retaliation capability. With SDI, they couldn’t have been sure.
Keep in mind that the sovs’ infrastructure had been practically destroyed in WW II, and they’d lost twenty million people. Consider further that they won. What would have been the amount of destruction they would consider unacceptable in that context?
We’d have had to be capable of pretty significant damage.
We had a strategic triad, missiles, bombers, and sub-launched missiles. Each of them depended on being able to beat the sov defenses. For example, the subs could hide. But we had discovered ways to track a sub from orbit by radar. Not even difficult, although finicky. Perhaps we were close to losing the Poseidon portion of the triad.
So we needed to be able to have at least one method of retaliation ahead of their defenses.
By adding to the uncertainty, we protected ourselves.
However, your point is well made. To object today is lunacy.
When people derided Reagan’s initial proposition for SDI, people called him an “Amiable Dunce” and things like that. Perhaps if any of these folks did their homework, they’d find that one of Reagan’s closest friends was a top flight scientist at JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratories. He was the one that turned Reagan on the idea…
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st.northropgrumman.comThe missile defense system that’s even more promising than “Arrow” is one that the Israelis also helped to develop…THEL.
See here: http://www.st.northropgrumman.com/media/presskits/mediaGallery/thel/videos/videogallery.html
This system never failed to “kill” a target that it engaged, including artillery shells and mortar rounds–targets that nothing else on earth could defeat.
Stumbley:
That is the coolest thing I’ve seen since _300_.
Which means Congress will now try to kill it.
The lateset press releases from Northrop Grumman were from ’04. You’d think by now we could have one of these at every FOB in Iraq and Afghanistan by now. It’s sure be nice if they did.
Trimegistus and Douglas:
Unfortunately, THEL is a chemical laser, and as such, inimical to the Army, for whatever reason. It requires a rather large installation (three semi-trailers), but even so, would be ideal for site defense, such as for airports, ports, HQs and the like. I can’t for the life of me understand why the Army doesn’t field a bunch of these asap. They are looking toward solid-state lasers now; pretty cool as well, but some time away from being as powerful as chemical lasers.
It should be remembered that it took the Army something like 20 years to accept the M-16 into service.
I think I saw that laser in a Future Weapons of War program, that also featured JDAM technology fitted on artillery shells, via Paladin (esque) auto-reloading self-propellled artillery.
Concerning Iran’s nukes, they aren’t going to go the ballistic route, in my view. They will use infiltration, subversion, and psychological methods combined with their nuclear arsenal. As people should already know by now, Iran prefers the psychological warfare game, not the conventional nuclear barrage duel. They know they would lose the latter, therefore the reason behind the before.
As for defenses, they are nice, but they won’t win a war. Especially not the kind of war in Iraq. Higher technology solutions is not the answer to the ultimate defeat of terrorism, for terrorism has already made great strides in counter-acting the technology of the United States. Making a strong point with high tech defenses only means that the enemy will bypass it and hit a weaker target. The logistical constraints with hardening every target is exponentially unfeasible.
There is a counter to every strategy and defense plan. It is why being on the attack is of such great importance. Combat power when dispersed is ineffective. Combat power when combined via hitting one target, becomes much more devastating a threat.
If the US can keep its GPS satellites safe from enemy sabotage, then the new generation of auto-reloading rockets and artillery shells, auto-guided with pinpoint GPS technology, will make killing terrorists easier. Less terrorists, less attacks to defend against.
It will also make a land raid into Iraq’s neighbors, a lot easier and faster. Combined with the proper surprise factor diplomatically, it prevents quagmire, it sustains momentum, and defeats the ability of the US’s enemies to sit down and think up a counter to new technology.
“Bethe … claimed a laser defense shield was unfeasible. He [also] said … that a defense shield could be viewed as threatening … ”
In fact, many people said both of these things without any sense of shame or any need to explain.
My memory, perhaps colored by later events, was that the left was so thoroughly convinced that diplomacy and only diplomacy would work that they opposed anything that might undermine a diplomatic effort.
