Of course, we now know that the Reagan Administration knew that the "Star Wars" anti-missile systems were not going to actually work. The goal was never for them to work as advertised. The goal was to convince the USSR that they would work, and force the USSR to spend huge amounts of money trying to keep up. And it worked.
Do you have any reading materials about the effects the SDI had on the Soviet aerospace program? The only citations I can find from a cursory search don't seem particularly reliable or authoritative in this matter (largely off hand comments by talking heads, even Carl Sagan).
I hear this out economic strategy repeated often as a post-hoc justification but based on first hand accounts (my maternal grandparents met while working on the Sputnik rocket and my entire family lived through this period in the USSR as engineers), my understanding is that although some spending in defense/aerospace rose during that time, the writing was on the wall for the USSR and it's space program by the late 70s. According to my grandparents it was impossible to reconcile the propaganda with what they were experiencing as engineers actually working in aerospace/defense. Apart from the politically doomed Buran, there wasn't even any ambition to try and match the United States except for geopolitical posturing.
There were earlier reports of Soviet economic weakness that predate Reagan. As early as 1975, Senator Moynihan had predicted the demise of the USSR for economic and ethnic reasons. I think at best the policy accelerated the process.
My view is that if the Soviet system was inherently inefficient, and it was, then it should eventually lead to collapse or reform if left to its own course. It didn't seem to necessitate such an wasteful expenditure that lead to a collapse that was terribly managed. It's not difficult to imagine worse scenarios where the Soviet nuclear arsenal played some role.
That said, Reagan's original argument for increased spending was that the Soviet Union's military capability was relatively stronger.
This is exactly the feeling I get from all of my family's stories. There was an immense amount of inefficiency and outright fabrication (no pun intended) at every level of management beginning with Stalin's five year plans that only got worse in the three decades after World War II. The momentum generated by the existential threat of a full invasion was heavily bolstered by the availability of natural resources and a cultural emphasis on universal education which resulted in a lot of cutting edge military technology and scientific progress but by the mid 1970s the machine was running on fumes.
By the time my grandparents left the aerospace industry (early 80s) it was a shell of its former self. Other than pioneering some stellar science using old but beefy rocket technology, it was incapable of developing anything groundbreaking new, especially given the gap in computer science and semiconductors that the Iron Curtain created in the 70s and 80s. The Buran project is a notable exception, but it was too little too late.
> As could be expected, the data on the Soviet strategic programs in the 1980s clearly show that the U.S. policies and actions and its strategic buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative program in particular, had a significant impact on the choices made by the Soviet leadership at that time. However, the nature of this influence, its mechanisms and the effect of the U.S. actions strongly indicates that these actions did not help bring the end of the Cold War.
> The new evidence on the Soviet response to SDI largely corroborates the prevailing view that the Soviet Union eventually realized that this program does not present a danger to its security, for it could be relatively easily countered with simple and effective countermeasures. The evidence also helps answer some important questions about the concerns that the Soviet Union had about the U.S. program, the reasoning behind the choices that the Soviet leadership made, and the process that led to those choices.
> ...
> The issue of the Soviet own program that was produced in response to SDI brings a question of whether the burden that it imposed on the Soviet economy was a factor in the decision of the Soviet leadership to initiate reforms or even in accelerating the demise of the Soviet Union. The answer to this question is most certainly negative. While the package of anti-SDI programs was supposed to be a massive effort, comparable in scale to its U.S. counterpart, very few of these projects were actually new. The most expensive programs, such as the Moscow missile defense system or the "Energiya-Buran" heavy launcher, or the second-tier programs like the "Skif" space-based laser, existed long before SDI. When they became part of the "D-20" or "SK-1000" programs, they did not require any additional commitment of resources. Most of the projects included in the package never went beyond paper research and those that did were among the least expensive ones. Overall, while the military spending was certainly putting a heavy burden on the Soviet economy, there is no evidence that SDI or the Soviet response to it increased that burden in any substantial way.[89] Documents show that the issues of effectiveness of the military programs or shifting resources to the civilian sector had not became prominent in the internal discussions until about 1988, when the key decisions about SDI and the response programs had already been made.[90]
Sorry, I think I wasn't clear in what I was suggesting with the sentence: "It's not difficult to imagine worse scenarios where the Soviet nuclear arsenal played some role."
