STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE (SDI)

1983

ECOCIDE
noun
destruction of the natural environment,
especially when deliberate.

STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE (SDI)

(Directed-Energy Warfare)

Mildred Dresselhaus

(President, American Physical Society, 1984)

The Official Story

MILDRED DRESSELHAUS
(President, American Physical Society, 1984)

Mildred Dresselhaus (November 11, 1930 – February 20, 2017), known as the “Queen of Carbon Science”, was an American physicist, materials scientist, and nanotechnologist. She was an institute professor and professor of both physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also served as the president of the American Physical Society, the chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the director of science in the US Department of Energy under the Bill Clinton Government. Dresselhaus won numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Enrico Fermi Award, the Kavli Prize and the Vannevar Bush Award.

PROJECT EXCALIBUR
(Strategic Defense Initiative)

Project Excalibur was a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Cold War–era research program to develop an X-ray laser system as a ballistic missile defense (BMD) for the United States. The concept involved packing large numbers of expendable X-ray lasers around a nuclear device, which would orbit in space. During an attack, the device would be detonated, with the X-rays released focused by each laser to destroy multiple incoming target missiles. Because the system would be deployed above the Earth’s atmosphere, the X-rays could reach missiles thousands of kilometers away, providing protection over a wide area.

Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems of the time only attacked the enemy nuclear warheads after they were released by ICBMs. A single ICBM could carry as many as a dozen warheads, so dozens of defense missiles were required per attacking missile. A single Excalibur device contained up to fifty lasers and could potentially destroy a corresponding number of missiles, with all of the warheads still on board. A single Excalibur could thus destroy dozens of ICBMs and hundreds of warheads for the cost of a single nuclear bomb, dramatically reversing the cost- exchange ratio that had previously doomed ABM systems.

The basic concept behind Excalibur was conceived in the 1970s by George Chapline Jr. and further developed by Peter L. Hagelstein, both part of Edward Teller’s “O-Group” in LLNL. After a successful test in 1980, in 1981 Teller and Lowell Wood began talks with US president Ronald Reagan about the concept. These talks, combined with strong support from The Heritage Foundation, helped Reagan ultimately to announce the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983. Further underground nuclear tests through the early 1980s suggested progress was being made, and this influenced the 1986 Reykjavík Summit, where Reagan refused to give up the possibility of proof-testing SDI technology with nuclear testing in space.

Researchers at Livermore and Los Alamos began to raise concerns about the test results. Teller and Wood continued to state the program was proceeding well, even after a critical test in 1985 demonstrated it was not working as expected. This led to significant criticism within the US weapons laboratories. In 1987, the infighting became public, leading to an investigation on whether LLNL had misled the government about the Excalibur concept. In a 60 Minutes interview in 1988, Teller attempted to walk out rather than answer questions about the lab’s treatment of a fellow worker who questioned the results. Further tests revealed additional problems, and in 1988 the budget was cut dramatically. The project officially continued until 1992 when its last planned test, Greenwater of Operation Julin, was cancelled.

APS report on directed energy weapons

In 1984 the American Physical Society (APS) approached Keyworth with the idea of setting up a blue-ribbon panel to study the various weapons concepts independent of the labs. Keyworth and Abrahamson both agreed with this idea, giving the team complete access to classified materials as required. The APS panel took almost a year to form, and was co-chaired by Nicolaas Bloembergen, who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on lasers, and Kumar Patel, who had invented the CO2 laser. The sixteen other members of the panel were similarly distinguished.

The report was completed in eighteen months, but due to the classified contents, it required about another seven months to clear the censors before the redacted version was released to the public in June 1987. The report, “The Science and Technology of Directed Energy Weapons”, stated that the technologies in question were at least a decade away from the stage where it could be clearly stated whether or not they would even work.

Some of the systems appeared to be theoretically possible but needed more development. This was the case for the free electron laser, for instance, where the panel was able to offer specific information on the required improvements, calling for two or more orders of magnitude in energy (100 times). In contrast, the report’s section on Excalibur suggested it was not clear it could ever work even in theory and was summarized thus:

Nuclear explosion pumped X-ray lasers require validation of many of the physical concepts before their application to strategic defense can be evaluated.

The report also noted that the energy requirements for a directed energy weapon used as a BMD asset was much higher than the energy needed for the same weapon to be used against those assets. This meant even if the SDI weapons could be successfully developed, they could be attacked by similar weapons that would be easier to develop. The movement of space-based assets in well-known orbital paths also made them much easier to attack and exposed to attack for longer times compared to the same systems being used to attack ICBMs, whose initial positions were unknown and disappeared in minutes.

The report noted this was particularly true of pop-up X-ray lasers. They noted that:

The high energy-to-weight ratio of nuclear explosive devices driving the directed energy beam weapons permits their use as “pop- up” devices. For this reason, the X-ray laser, if successfully developed, would constitute a particularly serious threat against space- based assets of a BMD.

A specific concern, in this case, was the susceptibility of the optics, and especially their optical coatings, of the various space-based weapons. Even relatively low-intensity laser light could damage these devices, blinding their optics and rendering the weapons unable to track their targets. Given the light weight of the Excalibur-type weapons, the Soviets could rapidly pop-up such a device just prior to launching an attack, and blind all the SDI assets in the region even with a low-powered weapon.

Source: Wikipedia