Comment by matthewmcg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matthewmcg | Hacker News Reader

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You (and Boing Boing) are mischaracterizing what OTA said about the Star Wars program.

They never claimed it would be impossible to shoot down a missile or that any of the technologies involved could not be made to work. Instead, OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline.

History has proven them correct.

You can read the actual reports here:

http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/

There's a reflexive tendency on HN to dismiss government-directed technology efforts. But a quick look at the advisory panel on the September 1985 OTA ABM report should convince anyone the report authors really did consult with experts in the field:

Guyford Steve, Chairman President, Universities Research Associates

Solomon Buchsbaum Executive Vice President AT&T Bell Labs

Ashton Carter Kennedy School of Government Harvard University

Robert Clem Director of Systems Sciences Sandia National Laboratories

Sidney D. Drell Deputy Director Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

Daniel J. Fink President D. J. Fink Associates, Inc.

Richard Garwin IBM Fellow Thomas J. Watson Research Center

Noel Gayler, Admiral, USN (Ret.) American Committee on East-West Accord

Colin Gray President National Institute for Public Policy

George Jeffs President North American Space Operations, Rockwell International

General David Jones, USAF (Ret.) Former Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff

Robert S. McNamara Former President of the World Bank

Michael M. May Associate Director-at-Large Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

H. Alan Pike Program Manager, Space Stations Lockheed Missiles & Space Co.

Frederick Seitz President Emeritus The Rockefeller University

Robert Selden Associate Director for Theoretical and Computational Physics Los Alamos National Laboratory

Marshall D. Shulman Director Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union

Columbia University Ambassador Gerard C. Smith President Consultants International Group, Inc.

Sayre Stevens Vice President System Planning Corp. Maj. General John Toomay, USAF (Ret.) Consultant

Seymour Zeiberg Vice President Research and Engineering Operations Martin Marietta Aerospace

You can read the actual reports here:

http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/

Actually, I can't, for all the links are dead.

So I don't know how they scored success. I score it:

Integral to winning the Cold War, which we did.

Deterring a first strike, because the Soviets couldn't choose which of their warheads would get intercepted. This is very important because the triad made a successful first strike, that is, one with minimum retaliation, extraordinarily difficult in the first place.

Preventing maximal damage to cities and infrastructure while civilians huddle in their shelters (which we could have built, and stocked with a years worth of food, for 1/3 of the annual DoD budget of the period).

Failing our building shelters, preventing all civilians in their cities and such from getting nuked. That one is iffy, especially since:

At the other end, you could define it as none of the 40,000 warheads in their inventory hitting us, but I know that's not what the proponents of SDI claimed it was capable of.

Note, I was something of a player in this arena during the period in question, including editing the Arpanet ARMS-D mailing list in the 1982-3 period, debating it with the best anti-s MIT had, you're not going to convince me by a raw appeal to authority, especially as filtered through such a notorious organization as the OTA.

Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.

Thanks.

From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF, the Executive Findings (all of which I skimmed), the OTA Findings section (all of which I read):

At the end of 1: While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely.

Ignores the economic issues, the Soviets, especially with our successful campaign of economic warfare focused on energy, could not afford to build a new BM fleet (we can quibble about mid- and terminal ranges, but boost phase intercept (by far the highest payoff) counter measures tended to require new boosters).

2 is not in conflict with the Reagan Administration (you indeed need Civil Defense, and we still need it).

3 is very speculative, but, in the end, that's actually what happened. Before the decisions about deployment that SDI proposed to be able to answer in the '90s could be made, the USSR was no more, as was much of its BM fleet (besides the draw-downs, it was a shame about how a solid third of the most dangerous RS-36/SS-18 Satan missiles were exiled outside of the Russian Federation).

4 likewise negated, USSR collapsed, we didn't deploy.

5-6 and 8 are not particularly controversial.

Pretty much the same for 7, which doesn't say much to begin with.

Nowhere do I see the combination of "OTA found it was unlikely a program that would be effective against a large scale Soviet first stike could be deployed within the desired timeline.

And History has proven them correct., and it couldn't be, since the proposed decisions in the '90s were mooted by the USSR's end in 1991, which we could see coming in 1988-9 (e.g. Afghanistan and the Berlin Wall, and note how widely derided G. H. W. Bush's 1991 Chicken Kiev speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech was; talk about being on the wrong side of history!).

"While it is certainly possible that defensive technological development could outpace the development of offensive weapons and countermeasures to defenses, this does not appear very likely."

This is sort of what I was getting at: this is no longer a technical assessment, but also (or even primarily) a geopolitical and economic one. A technical assessment would consist of "a defensive technological development that accomplishes X goal can be completed in estimated Y time." Anything beyond that is garbage.

The Union of Concerned Scientists report was probably the most effective one in my mind; Panofsky and Bethe among others showed that SDI was not cost effective at the margins, meaning that the marginal Soviet costs of more missiles was lesser than our marginal cost to scale SDI up to deal with them.

I'm pretty sure a UCS report was the single most bogus "scientific" study I've ever heard of, based on my memory and what I was just able to look up with Google:

It postulated that the entire battle would have to be fought by a single space battle station (ignoring for example that the Earth revolves), and therefore a huge number of huge stations would have to be built, and that we could only loft them into space at current Space Shuttle costs (as opposed to spending a fraction of the cost on building some cost effective rockets), all of this costing "hundreds of billions of dollars" (that's the key phrase to look for, and note the dollar has lost about half its value since then).

Bottom line would be that no one denied that the UCS could design an entirely impossible strategic defense system, but the construction and destruction of such strawmen are entirely uninteresting to those who care about the truth.

Marginal cost analysis are entirely irrelevant to a discussion of the real Cold War as I noted above, the Soviets simply didn't have the money to do it, even if it would have been cheaper for them.

They'd spent several fortunes in equipping North Vietnam with three complete mechanized armies (1st used up piecemeal, 2nd crushed in their first invasion, when only 40,000 of the 150,000 men committed even made it back to the north, and of course the 3rd succeeded after the Congress stopped supplying ammo to South Vietnam), building their Strategic Rocket Forces, all their other military expenses, vast armies and air forces to invade Western Europe (including maintaining up to date lists of "future war criminals", about 10,000 for France), their vast borders guarded to keep their people in and us out, in such a way that even the rather distant and not precisely strategic territory KAL 007 overflew generated a massacre, the money they had to spend to buy grain every year they had "a bad harvest", etc. etc. etc. etc.

Combine that with things like our support of the mujahideen, our economic warfare, our moral warfare including capturing Grenada (our denial of the Brezhnev Doctrine was a shock to the system), and it was game over. Funny how after the US President to decide to actually end the Soviet Union started the effort, it went poof in one decade....

I see. I suppose you think Vietnam was winnable then? Methinks you need to read some John Paul Vann.

Grenada was moral warfare? I am at a loss to understand you here.

Not winnable, it was won, "Peace With Honor" and all that jazz, the North had given it their best shot after we'd withdrawn our troops and got skunked. Then the Congress threw away the victory. And the end game happened while I was politically aware, so I don't exactly have to read historical accounts, although I've read plenty. Note also that Vann died a little too early in mid-72 to have any final words on the subject.

Grenada as moral warfare: it was the first time the West had ever taken back any Communist territory since the Korean War (which was ultimately unsuccessful), and by force of arms at that. Many then living in the Soviet Union attested to it being a shocking action.

In general, you could say that Reagan himself was "moral warfare". There's a huge difference between an opponent who's merely trying to delay your victory, and one who's determined to end you. One of the things that made George Washington such an effective and feared leader in our Revolutionary War.

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