Why Star Wars Is Not Like the Manhattan Project

...they chanted, and that may be the best analogy of all...

...If enthusiasts could keep the nuclear airplane alive for 15 years, they can keep "Star Wars" going as long as the human race survives...

...When the critics harp about technical impossibilities, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger pooh-poohs all doubts by saying that' "there are a lot of things we couldn't do when we first started, including going to the moon...

...But the Doomsday Machine notwithstanding, the record shows that most technological efforts to stop the arms race have only ended up producing more efficient instruments of destruction...

...But at the same time, he thinks that the "Star Wars" defense—to the vague extent that it exists in people's imaginations—is the latest addition to a list of what he calls "technical follies...

...And there were still no solutions to any of the glaring problems that had been identified 15 years earlier...

...Aviation Week reports warnings that the Soviets may move ahead in missile defense...

...Take the toys from the boys...

...The hydrogen bomb was developed, and some giant ones were tested...

...And the most important question: What exactly would the plane do to justify all this trouble...

...Oppenheimer reasoned that a country would have only a few of these H-bombs and would therefore make each as powerful as possible...

...Meanwhile, accurate missiles were being developed, and they could ultimately be armed with small, separate warheads...

...The people who like to plot careful strategies for limited nuclear wars think of space platforms as just another weapon to be used...

...Crashes may occur...

...How would a British gunner know that the unseen plane at which he was firing was in fact an enemy...

...Defensive weapons in space would be astoundingly complex yet impossible to test realistically...

...Consider the nuclear airplane...

...Dyson names three "salient characteristics" of a technical folly: 1) It's incapable of doing the job for which it was designed...

...he contemplates literature from the Odyssey to T. S. Eliot...

...Planes already carried a radio system called IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) to alert friendly gunners...

...Because bombers flew over in droves, a British pilot was much more likely at any one moment to find himself near another British bomber than a German fighter...

...They could be avoided by any enemy who decided to launch low-flying missiles or simply carry his warheads into the United States, perhaps inside the bales of marijuana that enter the country daily...

...But the public would have been spared the expense, both financial and psychic, of deploying hydrogen bombs...

...He still has faith in peace through technology, and, of course, he has an analogy to explain his optimism...

...When J. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists first contemplated this weapon after World War II, they were appalled...

...If th...

...They can ponder history...

...Dyson did some calculations...

...I stumbled across this alarming fact while listening to the debate on the Pentagon's "Star Wars" program...

...Alas, no one knew how to build it...

...All the gunner had to do was wait until the fighter came to an appropriate distance, still beyond visual range, and then pull the trigger," Dyson recalls...

...The critics need something less glamorous if they want to fight the Pentagon on its own rhetorical terms—and in the absence of any real plans, rhetoric seems almost the only way of debating the "Star Wars" defense...

...General James A. Abrahamson was named director of the $26 billion "Star Wars" program a.k.a...

...The nuclear theologians—the ones who brought us the "window of vulnerability'— think it will deter the Soviets from a first strike...

...But what's in it for the rest of us...

...Both America and the Soviet Union, after testing huge H-bombs in the 1950s (the record was 2,500 times the Hiroshima blast), have been steadily switching to smaller bombs...

...When it looked as if any nuclear plane would be too slow to be of any military use, it was decided to aim for a supersonic plane...

...This lesson, not to give up hope, is the essential lesson for people to learn who are trying to save the world from nuclear destruction ." When it comes to political solutions, Dyson is absolutely right: we can't give up hope in our ability to negotiate away nuclear weapons...

...Congress reacted by doubling the budget—and then, about a year later, the supersonic goal was quietly abandoned because no one knew how to reach it...

...The hydrogen bomb has turned out to be neither as evil as Oppenheimer feared nor as necessary as Truman insisted...

...If he relied on an IFF system that was 90 percent effective, then the odds would go down to 40 to 1. The engineers tried desperately to improve the IFF system, but it was a hopeless task...

...Pragmatists suggest that a defense might at least defend us against the attack of a terrorist like Khadafi...

...I find a different lesson in the Oppenheimer analogy...

...Both countries would instead have built nuclear arsenals entirely of atomic bombs—and, as Dyson points out, these arsenals would not be effectively different than they are today...

...Disarmament would acquire a technical appeal and might therefore seem less utopian...

...He hopes that non-nuclear defensive weapons can use sophisticated new sensors and computers to intercept ballistic missiles...

...Yet he rejects a basic assumption shared by most of his academic colleagues: that any defense against missiles is "destabilizing" because it upsets the balance of terror...

...If Truman had listened to Oppenheimer, if America had announced that it would not test a hydrogen bomb unless someone else did, there was at least some chance that the Soviet Union would have refrained also...

