November 18th 2008
The Lies They Teach: #8
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ontinuing with Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) here are the next two lies Schweikart lists in his review of what liberal revisionist history profs are doing to despoil the proud history of our nation and pollute the minds of the next generation with their drivel.
Lie #8 – Ronald Reagan Knew “Star Wars” Wouldn’t Work but Wanted to Provoke a War with Russia
Nicknamed “Star Wars” after a popular science fiction film, it spent billions of dollars trying to establish a space-based defense system. Most scientists contended that the project was as fantastic as the movie. – James West Davidson et al., Nation of Nations
Despite the flip dismissal of SDI technology by the Left, when Reagan announced the program in 1983, most of the technologies needed were in place, Schweikart says. The Left should have loved it because they hated the Cold War strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction which SDI sought to deconstruct – but because it came from Reagan and was directed at the Soviets, no such normalcy was evidenced.
Recently released National Security Council docs from 1982 lay out a U.S. goal of not just containing the Soviets, but reversing their expansion, with tapping out USSR military spending as one of several tactics to be employed. The strategy cunningly used the Soviet’s great respect for our technology so that “you leverage their perceptions dramatically” through technology investments.
Contrary to the Davidson quote above, it was the media not the scientists who pegged the Star Wars moniker on the program. The Soviets, fearful of our computer technology, certainly didn’t see the system as fantasy – and subsequent tests (carried out within Reagan’s original 20-year timeframe) proved that ultimately it was anything but Hollywood scriptwriting. Schweikart provides these quotes;
Inside the Kremlin, the top Soviet generals were terrified. They knew SDI had the potential to work. Nikolai Leonov said “it underlined still more our technological backwardness.” Gen. Makhmud Gareev, the deputy chief of the Soviet General Staff, agreed, saying it was “beyond our power” to compete with the Americans technologically. In 1981, a Soviet arms negotiator said, “Oh, you Americans! … You are going to make us spend and spend to keep up and our lousy standard of living will go down and down and in the end you will win.”
And we did. And not soon after, during the first Gulf War, Patriot Missiles shot incoming Scuds out of the air, and in 1992, space-based interceptors – real Star Wars stuff – were successfully tested, just 10 years, not 20, after Reagan’s speech. By 2008, an SDI antimissile missile shot a falling satellite to smithereens – but no one’s revising the textbooks yet.
The Lies They Teach: #6 And #7
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
The Lies They Teach: #1 – #3
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November 21st, 2008 at 8:36 am
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November 18th, 2008 at 8:29 am
In 1983, we were just getting the first desktop PCs from IBM (the famous XT) that sported the first internal hard drives (with 128K) and an Intel 8088 processor running at 4.77 MHz. This compares with the computer on my desk today with an 80Gig hard drive and a 3.000 GHz processor–all for less than one-half the cost. In other words, the performance has increased 625,000 times for the hard drive and 629 times for the processing speed, as the price has declined at least 50%. Now, while the rocket and telemetry technology was available in 1983 that is available today, the computing power needed to “solve” the problem of knocking down multiple ballistic targets while avoiding the dummies has still not yet been reached–proof is the fact that even today the military does not release kill rates run in highly simplified scenarios widely recognized as not realistic. Imagine trying to make the case that SDI could work in 5-10 years back in 1983 when the Reagan administration attempted to make this argument. There is no liberal lie here, unless you believe the misstatement that liberals believed that Reagan wanted to start a war. In fact, much of the press at that time centered on the likely failure of such a program at great cost, with only Reagan’s many financial supporters in the weapons industry (most in California) to benefit from this castle in the desert. As to the dismissal of SDI as a pipe dream given the technology at that time, it is the Right that is perpetuating a lie. And they ought to admit that the money allocated was wasted or explain why technical problems continue to plague the system despite the massive improvement in technology since that time (does Moore’s Law ring a bell?). The only good explanation I have heard is that some experts during the Reagan administration knew they could not build SDI but also knew the Soviets did not know that, so in pretending that we could build it we could make the Communists fear bankruptcy of the USSR if they maintained an arms race with the US. Now I think the story is more complicated than that–Gorbachev deserves credit for meeting Reagan half-way–but to the extent that it helped, I’d say that it was money well-spent. However, that is not the claim made by conservative, Reagan-worshiping Republicans. It should be.
November 20th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
You are assuming that military computers had the same capabilities as personal computers which of course is false. You are also forgetting that Reagan anticipated it could take 20 years to realize SDI.Why should we admit the money was wasted when Israel was protected from Scuds – which wouldn’t have happened without the research that went into SDI? Why should we admit the money was wasted if we were able to blow a falling satellite out of the sky?
November 24th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Laer, I am assuming nothing. Moore’s Law applies to the silicon powering supercomputers exactly as it does for desktops, since the manufacturing process is the same. In the early 80′s the Cray X-MP was the fastest computer in the world, capable of 200 megaFLOPs (a measure of performance for supercomputers); today, the cutting edge is close to 3 teraFLOPs. The cost-performance improvement is analogous to that of the PC that I referred to earlier. Now, if we STILL cannot build and SDI system capable of real-life conditions–which the military readily admits–then its was utter fantasy to believe that it could be accomplished in the 80′s when computing technology was at least FOUR ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less capable. And I am not forgetting that Reagan anticipated 20 years of development (he actually said that such a system may not be completed by the end of the century, implying that he thought that it was possible it could be), but rather pointing out that 25 years after the launch of SDI we STILL HAVE NO VIABLE system to handle the multiple warhead strike he sought to address. This is utter failure. What’s more, scientists STILL THINK THE SYSTEM cannot be built for the forseeable future (i.e., another 25 years or more), as you can read at http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/twenty-five-years-after-reagans-star-wars-speech. As for the “wasted money” argument, I’m sure that it would have been far harder to justify a system that at the time was expected to cost between $120B and $1Tn over 10 years if it merely shot down a falling satellite (which generally burns up in the atmosphere or mostly likely hits an unpopulated area, like the sea) or stopped a few scuds hitting Israel. Imagine how many more lives would be saved if the midpoint of that cost estimate ($550B) was used to put safer cars on the road. In fact, that amount of money would translate into $3,700 of advanced safety equipment (e.g., computerized accident prediction/mitigation systems now available on the highest end Lexus, MB, etc.) in all cars. Or imagine the shot in the arm it would deliver to cancer or heart disease or AIDS research. Accidents, cancer, heart disease and AIDS all cause far more damage than falling satellites or scud missiles. I thought it was conservatives that were smart about spending government money. You’ll need to show a better cost-benefit analysis to convince your fellow Republicans, much less me, that SDI spending was not wasted.