I meant outcomes such as where a fringe general in the USSR felt it was a legitimate threat requiring a first strike, or an unmanaged collapse lead to dissemination and use of nuclear weapons. Basically, a successful policy can easily become a Pyrrhic victory.
But this is interesting information, thanks for sharing it.
The Polyus is a great example of my point (and that Wikipedia page does not provide an abundance of references, although I enjoyed the Buran book). It was a failed mission whose expectations were drastically downgraded several times and launched seemingly for the sole purpose of posturing on the international stage. All of the primary technology like the Energia rockets were simply oversized versions of their predecessors like the Proton rocket, except designed in the mid 70s and cobbled together in the 80s.
Its extremely likely that the Soviet Union used far more resources to maintain control over the small republics and it's conventional military presence around the world than it did in tail end of the space race, the former two becoming even more expensive with the political uprisings and occupation of Afghanistan in the 80s. We're talking about 1-2 orders of magnitude here (no citations but the USSR was more populous than the United States so the numbers would be in the ballpark).
You can argue that this is the final straw that broke the proverbial camel's back but there were many, much bigger straws that had already done so, it's just that camel took a while to collapse under its own momentum.
This is an oft repeated myth. The US was far, far ahead of the Russians already to the point where they stood no chance of catching up. What motivated Star Wars was that the US had been overestimating Russian capability since the 1960s by factors of 10-100, so by the mid-1980s they were actually worried about where they stood. Basically, the CIA had no idea what was going on, as evidenced by their complete shock at the collapse of the USSR. Reagan decided to spend a ton of money redressing an imbalance that never existed.
Star Wars and less fictional technology such as the stealth bomber were so far ahead of what the Ruasians had that they actually risked destabilising MAD to the point where a Russian first strike could be a logical choice. So the decision was irrational unless the US thought the Russians were ahead of them.
Interestingly, that interpretation was originally a Soviet conspiracy theory that later became the post-Cold War narrative. Unfortunately, it's not true -- in fact, SDI was an idea that Reagan championed relentlessly, believed in completely, and thought could completely transform the arms race and lead to a total elimination of nuclear arms from the world. As for the Soviets, their scientific commissions on the project (e.g., the Velikhov Commission) downplayed the feasibility of SDI, and while the USSR did invest in some speculative technology projects and some rather more expensive silo-hardening programs, SDI had little direct effect on their spending.
The primary effect of SDI, other than some useful technological advancements, was to make arms-reduction talks more complex as the U.S. was unwilling to walk away from SDI research and the Soviets saw it as a needless provocation.
Things have surely changes in 30 years, because effective missile defense is a reality these days.
That said SDI wasn't a failure, the "Star Wars" part of it kinda was, but sensor, targeting solutions, ABM (heck one of the original SDI systems - ERIS is quite functional to this day) technologies serve as the base for the US's current missile defense shield and they do work.
SDI also lead to quite a few significant developments in both chemical and more importantly solid state laser.
Hubble also owes a large debt to SDI, there have been several experiments regarding bouncing ground based lasers of mirrors in space in which they've actually launched mirrors and bounced a laser over 1 or more of them.
Both the mirror manufacturing technology and more importantly the ground breaking tracking and stabilization technology which allowed them to bounce of a laser of a freaking tiny mirror in space were used in the HST.
Can you elaborate on or source your claim about ERIS?
I'm genuinely interested in the historical and scientific question of the viability of ABM at scale. I enjoyed a course perhaps 15 years ago with a professor who asserted that the challenge was intractable due to the limits of physics. Yet, I have also heard from a former aerospace engineer on the Patriot system that such objections are poppycock.
ERIS was not in the matters we studied, though THAAD and the then-recent midcourse interceptor tests were.
Apperantly ERIS (Exoatmospheric Reentry-vehicle Interceptor Subsystem) wasn't deployed directly but transferred into THAAD and GMD.
http://astronautix.com/lvs/eris.htm
Scale is a different question, it's a matter of number of interceptors vs number of threats.
Iron Dome and it's evolution Stunner/David's Sling(used the Radar, tracking and core interceptor form ID with an added booster stage) are quite capable of handling large salvos.
HAMAS attempted to saturate the Iron Dome missile defense shield with large salvos of 30-60 launches but the system still continued to operate with a very good success rate.
Now Iron Dome has an advantage over systems that would presumably be employed to counter mainly nuclear threats as it can ignore targets that will not directly hit populated areas which would be somewhat harder to ignore when nukes are in play.
