5 ms·

Brilliant Pebbles (2001)

41 points by keepamovin 3y ago

keepamovin 3y ago
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles
nabla9 3y ago
It was one of Edward Teller's increasingly insane projects. He could really sell crazy weapon concepts. 1. Conceive brilliant and super expensive system. 2. Don't think about basic countermeasures that could invalidate the plan.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  Also, require multiple technologies that hadn't even reached TRL 1 [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
- jonathankoren 3y ago
  Teller really did become a nuclear quack after the Manhattan Project. WRT SDI, he went to White House and told Reagan there he had an X-ray laser that could destroy warheads in flight. Reagan, got excited about it and encouraged Project Excalibur. The laser didn’t exist. Nor did Teller tell Reagan what would power the laser. It’s power source? A nuclear bomb. That guy really wanted to put nuclear bombs everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
    Teller's work on the hydrogen bomb (after the Manhattan Project) probably solidify his mind set. Immediately post WW2, Teller was in the minority view of believing that hydrogen bombs were feasible. But we all know how that ended up.
    - pfdietz 3y ago
      You can see how that would affect a person. Advocate exploring a far out idea against resistance, then be dramatically proved correct when an unexpected advance makes the goal achievable.
      - jonathankoren 3y ago
        It wasn’t a goal with achieving.
        philwelch 3y ago
        I disagree. Nuclear deterrence has prevented direct warfare between great powers for the longest period since at least the Roman Empire.
        jonathankoren 3y ago
        Nuclear deterrence was perfectly capable with fission bombs
        philwelch 3y ago
        I’m not sure it was. Hiroshima and Nagasaki (but especially Hiroshima) had outsized effects because of how Japanese cities were built of readily flammable materials at the time; incendiary bombing of Japanese cities was also far more effective than that of German cities. (Which is saying something because the German cities were very effectively bombed!) There’s disagreement over exactly how bad a major nuclear conflict would be, but everyone agrees that it would be significantly worse with an exchange of 500 kt thermonuclear warheads than with an exchange of 21 kt fission warheads. And the point of deterrence is to make that potential exchange as bad as possible.
        pfdietz 3y ago
        One can make larger fission bombs, but they end up being very unsafe, since they contain several critical masses of material. I believe the UK made a 500 kT fission bomb. Fusion devices are smaller and safer to handle and, most importantly, are considerably cheaper per yield.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    Who was more of a quack in that situation? Teller for dreaming up sci-fi bullshit powered by nukes, or Reagan for not even thinking to ask questions before buying into it? I saw something interesting recently, some short propaganda films in the style of news broadcasts created by the CIA specifically for consumption by Reagan. Apparently the man was a half-wit who disliked reading and easily mesmerized by video; a typical TV-watching zombie. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/03/ronald-reagan-cia-video-soviets/ https://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/03/ronald-reagan-cia-...
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      > Apparently the man was a half-wit I would say that seems to be the norm for many of our presidents since then. Maybe it always has been.
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        JFK at least was reputed to be an extremely proficient reader. His reported speed reading is probably somewhat exaggerated but conservative estimates would have him reading the script of one of those CIA brief videos in a small fraction of the time it took for Reagan to watch them. Being good at reading obviously isn't a sufficient qualification to make somebody a good president, but I think it's a necessary prerequisite.
        abecedarius 3y ago
        Don't most of us read a transcript many times faster than its video?
        lupusreal 3y ago
        Those of us who can bear reading in the first place at least.
        DonHopkins 3y ago
        Certainly not Trump.
  - habosa 3y ago
    Had wacky ideas for sure but calling him a quack after the Manhattan Project isn’t fair. Besides his foresight on the hydrogen bomb, he also was one of the first major names in science to raise the alarm about climate change: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
    - jonathankoren 3y ago
      The hydrogen bomb is a quack idea though. The whole purpose is just to destroy cities. It has no legitimate military value. Just because it can be That is why he was controversial in the post war.
      - adastra22 3y ago
        The hydrogen bomb is why the Cold War stayed cold. Deterrence is a military value.
        ceejayoz 3y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
        euroderf 3y ago
        In practice, "staying cold" often involved luck. A bit of Russian roulette, one might say.
      - adonovan 3y ago
        > The whole purpose is just to destroy cities. It has no legitimate military value. Well, destroying cities was also the military purpose of the first two atomic bombs.
        jonathankoren 3y ago
        It was the largest bomb ever until then, yes. But to equate a fission bomb to a fusion bomb is a disservice. We’re talking multiple orders of magnitude more powerful. If you want to know the difference, I suggest nukemap. To put it in perspective, we’re talking about destroying lower manhattan with the Fat Man, versus incinerating all five boroughs and shattering windows in White Plains, NY. I’m not talking about dick waving stunt like the Tsar Bomba, I’m talking about deployed weapons.
KineticLensman 3y ago
> However, before program cancellation, SDIO carried out the Clementine Deep Space Experiment, spectacularly demonstrating Brilliant Pebbles technologies. Well apart from the effectors actually required to rapidly intercept and destroy incoming missiles [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft)
photochemsyn 3y ago
The only long-term result of the incredibly expensive Star Wars programs championed by Edward Teller was that other countries developed systems that would defeat it - and some military-industrial contractors got wealthy.
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  Apart from bringing the USSR to its financial knees you mean, thereby hastening its demise and with that ending (that phase of...?) the cold war?
  - 48864w6ui 3y ago
