NOVA and Frontline combine resources to explore the Strategic Defense Initiative. The two-hour documentary contains the most comprehensive information on "Star Wars" ever produced. Bill Kurtis of WBBM-TV—Chicago hosts.
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00:00:00Major funding for this NOVA Frontline special report is provided by this station and other
00:00:15public television stations nationwide.
00:00:19Additional funding is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
00:00:26It could save us or destroy us.
00:00:29Tonight we're launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human
00:00:33history.
00:00:34The Strategic Defense Initiative.
00:00:38Will it end nuclear war?
00:00:41We could prevent World War III from happening.
00:00:44That alone would justify Star Wars.
00:00:46Or could Star Wars be just an expensive illusion?
00:00:51I think it's a shallow technical fix and I don't think that's what we need.
00:01:00Tonight, visions of Star Wars.
00:01:12A NOVA Frontline special report.
00:01:19I'm Judy Woodruff.
00:01:21Three years ago, from the White House, President Reagan made a speech that took the world by
00:01:26surprise.
00:01:27He announced a plan that he said could put an end to nuclear war.
00:01:31And that plan, the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly called Star Wars, may prove to be
00:01:37a turning point in the nuclear age.
00:01:39For 20 years, our nuclear strategy has been based on the doctrine of deterrence, the threat
00:01:45of massive retaliation.
00:01:47If the Soviets come after us, we go after them.
00:01:51However, the Strategic Defense Initiative seeks a defensive shield against nuclear attack.
00:01:57For some, the vision of such a shield is seen as the first ray of hope in the nuclear age.
00:02:03For others, it is a dangerous delusion.
00:02:06Tonight, a special co-production by NOVA and Frontline explores these visions of Star Wars.
00:02:13It is produced by Graham Chedd and Andrew Liebman and presented by correspondent Bill
00:02:19Curtis.
00:02:20We begin with the original vision of the Strategic Defense Initiative, presented from the Oval
00:02:25Office on the night of March 23, 1983.
00:02:32Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope.
00:02:35It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures
00:02:41that are defensive.
00:02:43What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest
00:02:48upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept
00:02:54and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
00:03:00I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons,
00:03:06to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the
00:03:11means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
00:03:17My fellow Americans, tonight we're launching an effort which holds the promise of changing
00:03:22the course of human history.
00:03:24There will be risks and results take time, but I believe we can do it.
00:03:30As we cross this threshold, I ask for your prayers and your support.
00:03:38A world in which nuclear weapons are rendered impotent and obsolete.
00:03:44This was the vision President Reagan held out to the nation that night, a world in which
00:03:48American science and technology provide us with a shield against Soviet nuclear missiles.
00:03:53Where did this vision come from?
00:03:55Why in March 1983 did the President come to believe the time was right to launch an effort
00:04:00which, in his words, holds the promise of changing the course of human history?
00:04:05Before the speech, the idea of a defensive shield against nuclear missiles simply wasn't
00:04:10on the national agenda.
00:04:12It was on the agenda, however, of two men who had the ear of the President, one with
00:04:16the perspective of a soldier, the other a scientist, both with a deep conviction that
00:04:21missile defense is not only possible, but imperative.
00:04:25In trying to answer the question where did the President's vision come from, we will
00:04:29focus on these two men and their influence.
00:04:37This is Edward Teller, one of the inventors of nuclear weapons, and a man who has come
00:04:41to believe that the threat of using them, our current strategy for deterring Soviet
00:04:46nuclear aggression, is morally and practically unacceptable.
00:04:50The idea that if many million Americans die, many million Russians should die also, I doubt
00:05:02that there are many people to whom that idea is attractive.
00:05:07Certainly not to me.
00:05:09It never was.
00:05:13For some time, people believed that is the only way to prevent war.
00:05:21Now, we know more and more that defense is possible.
00:05:26And what's much more important, we know for certain that the Russians are developing defense.
00:05:34Therefore, the idea of retaliation is not only morally bankrupt, which it was from the
00:05:42beginning, it is now also practically nonsense, because the Russians can and will defend themselves.
00:05:53Edward Teller shared his views on missile defense with Ronald Reagan shortly after Reagan was
00:05:58sworn in as governor of California in January 1967.
00:06:05In 1967, when newly elected as governor of California, he came to visit our weapons laboratory
00:06:14in Livermore.
00:06:16He listened, he asked questions, intelligent questions, about the technology of nuclear
00:06:30weapons and the defense against them, new subjects to him.
00:06:37At that time, we were talking about anti-missile missiles, still very important, but today
00:06:44probably not the most important.
00:06:49Years later, he visited the defense establishment in Cheyenne Mountain, heard that we could
00:06:59detect Russian firings, and he asked, what can we do about it?
00:07:05Nothing.
00:07:07He was shocked.
00:07:09Cheyenne Mountain houses the nation's early warning system.
00:07:12That Reagan was shocked by a tour he took here in 1979 as candidate for president, comes
00:07:17as no surprise to arms control expert Albert Carnesale.
00:07:21It comes at some point, I'm sure, in every president's tenure in office, where he must
00:07:26sit down at a meeting once and say, wait a minute, let me make sure I have this right.
00:07:32You're telling me that I'm responsible for the lives of these 230 million Americans,
00:07:37plus a lot of other people elsewhere in the world, and if the Soviets want to kill them,
00:07:42they can do it, and I can't do anything about it.
