Outside of the Soviets, the heaviest artillery fired at Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, otherwise known in the media as Star Wars) has come from some scientists, especially from the Union of Concerned Scientists. It’s now clear that, in attacking SDI, these scientists weren’t giving scientific opinion; they were only giving some scientists’ political opinions.
Scientists are constitutionally entitled to their political opinions, just as much as any other Americans. But scientists’ political opinions shouldn’t be respected as scientific opinion any more than doctors’ political opinions should be called medical opinions, or lawyers’ political opinions called legal opinions.
When President Reagan launched his SDI in March 1983, a handful of scientists received enormous media coverage by attacking it with a potpourri of figures and technical words which intimidated many people. Now we know that those scientists were simply covering their political opinions with a deceptive cover of jargon.
SDI is not a scientific debate at all. The United States, the great can-do nation, can build whatever we make up our mind to build. History shows a sorry record of negative scientists who said “it can’t be done,” including heavier than air flight, atomic power, the ICBM, and sending a man to the moon.
But the record is much more inspiring of scientists (and experimenters such as the Wright Brothers) who didn’t have the word “can’t” in their vocabulary. In the unique American environment of freedom, they were able to achieve their “impossible dreams.”
James Fletcher, the former head of the space program, concluded in a recent article in Issues in Science and Technology that the United States in the 1990s can defend 90% to 99% of our nation and, with the more exotic technologies, provide a “near perfect” shield against nuclear attack for 99% of our population. Star Wars would be a Star Shield.
Some of the anti-SDI scientists are now beginning to concede that they were wrong two years ago in their pseudo-scientific barrage against Ronald Reagan’s plan to build a defense against incoming nuclear missiles. To a large degree their shift in position is due to the honest objectivity, despite initial doubts about SDI, of Dartmouth physicist Robert Jastrow and Reagan’s science adviser George Keyworth.
They looked at the evidence and came out believers in SDI. Then, they examined the pseudo-science of the anti-SDI scientists which was aired so respectfully in the media, and they exposed it as unable to stand the test of critical analysis.
Hans Bethe is a genuine scientist of significant reputation who joined in the attack on SDI. He now concedes that his colleagues were probably wrong in most of their scientific arguments against SDI, including constellation size, the lethality of the X-ray laser, the weight of the components that need to be lifted into space, the potential power output by lasers, and the feasibility of “smart rocks.”
Having lost all the scientific arguments against SDI, Bethe still opposes it, but it is clear that his arguments are all political. “You know what I think,” he lamely said to an inquiring Wall Street Journal writer. Yes, we do know what he thinks. Hans Bethe has been a longtime opponent of any U.S. defense against the Soviet nuclear missile force, going back to the 1960s when he was a participant in Cyrus Eaton’s Pugwash Conferences and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions which published so many pamphlets urging the dismantling of U.S. military strength.
There is now a chart on a Pentagon wall showing how anti-SDIer Richard Garwin and the Union of Concerned Scientists have had to reduce and reduce again their estimate of how many satellites it would take to knock down incoming Soviet missiles. Starting at 2,400, this estimate is now below 100. SDI advocates laughingly call it “the Garwin curve.”
Most scientists haven’t been heard from at all on the issue of SDI. Some of them are starting to express their embarrassment at the way their colleagues have let their political views so obscure their scientific judgment as to be obvious to the layman.
For example, Arno Penzias of Bell Labs, declining to sign the Union of Concerned Scientists attack on SDI, said that “once you take a scientific issue and look at it as a battle you’re going to win, you no longer have the right to call yourself a scientist.”
The real issue in SDI is whether America will be defended or will cave into the rather-Red-than-dead lobby. That’s not a science issue; that’s the issue of the national will to survive.
