OPINION:
We welcome those applauding President Trump’s Jan. 27 Iron Dome for America executive order and argue that everyone should heed the products and lessons of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative of three decades ago.
That technology was sufficiently mature to develop, deploy and operate a genuinely cost-effective space-based defense system that would have countered destabilizing developments of concern today.
Indeed, if we had proceeded with Brilliant Pebbles space interceptor development, testing, deployment and operations, we would have an operational system with even more effective technologies today. Had the system gone into operation, it would have used thousands of small satellites, each with missiles placed in low earth orbit constellations above the Soviet Union. If the Soviets launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, the pebbles would detect and target their rocket motors using infrared seekers.
Why did we not proceed with that effort, and what are the implications of that failure for consideration today? The answer is political bias, not technological deficiency.
Historian Don Baucom elaborates on that in his excellent review, “The Rise and Fall of Brilliant Pebbles.” He begins by noting that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency concluded 65 years ago that space-based defenses would eventually be the most effective way to defeat ballistic missile attacks, but key technology was not then available.
As he observes, the private sector was developing the needed technology by the 1980s, as realized by Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who persuaded Edward Teller to help him persuade the “powers that be,” including Reagan, to support developments to demonstrate that capability in the context of the president’s SDI effort.
Thus, a special access program was born until the second director, Lt. Gen. George Monahan, fired the Air Force for refusing to consider the enabling technologies in the Department of Energy Laboratories and the private sector, which composed the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Brilliant Pebbles activities, and undertook management himself via a Brilliant Pebbles task force. That worked until political opposition killed the effort.
Memorable among that opposition was Reagan’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act because Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sam Nunn, Georgia Democrat, insisted that such space-based defense efforts be curtailed and that the development of arms-control-limited Ground-Based Missile Defenses become the nation’s primary and preferably sole focus.
The second author of this article was Reagan’s science adviser. Mr. Nunn’s SDI cancellation frustrated the first author, who was leading defense and space negotiations with the Soviet Union. Because our space technology was superior to that of the Soviets, we gained negotiating leverage that eventually led to the first major reductions in nuclear weapons. So, we supported Reagan’s veto.
That did not end the political restrictions on space-based defenses, particularly Brilliant Pebbles. Again, see Mr. Baucom’s “The Rise and Fall of Brilliant Pebbles” for a detailed discussion of how Mr. Nunn prevailed in gutting the Brilliant Pebbles effort in favor of much more expensive and less effective ground-based defenses.
Mr. Nunn’s counterpart in the House, Les Aspin, was of like mind. In one of his first acts as President Clinton’s secretary of defense, he gutted Brilliant Pebbles while memorably claiming he was “Taking the Stars out of Star Wars.”
What is the lesson from this tale? It is indisputable that politics rather than technology constrained the development of Brilliant Pebbles, and today’s challenge is not to let that happen again. Today’s technology is much more advanced than what SDI was pursuing, yet folks claim it isn’t or would be too costly even if it exists.
For example, see “Trump’s ‘Iron Dome for America’ plan would put weapons in space, at a high cost.” This exaggerated claim should be easy for Elon Musk to dispute.
• Henry F. Cooper was President Reagan’s defense and space negotiator with the Soviet Union and the third Strategic Defense Initiative director. William R. Graham was Reagan’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
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