00:07:45To which the advisors say, that's right, Mr. President.
00:07:48To which the president must say, that's no good, change that.
00:07:52Well, we can't, we don't know how.
00:07:54Well, for my successor, or for my successor's successor, change that.
00:07:59And so to reach for something, to try.
00:08:02Some think in terms of disarmament.
00:08:04Some think in terms of detente, change the political relationship.
00:08:08This one, this president, perhaps the advisor closest to him said, how's about a magic shield?
00:08:15I asked my daddy what this Star Wars stuff is all about.
00:08:19He said that right now, we can't protect ourselves from nuclear weapons.
00:08:24And that's why the president wants to build the Peace Shield.
00:08:28It would stop missiles in outer space so they couldn't hit our house.
00:08:32Then, nobody could win a war.
00:08:35And if nobody could win a war, there's no reason to start one.
00:08:39My daddy's smart.
00:08:41Support the Peace Shield.
00:08:43The Peace Shield commercial was made by an organization whose major goal is a space-based missile defense.
00:08:49High Frontiers founder, the second of the men who helped shape the president's SDI decision, is retired General Daniel Graham.
00:08:56Let's go get them. Go save the western world.
00:08:59Let me put it in very personal terms.
00:09:01I have seven children and I have seven grandchildren.
00:09:04And if nothing happens, if we stick with what we've been doing,
00:09:08then those children and grandchildren are going to live out their whole lives with this specter hanging over their heads of total nuclear destruction
00:09:18within 35 minutes of a decision by somebody I don't trust in the Kremlin.
00:09:24Now, I want to change that.
00:09:26General Graham began his quest in 1976 on retiring as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency
00:09:32and becoming the defense advisor to Ronald Reagan's first bid for the presidency.
00:09:37Ronald Reagan back in 1976, when I first became an advisor, was already saying,
00:09:43I don't, there's got to be some better way.
00:09:46As he described, it's like two men pointing nuclear pistols at each other's head
00:09:50and one man's finger flinches and both get their brains blown out.
00:09:53He says, there's got to be a better way.
00:09:55Well, in 76, I was fresh out of the Pentagon.
00:09:58I couldn't, I didn't know what it would be.
00:10:00But in 79, when he asked me to do it again, I thought, oh boy, I better get an answer to this thing.
00:10:05And that's when I got to work on it in earnest.
00:10:08Got some other people who didn't have bureaucratic turf to guard, that is retired people and so forth,
00:10:14got them together and said, how does one answer this man?
00:10:18High Frontier was created to help find an answer.
00:10:21Its studies involving industry as well as military experts devised a missile defense system
00:10:26that employed the space shuttle to put into orbit a few hundred satellites,
00:10:30each armed with interceptor rockets.
00:10:34When the network detects the launch of a Soviet ICBM, computers acquire the missile track
00:10:40and send interceptors to destroy the missile during its initial boost phase.
00:10:46Missiles that survive the boost phase encounter the more sophisticated second defense.
00:10:52Finally, if any enemy warheads survive the space-borne systems,
00:10:57the ground-based missile defense fires a high-velocity salvo of small projectiles
00:11:03that destroy the warheads at a distance sufficient to protect our Minuteman silos.
00:11:09Our choice is clear.
00:11:11We can assure our survival by seizing the high frontier,
00:11:16or we can move inevitably towards the day of our mutual assured destruction.
00:11:22General Graham shared his vision with President Reagan and was encouraged to continue.
00:11:27And I talked to him in the White House about it.
00:11:29I talked to Cap Weinberger, came back to the White House, talked to Ed Mason, Dick Allen,
00:11:34and J. Keyworth, and Marty Anderson, who was still there.
00:11:37And I said, go.
00:11:39So we raised the money and did the full study,
00:11:41and by March 82, we had the original high frontier study out on the street.
00:11:48And from then on, it was a matter of arguing with the bureaucracy more than anything else.
00:11:54And the bureaucracy was unimpressed.
00:11:57A former high frontier staffer recalls a visit to the Pentagon to meet a missile defense expert.
00:12:03I was told as I walked in his door, do not mention Danny Graham or high frontier here,
00:12:07or we'll kick you out in the hall.
00:12:09Well, of course, I proceeded to talk on precisely those subjects because that was what I was there for.
00:12:14I walk into this room and find not only the person I was supposed to meet,
00:12:18but four of his associates, one from the Army, one from the Navy,
00:12:22one from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and one from the Air Force,
00:12:26who proceeded to lambaste me for about an hour about the idiocy of high frontier,
00:12:34the cost ineffectiveness of it, the fact that it would cost upwards of $400 billion, etc., etc.
00:12:40I don't think there's any question among people who know this business well
00:12:44that the particular concept proposed in the high frontier study
00:12:49would have no effectiveness whatsoever against the future Soviet ICBM force.
00:12:57In contrast to high frontier's optimistic scenario,
00:13:00the Pentagon's own periodic studies of the prospects for an effective defense against nuclear missiles were consistently negative.
00:13:08In the Pentagon's view, the technology for missile defense simply didn't exist,
00:13:12a view shared, ironically, by Edward Teller when asked to comment on high frontier's plans.
00:13:18Oh, it's very simple, it's very doable, and very easily destroyed.
00:13:24I do not think it's the right way to go.
