The REAL Star Wars
By Carl Austin
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| Image courtesy flickr |
It all started with a
broadcast made on March 23, 1983 where the President said,
“I call upon the
scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn
their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace…To give us the
means to render these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. Tonight, consistent with our obligations of
the ABM treaty, and recognizing the need for closer consultation with our
allies, I’m taking an important first step.
I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a
long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate
goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wG019Mzd8L4
To say that this press conference stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy was to put it mildly. Not only was the Soviet reaction to the broadcast negative, so too were the opinions of many US allies and even some of Reagan’s own staff. In his own memoirs Reagan admitted that, “Some of my advisers, including a number at the Pentagon, did not share this dream. They couldn’t conceive of it. They said that a nuclear-free world was unattainable and it would be dangerous for us even if it were possible."
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| Image courtesy flickr |
While the nickname stuck,
it was only later that many people contended it was Ron Reagan’s Star Wars program
that hastened the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Later still, some in the administration called
it Reagan’s Big Bluff. However, the fact
is that the Reagan and Bush administrations spent some $30 billion on SDI. It wasn’t until 1993 that President Bill
Clinton finally pulled the plug on the project.
So, what did the US taxpayers get for their money? That’s a good
question.
To be able to protect the
United States and its allies from an ICBM attack was no easy task. It meant detecting and interdicting the
missiles themselves, as well as multiple reentry vehicles that many ICBMs could
spawn. While the technology in the 80’s
was such that the Air Force could detect the launch and trajectory of nuclear
missiles, it was thought by the public they had no way to intercept them. This was far from true. As early as the 1950’s, the US had developed
a hypersonic anti-missile missile system called Nike. Initially deployed around key coastal cities
to knock down Soviet bombers, in the late 60’s the Strategic Air Command and
the Army began developing an anti-ICBM version of the missile called
Nike-X. These 2-stage 8,000 MPH
interceptor missiles could be launched on a moment’s notice and could be fitted
with either a conventional or nuclear warhead.
The system was designed to cluster batteries of the rockets near
potential targets to be fired off in salvos at incoming missiles. This would allow interception of Russian
ICBM’s up to the last few seconds before impact. More importantly, Nike-X was designed to
operate below the altitude where decoys and jamming was prevalent.
Even after the
arms-control treaty of 1972, which limited the deployment of anti-ballistic
missiles to no more than 100 ABM’s on each side, both sides still had the
technology to target and shoot down ICBMs.
So, why was Reagan’s Star Wars such a political bombshell? More importantly, why did those in the Reagan
administration consider SDI to be technologically impractical given the earlier
development of ABMs?
The Soviet hierarchy
considered the project to be an affront to what they called the “Peace
Offensive.” Premier Yuri Andropov said, “It’s
time Washington stopped thinking up one option after another in search of the
best way of unleashing nuclear war in the hope of winning it. To do this is not
just irresponsible. It is madness"
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| Image courtesy flickr |
While ABMs could
intercept ICBMs as they reentered the Earth’s atmosphere, taking missiles out during
the boost phase on the way to orbit was a different matter. While technically getting around the ABM
treaty, orbital laser platforms or spaced based projectile systems were
devilishly difficult to deploy since the amount of time a missile took to
transit the boost phase was limited at best.
Additionally, the amount of hunter-killer satellites that would be needed
to create an effective shield in low earth orbit that ensured complete coverage
was anywhere from 1,000-2,000.
If having thousands of heavily
armed satellites circling above your head sounds scary, so too did the
logistics of deploying, maintaining, controlling and replacing them on orbit. One paper published by the Union of Concerned
Scientists summed up SDI like this, “Such a system would easily become one of
the most expensive military projects of all time.” An estimate by the Institute for Defense
Analyses pegged the cost for a constellation of 960 SDI satellites to be more
than $282 billion.
I guess it’s a good thing
that the plug was pulled on Reagan’s Star Wars program or it could have meant
that the US economy would have taken a big hit from such an expensive
project. As for where the $30 billion
that was spent on SDI went is anybody’s guess.
What’s even more troubling is the rationale behind such a costly
boondoggle by a President who failed to heed his advisers when it came to
developing a high-tech space-based weapons program nobody really wanted or
needed.
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| Image courtesy flickr |
“I occasionally think how
quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien
threat from outside this world. And yet
I ask you, is not an alien force already among us?”
While some people think
this comment was taken out of context, let me assure you that the Soviets did
not. In a speech given to the Central
Committee in 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev stated, “At our meeting in Geneva, the US
President said if the Earth faced an invasion by extraterrestrials, the United
States and the Soviet Union would join forces to repel such an invasion. I shall not dispute the hypothesis, though I
think it’s early yet to worry about such an intrusion.”
If you're interested in learning more about Ron Reagan's UFO encounters, check out the video.
Reagan and UFOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InymChuee6A
Reagan and UFOs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InymChuee6A
If you’re still having a
hard time getting your head around the real Star Wars, let me point out that if
you believe that it was due to SDI that the USSR collapsed, this assumption was
proven to be false. The CIA’s own records show that during the Reagan
Administration, Soviet military spending remained steady through the 80’s,
including Gorbachev’s first 4-years in office.
With the onset of Glasnost, both Reagan and Gorbachev spoke of ending
the arms race and reducing or even eliminating ballistic missiles, which if
anything eased Cold War tensions. Far from using SDI as a big stick to threaten
the Soviets, in the last half of his second term, Reagan offered to share the
technology with the Soviets provided they “agree on radical reductions in
strategic offensive weapons and are prepared, right now, to sign an agreement
on research, development, testing, and deployment of strategic defenses
As for the real reason that the
real Star Wars was pursued for more than a decade, I’ll let Darth Vader answer
that one. “Don’t be too proud of this technological terror you’ve constructed.”
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I would bet that we have some actual Star Wars weapon not being used right now. I recently read about the military using anti drone weapons that use lasers and high frquency energy to knock down drones.
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