Alex - Small point of correction. Recluse said, "I know that sounds outlandish, but this is the type of thing that we really did throughout the cold war. I mean the strategic defense initiative, for instance, we never really thought would work. It was just a way to get the Soviets to waste money."
During the Carter Administration, for the first time in its history, the Laboratory was forced to submit budget requests including justifications for their expenditures. This was new territory for them, as this symbol of American intelligence and military might, has always been showered with as much funding as they could spend.
Under Carter’s administration, some US nuclear weapon programs were cut, and the remaining ones were subject to budget scrutiny. One of Carter’s most vocal opponents was Edward Teller. From his position as emeritus faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a frequent critic of Carter’s constraining stance. In 1979, Teller, along with a small consortium of California business, academic and political leaders rallied behind California Governor Ronald Reagan as their hand-picked candidate for the 1980 Presidential election. Reagan, in turn, embraced Teller as his chief science advisor.
During a meeting in the Director’s conference room, one of the senior managers floated the idea of gathering every outlier researcher, every failing technology, every pointless experiment and all the most crackpot theories and throw all their budgets in a large bag which the Lab would label “Outer Space Missile Shield.” The idea was as simple as pissing in a perfume bottle, with the advantage that by the time anyone noticed all the principles in the room would be retired or dead.
One of the examples offered was the railgun, an electromagnetic weapon system theorized to fire a projectile with massive velocity. The technology was championed by a researcher who came to the Lab in the early 1960s and work on nothing else for nearly 20 years. The technological hurdles were unlikely to be overcome in anyone’s lifetime and its champion was a stereotypical “mad scientist.”
I was given some technical notes and the assignment to interview the project managers and compile a report for Congressional staff on the virtues of the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed, the Star Wars program.
Keeping the precedent established by Edward Teller, it was prohibited for any employee to question the broader implications of their work. The shadow of total annihilation hung over everyone’s head, but this was never to be spoken. The alternative instead was that the year I was there, Los Alamos had the highest suicide and divorce rates of anywhere in the United States. Drug and alcohol abuse, hypersexuality and disabling mental health symptoms were rampant.
President Carter lost his re-election bid in 1980 and on the day of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, I received a fax from the Laboratory contracting office that my services were terminated effective immediately. Within 30 days, Edward Teller was named the President’s Chief Science Advisor, all research into alternative energy sources was terminated and the requirements for funding rationales were lifted.
The President’s first budget included massive increases in military funding. In response to the proposal for a space-based missile shield, two veterans of 1950s Los Alamos, physicists Hans Bethe and Richard Garwin testified to Congress about the folly of the effort. Noting that such a defensive system was costly and difficult to build, yet simple to destroy, they advocated that the only way to stop the threat of nuclear war was through diplomacy. In response, Teller testified that the political advocacy from scientists were by definition invalid because these difficult issues are outside their range of expertise.
Soon after, the railgun and the Strategic Defense Initiative was fully funded. After 40 years, the research has cost more than $500 billion and has not produced a working prototype of a railgun or a space-based defense shield.