00:13:27It's much too simple to be effective in the way in which it has been proposed.
00:13:35But Teller does think missile defense is possible, using not today's technology, but tomorrow's.
00:13:41Weapons not invented yet, but if they could be built, of awesome potential against Soviet missiles.
00:13:48So by 1982, President Reagan was hearing from trusted advisors
00:13:52that his instincts about the need for a defense against Soviet missiles were sound,
00:13:57and that the means to achieve it were either immediately available or possible in the future.
00:14:02But despite their influence, Teller and Graham might not have overcome the Pentagon's pessimism about missile defense
00:14:08were it not for other factors at work during 1982.
00:14:17The nuclear freeze movement was worrying the administration and the Pentagon
00:14:21that the nation might be losing its political will to keep up with the Soviet Union
00:14:26in modernizing and upgrading our offensive strategic forces.
00:14:32Then, in November 1982, the Catholic bishops debated publicly the draft of a letter to be read in parishes across America,
00:14:40arguing that our established strategy of deterrence through the threat of retaliation is flawed.
00:14:47I can summarize our intention.
00:14:50It is to draw a strong, clear line, politically and morally, against resort to nuclear weapons.
00:14:59By March 23, 1983, the stage had been set for a new initiative.
00:15:04My fellow Americans, thank you for sharing your time with me tonight.
00:15:08The subject I want to discuss with you, peace and national security, is both timely and important.
00:15:13Timely because I've reached a decision which offers a new hope for our children in the 21st century.
00:15:19Advanced copies of the President's speech gave no hint of what soon became known as Star Wars.
00:15:24In fact, almost no one beyond the White House inner circle had even been consulted
00:15:28about what is the most radical shift in defense policy in the last 15 years.
00:15:33There are always people who are well-meaning but cautious, who work against the very concept of leadership.
00:15:40Now, that isn't their intent.
00:15:42But the effect, by cautious people, upon receipt of a new idea,
00:15:47is to hedge against all of the possible risks that argue against it.
00:15:51You must never do that. You can't ever do that.
00:15:54President Reagan, being given too strong leadership as a general proposition, recognized that
00:16:00and said if we farm this out to the bureaucracy, it will be a skeleton of its current form.
00:16:08We mustn't do that.
00:16:09Having left the Pentagon shortly before the speech was given,
00:16:14my first thought was, what's going on here?
00:16:16I never heard anything about this and called some friends and no one else knew anything about it either.
00:16:22And so if I'm characteristic of people who are in the defense establishment, we were pretty surprised.
00:16:30Among those invited to the White House to hear the speech was a scientist who, like Edward Teller,
00:16:35had helped invent the atom bomb, Hans Bethe.
00:16:38I felt that it was nonsense, that he was setting the country on a completely futile course.
00:16:51Only later on did it occur to me that it might also be a very dangerous course.
00:17:02I don't believe that many of the people there had the sense of drama.
00:17:09Was Dr. Teller there?
00:17:11Yes, and he was very happy.
00:17:15I believe, I know, that this was a careful decision and the right decision.
00:17:25Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, both men who helped invent nuclear weapons,
00:17:30were at opposite extremes in their reaction to the president's call to invent a defense against them.
00:17:35But why should a call for a defense against nuclear missiles be controversial at all?
00:17:40Why hasn't there been a strategic defense initiative for as long as there have been strategic missiles?
00:17:45As we'll see in the next segment, the United States once did have a multi-billion dollar missile defense program.
00:17:52But 14 years ago, we and the Soviet Union jointly renounced nationwide defenses against nuclear missiles
00:17:58and signed a treaty that remains the only formally ratified arms control agreement between the superpowers.
00:18:04How did that happen?
00:18:06How could each of two mighty nations choose to allow its citizens to be vulnerable to annihilation at the hands of the other?
00:18:18Before the nuclear age, every new weapon prompted a defense that could counter it,
00:18:23even when the civilian population was the target, as in the German bombing of London in World War II.
00:18:28An effective defense soon emerged.
00:18:32British fighter planes, alerted to bomber raids by radar, were able to shoot down 10% of the bombers in every raid,
00:18:39a rate of loss that simply couldn't be sustained by the German war machine.
00:18:46The low explosive power of conventional bombs meant that London was able to ride out the battle fought overhead.
00:18:53But the bombs that ended World War II changed that calculus forever.
00:18:57In Hiroshima's instant of annihilation, the balance between offense and defense shifted so dramatically
00:19:03that never again would a 10% or even a 90% effective defense protect the civilian population in war.
00:19:11World War II also saw the invention of another weapon that enabled offense to take a devastating lead over defense,
00:19:17the V-2 rocket, the first ballistic missile.
00:19:21After the war, U.S. scientists, helped by the German inventors of the V-2,
00:19:26began the research that would lead from a missile with a range of 100 miles or so
00:19:30to the first intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Atlas and the Titan.
00:19:37Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, also aided by German rocket scientists, began developing its own ICBMs.
00:19:47Starting in the late 1950s, the United States began to build nuclear-tipped ICBMs in quantity.
00:19:53By the time the Kennedy administration took office in 1961, the question became how many missiles were needed.
00:19:59The answer depended on what they were for, to fight a war, or as Kennedy's defense secretary Robert McNamara argued,
00:20:06to fight war by deterring the opponents.