Any leakage of munitions is also not as huge of a threat as with nuclear warheads, but losing 2 cities instead of 40 is still worth every penny if it ever will come to a nuclear exchange, and with a rogue actor / single launch all of your interceptors can focus on a single target which gives you very good leakage protection.
From my experience what scientists often miss is that a system doesn't have to be 100% effective, and you also can have multiple systems (which is the current doctrine, early/co-stage interception, exo-atmospheric interception, terminal stage interception, near target interception etc.) and depending on your target hit success rate use multiple interceptors.
Missile defense is very real, systems like Iron Dome are bigger technological advancement than things like GMD they can intercept a target as small as a mortar shell in under 30 seconds which one would never thought would've been possible even 10 years ago.
However considering that 15 years ago systems like Arrow (2) and Agies/SM-3 were already in advance testing or already deployed with quite a successful track record I'm not sure why a professor would argue that physics make it impossible, It was never a question of physics to some extent more about sensors, software, and the ability to actually terminally guide interceptors well enough to hit anything, but even during the years of SDI some branches of the program had successful intercepts.
Last week I got through reading "The Dead Hand", which I will plug again. Great book. I saw and lived these things as a armed forces member and citizen. It was really cool to finally be able to see behind the scenes.
The most amusing thing about the story of the end of the cold war was SDI. Reagan, contrary to popular belief, was not a cowboy. His goal was actually to completely eliminate nuclear missiles, and he told his staff this several times. Whenever he said this, however, the clique of those in power went berserko. How could he advocate such a thing! So they most always managed to shut him down, prevent him from ever going public with his dream.
Gorbachev, likewise, was a prisoner of the system he was in. The armed forces had a huge -- and mostly secret -- budget. They were into everything. They were paranoid and highly suspicious of anything having to do with the U.S. They were more and more detached from reality. For a while there, soviet spies were instructed to start gathering clues that a surprise nuclear attack was underway, even though nobody in the west had anything like that in mind. Given that amount of craziness, Gorbachev's goal was never to end communism, it was to open things up and try to make the system work better. He genuinely cared for the little guy, and saw that the system was not working.
Additionally, the Soviets had reached the point where everybody in the system (mostly) knew how messed up it was. They just couldn't do anything about it. People wanted somebody, somehow to fix things.
During a meeting with a physicist, Reagan first heard the idea of a missile defense. He latched on to it right away, although it took many months to go public. What better way to eliminate nuclear weapons than to make them obsolete? It wouldn't be offensive, it would be something to prevent damage. Who could oppose that?
Now the funny part is that even though this was mostly just an idea in Reagan's head, it drove the Soviet's crazy. How much work had been done? Did the Americans have a working weapon? What technologies should we develop? The natural Russian paranoia and distrust of the U.S. fed into what was just a dream on the American side. (Yes, I understand that money was spent, but SDI was something that was going to take decades. Initial progress was extremely slow.)
So the Soviet armed forces spent all kinds of resources pouring over SDI and trying to come up with a response. What did they fear? Space-based nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered space-based lasers, not SDI itself. Finally they came up with their own plan to create their own SDI -- a hugely expensive program. After all, how could you plan to counter something that doesn't currently exist? When the Soviet government looked at those projected expenses, along with the failing economy, the lost war in Afghanistan, and many other factors? It was obvious that something had to change.
It's a fascinating story because although the system on the U.S. side could certainly shut down the president from doing something so radical as proposing an elimination of nuclear weapons, what could they do about the guy just having a dream? He had an idea. People have ideas. Nobody really knew how to stop him from talking about his ideas. But the idea alone, whether it worked or not, was just another straw on the camel's back that eventually brought down a huge system of governance. Amazing story.
19 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 55.1 ms ] threadI hear this out economic strategy repeated often as a post-hoc justification but based on first hand accounts (my maternal grandparents met while working on the Sputnik rocket and my entire family lived through this period in the USSR as engineers), my understanding is that although some spending in defense/aerospace rose during that time, the writing was on the wall for the USSR and it's space program by the late 70s. According to my grandparents it was impossible to reconcile the propaganda with what they were experiencing as engineers actually working in aerospace/defense. Apart from the politically doomed Buran, there wasn't even any ambition to try and match the United States except for geopolitical posturing.
