Second Worst President in US History.

[CaptainBeowulf]

Such battle stations *would* be possible given a budget of tens of trillions of dollars and a development timeline of a few decades. We can make lasers, we can launch stuff into space. With enough work, we probably can make computers and sensors that can track and target missiles in flight. He just exaggerated what could feasibly be done.

Remember, though, that it wasn't clear to the Soviets what was within the West's technical capabilities and what wasn't. They were presented with 8086, 8088, 286, 386 and maybe even early 486 chips (my memory is a bit fuzzy when exactly those came out) during the 1980s. NATO developed laser rangefinding and other capabilities quite well - they talked up "look down, shoot down" on new iteration warplanes during the time.

Western companies churned out not just faster chips, but early generation hard drives, graphics processors, and so on during the 1980s. Places like Corning glass were talking up their development of fibre-optic cables. The U.S. armed forces were fielding a new generation of very good equipment - Abrams tanks, Bradley IFVs, F-15s, F-16s, etc.

Finally, the space shuttle had just come into service. NASA was boasting about how it would allow routine, cheap access to space. Even if the numbers didn't quite add up, it was still obvious that the thing worked... and since the U.S. had beaten the USSR to the moon a mere 10 to 20 years earlier, there wasn't so much reason to believe shuttle would become a fiasco. It certainly could have seemed to some like shuttle might be used to put laser cannons in space. (Even with Challenger in 1986, it wasn't immediately apparent that there were problems which couldn't really be solved, but just kludged.)

The Soviet economy, by contrast, was actually a wreck. The Soviets had covered a lot of it up with propaganda and by fixing the figures, but they knew that large sectors of their economy were underperforming, felt that their IT tech was falling rapidly behind that of the west, and realized that their level of military spending to keep pace with perceived Western capabilities was unsustainable. I don't think Gorbachev felt he had any option but Glasnost - he had to try to make the Soviet economy more innovative and robust through openness, like that in the West of the 1980s. He just hoped that the local populations would remain scared enough of the Soviet army to not gamble on open revolution, but would instead simply count their blessings that they had more freedom.

He may also have thought that enough time had passed since Stalin that the peoples who had been conquered by the Soviets would have stop holding more than a minor grudge.

The Soviets had gradually been maneuvered into that position by the western strategy of containment through the whole Cold War, and because the brutality of Lenin and Stalin had assured that most of the ethnic groups under their control would always resent them. Reagan recognized this situation plus the perception that advances in Western technology were creating during the 1980s, and put pressure on at the right time... otherwise the Cold War might have lasted a while longer.

[CaptainBeowulf]

Also, this seems as good a place as any to post this:

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ ... ost-canada

[Skipjack]

Such battle stations *would* be possible given a budget of tens of trillions of dollars and a development timeline of a few decades. We can make lasers, we can launch stuff into space. With enough work, we probably can make computers and sensors that can track and target missiles in flight. He just exaggerated what could feasibly be done.

Yeah, I was referring to "realistically" possible
Either way, hadnt Reagan been such a great actor, noone would have fallen for it. I still remember the "umbrella" thingy that was supposed to ram a group of warheads...
Space is big, very big. Warheads move fast. The chances of anything hitting a warhead in space without being really, really close to begin with are minimal. It was and is ridiculous.

[GIThruster]

Lot of people offering a lot of ignorance on the issue of SDI.

Before you blather about what is and is not possible, you should remember that while the Soviet's general tactic during the cold war was to exaggerate their abilities, it was the US's tactic to minimize them. We habitually for decades had far more ability than the Soviets knew about and that is still true today, in many different kinds of programs. The US has all sorts of programs the public does not know about. Remember, we flew F-117's for more than a decade before deliberately making them public knowledge, and those F-117's were removed from service several years back now. They were replaced by something, as was the Blackbird. Who here that is blathering about what SDI did not accomplish has any idea what replaced the Nighthawk and Blackbird?

[williatw]

and he probably believed those laser powered space battle stations were possible.

I dont think he seriously believed that. I was not even a teenager back then and I thought it was ridiculous.

He was an actor of limited intelligence who was very impressed with what Edward Teller was telling him...he convinced the Russians because 1) yes he was a decent actor and 2) he believed it himself.

[GIThruster]

Whereas you don't believe it because you're such a genius.

Can you tell us what SDI is working on inside Kirtland Air Force Base and the current state of affairs with particle beam weaponry?

[williatw]

Whereas you don't believe it because you're such a genius.

Can you tell us what SDI is working on inside Kirtland Air Force Base and the current state of affairs with particle beam weaponry?

Probably reversed engineered UFO derived tech:

http://jamieinenglewood.hubpages.com/hu ... s-the-TR3B

Why bother with mere trifles like laser powered battleships in orbit when we have this? And that was the true genius of Reagan he rope-a-doped the Soviets into worrying about battleships in orbit when we really had/have alien tech.

[GIThruster]

The point is, none of us here really know what we have. What we do know is that Reagan shocked Gorbachev when they were together. Many say that yes, he divulged we had back-engineered some alien tech, but I don't know of any evidence of that. All we know is that there must be a lot we don't know. Thumbing your nose at SDI is pretty silly given what we do know about it.

[WizWom]

The patriot anti-missile system was deployed first in 1990; the first laser anti-missile systems in 1994. We have railguns at deployment level. What part of SDI was crazy?

