Posted on 09/02/2002 7:06:19 AM PDT by Ranger
Brilliant Pebbles and its original braintrust of physicists -- the mercurial Edward Teller, lead co-inventor of the H-bomb, and his creative proteges, defense theorists Lowell Wood and Greg Canavan -- are entwined in the public memory of the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative.
In the early 1980s, Teller sold Reagan on the technical feasibility of making nuclear war obsolete, then assembled Wood and Cavanan month after month in 1986 for strategic thought exercises, based on John Nash game theory. Wood played attacking Soviet forces, the red team; Canavan played the American defenders, the blue team; Teller refereed.
Canavan stretched his imagination to envision all manner of defenses as Wood defeated them, one by one, laying America open to annihilation. The final battle came over breakfast on the north side of the Charles River, in Cambridge, Mass.
"Lowell was so confident then. He'd killed me like 40 or 50 times. He was reading his newspaper and not paying much attention when I laid it all out," Canavan said. "Teller said, 'That's it!' Lowell snapped upright. 'What? What? What?' And he started trying to construct a counterargument. But by then Teller was sold."
The basic premise was an automated multitude of inexpensive satellites that would each carry a powerful computer and their own sensors for seeing target missiles. Early space interceptor schemes were highly vulnerable to attack. But the team's satellites would be hardened against radiation, laser beams and shrapnel. They could maneuver to dodge missiles. They could kick off decoys and chaff to confuse attackers. As a last measure, they carried a tiny dart to fire in self defense.
Teller and Wood sold the idea in Washington and translated it into hardware, with Wood towing a sample pebble on a cart through the corridors of power. At the time, wags joked that after smart rocks and Brilliant Pebbles could only come genius dust. Critics rolled their eyes and denounced the weaponization of the heavens. But of all SDI's beams and schemes, the pebbles came closest to the reality. Its major components were tested next to exploding nuclear bombs in the Nevada desert. They flew to the moon and mapped it in the Clementine mission.
In 1991, former Soviet weaponeers told Canavan that they labored hard but couldn't theorize a cost-effective assault against Brilliant Pebbles. They said they realized at their level of technology they could not beat the Brilliant Pebble and it would bankrupt them to even try. So they didn't try.
Even after garnering a huge share of $40 billion spent on missile defense in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, no pebble has ever flown against a missile in space. Its backers haven't given up yet.
Nice way to end a forty year standoff.
:)
Canavan stretched his imagination to envision all manner of defenses as Wood defeated them, one by one, laying America open to annihilation. The final battle came over breakfast on the north side of the Charles River, in Cambridge, Mass.
Oh to have been a fly on the wall for those get-togethers.
The Air Force is developing the Airborne Laser (ABL). Boeing and TRW are already flight testing the airplane (a modified 747). Tests of the laser itself are to come next year. If this all works, and every thing seems to indicate that it will, modern warfare will be totally revolutionized. Thank you, Ronald Reagan!!
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