Empty Promises

...One guesses that it's on this second issue, scientific feasibility, that Star Wars will rise or fall, come to fruition or be laid aside after Mr...

...In the process of building thousands of these anti-missile satellies, he offers financial salvation by pumping billions of dollars into the arms industry...

...If, as some students of civilizations argue, humanity is shaped by its pursuit of persistent myths, accidentally or not, the present administration has hit upon a brilliant scheme to guide old longings into the appealing technological razzle-dazzle of the twentieth century...

...Star Wars may well offer us just such uncertain gifts...

...It might be noted before proceeding, that collections of this sort, essays by a heterogeneity of writers, tend to have the noisome features of overlapping and disjunction...

...Looking into a Star-Wars future, they see a United States made militarily vulnerable as funding for conventional forces shrinks to fund a one-shot monstrosity...

...People once gazed into the firmament with divine wonder...

...All this should give pause to a nation still scratching its head over the space shuttle disaster involving a single rocket, and still upset about the worldwide consequences of the radioactive cloud over Chernobyl, before rushing in where the angels themselves would fear to tread...

...Missing in the self-flattery is the often overlooked fact that many such a well-laid plan has not turned out as expected, has in fact become the mischievous genie released from his bottle...

...And what of the social programs, the medical research, and aid to the aged and malnourished, that will go a-begging in this massive distortion of the budget...

...Computer scientists, consultants to the Defense Department, and researchers at the country's most prestigious universities, speak with authority in their particular fields...

...ironically, now they look starward with a different kind of salvation in mind...

...Yet, thanks almost entirely to President Reagan and his proposal for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), there's hope here, too...

...on the other hand, they present arguments capable of being digested by interested lay readers, yet include sufficient detail to satisfy specialists...

...Star Wars is mind-bogglingly complex...

...They must be invulnerable to the high-tech assemblages of decoys and anti-missile-missiles that the Soviets are bound to launch to confuse and destroy this skittish defense...

...After all, from the building of the transcontinental railroad to placing a man on the moon, splashy projects have chronically had their detractors, their grousing Luddites...

...The technical chapters do not make the easiest reading...

...Peter Wild Money from Heaven" proclaims one busi- ness journal, dazzled over the prospect of Star-Wars dollars falling from the government into the lap of industry...

...So that's the most obvious and most-often mentioned objection to SDI...

...For Congress, especially in these hard budgetary times, remains skeptical in the face of the furor being raised by hard-nosed science...

...And our automobile economy, for a few decades America's financial glory, now threatens the nation with perilous air, ruined neighborhoods, and an economic marriage quite likely on the rocks...

...And since the only true, full-scale trial of Star Wars can be a nuclear attack itself, the whole celestial shebang can be tested only once — the first and probably only time it's used...

...Without going into the intricacies here, they come down to this...

...Reagan's departure, as one more example of an initially appealing but finally unworkable Buck-Rogers fantasy...

...There are others, more subtle but equally wide-ranging in their implications...

...They echo a large and growing number of their scientific colleagues who are concluding that Star Wars not only would be an economic, political, and social fiasco but the concept itself is so riddled with "intrinsic weaknesses" that it simply won't work...

...And these are, mind you, men and women who stand to benefit from the windfall of Star-Wars research dollars...

...What once symbolized a future promise, in the twentieth century has become a future 392: Commonweal battlefield...

...From the settling of a wild continent to the finding of a cure for cancer, Americans have always been energized by seemingly impossible challenges...

...They must react instantly and work with precise coordination to defang a Soviet attack...

...We are talking, of course, in terms of billions upon billions, something in the order of a trillion dollars...

...Star Wars, the quixotic brain child of a president given to the dramatics of television, but conceived in ignorance of warnings from many of the country's top physicists, would bleed the nation white to deploy an at-best unreliable and for certain bewilderingly expensive system...

...Despite our yearnings, we haven't yet found a cure for the common cold, let alone for cancer...

...We'd like to believe that by turning on our Yankee ingenuity and throwing enough money at a problem we could build a bridge to the moon if we put our minds to it...

...Thankfully, editor John Tirman has kept these potential chuckholes to a minimum, and the book clearly leads us through the three major areas surrounding SDI's inherent difficulties: politics, technical issues, and implications for the arms race...

...Most of them involve money...

...He would militarize the heavens, turning the celestial regions into an impenetrable shield to ward off incoming Soviet missiles...

...So we have a gargantuan complex, far more ganglionic than anything ever constructed, that can't be tested but must work once and work perfectly...

...Their channeling into Star Wars would drain the country's scientific talent away from a host of other pressing problems such as toxic waste and acid rain, to concentrate them on this one, doubt-filled area...

...It would require deployment of thousands of satellites with millions of parts...

...The contributors to Empty Promises, an eminently cool-headed evaluation of this controversial subject, hardly can be accused of knee-jerk naysaying or lack of patriotism...

...But, psychology and history aside, will SDI deliver on its grand promise...

...With good reason, even high-ranking officers in the Pentagon are furrowing their brows...