My view is that if the Soviet system was inherently inefficient, and it was, then it should eventually lead to collapse or reform if left to its own course. It didn't seem to necessitate such an wasteful expenditure that lead to a collapse that was terribly managed. It's not difficult to imagine worse scenarios where the Soviet nuclear arsenal played some role.
That said, Reagan's original argument for increased spending was that the Soviet Union's military capability was relatively stronger.
By the time my grandparents left the aerospace industry (early 80s) it was a shell of its former self. Other than pioneering some stellar science using old but beefy rocket technology, it was incapable of developing anything groundbreaking new, especially given the gap in computer science and semiconductors that the Iron Curtain created in the 70s and 80s. The Buran project is a notable exception, but it was too little too late.
Certainly. The question is, is there any actual evidence?
Quoting http://russianforces.org/podvig/2013/03/did_star_wars_help_e... , which examines the topic:
> As could be expected, the data on the Soviet strategic programs in the 1980s clearly show that the U.S. policies and actions and its strategic buildup and the Strategic Defense Initiative program in particular, had a significant impact on the choices made by the Soviet leadership at that time. However, the nature of this influence, its mechanisms and the effect of the U.S. actions strongly indicates that these actions did not help bring the end of the Cold War.
> The new evidence on the Soviet response to SDI largely corroborates the prevailing view that the Soviet Union eventually realized that this program does not present a danger to its security, for it could be relatively easily countered with simple and effective countermeasures. The evidence also helps answer some important questions about the concerns that the Soviet Union had about the U.S. program, the reasoning behind the choices that the Soviet leadership made, and the process that led to those choices.
> ...
> The issue of the Soviet own program that was produced in response to SDI brings a question of whether the burden that it imposed on the Soviet economy was a factor in the decision of the Soviet leadership to initiate reforms or even in accelerating the demise of the Soviet Union. The answer to this question is most certainly negative. While the package of anti-SDI programs was supposed to be a massive effort, comparable in scale to its U.S. counterpart, very few of these projects were actually new. The most expensive programs, such as the Moscow missile defense system or the "Energiya-Buran" heavy launcher, or the second-tier programs like the "Skif" space-based laser, existed long before SDI. When they became part of the "D-20" or "SK-1000" programs, they did not require any additional commitment of resources. Most of the projects included in the package never went beyond paper research and those that did were among the least expensive ones. Overall, while the military spending was certainly putting a heavy burden on the Soviet economy, there is no evidence that SDI or the Soviet response to it increased that burden in any substantial way.[89] Documents show that the issues of effectiveness of the military programs or shifting resources to the civilian sector had not became prominent in the internal discussions until about 1988, when the key decisions about SDI and the response programs had already been made.[90]
I meant outcomes such as where a fringe general in the USSR felt it was a legitimate threat requiring a first strike, or an unmanaged collapse lead to dissemination and use of nuclear weapons. Basically, a successful policy can easily become a Pyrrhic victory.
But this is interesting information, thanks for sharing it.
"The 1983 announcement by the US of their SDI program prompted further political and financial support for the satellite interceptor program."
You can argue that this is the final straw that broke the proverbial camel's back but there were many, much bigger straws that had already done so, it's just that camel took a while to collapse under its own momentum.
Star Wars and less fictional technology such as the stealth bomber were so far ahead of what the Ruasians had that they actually risked destabilising MAD to the point where a Russian first strike could be a logical choice. So the decision was irrational unless the US thought the Russians were ahead of them.
The primary effect of SDI, other than some useful technological advancements, was to make arms-reduction talks more complex as the U.S. was unwilling to walk away from SDI research and the Soviets saw it as a needless provocation.
That said SDI wasn't a failure, the "Star Wars" part of it kinda was, but sensor, targeting solutions, ABM (heck one of the original SDI systems - ERIS is quite functional to this day) technologies serve as the base for the US's current missile defense shield and they do work.
SDI also lead to quite a few significant developments in both chemical and more importantly solid state laser.
Hubble also owes a large debt to SDI, there have been several experiments regarding bouncing ground based lasers of mirrors in space in which they've actually launched mirrors and bounced a laser over 1 or more of them. Both the mirror manufacturing technology and more importantly the ground breaking tracking and stabilization technology which allowed them to bounce of a laser of a freaking tiny mirror in space were used in the HST.