00:20:09One would deter an opponent from utilizing nuclear weapons by maintaining a force so strong
00:20:15that it could absorb the opponent's strike and survive with sufficient power to inflict unacceptable damage on them.
00:20:23That is what is known as deterrence.
00:20:25That is what is known as mutual assured destruction by those who wish to deprecate it mad.
00:20:33To absorb the opponent's strike and survive with sufficient power to retaliate,
00:20:37that became the guiding principle of U.S. strategy.
00:20:41It led to civil defense exercises and to the burying of U.S. missiles in hardened concrete silos.
00:20:47Meanwhile, the military had begun trying to devise a defense against the nuclear missile.
00:20:52Nike Zeus was the first major anti-ballistic missile, or ABM system.
00:20:57In the early 1960s, it enjoyed great congressional support,
00:21:00especially in the light of intelligence reports then coming out of the Soviet Union,
00:21:04that the Russians had begun a major ABM development program of their own.
00:21:08C.E.R. Stevens.
00:21:10I was at that time an analyst at the CIA, and there was a lot of concern there about these reports
00:21:17and what they meant and whether or not they were really true.
00:21:20A lot of effort went into trying to confirm them.
00:21:23It was very, very difficult to do, of course.
00:21:26The confirmation ultimately came quite fortuitously, in a sense,
00:21:30because on the last U-2 mission that returned with photography,
00:21:35that is, the mission before Gary Powers was shot down in May of 1960,
00:21:40we got some pictures of Sarachagan, which was a little settlement on the edge of Lake Balkhash in Central Asia.
00:21:48CIA analysts like Stevens had been trying to get Sarachagan on the list of U-2 targets for several months,
00:21:54when what was to be the last useful flight of the U.S. spy plane over the Soviet Union returned.
00:21:59Its photographs confirmed a large ABM test range at Sarachagan.
00:22:05There was a lot of excitement and a good deal of concern about what we saw.
00:22:09I mean, this really was a substantially greater effort than we anticipated
00:22:14and certainly a good deal more than the United States was doing at that time.
00:22:18Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific now became the focus of an intensified U.S. ABM effort.
00:22:23A new missile, the Spartan, was developed.
00:22:26Swooping out of the atmosphere, it was designed to detonate a nuclear warhead near Soviet missiles while they were still in space.
00:22:33In this test, two Spartan missiles are readied for a night launching against a dummy warhead.
00:22:43The warhead's track is in red.
00:22:45The projected intercept point is a circle and the two Spartans form a single track in the lower left.
00:22:53But despite successful tests, the Spartan had a major flaw.
00:22:57The Kwajalein researchers found it could easily be countermeasured by surrounding the incoming warhead with decoys.
00:23:03The radar that guided the Spartan to its target couldn't tell the real warhead from the fakes.
00:23:08The only way around the problem was to wait till the lighter decoys had burned up on reentry into the atmosphere,
00:23:14leaving only the warhead behind.
00:23:20That meant inventing a new missile that could reach the warhead in the seconds then remaining before impact.
00:23:29So was born the super-fast Sprint missile, designed as a second layer of defense behind the longer range Spartan.
00:23:39But the ABM system of Spartans and Sprints had one other problem.
00:23:43The radars needed to track the incoming Soviet warheads and guide our interceptor missiles to them were large, complex and extremely vulnerable.
00:23:52One hit would knock out the entire facility.
00:23:55The fact that the system was so susceptible to countermeasures and vulnerable to attack
00:24:00caused one of the Pentagon's top experts on missile defense to become very pessimistic about his chances of success.
00:24:08It began to become clear to me that there really was no technical solution to this particular problem.
00:24:15That the game between measures and countermeasures and counter countermeasures and so on that would be necessarily involved had no end.
00:24:25And in particular, it had no favorable end.
00:24:28That is, one couldn't see at a time when the balance would really be over, substantially over in favor of the defense.
00:24:36It looked as though the offense, there were great natural advantages to the offense that were going to continue and dominate the situation as far as one could see.
00:24:48But military and political support for deploying an ABM system grew.
00:24:52In December 1966, President Johnson met with his top advisors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Austin, Texas to consider the military budget.
00:25:01Congress had appropriated money for ABM deployment.
00:25:04The Joint Chiefs were enthusiastic.
00:25:06Only Defense Secretary McNamara opposed deployment on the grounds that the system was inadequate
00:25:12and would encourage the Soviets to simply add more missiles to overcome it.
00:25:17The president was caught in this terrible bind between his secretary and deputy secretary on the one hand
00:25:22and the five chiefs and his national security advisor on the other.
00:25:25And I saw him just sweating under this pressure.
00:25:29And finally I said to him, Mr. President, I recognize your problem.
00:25:33Let us do this.
00:25:35Let us include in the budget provision for these funds, which the Congress has already appropriated.
00:25:42But we will say that we will accept the funds they've appropriated and we will pursue the program.
00:25:47And for that we have included in the budget X.
00:25:50But, I said, Mr. President, let us state in the document itself, and let me state to the Congress, we won't spend one damn dime of that money,
00:25:58what they've appropriated or the additional funds included,
00:26:01until we make every possible effort to negotiate with the Russians not only a prohibition on deployment of ABM system,
00:26:09but limits on offensive weapons.
00:26:11He agreed. That was the beginning of the negotiations that ultimately led to the ABM Treaty and to SALT I and SALT II.
