Plutonium Page's post, Star Wars Episode II reminded me of my friendship with one of the original team modeling SDI during the Reagan/Bush41 years.
It was the summer of 1989. A series of unfortunate accidents resulted in me joining the household of an aeronautical physicist (or some similarly esoteric combination). It wasn't hard to tell that whatever my host did at the Pentagon was high pressure; my own father had spent years at the Pentagon doing highest-security level stuff so I guess I recognized the symptoms of a brilliant person who knows he's trying to hold the scientific truth in the face of determined brass.
I figured the least I could do in return for a place to live was to lighten the atmosphere, get my host to talk, give him a chance to let it out even if the exact details were always withheld. In the end, I got a more cheerful host -- along with a headful of baffling realizations about the state of our military weapons development processes. I've never diaried here before, and this is a story I've rarely told anyone, but if anyone's curious about a footnote in the SDI history, I've got one that might amuse.
FWIW, I don't name my host nor the specifics of our friendship because I don't want to impact his current career (just in case) and because I don't know the exact details of what was permissible, or not, to tell me at the time. I would imagine it's a fine line, and I never got specifics, but it's hard to guess what will get the Pentagon brass all up in arms. So to speak.
I'd heard about SDI, some from the news and some from my dad, and my host's wife let slip that my host was one of the main scientific leads. I really hadn't been able to figure out just what this SDI-thing was supposed to do, even if it'd been on the table since before I entered HS... so I asked. I figured it was a simple enough question, and it'd be interesting dinner conversation, right? Yes on the latter, but not even close on the former.
Next thing I knew, my host had brought home a video tape 'draft' of the modeling output the team was putting together for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was just images, no details or print, so it really didn't tell you much on its own (so I'm guessing not really classified... I hope). Anyway, it was this elaborate series of lines that started at the bottom of the screen, shot upwards and created a chicken-wire netting across the screen. Granted, it was rudimentary enough that even the video games of the time looked pretty advanced in comparison, but, hey, government budget.
My host spent a good forty-five minutes geeking out to no end about how the pebbles' trajectory worked in relation to the earth and stuff about the equator and how to shoot them into the sky. (Me: really big guns? Him: no, but we asked anyway just to see if they'd let us have our own bazookas.)
That video was the first working visual model of tiny pebbles. A series of tiny satellites would rotate the earth and when a missile entered the low-earth orbit (LEO) ring, the nearest pebbles would... My host shrugged.
"Would what," I asked.
"Jump it," my host said. He switched to geek-speak, which I already knew from my own father was clear sign of geek non-lying; rather than lie, a geek tries to hedge or cover. "A missile doesn't arm itself until X point, after it's completed its arc and begun to decrease elevation. The tiny pebbles get to it before then."
"And then what?"
"Dead missile."
"Okay, but how?"
"Oh, look, I finished my beer. Boy, I'm thirsty!"
When you ask a question that's verging into secured topics, the usual response is a kind of shut-down expression and a, "I can't tell you that," reply. I had lived with that my entire life, so I knew full well the cagey response wasn't entirely (if at all) due to secure info. It was something else, and that naturally had my curiosity ramping up.
Plus, I knew he was taking it down to the simplest level because I am many things but I sure ain't no aeronautical anything, let alone physicist or engineer. But still, it just seemed to me at the time that I had to be missing something. Eventually I worked our morning commute conversation around to the topic again. How would the tiny pebbles 'jump' the missile? What would they do? Blow it up? Beat it into submission? Knock it off-course?
"Ah, eheheh, there's lots of possibilities," he said, that kind of nervous laugh some folks make when they know the answer but aren't sure they want to say it. "Well. Uh. We're not really sure."
There was a long pause in the car at that point. I was used to my father's work (in general terms) programming for the major defense systems -- and there really isn't any "we're not sure" in programming. I had no idea how anyone could design a missile defense system, any system, and "not be sure", and said so.
"It's a lot of theory," my host explained. "But generally, based on current technological developments, the idea is that this will become a working model once we've made additional advances."
I processed that, and you've probably caught the underlying assumption there that I caught, that made me do a significant doubletake. Because everyone in DC knew -- we heard it over and over on the radio and TV -- that the SDI budget was big, massive, freaking gargantuan. That kind of money would've built several jets over and had enough to spare for three more Crays shoehorned into the Pentagon's basement.
Getting suspicious by this point, I said, "what kind of additional advances?"
"A bunch of things..." He did that vague hand-wave that really means 'don't ask for details from here on out' before giving me the gist of the argument. "In the past ten years, look how much things have changed. Now people have car phones. Fax machines. Home computers. Cars that will talk to you. Right?"
I allowed that was the case; as a child, I watched the grad students at GA Tech exchange tire-sized reels from one metal box to another and helped my father carry the box of punch cards to run statistical date for his dissertation... and my freshman year in college, I had one of the first portable computers in my dorm room. Okay, technology had come a long way.
"We can compute the speed of technological advances," my host continued. "Based on that data, we can reasonably deduce that if X wasn't possible Y time ago without the development of Z, and having finally achieved Z and thus begun to develop X, that if we know we'll need D technology and that this will require achieving E developments first, that it'll be roughly F time, based on comparison with the Y time frame of the previous development and required prerequisites."
Yes, at that point I distinctly recall I just blinked a few times. Because I think I got an answer but it's not sounding like any kind of answer I'd recognize. "What does that have to do with tiny pebbles," I prodded.
