The date of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech is burned in my memory – March 23, 1983. I looked at today’s date on my computer and couldn’t help but think of it.
It’s the date that I sat up in my chair while watching Reagan and said “WTF??? This guy knows something that I don’t”
What he knew was basically Edward Teller’s “third generation” nuclear weapon, the X-ray laser, an untested bit of technology that makes less sense the more you think about it. But it appealed to Reagan. And, because he was so vague about it, lots of High Tech fixes to the Cold War situation started popping up, like Daniel O. Graham’s “High Frontier” strategy (that had the advantage of using mostly “Off he Shelf” technology, but which only really protected military targets). Heinlein loved it. Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov didn’t.
Some really weird ideas started popping out of the woodwork as people saw funding opportunities arise. The Mid Infra Red Advanced Chemical Laser (AKA MIRACL, appropriately enough) was shown to be effective in blasting open pressurized launch vehicle from a kilometer away (although actual launch vehicles in the boost phase would be a helluva lot farther from the lasers in orbit) Laser propulsion schemes were re-started as a way to get lots of hardware into space with minimal reaction mass. Railgun ideas were floated again. Weird electromagnetic field devices were suggested. A plethora of incompatible ideas jostled for support, until it all died away a few years later.
I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who pointed out that you could defeat all those proposed multi-billion dollar antimissile satellites with “a coffee can filled with black powder and nails” due to how vulnerable anything in orbit is.
Reagan was the point America went off the rails and embraced fantasy solutions to complex problems (usually involving slaughtering some poor folk). There is a continuum of GOP “thought” from Reagan to Trump.
When I was in grad business school after my physics degree, that same University got a whopping grant to study gamma lasers as part of the Star Wars initiative. On a lark I wrote the director asking if they were hiring any lab people, but alas, they weren’t (TBH once they saw my GPA I likely wouldn’t have been hired anyway).
Would’ve been interesting, anyway, but even then they were saying it was a long shot.
At least one editorial cartoon afterwards called him “Ronald Ray-Gun”
Interestingly, Reagan appeared as U.S. Treasury agent “Brass” Bancroft in a film series in the 1930s-1940s. In on of these, Murder in the Air (1940). It involves a secret military project to develop a weapon called the Inertia Projector, a ray un that can be pointed at another aircraft to neutralize electrical currents and this bring the plane down. A lot of people think that his role in this film prejudiced him in favor of the Strategic Defence Initiative.
I’ve heard it argued that, indirectly, SDI did work: Even though the weapons themselves wouldn’t have worked, they spurred a great amount of spending (on both sides) into trying to make them work, and the US could afford that spending, but the Communists couldn’t, which ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Not sure I buy it. The USSR spent a lot of money they couldn’t afford on a lot of projects, all the way back to the Russian Revolution.
I have a vague recollection of a samurai Raygun cartoon from the first election that was riffing on the Shogun miniseries of the time, but my google-fu is weak.
Reagan didn’t consult with anyone before making that speech. He had no concrete plan in mind, just a vague idea that we could make the country safe from nuclear attack by shooting down missiles from space. It received immediate criticism from the scientific community, but that didn’t stop organizations from lining up for research dollars.
Among the many problems with the idea was that it if it worked at all, it would only be against ballistic missiles. It wouldn’t be effective against cruise missiles because they fly at too low an altitude.
The Soviet Union was critical of SDI, even though Reagan said he would share the technology with them. They probably didn’t believe him, and thought the U.S. would use any anti-missile system to its own advantage. They might not have believed it would be strictly defensive. And even if it were defensive, they were probably concerned that it could make it more difficult to retaliate against an offensive strike.
Reagan often gets credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, because he supposedly forced them to increase their military spending to the point where their economy collapsed. But after the Soviet Union fell, it came out that they hadn’t increased their military spending in response to Reagan. For years leading up the collapse, C.I.A. analysts knew the country was in trouble both economically and politically. It probably would have fallen even without the increases in America’s military budget.
Yourassertion is at odds with what I’ve read about Edward Teller consulting with Reagan, nd with this snippet from Wikipedia’s Robert Heinlrin page:
Policy recommendations from the Council included ballistic missile defense concepts which were later transformed into what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Heinlein assisted with Council contribution to the Reagan SDI spring 1983 speech.
Heinlein was supportive of SDI, and wrote a foreword to Daniel O. Graham’s book High Frontier, which pushed Graham’s own suggested SDI architecture. Graham, like Heinlein, was on the Citizen’s Advisory Council on National Space Policy, referred to in the quote. (So was my boss at the time, although he’s not listed on the Wikipedia page on the Council)
Reagan may not have had direct assistance in writing the speech, but he had definitely been advised of a lot of the possibilities that could go into SDI before he made the speech.
Realistically, the only options outside of MAD are a missile shield or interstellar colonization.
Saying that the technology wasn’t there at the time is sort of like saying that airplane technology wasn’t there in 1900. It’s true but we were also flying across the Atlantic by 1919. Pretty much everyone that could never imagine flying was still alive by the time intercontinental travel was available.
We know now that, even with serious R&D money thrown at the matter, it wasn’t possible with what they had available to them. Saying that we could have known that beforehand, though, is questionable. There’s always the chance that some random guy might have had the necessary insight to generate a solution. (Maybe not lasers, but something.)
Personally, I’d rather keep people in the game of advancing the tech. Maybe it should just be investment on the same level as we’re willing to put towards Cold Fusion, but MAD and interstellar colonization are real bad and far more impossible, respectively.
Yeah, it’s hard to remember how much faith we had in the exponential growth of space in those days. Kittyhawk in 1903 to Apollo11 in 1969. If you’d asked me, in 1980, whether it was more likely we’d have colonized the planets or never even been back to the Moon by 2026, I’d have put my money on colonizing.
Why did he feel the need to do a speech about it? If he didn’t have enough votes in Congress, surely he had ways to utilize defense industry money to put non-disclosed killer satellites into space? It’s not just lasers (or photon torpedoes) but ballistic stuff that will send another country’s satellites spinning and useless. Were voters supposed to write to their congressman, urging “space lasers”?
It would be like Putin announcing he’s planning to mine undersea fiber and power cables, being ridiculed as the Russian Jacques Cousteau with his Science ship, yet we now know he’s done it. Shutting down your foe’s communication in wartime is essential, and the notion probably pre-dates Sun Tsu.
What kind of havoc will occur in your country when ATM’s and points of sale stop working and even if you have cash, prices will skyrocket, and if you rely on debit/credit cards you’d better have a well-stocked pantry.
At any rate, I don’t recall the details of the speech itself, and if he used George Lucas’ movies as an example, however many of those satellites eventually launched are matched by Russia and China. It’s not “Star Wars”, just satellites acting as remote tanks trying to gain a communication advantage over whomever you’re fighting.
It’s as crazy or downright sensible as Kennedy’s space race to the moon. C’mon, cure the common cold first!
Reagan never called it “Star Wars”. That was the shorthand moniker given it by the media. I guess “SDI” sounded too clinical.
The Russians reportedly loved the term “Star Wars”, and used the Russian translation for it when they spoke of it. It made the US seem like it was breaking new frontiers in warfare.
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