00:26:21This idea that the superpowers would agree to ban missile defenses and limit their offensive forces
00:26:26was a brand new and quite startling notion in U.S.-Soviet relations.
00:26:30And before it could even be explored, the Soviet leader, Alexei Kosygin,
00:26:34had to be convinced that talks about limiting nuclear arms were in his best interests as well as the United States.
00:26:41An opportunity came at the summit meeting held in Glassboro, New Jersey in June 1967.
00:26:47By this time there was no doubt that the Soviet Union had already begun deploying an ABM system around Moscow.
00:26:53I was glad to meet with Chairman Kosygin.
00:26:55The meeting was on a Friday, I remember it very well.
00:26:58It began in the morning, the Prime Minister Kosygin and the President met all morning.
00:27:03We had lunch together with their senior associates and there might have been, let's just say, ten people around the dining room table.
00:27:10The President, after talking to Kosygin, trying to persuade him that we should start these negotiations,
00:27:15was getting nowhere and he was getting frustrated.
00:27:17He finally turned to me and said, Bob, you tell the Prime Minister what the problem is.
00:27:21I said, Mr. Prime Minister, you don't seem to understand that if you proceed with further deployment of your ABM system,
00:27:30our response should not be to deploy an ABM system in the U.S.
00:27:35Our response to maintain our deterrent, which we must maintain, will require that we expand our offensive forces.
00:27:42And that's within prospect. And there will be an escalation in the offensive forces.
00:27:47That's what you're forcing us to do.
00:27:49He, the blood rose to his head, his neck was swollen, he got red in the face, he pounded the table,
00:27:58and he said, defense is moral, offense is immoral.
00:28:03It would be over two years before the strategic arms limitation talks began.
00:28:07Meanwhile, domestic political pressure to deploy an ABM system grew,
00:28:12leading to one of the strangest speeches ever made by a U.S. Secretary of Defense.
00:28:17In September 1967, McNamara once again argued that ABM deployment would be an irrational folly, but then concluded...
00:28:24After a detailed review, then, of all of these considerations, we've decided to go forward with this Chinese-oriented ABM system.
00:28:33To this day, I wouldn't change a word in the first seven eighths of that speech.
00:28:37It is, I think, one of the best statements of the irrationality of anti-ballistic missile deployments that has ever been made.
00:28:46The last one-eighth of it, I'd like to scrap and remove from the records.
00:28:51The reason is that the last one-eighth of it said...
00:28:54Now, having stated there is absolutely no rational basis whatsoever for deploying an ABM system,
00:29:02we feel we will go ahead with what we called a thin system, an inexpensive system,
00:29:10designed to protect against, I'll call it third power threats, possibly China, small offensive forces.
00:29:19The only reason that was in there was to recognize the political pressure and the fact that the Congress had authorized such a system,
00:29:28appropriated funds for it, and was pushing unmercifully to deploy not the thin system, but a thick system.
00:29:37In its final form, the thin system was designed to protect eleven cities around the country.
00:29:42But as deployment plans progressed, the mood of the country changed.
00:29:46Now, ironically, McNamara's arguments against ABM deployment began to sink in.
00:29:51And one of the new Nixon administration's first acts was to scrap the thin system
00:29:55and replace it with an even more scaled-down version, designed not to protect people, but missile silos.
00:30:02I found that there is no way, even if we were to expand the limited sentinel system,
00:30:08which was planned for some of our cities, to a so-called heavy or thick system,
00:30:16there is no way that we can adequately defend our cities without an unacceptable loss of life.
00:30:24The only way that I have concluded that we can save lives, which is the primary purpose of our defense system, is to prevent war.
00:30:34And that is why the emphasis of this system is on protecting our deterrent, which is the best preventive for war.
00:30:43From a nationwide population defense, to the defense of selected cities against a small attack,
00:30:49to the defense of a few missiles to ensure our ability to retaliate,
00:30:53that was the ever-narrowing goal of America's first strategic defense initiative.
00:30:58The technology of defense simply wasn't up to the job.
00:31:02And since a defense that can be overwhelmed invites the other side to overwhelm it,
00:31:06an inadequate defense was seen as worse than no defense at all.
00:31:10As the strategic arms limitation talks began, the U.S. delegation's goal was to persuade the Soviets
00:31:16to reverse the position Premier Kosygin had taken three years earlier, that defense is moral, offense is immoral,
00:31:22and recognize instead that in the nuclear age, defense is dangerous and destabilizing.
00:31:28In May 1972, President Nixon and Soviet leader Brezhnev signed the first SALT agreement.
00:31:34It outlawed nationwide defenses and froze offensive missile inventories.
00:31:39The theory behind the treaty was simple.
00:31:41In the absence of defense, each side could be sure of destroying the other with the offense it already had.
00:31:47In fact, a beginning could now be made on reducing the world's nuclear arsenals.
00:31:55When the treaty was signed, the United States possessed 1,054 land-based missiles
00:32:00buried in silos in missile fields in Missouri, Arkansas, North Dakota, Montana.
00:32:06We also had some 2,000 nuclear bombs available to the bombers of the Strategic Air Command
00:32:11and some 650 missiles in nuclear submarines.
00:32:15Some 50% of our sub-fleet is always hidden somewhere out to sea, essentially invulnerable.
