"Peace is our Profession"
Hey, it worked. Thanks Dr. Teller.
Posted on 09/09/2003 8:55:00 PM PDT by MikalM
Edited on 04/13/2004 2:43:36 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
May his soul already be in heaven; R.I.P. Dr. Teller.
It was probably Teller's closest friend, Eugene Wigner, who died some seven or eight years ago. Although not a household name, Wigner was the first to apply gauge theory to the study of nuclear reactions, which helped lead directly to the Standard Model. He shared the Nobel Prize with Teller's old student Goeppert-Mayer.
Incidentally, Wigner is best known for an idea which was later DISproved, the notion of perfect particle symmetry, or parity. This notion was, ironically, disproved by Chen Ning Yang (In collaboration with Tsung Dau Lee), another of Teller's students. Yang and Lee would also win Nobel Prizes for their effort.
yep. bttt ...
"Peace is our Profession"
Hey, it worked. Thanks Dr. Teller.
Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics
Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery
Perseus, Cambridge, Mass., 2001. $35.00 (640 pp.). ISBN 0-7382-0532-X
Edward Teller at Acadia
University in Wolfville,
Nova Scotia, 1973
BTTT for a great American. Rest in Peace.
From the looks of this thread, you and I are among the few freepers who didn't. This is an amazing website.
Behold, the rest of the story:
Physicists' war games led to brilliant space defense plan
By Ian Hoffman/Oakland Tribune/September 10, 2002
Brilliant Pebbles and its original braintrust of physicists -- the mercurial Edward Teller, lead co-inventor of the hydrogen 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., Canavan recalled, "deep in the heart of enemy territory," the academic nexus of the anti-missile defense debate.
"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 at first known as "smart rocks" because they 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 anti-satellite 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.
"Nothing can get through all that. By the time he can get to you, he's expended a mass that's 100 times larger than you are, so you win," Canavan said.
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.
Astounding acheivments, by an astounding giant of a man. But the demise of John Ritter and Johnny Cash will get front page coverage, while Teller's death was relegated to a dinky article on page 4 of the newspaper. As a society, we seem to have rather odd priorities.....
Not really astounding. Consider these two men:
1. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the A-Bomb.Oppenheimer is lionized in intellectual circles, Teller is demonized. Curious, what? So how do we account for this paradox? Hint: One of the two was a leftie, the other was outspokenly anti-communist. I leave it to the reader to connect the dots.2. Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb.
I beg to differ. Even in the thick of it, the Soviets realized very quickly that the way to circumvent SDI was a purely statistical exercise. SDI is good for theater-level defense, or against nations with limited ICBM capability and no undersea launch capability, but as a strategic defense against an enemy with a sizeable and well-integrated nuclear force, as the Soviets had, it's not useful.
You are correct to the extent that what SDI has morphed into is a system of limited capability. But as far as the "Brilliant Pebbles" variant is concerned, I have seen no evidence to cause me to doubt the conclusions of Teller, or the testimony of ex-Soviet weapons planners. If the opponent tries to overcome BP by sheer numbers, you launch more inexpensive, self-contained "Pebbles." Economically, you exhaust your opponent, for it is far cheaper to launch more Pebbles than it is to overcome them with more missiles.
At least that's my understanding of it.
Surely, surely this is just a coincidence! You don't for a minute suppose that the same communist apoligists who proclaimed Alger Hiss wasn't a Soviet spy for 50 years would demonize a great scientist like Teller just because.... excuse me, what's that you say? "Venona Papers"? Hmmmm, let's see what they say......
Ohhhhhhh; .............never mind.
Ah, but we already have what is AFAIK an inpenetrable defense for sub-launched missiles, namely the fact that no opponent has ever successfully sent a sub on to station without us knowing where it was, and having an attack sub trailing it if it is a nuclear threat, ready to blow it out of the water the moment it tried to approach the surface to launch it's missiles in anger.
As for cruise missiles, you are correct that PB doesn't address that threat, but that forces the opponent into a long-range bomber attack, which we can detect long before it arrives, or they have to put the cruise missiles on subs, which are already under our cross-hairs as described above.
In short, the point of PB isn't that it is the ultimate defense for ALL types of nuclear attack; it doesn't have to be, because we already have SOME type of defense against all the other modes of attack (other than ground-based missiles). It was ground based missiles alone for which we were defenseless, and PB was the answer to it.
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