They cast themselves as the only reasonable diplomats, of course, and were convinced that they could convince the Bad Soviet Leaders to see the light for long enough that the Natural Virtue of Communism would win out.
The arrogance that it was their talking and persuasive skills that were the key to world peace and universal harmony caused them to disparage any other type of solution. They weren’t good at those other things like science and military strategy, so what would there be for them to do?
They were willing, ultimately, to risk the lives of us all rather than accept a lesser status in the world. Truly frightening.
Good Ole Charlie, methinks if you re-read my post with a tone of sarcasm you will get much closer to what I meant. For example, I was making fun of the doomsday clock people for thinking that their careful analysis and boldly claiming were are now “2 minutes from midnight” somehow broke the Soviets.
Even if SDI (or our current offerings) was/is only 99% effective it is *still* very much worth it. It takes more than a handful of nukes to wipe a country out – even a small one. It also allows time to make it to shelters and counter-attack with enough lethality to *stop* the thing (assuming you have the firepower and they have no shield). Even if only 50% effective it would mean that side is the one that will be left at the end of the day.
The Soviets well understood this, they understood that if this happened it was “game over”, their main bargaining chip was mostly gone. Because of some past “pie in the sky” things that we *did* achieve they had little reason to think we were incapable of doing it. For instance – the f-15 has dominated for so many years in part because the Soviets thought to scare us by leaking faked MIG performance numbers, they chose some they thought were near laughably impossible: we panicked and created a jet that matched them. So why not do it again – we had done so more than a few times.
And now, given that we face a salvo of no more than a few, even a 25% success rate saves the lives of millions. It is *well* worth the cost to stop one missile of four headed toward New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Denver. It will obviously not stop all threats, as people state it will not stop a suite case bomb but then those aren’t 30+ megaton bombs either and, interestingly enough, are MUCH MUCH MUCH more difficult to create and detonate than the larger ones.
To say a particular threat is so unlikely that no defense is built is to invite that threat to come through the open door.
Countries use terrorism against us because open warfare woud be silly. Three weeks to Baghdad and we’re still arguing if the casualties were worse than peacetime.
Desert Storm. One hundred hours.
China might think it could do better in conventional warfare, sometime or other, but it might be safer to chip away using our left as the primary force. The problem with coming close to beating the US overtly and conventionally is that we may decide to kill you all. But if they use the left, we may be gone before we wake up.
Who owns the ends of the Panama Canal? What does it take to disable a lock mechanism?
So we need to be able to defend against anything the other side might be able to think up. This has the short-term downside of convincing them not to think the stuff past initial drawings, thus convincing our dummies that the defense isn’t necessary.
But we can’t defend everything everywhere for all time.
If we figure a way to secure the busiest two hundred airports in the country against a particular threat involving commercial aviation, the two hundred and first will be the target. A Canadian security expert, referring to the large number of small airfields in that huge country, said he was not worried about DC10s. He was worried about a Pilatus Porter with a ton of fuel aboard. It is difficult to secure all those airports or airfields, and there are lots and lots of small and medium planes in lots of locations.
The solution is to defend, secure the base, and then defeat the enemy aggressively.
strcpy:
Ah—I was not trying to disparage you. Honest.
I was trying to make the point that, even granted that the original SDI was impractical, the present situation is much in its favor. Hence the calculation that even with an 80% success rate, a firing of three or four relatively inexpensive missiles, would almost ensure (>99% success for such a salvo) that incoming missiles would be defeated. If that seems like short odds, fire another one.
Further, I seriously doubt that any turd world country would be able to conduct a salvo of more than two or three. Soviets had that problem on their hands. Answer was a solid fuel rocket: technology far beyond ragheads (Note: I worked on the original Polaris solid fuel rocket when fresh out of college[I’m a chemist, ahem])…took the Ivans how long to develop one of their own? Long time…and still is somewhat problematical.