00:32:21This dispersal of our nuclear forces is intended to ensure the survival of enough bombs and missiles to retaliate,
00:32:28should the Soviet Union strike first, the essence of deterrence.
00:32:32The Soviet Union in 1972 had slightly more land-based missiles than the United States,
00:32:38some 1,500 as compared to 1,054, spread out in an immense arc of launch sites
00:32:45across most of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
00:32:49They had fewer nuclear bombs, less than 400 available to their bomber force,
00:32:53and some 500 missiles on board nuclear submarines.
00:32:57Today, both sides have about the same number of missiles as they did in 1972
00:33:02in accordance with the letter and the spirit of the First Salt Agreement.
00:33:06But there was a technological legacy from the days when both sides weren't only building ABM systems
00:33:12but seeking ways to overwhelm them, a legacy which didn't go away when the treaty was signed
00:33:18and which in turn has done much to spur today's strategic defense initiative.
00:33:28That legacy was a U.S. invention called the Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle, or MIRV.
00:33:35It allows one rocket to deliver several warheads with great accuracy to different targets.
00:33:40It was developed for the specific purpose of overwhelming a Soviet ABM system.
00:33:45So when ABMs were banned, the original purpose of MIRVs disappeared as well.
00:33:49And what did we do then?
00:33:51We went ahead with the development, the production, the deployment of MIRVs.
00:33:56And that force of ours, which in terms of total strategic nuclear warheads
00:34:01amounted to something on the order of 4,4500 warheads at the time we signed the ABM treaty,
00:34:06became on the order of 8,000 warheads by 1975.
00:34:14The Soviet Union too jumped on the MIRVing bandwagon,
00:34:17more than tripling their warheads from 1,800 to 6,000 during the 1970s.
00:34:23An invention designed to counter ABMs, therefore did much to undercut the treaty banning ABMs.
00:34:30But there was worse to come.
00:34:34The United States chose to put most of its MIRVs on its submarine-based missiles,
00:34:38the classic retaliatory weapon.
00:34:41But the Soviet Union MIRVed its large land-based missiles, like the SS-18.
00:34:46To many U.S. military planners, this looks unnervingly like a first-strike weapon.
00:34:51Land-based MIRVed missiles are very accurate,
00:34:53just what is needed if you are trying to destroy U.S. missiles in their silos before they are launched.
00:34:59And land-based missiles are themselves vulnerable.
00:35:02So in a crisis, a Soviet leader might be tempted by the old maxim,
00:35:06Use it or lose it.
00:35:13The United States and the Soviet Union have also appeared to differ in their attitude to defense since the ABM treaty.
00:35:20The treaty allowed each side to build one local ABM system.
00:35:24This is America's, called Safeguard, protecting a missile field in North Dakota,
00:35:28and nearing completion in 1974.
00:35:31This huge building is the radar.
00:35:33Nearby were the silos, housing the Spartan and Sprint rockets.
00:35:39But in the era of MIRVed missiles, designed originally for the very purpose of overcoming a defense like this
00:35:44by simply swamping it with warheads,
00:35:46the Safeguard ABM system was already obsolete.
00:35:49Missiles were installed, the radars, everything was operating,
00:35:52and it was decided that it simply was not cost-effective,
00:35:54that it was just silly to have this one site
00:35:59on which if the Soviets put the warheads from three missiles,
00:36:06they could be sure to destroy it.
00:36:08Well, since they had about 1,400 missiles at the time,
00:36:12and since this would take them three to destroy the missile site radar,
00:36:16or if they wanted to be extra careful, they might put 30 on it,
00:36:20some tiny fraction of their force,
00:36:22that it was useless against the Soviets.
00:36:25It was therefore not cost-effective.
00:36:27Since it was expensive to maintain, Congress ordered it shut down.
00:36:31By contrast, the Soviet Union has not only retained its one permitted ABM system installed around Moscow,
00:36:37but has recently improved and upgraded both its Galosh ABM missile, shown here,
00:36:42and its associated radars.
00:36:44The Soviets have also maintained a very extensive surface-to-air missile system,
00:36:48designed to shoot down aircraft, but perhaps with some capacity, against missiles.
00:36:56According to the Pentagon, the Soviets have also begun research
00:37:00on futuristic anti-missile weapons, like lasers.
00:37:03And finally, there is the strange business of the giant radar at Krasnoyarsk.
00:37:10It looks like an ABM radar, and if it is, it clearly violates the ABM Treaty.
00:37:15This Soviet emphasis on defense contrasts sharply with recent U.S. policy.
00:37:20They have been putting as much money, more money really,
00:37:24into strategic defense of the Soviet Union than they've put into strategic offense.
00:37:28So the Soviets never bought this mutual assured destruction idea,
00:37:31and they just pursued the technical possibilities that they had for defense,
00:37:37and even violated the ABM Treaty where it got in the way,
00:37:40where we have actually behaved as if mutual assured destruction is now legislated,
00:37:46it's mandated by the treaty, and have allowed our entire nation
00:37:51to become a nation of nuclear nudists,
00:37:53absolutely vulnerable to a long-range attack with Soviet ballistic missiles.
00:38:00This vulnerability of the U.S. to Soviet missiles, plus the Soviet emphasis on defense,
00:38:05has led many to believe the Soviets might soon decide
00:38:08that the era of deterrence through mutual assured destruction is over.
