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Apparently it has been found from the actions of intelligent life on other planets that the step of putting weapons in space makes avoiding a nuclear conflict nearly impossible. That is the background to my pre-life promise.
So SDI is OK as long as weapons in space are avoided. The best scheme is BMD (ballistic missile defense) launched from ships. MIT has proposed this. It could catch the ICBMs in launch phase which is the only phase that BMD works. Decoys prevent its working in re-entry or midcourse.
I helped to stop the Early Deployment by pointing out that the platforms on which the kill missiles resided in orbit were inherently vulnerable. The answer to my analysis was Greg Canavan's (LANL) proposal of "Brilliant Pebbles", which is the orbiting of 10,000 individual missiles in space. They are not vulnerable to being killed by their own kind as the platforms were. But the idea of 10,000 missiles orbiting the world and capable of shooting down everything that lifted off our planet was so obnoxious that the whole program was abandoned in 1988.
But work on that idea continued in the National Labs. Bush's ground-based BMD, in my opinion, is just a foot in the door. They really want to deploy Brilliant Pebbles. Well, it turns out that you cannot shoot down that system, but you can blind it. Each missile is always looking at the ground for an ICBM lift-off. All you have to do is explode a nuclear device in their field-of-view and the fraction of the kill missiles that could reach the ICBMs will be blinded.
At the proper time, after Bush actually starts the push for deployment of Brilliant Pebbles, I will expose its vulnerability, if it has not already been exposed by others. Better that such info came from someone else rather than expose myself to risk. I'll probably just send an Email to the MIT people if for some strange reason they miss that point. But that is unlikely. Ted Pistol is really smart.
Hope that conveys my opinion. SDI will work on a backward country from a ship, but not otherwise.
Regards,
Richard
PS: rereading and editing this post, I am struck by again seeing how the name of a person often conveys something about his or her character. Pistol is exceptionally good at shooting down incorrect government positions. |