    If the SU was a gas station with an army, King Fahd probably did far more on the financial knees front.
    - the_third_wave 3y ago
      If that were true, maybe. Since the Soviet Union was far more than that it doesn't quite match.
- myself248 3y ago
  The book Eccentric Orbits makes the point that the Iridium satellite constellation relies heavily on the basic technologies which were devloped, in some fledgling form, for SDI. Specifically, communications satellites before that were as dumb as possible, the 'bent pipe' model -- whatever goes up on one frequency, comes down on another. The satellite neither knew nor cared about the payload. The majority of electronics were actually analog. But with SDI, satellites had to communicate with each other. They had significant processing on-board. They made their own in-space mesh network, though that term wouldn't be used until later. They had to cope with possible loss of a satellite and keep the data flowing between the others. That's exactly the fundamental concept behind Iridium and several more constellations since, Starlink perhaps most familiar to the most HN readers. Motorola did a lot of the dev work for SDI, and after the project was scrapped, Motorola went on to build Iridium. Brooks argues in the book that the fundamental R&D for Iridium wouldn't have been practical without the groundwork laid, and paid for, by SDI.
inejge 3y ago
The same Lowell Wood whose group dreamed up the Brilliant Pebbles concept later came up with a return-to-the-Moon/Mars exploration scheme using some zany technology, including inflatable spacecraft, which the critics proceeded to name "Brilliant Condoms".
- pfdietz 3y ago
  Was that the scheme that used the rocket engine with piston pumps?
- keepamovin 3y ago
  An excellent bit of trivia! As if spacecraft particulary Rocketships weren’t phallic enough already
- Intralexical 3y ago
  Transhab is kinda still around (or at least was until the pandemic), and even has a fully functional package hooked up to the ISS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransHab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransHab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Expandable_Activity_Module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Expandable_Activity_Mo... Image sequence of it inflating in space: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BEAM_module_expansion_series.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BEAM_module_expansio...
paulsutter 3y ago
Below shows the shortsightedness of government programs. They decided almost 40 years ago that the technologies were "not remotely ready for use", and stopped working on them Obviously we should have started anyway, and by now we'd be 40 years further along. But apparently they can only think in election cycles (quote from the Wikipedia article on Brilliant Pebbles) > Teller and Wood initially proposed their own BMD system, Project Excalibur. This used an X-ray laser driven by a nuclear warhead that could attack dozens of ICBMs at once. In 1986, Excalibur failed several critical tests. Soon after, the American Physical Society published a report stating that none of the directed-energy weapons being studied by SDI were remotely ready for use.
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Sometimes I wonder how much stuff was actually air quotes stopped working on, and how much stuff simply went black and became a classified program that’s not released. Or a waived bigoted special access program that effectively doesn’t have congressional oversight. or even the corporate side of those programs that doesn’t even have government oversight necessarily.
- sillystuff 3y ago
  Careful what you wish for. Missile defense is going to be viewed as an offensive weapon by any adversaries (and probably most/all of the folks pushing for it domestically as well). If you can destroy most of your target's counter-strike, deterrence against starting a nuclear war from mutually assured destruction is no longer a consideration. With an effective missile "defense" the US can first-strike nuke whomever they please with "acceptable" consequences for those in power (hiding in their bunkers). We have had presidents since Reagan who have lamented that they couldn't use our nukes.
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  I wouldn't characterize the history that way. First, there are multiple reasons that SDI was not pursued, beyond concerns around its feasibility. Most notably, bilateral agreements were signed with the Soviet Union to cease development of ballistic missile defense technology. Those agreements held until only very recently, and they seem to have been effective in mitigating the worst of the Cold War by both preserving the status quo around nuclear deterrence and heading off another extremely expensive large-scale development program. Both the US and the USSR agreed to only field two BMD systems and actually fielded only one at most during the Cold War; SDI just didn't fit into the political/military climate of the time and there were good reasons not to push that envelope. Besides, the extreme cost of SDI meant that there was enormous opportunity cost. One of the criticisms of SDI is that it was such a sink of money and political capital that it delayed the development of other approaches to missile defense and broader nuclear security. Second, BMD efforts in no way stopped cold after the failure of SDI. SDI survives to the present day, after a couple of renamings as the Missile Defense Agency. MDA continued to develop many of the more practical aspects of SDI and these serve as the basis of BMD countermeasures today. The problem of BMD is very challenging considering adversarial countermeasures and even modern systems show poor efficacy, but that's not to say that MDA efforts haven't produced outcomes. Major improvements in fire control technology came out of the program, perhaps most significantly the development of phased-array and electronically scanned radar, and attendant broad improvements in microwave electronics.
alexjplant 3y ago
And here I thought this was going to about the hi-fi snake oil "Brilliant Pebbles" [1]. Interesting to know that the guy selling these named them after a government program. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070929015257/https://machinadynamica.com/machina17.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20070929015257/https://machinady...
some1else 3y ago
In December 2022, SpaceX announced Starshield[1], a separate Starlink service designed for government entities and military agencies. [1] https://spacenews.com/with-starshield-spacex-readies-for-battle/ https://spacenews.com/with-starshield-spacex-readies-for-bat...
- nradov 3y ago
  Starshield won't be used directly for missile defense.