I do agree that the “suitcase nuke” is more likely…Only remember, it’s not really a suitcase size. Real damage is done with devices that are roughly the size of your refrigerator…not to mention that as the size gets smaller, the technology needed goes up – exponentially even.
A dirty bomb is most likely, BUT for the amount of hysteria generated, the damage is not worth it. Especially if USA decides No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy is the policy de jour.
In summary: in real life against a real threat, anti-missiles are a good sound bet. For the other threats, “A good defense is a good offense”…wink, wink, nod, nod. Go after the bastards in their own holes.
Prominent Soviet scientist and human rights advocate Andrey Sakharov also declared that full-proof SDI is impossible. (He was father of Soviet H-bomb and knew strategic calculations of MAD very well.) But he also advocated limited anti-missle defense as stabilizing factor against some accidental unautorised launch or rogue state threat – exactly the type that is now proposed. May be, you do not know that such system already exists in Russia and is operational. It can defend Moscow region against simultaneous attack of 100 ballistic missiles destroying warheads on re-entry track at altitude 40 km by nuclear blast. It employes supercomputer with automated tracking of multiple targets and decision making, silo-launched hypersound interceptors and phased radar array with a range 3000 km.
American-developed Arrow missile, one of the only operational ballistic missile defense systems in the world.
This statement in the article cited by Neo is not correct. Russian anti-missle system which I described above is operational since 1990 and is much more advanced and capable than Arrow.
See description of the system in
http://russianforces.org/sprn/
“Further, I seriously doubt that any turd world country would be able to conduct a salvo of more than two or three.”
My general feeling is to at least double, maybe triple the upper rational limit I find. We tend to think using our technology in their climate, they tend to be (like any human) fairly creative. We have been caught numerous times because of that. Not that I particularly see how they could launch a dozen or so, but I sure hope planners are giving a fairly high limit to what they can take care of.
“Real damage is done with devices that are roughly the size of your refrigerator”
The problem is that we actually do have a detection system in place over much of the US, have for years. Not because of a terrorist threat, but because of the public health issues of radiation sources and catching domestic accidental leaks. With larger amounts of material it would take more shielding – I rather suspect that even going above and beyond my above “give them the benefit of doubt and then double it” that they would need well over a semi to transport anything they could actually get to detonate. And that would get caught.
“not to mention that as the size gets smaller, the technology needed goes up – exponentially even.”
You will note I said the same thing
“A dirty bomb is most likely, BUT for the amount of hysteria generated, the damage is not worth it. Especially if USA decides No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy is the policy de jour.”
This assumes that they actually have some place to bomb and the people actually care about their lives – if Al-qaida were to currently do this what else do we do? Plus this doesn’t take much to kill a few hundred thousand in some place like New York and is a small enough amount of material that it would be near impossible to detect. Heck, just dispersing a few pounds of alpha or beta emitting dust would be enough – while no short term deaths and the area is pretty easy to clean, imagine the panic if these things were regularly giving people a lung full of Strontium 90 and 100% case of terminal cancer in 10-15 years.
*shrug* I personally think something like that is going to have to happen to get the US fully behind the “offense” idea until we win. As such I think it *will* happen – we can not win until it does and until we win they will not give up. We like to navel gaze or think that moving the doomsday clock hands forward a minute will really show them (amusingly enough they were in the news a few months back blaming Bush for increasing the likely hood the terrorist would launch on us – so they moved the hands forward – same old same old).
Hi –
Getting back to the topic, there were two reasons why the Sovs were so hysterical about SDI: first, the Sovs were great lovers of something called “correlation of forces”, a kind of military calculus that formed the fundamental basis of their military sciences. It required, however, that uncertainty be something that could be quantified to a reasonable level and, above all, be accidental, not deliberate; second, they couldn’t even begin to match it and it meant that their huge, massive investment in strategic weapons – done at massive cost to their economy, in many ways crippling it – would become more or less worthless.