...As long as there were no specific, insurmountable obstacles, aviation buffs were ready to proceed...

...When weapons planners become infatuated with high technology, when they start talking about another Manhattan or Apollo project, it's time to keep in mind the message of a group of women who protested recently at the Pentagon...

...Dyson sees nothing inherently wrong with building a defense against missiles...

...I suppose my disappointment stems mainly from the fact that I happen to know a lot about this particular fiasco (there are fortunately few of us authorities around), but I also think that the nuclear airplane is an ideal analogy for "Star Wars...

...Let us have our chance, too...

...It means they're not bogged down in petty details...

...He simply pointed to the space shuttle and said, "We have a nation that can indeed produce miracles...

...Dyson's first encounter with one of these follies occurred with the Royal Air Force in World War II...

...Dyson estimated that if a British gunner used his automatic gun to shoot any unseen target that appeared on the radar, the odds were 400 to 1 that he would shoot down a countryman instead of a German...

...Peace through analogy Now consider "Star Wars ." It, too, has been pondered by panels of Pentagon-appointed experts, and their conclusions have been about the same as those on the plane: we're optimistic about solving many of the technical problems, but we don't know how useful the results will be...

...Two years have passed since Ronald Reagan proclaimed his dream of a missile defense that would render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," and still no one has the faintest idea how to build it...

...The final design of the H-bomb didn't require as much tritium as Oppenheimer had feared, so it was cheaper than the first estimates...

...Now there's an impermeable defense...

...The Air Force's bomber enthusiasts, worried about competition from ballistic missiles (the pilots, used to talk fearfully about becoming the "silent silo-sitters of the Sixties"), saw the manned nuclear airplane as a glamorous alternative (and a way of keeping up with the nuclear Navy, of course...

...Economics and strategy dictated filling the missiles with many small H-bombs instead of a few big ones...

...and he consistently comes up with a fresh insight, a new analogy...

...And I can't think of any better way to begin than with Freeman Dyson's new book, Weapons and Hope.* "History never repeats itself," he writes, "but it offers wisdom to those who are willing to learn" Dyson began World War II as a pacifist and ended it planning the brutally ineffective bombing of German civilians...

...It became technically obsolete...

...When Lt...

...This seems to me characteristic of truly grand technical follies...

...Where others insist that space should remain a peaceful sanctuary, he suggests that weapons might perform a limited service there...

...Simple...

...As ballistic missiles and long-range bombers were successfully developed, the need for the plane steadily diminished, yet the project leaders kept coming up with new rationales...

...To restore some sane perspective to our military planning, I suggest we close the Analogy Gap...

...My job was to get better reactors, and I didn't care what label the money had on it," one researcher at the Atomic Energy Commission later explained...

...Dyson's argument isn't always convincing, but his hopeful perspective provides a consistently refreshing contrast to the lamentations of Jonathan Schell...

...Star Wars" advocates have their way, an arms race will instead begin up there...

...How would it be repaired if it had to make an emergency landing...

...But a crew would have to be protected from the reactor's radiation, and it seemed that any shield would weigh so much that the plane couldn't get off the ground...

...The problem of the German night fighters was solved" Bombers with the new guns were coming off the production line when Dyson was called in to help with one last niggling problem...

...To help their bombers, which were being shot down by enemy planes during night runs over Germany, British engineers developed an expensive weapon called the automatic gun-laying turret (AGLT...

...Dyson hopes that something analagous can happen someday to all offensive nuclear weapons...

...2) It can't be adapted effectively to any other job...

...It was a question of economics...

...They can consider the larger picture...

...They urged the country to announce that it would not develop an H-bomb, hoping this would inspire similar restraint in the Soviet Union...

...But no, the very absence of a plan seems to be the "Star Wars" advocates' greatest strength...

...The project began in 1946 with a hope as simple and uncontroversial as Ronald Reagan's dream of eliminating nuclear weapons: Wouldn't it be nice if an airplane could stay aloft for weeks at a time...

...The program was started by some of the same engineers who had just succeeded in developing America's first jets—and who used that analogy for the nuclear flight program...

...In that case both countries presumably would have secretly worked on a few prototypes of the H-bomb (so that either country could quickly match the other in case it violated the ban), but the weapons would have remained untested and undeployed...

...It's a folly mentioned by Dyson, although I wish he had gone into more detail...

...The critics have tried to counterattack—there's been some mumbling about the Maginot Line—but without much luck...

...One critic, Edward Teller, estimated that a crash might release as much radiation as a hydrogen bomb...

...Calling it the "Star Wars" program seemed like a clever enough analogy at first, something to link Ronald Reagan with another movie fantasy, but in retrospect it was probably a tactical error...

...The rationales are already beginning to take shape...