41 points by keepamovin 3y ago

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles

It was one of Edward Teller's increasingly insane projects. He could really sell crazy weapon concepts. 1. Conceive brilliant and super expensive system. 2. Don't think about basic countermeasures that could invalidate the plan.

KineticLensman 3y ago
Also, require multiple technologies that hadn't even reached TRL 1 [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
jonathankoren 3y ago
Teller really did become a nuclear quack after the Manhattan Project. WRT SDI, he went to White House and told Reagan there he had an X-ray laser that could destroy warheads in flight. Reagan, got excited about it and encouraged Project Excalibur. The laser didn’t exist. Nor did Teller tell Reagan what would power the laser. It’s power source? A nuclear bomb. That guy really wanted to put nuclear bombs everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  Teller's work on the hydrogen bomb (after the Manhattan Project) probably solidify his mind set. Immediately post WW2, Teller was in the minority view of believing that hydrogen bombs were feasible. But we all know how that ended up.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    You can see how that would affect a person. Advocate exploring a far out idea against resistance, then be dramatically proved correct when an unexpected advance makes the goal achievable.
    - jonathankoren 3y ago
      It wasn’t a goal with achieving.
      - philwelch 3y ago
        I disagree. Nuclear deterrence has prevented direct warfare between great powers for the longest period since at least the Roman Empire.
        jonathankoren 3y ago
        Nuclear deterrence was perfectly capable with fission bombs
        philwelch 3y ago
        I’m not sure it was. Hiroshima and Nagasaki (but especially Hiroshima) had outsized effects because of how Japanese cities were built of readily flammable materials at the time; incendiary bombing of Japanese cities was also far more effective than that of German cities. (Which is saying something because the German cities were very effectively bombed!) There’s disagreement over exactly how bad a major nuclear conflict would be, but everyone agrees that it would be significantly worse with an exchange of 500 kt thermonuclear warheads than with an exchange of 21 kt fission warheads. And the point of deterrence is to make that potential exchange as bad as possible.
        pfdietz 3y ago
        One can make larger fission bombs, but they end up being very unsafe, since they contain several critical masses of material. I believe the UK made a 500 kT fission bomb. Fusion devices are smaller and safer to handle and, most importantly, are considerably cheaper per yield.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  Who was more of a quack in that situation? Teller for dreaming up sci-fi bullshit powered by nukes, or Reagan for not even thinking to ask questions before buying into it? I saw something interesting recently, some short propaganda films in the style of news broadcasts created by the CIA specifically for consumption by Reagan. Apparently the man was a half-wit who disliked reading and easily mesmerized by video; a typical TV-watching zombie. https://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/03/ronald-reagan-cia-video-soviets/ https://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/03/ronald-reagan-cia-...
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    > Apparently the man was a half-wit I would say that seems to be the norm for many of our presidents since then. Maybe it always has been.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      JFK at least was reputed to be an extremely proficient reader. His reported speed reading is probably somewhat exaggerated but conservative estimates would have him reading the script of one of those CIA brief videos in a small fraction of the time it took for Reagan to watch them. Being good at reading obviously isn't a sufficient qualification to make somebody a good president, but I think it's a necessary prerequisite.