"Oh, uh..." More of that nervous laughter. "See, we can't actually do tiny pebbles at this point. We don't have the technology for it, but if we can deduce the required technology and then extrapolate, then we've got a pretty good idea of when we could, uh, do it."
I thought I got what he was saying, but it just seemed impossible. This was the general gist of his best analogy: say you're Joe Development in 1870, and the Govt tells you it wants to have cannon that will fire from point A when the person giving the order is at point B, out of earshot and sight, and have the cannonball land neatly at point C -- without having personnel around it to be endangered by return shots at the cannon.
Well, you've got the cannon, so that's one part. And you've got the telegraph system for relaying the order, but cannon don't speak telegraph, plus telegraph is tied to specific landlines so it's close but no cigar. And you've got engines getting more advanced per the industrial revolution but nothing maneuverable like a cannon would need to be... so you need to wait until radio's invented, and then automobiles, and then the combination of those two to create radio-controlled automobiles, and then you should be able to start working on further development of long-distance controlled guidance systems for your cannon.
But how would you know in 1870 that it'd only be fifteen years before Karl Benz would build the first four-stroke gasoline-powered automobile? Or that it'd be another five years until the wireless telegraph, and ten or so more past that before anyone came up with a receiver to get the signals from the new-fangled radio systems? By which time hulking two-ton cannons might be obsolete, anyway, I pointed out.
"Ah, yeah, there is that," my host allowed.
Heh. Yeah, no kidding.
In other words: the entire SDI budget was being spent on a bunch of brilliant MIT and Stanford trained engineers and physicists who were designing a system using technology that didn't exist, and that non-existent technology in turn was based on technology... that didn't exist.
"Yep! That's it in a nutshell," my host said.
"You're kidding me."
"Nope. The brass wants SDI, one way or another. There's no way we have the technology to do it, not right now. Given that, the best we can do is determine the technology needed to do it, and then in turn figure out what technology we'd need to create that technology in turn, and... based on that, determine whether or not the concept is feasible."
I was floored. "How can you decide a concept is feasible based on guesses about how technology will develop? Let alone how fast?"
"Actually, you can't." He wasn't even nervous by that point. I recall he just looked frustrated, and a bit sad, and more than a bit tired of it, too. "But when the Joint Chiefs of Staff want answers, it's my job to provide them."
"But the questions you're asking are..."
"Hot air. Nothing but hot air."
You can't possibly be spending millions of dollars to build the emperor's new defense... can you? Sure you can. Unless you're the non-military scientist leading the group, who sees the data and looks at the models and knows that it doesn't matter at all whether the technology exists now, or later, or way down the road. Say what, I asked: what do you mean it doesn't matter?
"Because it still won't work," my host said. "It doesn't matter what technology we develop. The concept itself is fundamentally flawed."
Flawed on the level of saying we can create Fabulous Defense System X once we develop technology that overcomes that pesky issue of friction, or of gravity, or any other immutable law of the universe. It'd be like Joe Development in 1870 being asked to develop a cannon that can be remotely controlled with perfect accuracy for location and time, where 'time' equals 'four days in the past'.
It was a good summer, overall, and I treasured the friendship, but our talks about SDI made me think a lot about the work my father had done (and never discussed at nearly as much length) -- and it made me rethink my original plans to follow my father's footsteps into military-based applications development. Because my host was the one person saying it wouldn't work, and he had the entire military establishment bearing down on him to keel in and agree that it would work, just so they'd get their funding and the credit of doing this marvelous initiative, and the facts of the case were really beside the point.
I only asked once, rather timidly, how it was coming along; that was the night before a big meeting which I had the vague impression would be another round of annoyed generals and bigshots angry over the scientific teams' refusal (or more precisely, the team lead's refusal) to sign off on the concept. The only answer I got was a rather fatalistic shrug; later I learned that the original concept design was scrapped, at least. The bad news was that the military immediately created a 'new and improved' version that was just as divorced from reality, and just as technologically and scientifically unsupportable.
("Here we go again," was all my host said. It went without saying that second time would be worse, given he was going into it with a bunch of bigshots convinced he'd roadblocked them on the first try solely from eggheaded orneriness.)
Yeah, that's SDI. Eventually it did get ditched, as Plutonium Page notes, but the original romantic notion is what stuck. Presidents come and go, but military brass are doing it for life, and they have a lot riding on pet projects. Reinvent it as missile defense shield, call it something else, but between what I learned that summer and what I've seen since, it reminds me of nothing so much as corporate managers who spend as much time having meeting to discuss what they'll discuss in the actual meeting and thereby arguing that they're, uh, being productive, and getting fat bonuses for it.
Billions of dollars worth of bonuses, and so very little to show for it. Not much at all to show for it, really. It may be exactly the kind of pipedream an administration embraces (like Bush 43 has), or reluctantly bankrolled thanks to military muscling (per the Clinton years), but it's the military who have ultimately been pushing it from the very start. It's not enough to cut the funding, I think, but I have no idea how one could go about reducing -- let alone undoing -- the warp in the military fabric that thinks it's perfectly acceptable to toss good taxpayer money after bad, for the sake of a twenty-year old delusion.
What I do know for certain is that the story of the emperor's new clothes was no longer just a children's story for me, after that summer.