...A modest space defense might be useful, but I can't imagine our military technologists stopping at anything modest...

...Even if the defense is imperfect, say the hard-liners, it will be a vital symbol of our national will...

...It was this vision that inspired the Doomsday Machine in Doctor Strangelove, a single weapon that could destroy the entire planet...

...By 1961, when President Kennedy killed the project, it had produced four large laboratories, several radioactive jet engines, a nine-story hangar, and a 15-meal menu for a five-day nuclear flight that the Air Force drew up after extensively testing volunteers in a mock cabin on the ground...

...The AGLT itself was such a technical tour de force that nobody expected to be stymied by the comparatively simple job of building a reliable IFF," Dyson writes...

...But I don't think Dyson's definition fully accounts for blunders as massive as "Star Wars?' Although it's clear to just about everyone that "Star Wars" can't meet its stated goal—rendering nuclear weapons obsolete—it's also clear that just about no one regards this as the real goal of the program...

...It is the hydrogen bomb...

...Air Force's decision to build the MX missile, despite more than 30 schemes (of varying degrees of absurdity) to find an invulnerable base, the MX designers aren't any closer than the British engineers were...

...It was the next frontier...

...I don't blame any of them for relishing the excitement of the challenge...

...The MX with its ten accurate and independently targetable warheads is likewise a technical tour de force, and its designers did not expect to be stymied by the comparatively simple job of building a base for it ." But today, despite the U.S...

...No one could work near a hot reactor, meaning that mechanics would need special hangars and equipment to service the plane...

...The bombs might get too big to be carried in an airplane, at which point they would have to be carried by sea and detonated offshore, which would mean that they had to be even more powerful—and so it seemed that the logical conclusion would be a "super bomb," with 50,000 times the power of the bomb...

...It worked brilliantly...

...It was a system that used radar to track a hostile plane at night and then automatically aimed the gun...

...In theory it was possible to power an airplane indefinitely with a nuclear reactor...

...It might, as Dyson says, be an arms race that contributes to the obsolescence of offensive weapons...

...Going back through literature, he traces the long history of doomsayers in human society—and the equally long history of how humans have somehow survived, of how stories have happy endings...

...These small hydrogen bombs cost about the same—and do about the same amount of damage—as the old-fashioned A-bombs...

...With charming erudition and quiet intelligence, Dyson tells personal war stories...

...When it comes to technical solutions, however, Dyson may be drawing a naively optimistic conclusion from the story of the hydrogen bomb...

...But the picture soon changed...

...Their sensitive mirrors and telescopes could be disabled by a single speeding pebble in orbit...

...Once the major task is accomplished—a political agreement to get rid of most of the missiles—a modest array of defensive weapons on the ground and in space could give the superpowers added security against whatever remained...

...The ignition system of a hydrogen bomb looked as if it would be expensive to build (because tritium fuel was scarce), but once it was there the bomb's destructive force could be increased very cheaply with readily available deuterium...

...the Strategic Defense Initiative—he didn't waste any time at the press conference discussing how he actually expected to build an impermeable defense against 8,000 warheads...

...This book, a sequel of sorts to his well-received autobiography, Disturbing the Universe, is a rambling meditation on nuclear weapons that somehow manages to reach a cogent and optimistic conclusion...

...I was willing to take advantage of the Air Force's enthusiasm" This technical folly lasted 15 years and cost $1 billion...

...And as always, engineers were arguing that no matter what happened to the plane, the project's spinoffs—new materials and designs for planes and nuclear power plants—would pay for themselves...

...President Truman ignored their plea...

...Scientists and engineers were also attracted by the glamour, and even the skeptics among them were glad to accept funding that enabled them to pioneer new reactor designs...

...The system was installed in a bomber and tested against pilotless drone targets in trials over England...

...There were no answers, but the Air Force was undeterred...

...Then, after Sputnik, the plane became a matter of national prestige...

...He thinks that a modest missile defense in space might be worthwhile if combined with drastic reductions—preferably to zero—of arsenals on Earth...

...Harper & Row, $17.95...

...Since it could easily be replaced by the atomic bomb in today's arsenals, Dyson writes, "the hydrogen bomb has become almost irrelevant ." So the threat of the Doomsday Machine has disappeared not by treaty, not by political action, but by the force of the arms race itself...

...The young physicists working on "Star Wars" reply to skeptical colleagues by citing the atomic bomb...

...Scientists say the program will keep us ahead in vital technologies...

...If the plane ever did fly, what would happen if it crashed...

...Planners next converted their dream plane from a speeding bomber to a lumbering missile carrier that would float above the Russian border, perpetually ready to fire...

...The purging of nuclear weapons from the earth is too big a job for technology to do alone," Dyson writes...