I'm genuinely interested in the historical and scientific question of the viability of ABM at scale. I enjoyed a course perhaps 15 years ago with a professor who asserted that the challenge was intractable due to the limits of physics. Yet, I have also heard from a former aerospace engineer on the Patriot system that such objections are poppycock.
ERIS was not in the matters we studied, though THAAD and the then-recent midcourse interceptor tests were.
Scale is a different question, it's a matter of number of interceptors vs number of threats.
Iron Dome and it's evolution Stunner/David's Sling(used the Radar, tracking and core interceptor form ID with an added booster stage) are quite capable of handling large salvos.
HAMAS attempted to saturate the Iron Dome missile defense shield with large salvos of 30-60 launches but the system still continued to operate with a very good success rate.
Now Iron Dome has an advantage over systems that would presumably be employed to counter mainly nuclear threats as it can ignore targets that will not directly hit populated areas which would be somewhat harder to ignore when nukes are in play. Any leakage of munitions is also not as huge of a threat as with nuclear warheads, but losing 2 cities instead of 40 is still worth every penny if it ever will come to a nuclear exchange, and with a rogue actor / single launch all of your interceptors can focus on a single target which gives you very good leakage protection.
From my experience what scientists often miss is that a system doesn't have to be 100% effective, and you also can have multiple systems (which is the current doctrine, early/co-stage interception, exo-atmospheric interception, terminal stage interception, near target interception etc.) and depending on your target hit success rate use multiple interceptors.
Missile defense is very real, systems like Iron Dome are bigger technological advancement than things like GMD they can intercept a target as small as a mortar shell in under 30 seconds which one would never thought would've been possible even 10 years ago.
However considering that 15 years ago systems like Arrow (2) and Agies/SM-3 were already in advance testing or already deployed with quite a successful track record I'm not sure why a professor would argue that physics make it impossible, It was never a question of physics to some extent more about sensors, software, and the ability to actually terminally guide interceptors well enough to hit anything, but even during the years of SDI some branches of the program had successful intercepts.
The most amusing thing about the story of the end of the cold war was SDI. Reagan, contrary to popular belief, was not a cowboy. His goal was actually to completely eliminate nuclear missiles, and he told his staff this several times. Whenever he said this, however, the clique of those in power went berserko. How could he advocate such a thing! So they most always managed to shut him down, prevent him from ever going public with his dream.
Gorbachev, likewise, was a prisoner of the system he was in. The armed forces had a huge -- and mostly secret -- budget. They were into everything. They were paranoid and highly suspicious of anything having to do with the U.S. They were more and more detached from reality. For a while there, soviet spies were instructed to start gathering clues that a surprise nuclear attack was underway, even though nobody in the west had anything like that in mind. Given that amount of craziness, Gorbachev's goal was never to end communism, it was to open things up and try to make the system work better. He genuinely cared for the little guy, and saw that the system was not working.
Additionally, the Soviets had reached the point where everybody in the system (mostly) knew how messed up it was. They just couldn't do anything about it. People wanted somebody, somehow to fix things.
During a meeting with a physicist, Reagan first heard the idea of a missile defense. He latched on to it right away, although it took many months to go public. What better way to eliminate nuclear weapons than to make them obsolete? It wouldn't be offensive, it would be something to prevent damage. Who could oppose that?
Now the funny part is that even though this was mostly just an idea in Reagan's head, it drove the Soviet's crazy. How much work had been done? Did the Americans have a working weapon? What technologies should we develop? The natural Russian paranoia and distrust of the U.S. fed into what was just a dream on the American side. (Yes, I understand that money was spent, but SDI was something that was going to take decades. Initial progress was extremely slow.)
So the Soviet armed forces spent all kinds of resources pouring over SDI and trying to come up with a response. What did they fear? Space-based nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered space-based lasers, not SDI itself. Finally they came up with their own plan to create their own SDI -- a hugely expensive program. After all, how could you plan to counter something that doesn't currently exist? When the Soviet government looked at those projected expenses, along with the failing economy, the lost war in Afghanistan, and many other factors? It was obvious that something had to change.
It's a fascinating story because although the system on the U.S. side could certainly shut down the president from doing something so radical as proposing an elimination of nuclear weapons, what could they do about the guy just having a dream? He had an idea. People have ideas. Nobody really knew how to stop him from talking about his ideas. But the idea alone, whether it worked or not, was just another straw on the camel's back that eventually brought down a huge system of governance. Amazing story.