SDI and the Soviets

Many moons ago, there was a major gummit program that one would think would have the military/industrial complex all happy and squirmy as a box full of puppies. Gazillions of tax-payer bucks to spend on pie-in-the-sky doodads to zap Soviet bang-sticks out of existence before they could make us glow in the dark. Although Ronnie Ray-gun's Evil Empire was fully stocked with engineers and physicists every bit as bright as our own, theirs were always bogged down with a type of gummit that universally fails.

Well, lots of methods were being developed in parallel, gummit money was pouring into the armed forces, universities, national labs, and various spooky groups to make many proof-of-principle machines from huge, ground-based chemical lasers to anti-ballistic missile missiles. There were all varieties of scientific and press releases declaring all varieties of near-term successes including the space-based X-ray lasers. Now the X-ray lasers were probably the meanest shooters in the showdown, each consisting of a very sophisticated tracking/guidance system, the 200 individual lasers, and a small, 2 to 4 thousand ton yield atomic bomb to provide power to the lasers. If the Soviets decided to launch a first strike, sensors on the platforms and separately in orbit would coordinate the frying of missiles as soon as they cleared the atmosphere and since each platform costs less to build than a fighter jet, it looked like the era of the ICBM was coming to an end. For the Soviets. Not us. Now the poor Soviets had all these sophisticated ''Star Wars'' defenses that could be used to render their gadgets no more effective than a spitball. What's a poor Evil Empire to do? The rich, decadent Westerners were eating their lunch, both figuratively and literally. SDI grew and grew, the ground-based systems continued to advance, the anti-missile missiles were coming along, albeit slowly and looked like they would wind up as terminal defense as would the aircraft-based laser. These systems all had holes that would allow a certain number of nukes through, however, our science and skill with the X-ray system made the best of the Soviet systems obsolete. We won! Only three years after the beginning of SDI, the satellite countries (Hungary, Latvia, Poland, etc.) were withdrawing and eight years from the beginning of our defensive offense, the once mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was vastly overspent, broken, in turmoil, too ruined to ever compete in the Cold War.

The winners write the history books.

There was only one flaw. The X-ray laser didn't work. The fundamental flaw was a 4th order instability, possibly impossible (that's an engineering fighting word!) to overcome, and so esoteric that it was easily overlooked by even the best.

We didn't outspend the Soviets, especially on this, the panacea of all the SDI menagerie. For a military system we spent damn-near nothing (for a military system! ;o).

Boris didn't call our bluff!

The 40 years of the Cold War ended.