...John Tierney is a staff writer at Science 85 magazine...

...And he did acquire The Force without any cost overruns...

...Dyson calls this defensive scenario "live-andletlive...

...Star Wars" just reinforces that successful, futuristic "High Frontier" image that's been so helpful to the advocates of space weapons...

...Best of all, he manages to disagree with everyone...

...On the question of "Star Wars," for instance, Dyson is a traitor to his class...

...he chronicles diplomacy since Metternich...

...But it was effective only about 90 percent of the time...

...Besides meeting Dyson's three criteria, any long-lived folly must satisfy one more: its purpose is vague enough to satisfy anyone—and for the wrong reasons...

...In the meantime the U.S...

...They couldn't stop thousands of missiles, but they might help against a few...

...Drones venturing within half a mile of the bomber were shot down more reliably by the AGLT at night than by the gunner using his eyes to aim the guns in daylight...

...Once again this has been seized as an endorsement by the same constituencies: defense contractors and politicians eager for new jobs to be created, glamour-minded Air Force officers (who always resented NASA invading their turf), scientists who are both excited by a glorious new mission and anxious to get funding for their work in optics, lasers, and particle beams...

...He still finds himself in an awkward middle ground—trying to mediate between what he calls "the warriors" and "the victims...

...The Soviet plane turned out to be nonexistent, but not before a good deal more breastbeating about the nuclear plane gap...

...The report was taken as an endorsement...

...He's a certified defense intellectual, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a member of the elite Jason group of scientists that meets in secret every year to advise the Pentagon...

...Today there's a similarly brief chance to declare a moratorium on testing weapons in space...

...The aviation industry and Congress were delighted with a project that employed 14,000 people in seven different states, including the districts of congressmen sitting on key committees...

...Aviation Week published drawings of a Soviet nuclear plane and asked, "How much longer can we survive as a free nation...

...One of them wrote in a letter to the eminent physicist Hans Bethe, "You people who worked on the Manhattan Project had your chance...

...There was still no plane, however...

...The system was abandoned, and for the rest of the war gunners fired at planes the old-fashioned way—after seeing the enemy and counting his engines...

...It is a beautiful dream," he says, referring to "the celestial lightning bolts," but it leads only to "a future of double folly, the smallscale folly of militarily useless weapons, and the large-scale folly of unattainable strategic objectives ." But here Dyson parts company with other critics...

...Space weapons will be horrendously costly, not notably useful for anything except shooting down missiles, and imbued with the same basic flaw as the IFF system in the bombers: even if the system works 99 percent of the time, there will still be too many casualties...

...The public, after all, puts a lot of faith in Luke Skywalker...

...You might think this would render the dream impotent...

...As he points out, it is a more moral philosophy than our current doctrine of defense: threatening the Soviet Union with "assured destruction" He rejects the notion that we're inevitably trapped in a suicide pact with our enemies...

...One percent of the Soviet Union's warheads could devastate every major city in America...

...There would be an endless frontier of scenarios to worry about, gaps to close, rationales to consider, promising technologies to test, new Soviet threats to read about in Aviation Week...

...They were convinced that it was far more dangerous than the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima because it could lead to the ultimate nightmare: a single weapon capable of unlimited destruction...

...3) It's expensive...

...This is a nice enough definition, and certainly fitting for the "Star Wars" program...

...Oppenheimer and his colleagues called on America to avoid this monstrosity...

...Each British plane would identify itself...

...With their narrow technical concerns, they overlook impracticalities that are as obvious as the nuclear airplane's...

...The diplomatically minded suggest it will be a "bargaining chip" with the Soviets...

...could proceed with lots of small Abombs...

...These rationales enable the special-interest groups to proceed on the project without bothering to worry about the original goal of making nuclear weapons obsolete...

...Why Star Wars Is Not Like the Manhattan Project BY JOHN TIERNEY I can't be sure, since it hasn't been leaked yet to Aviation Week, but I'm afraid our nation faces a major new military threat: the Analogy Gap...

...Jealous of the Navy's plans for nuclear submarines (a notion that made sense technically and strategically), it enlisted congressional support and pressured the Atomic Energy Commission to convene a panel of technical experts...

...he reviews military tactics of Napoleon, Admiral Nelson, and Hitler...

...Even if it worked 99 percent of the time, a British gunner would still end up shooting down four British planes for every one German...

...They produced a report that noted the obvious problems and contained warnings like, "It is to be expected that crashes may occur, and the site of a crash will be uninhabitable?' But speaking from a strictly technical viewpoint, they concluded that "there is a strong probability that some version of nuclear-powered flight can be achieved" The experts warned that they weren't trying to assess the usefulness of such a plane, but that caveat was ignored...