The same Lowell Wood whose group dreamed up the Brilliant Pebbles concept later came up with a return-to-the-Moon/Mars exploration scheme using some zany technology, including inflatable spacecraft, which the critics proceeded to name "Brilliant Condoms".
Below shows the shortsightedness of government programs. They decided almost 40 years ago that the technologies were "not remotely ready for use", and stopped working on them
Obviously we should have started anyway, and by now we'd be 40 years further along. But apparently they can only think in election cycles (quote from the Wikipedia article on Brilliant Pebbles)
> Teller and Wood initially proposed their own BMD system, Project Excalibur. This used an X-ray laser driven by a nuclear warhead that could attack dozens of ICBMs at once. In 1986, Excalibur failed several critical tests. Soon after, the American Physical Society published a report stating that none of the directed-energy weapons being studied by SDI were remotely ready for use.
First, there are multiple reasons that SDI was not pursued, beyond concerns around its feasibility. Most notably, bilateral agreements were signed with the Soviet Union to cease development of ballistic missile defense technology. Those agreements held until only very recently, and they seem to have been effective in mitigating the worst of the Cold War by both preserving the status quo around nuclear deterrence and heading off another extremely expensive large-scale development program. Both the US and the USSR agreed to only field two BMD systems and actually fielded only one at most during the Cold War; SDI just didn't fit into the political/military climate of the time and there were good reasons not to push that envelope.
Besides, the extreme cost of SDI meant that there was enormous opportunity cost. One of the criticisms of SDI is that it was such a sink of money and political capital that it delayed the development of other approaches to missile defense and broader nuclear security.
Second, BMD efforts in no way stopped cold after the failure of SDI. SDI survives to the present day, after a couple of renamings as the Missile Defense Agency. MDA continued to develop many of the more practical aspects of SDI and these serve as the basis of BMD countermeasures today. The problem of BMD is very challenging considering adversarial countermeasures and even modern systems show poor efficacy, but that's not to say that MDA efforts haven't produced outcomes. Major improvements in fire control technology came out of the program, perhaps most significantly the development of phased-array and electronically scanned radar, and attendant broad improvements in microwave electronics.
> the extreme cost of SDI meant that there was enormous opportunity cost.
And on another angle, marginal costs greatly favor the offense over the defense. The mutually-agreed ban on MIRVs has ameliorated this, but still, in SDI scenarios the offense has it much easier and cheaper than the defense.
Careful what you wish for. Missile defense is going to be viewed as an offensive weapon by any adversaries (and probably most/all of the folks pushing for it domestically as well).
If you can destroy most of your target's counter-strike, deterrence against starting a nuclear war from mutually assured destruction is no longer a consideration. With an effective missile "defense" the US can first-strike nuke whomever they please with "acceptable" consequences for those in power (hiding in their bunkers). We have had presidents since Reagan who have lamented that they couldn't use our nukes.
Sometimes I wonder how much stuff was actually air quotes stopped working on, and how much stuff simply went black and became a classified program that’s not released.
Or a waived bigoted special access program that effectively doesn’t have congressional oversight. or even the corporate side of those programs that doesn’t even have government oversight necessarily.
Teller really did become a nuclear quack after the Manhattan Project. WRT SDI, he went to White House and told Reagan there he had an X-ray laser that could destroy warheads in flight. Reagan, got excited about it and encouraged Project Excalibur.
The laser didn’t exist. Nor did Teller tell Reagan what would power the laser. It’s power source? A nuclear bomb.
That guy really wanted to put nuclear bombs everywhere.
Had wacky ideas for sure but calling him a quack after the Manhattan Project isn’t fair. Besides his foresight on the hydrogen bomb, he also was one of the first major names in science to raise the alarm about climate change:
It was the largest bomb ever until then, yes. But to equate a fission bomb to a fusion bomb is a disservice. We’re talking multiple orders of magnitude more powerful.
If you want to know the difference, I suggest nukemap. To put it in perspective, we’re talking about destroying lower manhattan with the Fat Man, versus incinerating all five boroughs and shattering windows in White Plains, NY. I’m not talking about dick waving stunt like the Tsar Bomba, I’m talking about deployed weapons.
Teller's work on the hydrogen bomb (after the Manhattan Project) probably solidify his mind set. Immediately post WW2, Teller was in the minority view of believing that hydrogen bombs were feasible. But we all know how that ended up.
You can see how that would affect a person. Advocate exploring a far out idea against resistance, then be dramatically proved correct when an unexpected advance makes the goal achievable.
I’m not sure it was. Hiroshima and Nagasaki (but especially Hiroshima) had outsized effects because of how Japanese cities were built of readily flammable materials at the time; incendiary bombing of Japanese cities was also far more effective than that of German cities. (Which is saying something because the German cities were very effectively bombed!)
There’s disagreement over exactly how bad a major nuclear conflict would be, but everyone agrees that it would be significantly worse with an exchange of 500 kt thermonuclear warheads than with an exchange of 21 kt fission warheads. And the point of deterrence is to make that potential exchange as bad as possible.