[CaptainBeowulf]

Space is big, and laser beams and particle beams travel at light speed. At geosynchronous orbits and below, that means they can reach out and touch someone/something within a few seconds (or less, depending on when the target is). Add in the light speed delay for observation as well, and then maybe a second to calculate the target's trajectory. In theory, it can work. However, three decades later we're still working on it, and have spent a largely undisclosed amount of money. Had we dropped a few trillion into the program, we could likely have made it work by now. Therefore my comment above.

GIThruster, we don't always replace a capability with a renewed capability of the same sort, because sometimes there are just too many budget constraints and it's a capability you really don't need for the time being. You often try to maintain it at some reduced (perhaps not even viable for combat) level in order to maintain the corporate knowledge. But I understand your point.

But amongst the stuff we know we have: we tested an airborne laser on a Boeing NKC-135 in the 1980s (maybe Reagan showed this thing, amongst others, to Gorbachev as an example of promising SDI research). Later on we've tested a Boeing 747 with a big laser in it that can be aimed all sorts of directions out the jet's nosecone by the lenses at the end of the cannon (ie. you don't have to turn the jet to aim at the target, you have to just be pointed sort of the right way and you can fire off at a 30 or 40 degree angle). The laser is powerful enough to melt the casing of most ICBMs or launch vehicles and cause the fuel to either detonate or spill out - either way causing the missile to disintegrate. I don't think the thing's range is public, but it's at least tens of kilometers within the atmosphere (in the vacuum of space range would increase considerably until the beam hits the thicker parts of the atmosphere - which it may not have had to, since a lot of ICBMs would be pretty high up at the apogee of their trajectory).

Yes, the laser jet has been on-again-off-again with the fiscal problems since 2008 and supposedly it's currently been mothballed, but I'm sure the laser research continues at some level.

So yeah, a lot of the ideas for SDI tech are *sort of* believable. Let's double-check what the USSR had seen the U.S. do before: basically build an atom bomb from scratch within five years in the 1940s with only a bit of Polish and Brit research and help from some emigre German physicists as a springboard; beat them to the moon in the 1960s even after they had the headstart with Sputnik, and churn out all the advanced tech during the 1980s that I talked about in my previous post. I can see how Gorbachev would have trouble being able to be certain what was real and what was bluff.

After all, "death rays" on cannons on space satellites are really no more sci-fi than splitting the atom and making a huge bomb out of the result, when you think about it. I bet if you asked someone from the 1920s or 1930s whether one seemed more realistic than the other, they'd probably say no.

[GIThruster]

Lasers, microwaves, particle beams and the systems necessary to target them have all had huge funding since SDI began. Indeed it would be very hard to defund them now as they make breakthroughs on a regular basis. SDI did have it's funding cut long ago, but it established certain foundational technologies of the future as serious and changed the face of the industrial military complex forever. It's very likely the day will never come the US will stop funding this sort of research. We pass on things like caseless ammo rifles that are based on well understood physics and faces relatively simple challenges, because we don't need to direct R&D funds for those sorts of weapons anymore. H&K will pay for it and if not them, then someone else. Weapons manufacturers do that research mostly unfunded. It's the wild stuff that takes decades to master that gets the money, and we have Reagan to thank for that. SDI has produced hundreds of developments over the decades--too many to count.

[Skipjack]

There is a difference between a theoretically possible technology and a technology that is realistically there and can be realistically deployed.
SDI was a lot of great concept art with some early stage prototypes that were way underperforming. There was no way to deploy it either.
Some of the concepts demonstrated, however were outrageously stupid.
I remember laughing about the "space umbrella" thingy as well as the nuclear bomb driven particle beam weapon system. Absolutely silly devices. The performance of the lasers back then was way worse than the performance of lasers now, 30 years later and even today our laser technology would be insufficient for such a project. Most of them are too high maintenance as well. You cant just put them into space and let them sit there for a decade.
And again, space is big and there would be a lot of warheads coming from many directions, some with very short warning times (e.g. launched by SSBNs).
Anyway, these things would either orbit in LEO or GTO.
In LEO, you need a network of many, many satellites to make sure that there are always enough of them right where you need them.
In GTO, you have an even bigger problem with deployment (the space shuttle would not have been able to do it) and no way of servicing them.
All this would have made this program so expensive, there would have been no way to ever have it operational. Theoretically some of the concepts might have worked, practially, they were all ridiculous, IMHO.

[GIThruster]

Some of them were silly ideas, but those were harsh times when people were terrified of thermonuclear war. Today the threat of a nuke being used is probably greater, but people don't worry about it so much. They figure if it happens it will be some psychotic state or band of terrorists detonate a device somewhere in the US, but it's not as if the whole world will go up in smoke. It's that attitude that places us at such great risk.

But you're missing the point. In the 70's and 80's critics of directed energy weapons had three objections. They said such weapons could not be focused across long distances in atmosphere, they said the component parts of the weapons would melt down and they said there was no way to target them accurately. All these were seen by the critics as unsolvable issues, and all three have been for the most part solved. They're still being refined and there aren't any combat systems deployed, and you could say that in almost 30 years work you'd expect more, but those early critics obviously expected far less.

[Skipjack]

Today the threat of a nuke being used is probably greater, but people don't worry about it so much. They figure if it happens it will be some psychotic state or band of terrorists detonate a device somewhere in the US, but it's not as if the whole world will go up in smoke. It's that attitude that places us at such great risk.

That depends on what part of the world you are in, I guess...

[ladajo]

The current highest assessed risk is that of an irrational actor (state or non-state) popping a boosted nuke at altitude for EMP. It is not a surface detonation. Depending on who and where it could have a devastating impact on the global system.
We have talked on this before.