00:38:12If they deploy increasingly effective defenses,
00:38:17then the basis, this balance of terror, gets badly out of balance,
00:38:23because then they would have the feeling that they could put in an attack on us,
00:38:27their defenses could blunt or stop or weaken very seriously a retaliatory capability by us,
00:38:34and that removes the restraint that our retaliatory capability is supposed to bring to this equation.
00:38:43And so it would be very, very dangerous if they had the feeling that they could attack
00:38:48without worrying too much about the retaliatory capability we would put in.
00:38:56This apocalyptic view assumes the Soviet Union would one day be so sure of its ability
00:39:01to survive America's retaliatory strike that it would risk a first strike against us.
00:39:07It's a view that plays down the fact that most of our submarines would survive to retaliate
00:39:11even if most of our land-based missiles had been destroyed.
00:39:14And it assumes, too, a Soviet defense that's much more effective than their present technology permits.
00:39:20But it's the haunting fear of a Soviet first strike that leads many,
00:39:24especially in the military, to support the Strategic Defense Initiative.
00:39:30Their vision is for a defense that need not necessarily make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete,
00:39:35but could at least match Soviet efforts in defense,
00:39:38and reduce the likelihood the Soviets might one day be tempted to strike first.
00:39:43But whether the goal is a perfect defense or something less ambitious,
00:39:47this is what a strategic defense system has to stop.
00:39:50This is a full-scale replica of a nuclear warhead.
00:39:53It's actually modeled on an American one, but Soviet warheads are much the same.
00:39:58This is six feet long, weighs under 800 pounds,
00:40:02and has the explosive power of 335,000 tons of TNT,
00:40:0825 times the destructive potential of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima.
00:40:13In an all-out assault, the Soviet Union could throw about 10,000 of these at us in the space of a few minutes.
00:40:19And the warheads wouldn't be alone.
00:40:21For every real warhead, there might be 10 or more of these, dummy or decoy warheads,
00:40:27perhaps stacked like witch's hats or inflated like balloons,
00:40:30then thrown into space along with the real things.
00:40:33When in his Star Wars speech, President Reagan spoke of intercepting and destroying strategic ballistic missiles
00:40:40before they reached our soil, this is what he was talking about.
00:40:44Stopping perhaps 10,000 of these, hidden among more than 100,000 of these,
00:40:49all traveling at just under 20,000 miles per hour,
00:40:53in a long arc over the top of the globe.
00:40:57Back in the days of safeguard, the only way to attack the warheads was to wait till they had practically arrived,
00:41:03here at what's called the terminal phase of their flight, when the decoys have been burned up by the atmosphere.
00:41:09What's different today is the possibility of attacking the warheads much earlier.
00:41:14The longest portion of the flight, all the way over the pole at a height of about 700 miles, is the midcourse.
00:41:20Here the warheads, surrounded by their cloud of decoys, are simply falling free in space for perhaps 20 or 30 minutes in all.
00:41:28Before that, the warheads and decoys are still packed neatly together in what's called a bus.
00:41:34And before that, they were all sitting on top of the rocket that pushed them up through the atmosphere
00:41:39and gave them the speed they need to fall a quarter world away.
00:41:43This is the boost phase of the flight.
00:41:46Lasting with current generation Soviet missiles, like this SS-18, about five minutes or so.
00:41:52Weapons that can attack the boost phase and the midcourse have to be able to see their targets.
00:41:58And because of the curve of the Earth, that means being up in space.
00:42:02They also have to be able to attack from hundreds of miles away,
00:42:06which means that whatever they shoot has to get to its target very fast.
00:42:10This is why Star Wars is likely to employ weapons like this.
00:42:14Lasers, particle beams, electromagnetic launchers.
00:42:18The first task of the Strategic Defense Initiative is finding out whether weapons like these can indeed be built and made to work.
00:42:31This is the free world's biggest laser, the mid-infrared advanced chemical laser, or Miracle.
00:42:37It was built for the US Navy to see if lasers could knock down missiles aimed at ships.
00:42:42But its ability to project an intense beam of heat or light against distant targets
00:42:46also made the chemical laser an obvious candidate for the task of destroying ICBMs,
00:42:51as the Miracle demonstrated in a test against an empty rocket booster in July 1985.
00:43:00Destroying Soviet missiles in their boost phase is essential to an effective strategic defense.
00:43:05It's the time the missiles are most easily spotted.
00:43:08They're sitting on top of a huge flame that's very visible from space.
00:43:14And every rocket that's hit takes with it the entire cargo of warheads and decoys,
00:43:19relieving the defense from the much more difficult task of finding and destroying them later.
00:43:25So not surprisingly, the idea of a space-based chemical laser,
00:43:29able to shoot down Soviet missiles as soon as they've been launched,
00:43:32was one of the first options to be explored by the SDI.
00:43:38But the Miracle laser demonstrates not only the chemical laser's strengths, but also its weaknesses.
00:43:44Miracle is powered by mixing together very large quantities of chemicals in a plant the size of a small factory.
00:43:51And since the laser produces a beam that is more heat than light,
00:43:55the optical system needed to direct it accurately has to be very large.
00:43:59These requirements for hundreds of tons of chemical fuel and mirrors several yards in diameter
00:44:05have now pretty much ruled out chemical lasers for strategic defense.