One can make larger fission bombs, but they end up being very unsafe, since they contain several critical masses of material. I believe the UK made a 500 kT fission bomb.
Fusion devices are smaller and safer to handle and, most importantly, are considerably cheaper per yield.
Who was more of a quack in that situation? Teller for dreaming up sci-fi bullshit powered by nukes, or Reagan for not even thinking to ask questions before buying into it?
I saw something interesting recently, some short propaganda films in the style of news broadcasts created by the CIA specifically for consumption by Reagan. Apparently the man was a half-wit who disliked reading and easily mesmerized by video; a typical TV-watching zombie.
He repeatedly gave multiple speeches where he confused reality with roles he played, or movies he saw. Most famously, he repeated told the story of a B-17 pilot that was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for staying with the plane to comfort a trapped ball turret gunner until it crashed.
This was climax of the film, “A Wing and a Prayer”.
I wonder whether the same problem would occur with enough focus on what any one of us says?
If we recorded your words over a period of a few years and then had thousands of people looking for errors in the transcripts, what errors would be found in your memory or thinking patterns?
It is certainly common enough to see some doozy mistakes from smart people within the comments on HN.
Well, he did have Alzheimer’s, a degenerative brain disease that affects memory. And we’re supposed to believe that he had no symptoms of until January 21, 1989.
As a person that had a grandmother and aunt that developed it, that’s… mighty suspicious.
>Trump avoids mention of his father’s Alzheimer’s disease as he lashes Biden for being ‘cognitively impaired’
>Donald Trump invited his extended family to Mar-a-Lago in the mid-1990s. As the clan gathered at the palatial Florida estate, though, his father was badly struggling, according to Mary L. Trump, Donald’s niece.
>Fred Trump Sr., the pugnacious developer then in his late 80s, didn’t recognize two of his children at the party, recalled Mary L. Trump, who attended the gathering. And when he did recognize Donald, the family patriarch approached his son with a picture of a Cadillac that he wanted to buy — as if he needed his son’s permission.
>The incident, Mary L. Trump said, left Donald Trump visibly upset at his father’s descent into dementia, which medical records show had been diagnosed several years earlier. Trump reflected his anguish in an interview around that time, with Playboy in 1997 reporting that seeing his father “addled with Alzheimer’s” had left him wondering “out loud about the senselessness of life.”
>“Turning 50 does make you think about mortality, or immortality, or whatever,” Trump, who had recently reached that milestone, told the magazine. “It does hit you.” [...]
>...Apparently the man was a half-wit who disliked reading and easily mesmerized by video; a typical TV-watching zombie.
Your source says:
>...While Reagan found the videos helpful and asked for more, the original idea for the televised briefings was the CIA’s. The president still received regular written and in-person briefings, Dujmovic writes.
JFK at least was reputed to be an extremely proficient reader. His reported speed reading is probably somewhat exaggerated but conservative estimates would have him reading the script of one of those CIA brief videos in a small fraction of the time it took for Reagan to watch them. Being good at reading obviously isn't a sufficient qualification to make somebody a good president, but I think it's a necessary prerequisite.
And here I thought this was going to about the hi-fi snake oil "Brilliant Pebbles" [1]. Interesting to know that the guy selling these named them after a government program.
> However, before program cancellation, SDIO carried out the Clementine Deep Space Experiment, spectacularly demonstrating Brilliant Pebbles technologies.
Well apart from the effectors actually required to rapidly intercept and destroy incoming missiles [0]
The only long-term result of the incredibly expensive Star Wars programs championed by Edward Teller was that other countries developed systems that would defeat it - and some military-industrial contractors got wealthy.
The book Eccentric Orbits makes the point that the Iridium satellite constellation relies heavily on the basic technologies which were devloped, in some fledgling form, for SDI.
Specifically, communications satellites before that were as dumb as possible, the 'bent pipe' model -- whatever goes up on one frequency, comes down on another. The satellite neither knew nor cared about the payload. The majority of electronics were actually analog.
But with SDI, satellites had to communicate with each other. They had significant processing on-board. They made their own in-space mesh network, though that term wouldn't be used until later. They had to cope with possible loss of a satellite and keep the data flowing between the others.
That's exactly the fundamental concept behind Iridium and several more constellations since, Starlink perhaps most familiar to the most HN readers.
Motorola did a lot of the dev work for SDI, and after the project was scrapped, Motorola went on to build Iridium. Brooks argues in the book that the fundamental R&D for Iridium wouldn't have been practical without the groundwork laid, and paid for, by SDI.
>That's exactly the fundamental concept behind Iridium and several more constellations since, Starlink perhaps most familiar to the most HN readers.
This isn’t at all a fundamental concept special to space. This happens all over the ground (smart networks tolerant to faults). Routing protocols, packet switching, multiplexing, link layer authentication, etc were all before SDI.
Any special sauce for iridium or Starlink has nothing to do with the nodes being active routers.