      - abecedarius 3y ago
        Don't most of us read a transcript many times faster than its video?
        lupusreal 3y ago
        Those of us who can bear reading in the first place at least.
        DonHopkins 3y ago
        Certainly not Trump.
- habosa 3y ago
  Had wacky ideas for sure but calling him a quack after the Manhattan Project isn’t fair. Besides his foresight on the hydrogen bomb, he also was one of the first major names in science to raise the alarm about climate change: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
  - jonathankoren 3y ago
    The hydrogen bomb is a quack idea though. The whole purpose is just to destroy cities. It has no legitimate military value. Just because it can be That is why he was controversial in the post war.
    - adastra22 3y ago
      The hydrogen bomb is why the Cold War stayed cold. Deterrence is a military value.
      - ceejayoz 3y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
      - euroderf 3y ago
        In practice, "staying cold" often involved luck. A bit of Russian roulette, one might say.
    - adonovan 3y ago
      > The whole purpose is just to destroy cities. It has no legitimate military value. Well, destroying cities was also the military purpose of the first two atomic bombs.
      - jonathankoren 3y ago
        It was the largest bomb ever until then, yes. But to equate a fission bomb to a fusion bomb is a disservice. We’re talking multiple orders of magnitude more powerful. If you want to know the difference, I suggest nukemap. To put it in perspective, we’re talking about destroying lower manhattan with the Fat Man, versus incinerating all five boroughs and shattering windows in White Plains, NY. I’m not talking about dick waving stunt like the Tsar Bomba, I’m talking about deployed weapons.

KineticLensman 3y ago

> However, before program cancellation, SDIO carried out the Clementine Deep Space Experiment, spectacularly demonstrating Brilliant Pebbles technologies. Well apart from the effectors actually required to rapidly intercept and destroy incoming missiles [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft)

photochemsyn 3y ago

The only long-term result of the incredibly expensive Star Wars programs championed by Edward Teller was that other countries developed systems that would defeat it - and some military-industrial contractors got wealthy.

the_third_wave 3y ago
Apart from bringing the USSR to its financial knees you mean, thereby hastening its demise and with that ending (that phase of...?) the cold war?
- 48864w6ui 3y ago
  If the SU was a gas station with an army, King Fahd probably did far more on the financial knees front.
  - the_third_wave 3y ago
    If that were true, maybe. Since the Soviet Union was far more than that it doesn't quite match.
myself248 3y ago
The book Eccentric Orbits makes the point that the Iridium satellite constellation relies heavily on the basic technologies which were devloped, in some fledgling form, for SDI. Specifically, communications satellites before that were as dumb as possible, the 'bent pipe' model -- whatever goes up on one frequency, comes down on another. The satellite neither knew nor cared about the payload. The majority of electronics were actually analog. But with SDI, satellites had to communicate with each other. They had significant processing on-board. They made their own in-space mesh network, though that term wouldn't be used until later. They had to cope with possible loss of a satellite and keep the data flowing between the others. That's exactly the fundamental concept behind Iridium and several more constellations since, Starlink perhaps most familiar to the most HN readers. Motorola did a lot of the dev work for SDI, and after the project was scrapped, Motorola went on to build Iridium. Brooks argues in the book that the fundamental R&D for Iridium wouldn't have been practical without the groundwork laid, and paid for, by SDI.

