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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 tha

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/ 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

hga 11y ago
You can read the actual reports here: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/ 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.
- k3oni 11y ago
  Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.
  - hga 11y ago
    Thanks. From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech was; talk about being on the wrong side of history!).
    - aggieben 11y ago
      "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.

hga 11y ago

You can read the actual reports here: http://fas.org/spp/starwars/ota/ 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.

k3oni 11y ago
Just delete wws from the links, they will start working fine after that.
- hga 11y ago
  Thanks. From http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1985/8504/850403.PDF 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_Kiev_speech was; talk about being on the wrong side of history!).
  - aggieben 11y ago
    "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.