In regards to the first point, the core of their correlation of forces was to achieve numerical superiority, deny qualitative superiority (i.e. neutralize it, not pretend it didn’t exist) and be able to dominate any game of escalation that started up. They were basically the Sov counterpart of McNamara’s Whiz Kids, but unlike Mac’s kids, they never lost power. They could – and did – deal with uncertainty, but what really bollixes the works with their kind of calculations was the fact that something like SDI completely threw their game book up into the air and made it virtually impossible to achieve escalation dominance without actually going to war. In other words, the mere possibility of an even partially successful SDI program meant that whatever the equivalent SIOP they were using couldn’t be used, because there was no way of ensuring that, for instance, an attack on San Diego would actually succeed before they would move on to Colorado Springs (examples are random).
Let’s look at an example. In the non-SDI world, you assume, say, 3 warheads for San Diego, based on the likelihood of each warhead making it there and actually detonating at, say, 40%, which ensures the destruction of San Diego. But introduce SDI, and all of a sudden your likelihood of destroying San Diego with those three warheads drops to less than 100%, meaning that you need to either up the number of warheads to at least 5, actually 7 for the same probability, and you can’t be sure even then that whatever SDI assets defend San Diego don’t work perfectly and actually knock down 100% of any attacking missiles.
It is this introdcution of uncertainty that made war planning basically undoable, at least the kind of war planning that the Sovs loved to do. The US had radically different SIOPs and in many cases these were designed to be very, very flexible, with attacks under way changing to meet needs, based on better command and control assets.
That’s what really devestated the Sovs when it was clear that SDI was going to be funded – it made no difference whether it was achievable or not, it was the fact that the US was committing to field it by spending sums vastly in excess of what the Sovs could have spent that meant that it effectively destroyed Sov military power…by making it, according to how the Sovs actually planned to use it, marginally usable at best and a complete waste of resources at worst.
Very nice brief, John.
I liked how someone I don’t remember put it. That there is a “quality to quantity all on its own”.
The Russians have been operating by this principle for awhile now. They still do even. I don’t know why, but it just is.
America has always favored more individualism, and thus more personal initiative, less centralized control and micromanagement. Leading to that little joke that a Colonel in Saudi Arabia has the same authority as a Sergeant in the US military.
It is this introdcution of uncertainty that made war planning basically undoable, at least the kind of war planning that the Sovs loved to do. The US had radically different SIOPs and in many cases these were designed to be very, very flexible, with attacks under way changing to meet needs, based on better command and control assets.
Somebody said all war was based upon deception, but I think he should have added “all competently run wars”. All those spies and saboteurs working against our side in the US, was a big problem.
Personally, my theory and prediction about Iran’s nuke plans is that they are going to nuke Medina and Mecca and blame it on the US/Jews. This is based upon the sort of sectarian divide and conquer strategy seen attempted in Iraq by Shia-Iranian proxies and Al Qaeda-Sunni proxies.
Prayers for the Assassin first brought it up of course.
Yet, but after that step….
What would the Iranians do with an existent Israel and an inflamed West?
Hi –
The quote is “Quantity has its own quality” is attributed to Stalin when he answered questions as to whether the massive numbers of Soviet tanks being made where going to be good enough to go up against the highly – and overly – engineered German tanks.
Part of Soviet doctrine was that quantitative changes could bring qualitative improvements. Part of soviet-style marxist dialectics, and as understandable today after the ruin of the Soviets as medieval metaphysical arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
I don’t think that the Iranians would nuke Medina and Mecca: too easy for that to backfire, and they have borders. I have more horrific scenarios, and for the peace of mind of the readers here I will not go into them…
Ymar-“As for defenses, they are nice, but they won’t win a war.”
Since we’re mainly in a propaganda war now, reducing opportunity for attacks on bases, and the subsequent casualties that are the fodder for your typical MSM war reporting, I’d say it’s pretty important. Sure, they don’t win wars on their own, but they sure help.