inejge 3y ago

The same Lowell Wood whose group dreamed up the Brilliant Pebbles concept later came up with a return-to-the-Moon/Mars exploration scheme using some zany technology, including inflatable spacecraft, which the critics proceeded to name "Brilliant Condoms".

pfdietz 3y ago
Was that the scheme that used the rocket engine with piston pumps?
keepamovin 3y ago
An excellent bit of trivia! As if spacecraft particulary Rocketships weren’t phallic enough already
Intralexical 3y ago
Transhab is kinda still around (or at least was until the pandemic), and even has a fully functional package hooked up to the ISS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransHab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransHab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Expandable_Activity_Module https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Expandable_Activity_Mo... Image sequence of it inflating in space: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BEAM_module_expansion_series.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BEAM_module_expansio...

paulsutter 3y ago

Below shows the shortsightedness of government programs. They decided almost 40 years ago that the technologies were "not remotely ready for use", and stopped working on them Obviously we should have started anyway, and by now we'd be 40 years further along. But apparently they can only think in election cycles (quote from the Wikipedia article on Brilliant Pebbles) > Teller and Wood initially proposed their own BMD system, Project Excalibur. This used an X-ray laser driven by a nuclear warhead that could attack dozens of ICBMs at once. In 1986, Excalibur failed several critical tests. Soon after, the American Physical Society published a report stating that none of the directed-energy weapons being studied by SDI were remotely ready for use.

keepamovin 3y ago
Sometimes I wonder how much stuff was actually air quotes stopped working on, and how much stuff simply went black and became a classified program that’s not released. Or a waived bigoted special access program that effectively doesn’t have congressional oversight. or even the corporate side of those programs that doesn’t even have government oversight necessarily.
sillystuff 3y ago
Careful what you wish for. Missile defense is going to be viewed as an offensive weapon by any adversaries (and probably most/all of the folks pushing for it domestically as well). If you can destroy most of your target's counter-strike, deterrence against starting a nuclear war from mutually assured destruction is no longer a consideration. With an effective missile "defense" the US can first-strike nuke whomever they please with "acceptable" consequences for those in power (hiding in their bunkers). We have had presidents since Reagan who have lamented that they couldn't use our nukes.
jcrawfordor 3y ago
I wouldn't characterize the history that way. First, there are multiple reasons that SDI was not pursued, beyond concerns around its feasibility. Most notably, bilateral agreements were signed with the Soviet Union to cease development of ballistic missile defense technology. Those agreements held until only very recently, and they seem to have been effective in mitigating the worst of the Cold War by both preserving the status quo around nuclear deterrence and heading off another extremely expensive large-scale development program. Both the US and the USSR agreed to only field two BMD systems and actually fielded only one at most during the Cold War; SDI just didn't fit into the political/military climate of the time and there were good reasons not to push that envelope. Besides, the extreme cost of SDI meant that there was enormous opportunity cost. One of the criticisms of SDI is that it was such a sink of money and political capital that it delayed the development of other approaches to missile defense and broader nuclear security. Second, BMD efforts in no way stopped cold after the failure of SDI. SDI survives to the present day, after a couple of renamings as the Missile Defense Agency. MDA continued to develop many of the more practical aspects of SDI and these serve as the basis of BMD countermeasures today. The problem of BMD is very challenging considering adversarial countermeasures and even modern systems show poor efficacy, but that's not to say that MDA efforts haven't produced outcomes. Major improvements in fire control technology came out of the program, perhaps most significantly the development of phased-array and electronically scanned radar, and attendant broad improvements in microwave electronics.

alexjplant 3y ago

And here I thought this was going to about the hi-fi snake oil "Brilliant Pebbles" [1]. Interesting to know that the guy selling these named them after a government program. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070929015257/https://machinadynamica.com/machina17.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20070929015257/https://machinady...

some1else 3y ago

In December 2022, SpaceX announced Starshield[1], a separate Starlink service designed for government entities and military agencies. [1] https://spacenews.com/with-starshield-spacex-readies-for-battle/ https://spacenews.com/with-starshield-spacex-readies-for-bat...

nradov 3y ago
Starshield won't be used directly for missile defense.