THERE was doubtless much celebration and more than a little relief in Washington last month when a missile fired from the USS Lake Erie destroyed a defunct spy satellite. Strange then that the technology employed in this display of American military prowess was a pale shadow of what it might have been. The exercise was the direct descendant of Ronald Reagan’s grandiose Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was born 25 years ago this week.
In March 1983, Reagan asked the scientists and engineers who had built the world’s nuclear arsenals “to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete”. He asked them to develop a nuclear shield that “could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our soil or that of our allies”.
SDI – or the Star Wars programme, as it quickly became known – generated immense controversy because of its potential for shattering the fragile peace of the cold war and turning space into a battlefield. If the technology had worked, there would have been a network of high-powered lasers in space and on the ground capable of shooting down thousands of Soviet nuclear missiles at a time. In the end, the plan proved too ambitious, and a decade later Bill Clinton quietly dismantled it.
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By that time it had consumed more than $30 billion. What did that investment bring the world? Technologically speaking, the return has been modest. The missile defences the US has deployed under George W. Bush fall far short of Reagan’s vision. The system that destroyed the spy satellite is intended to block only a few missiles, launched by “rogue states”, at a cost of around $9 billion a year.
The orbiting laser battle stations envisioned by SDI planners were never built. The airborne laser, an idea inspired by SDI but not part of it, has survived but is years behind schedule: only now have contractors begun bolting a massive chemical laser into the specially adapted hull of a Boeing 747, and it should start taking potshots at missiles next year.
There are some spin-offs too. It was military researchers trying to focus laser beams through the atmosphere who developed the “adaptive optics” that now give ground-based telescopes nearly as clear a view of the stars as the Hubble Space Telescope. High-power semiconductor lasers developed with Star Wars money power optical amplifiers that allow fibre-optic cables to carry signals for thousands of kilometres. SDI research improved infrared and optical sensors and electronics, contributing to today’s digital cameras. Aerogels, those solid foams that are almost as light as air, were developed as structural components of X-ray laser weapons.
Most of those developments would have come without SDI, though probably a little later. Think of them as the assets of a bankruptcy sale that bring creditors pennies on the dollar. Other hoped-for spin-offs didn’t happen at all. SDI never built the new generation of launch vehicles that space advocates sought. And nobody in the civilian world needed the megawatt-class lasers designed to hit targets hundreds of kilometres away. Bring a kilowatt-class laser close enough and it can cut anything that industry needs to cut.
The wildest of all SDI schemes, championed by the H-bomb pioneer Edward Teller, was an X-ray laser weapon powered by a nuclear bomb. Teller envisioned an orbiting battle station looking like a cross between the Death Star and a porcupine. The spines would point at enemy missiles thousands of kilometres away, and detonating the bomb was supposed to send X-ray pulses down the spines to destroy the missiles.
“Edward Teller envisioned an orbiting battle station resembling a cross between the Death Star and a porcupine”
The idea violated no known physical laws, but like human flight to Mars it was far beyond available technology. In short, it was a perfectly realistic weapon for a science fiction novel. Yet this is arguably where Star Wars had its greatest impact. According to some reports, the scheme was credible enough to make Soviet generals worry that the US knew something they didn’t. Although it did not single-handedly topple the Soviet empire, it was one more pressure point on a tottering house of cards.
SDI was either a wildly over-optimistic quest for the ultimate defensive weapon or a brilliant bluff – or most likely a combination of the two. That $30 billion seems a very reasonable price for helping to end the era of mutual assured destruction.
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