00:44:11Today the SDI is looking for new ideas for space-based lasers.
00:44:15And it's looking mainly to the National Weapons Laboratories, like Los Alamos in New Mexico, to provide them.
00:44:22Here at Los Alamos, for instance, is a research laser that operates at shorter wavelengths than chemical lasers,
00:44:28so needing smaller optics, and works by a mechanism that is much more efficient.
00:44:33Efficiency is important in space-based weapons because the higher the efficiency,
00:44:38the less fuel that has to be carried aboard the spacecraft, and the cheaper it is to loft the spacecraft into orbit.
00:44:45Free electron lasers look as though they could be as much as ten times more efficient than other kinds of short-wavelength lasers,
00:44:54which makes them useful in a space-based application where other lasers might not be.
00:44:59The free electron laser starts with an intense beam of electrons.
00:45:02The electrons are then gathered into bunches, a centimeter or so long,
00:45:06and accelerated to speeds close to the velocity of light.
00:45:11We have this very powerful electron beam, and now we have to make light out of it.
00:45:14And we do that with a gimmick called a wiggler.
00:45:17And there's a wiggler here to show you, and there's another one right in the middle of this yellow chamber.
00:45:23The way the wiggler works is the electron beam, the short pulse of electrons, enters this hole,
00:45:28and it encounters a lot of magnets in this region.
00:45:31There's something like 400 permanent magnets.
00:45:33What the magnets do is they bend the electron beam so that it wiggles left and right.
00:45:37Obviously, that's why it's called a wiggler.
00:45:39Every time the electron beam wiggles to one side, it loses energy, and it generates light.
00:45:44The tiny pulse of light, still very weak, is reflected from mirrors at each end of the system,
00:45:49back and forth through the wiggler, picking up strength at every pass.
00:45:53And that keeps on happening time after time after time,
00:45:56and the optical pulse then builds from a rather weak pulse to an extremely strong pulse.
00:46:01And finally, it saturates at some level, equal roughly to the power of Grand Coulee Dam.
00:46:06Today is to be an important test of the laser.
00:46:11That's terrible, isn't it?
00:46:12But things don't get off to a promising start.
00:46:16This group has been working on the laser since the late 70s,
00:46:19when it was interesting mainly for its possible uses in chemistry and medicine.
00:46:23But then the Defense Department spotted its potential as a beam weapon,
00:46:27and has been funding it since.
00:46:31The trick to the free electron laser is getting the light pulses and electron pulses to overlap perfectly,
00:46:37and that involves some extremely fine adjustments.
00:46:45Why are we lazing?
00:46:46The alignment has to be very critically adjusted to be just right.
00:46:49The focusing has to be just right.
00:46:51The cavity length has to be just right.
00:46:53And we're trying to do all three of those things together.
00:46:56We've changed our accelerator a great deal from the last time.
00:46:59And the experience we've had lately is that we're having more trouble making it laze.
00:47:02And we don't fully understand that.
00:47:04Why don't you go back to your previous setting? We'll help you, Ted.
00:47:06Call it good, then?
00:47:08Several hours pass as the delicate tuning continues.
00:47:11There's a certain question about our ability to respond instantly to the threat of missiles coming over.
00:47:16How long do we have? Ten minutes? Five minutes?
00:47:22It may get lazed, Michael.
00:47:25When you have a change in temperature,
00:47:28all the mechanical things down there move further apart or closer together.
00:47:32And if we run every day, then we tend to keep it close enough that it lazes right off the bat the next day.
00:47:39But if we're down for a week or so, and especially when we have a cold front coming like it did,
00:47:43and the temperature changes down there, we have to search for it.
00:47:47Michael, make it laze.
00:47:49As debate continued as to why the laser stubbornly refused to work,
00:47:53we took the opportunity to ask about the team's expectations for strategic defense.
00:47:58Opinions were by no means unanimous.
00:48:01It's sure to work at a low level.
00:48:04We're sure to be able, in the next few years, to shoot down at least a few missiles.
00:48:09And that's a useful thing.
00:48:11That alone would prevent an accidental war.
00:48:15If somebody, without authorization or accidentally, shot off a few missiles,
00:48:20on either side, we could shoot those down and prevent World War III from happening.
00:48:26That alone would justify Star Wars, in my opinion.
00:48:30But surely we're going to do better than that.
00:48:33And with time, the system will get more and more reliable, more and more capable.
00:48:41It's just going to take time and money.
00:48:45I think it's too shallow, too mechanistic an attempt to solve our problems.
00:48:50I don't think it'll work.
00:48:53If I were an enemy, I'd put a bomb on a boat in the harbor.
00:48:56And then SDI does you no good.
00:48:58I think that would be just as much of a threat.
00:49:00So I don't think it's... I think it's a shallow, technical fix.
00:49:05And I don't think that's what we need.
00:49:06All of us that are in this business love science.
00:49:09So we work hard on it just because we enjoy it so much.
00:49:13If we were supposed to kill little children with what we're developing here,
00:49:16many of us could hide the final use of the thing,
00:49:20if the experiment were basically interested in science and things like that.
00:49:23And I think it's always been that kind of a problem.
00:49:25I think we're all very glad that we don't have to do anything like that.
00:49:28What we're working on is, first of all, a defensive weapon
00:49:31that I don't think any of us really think that is going to be applied
00:49:34in exactly the form we're working on.
00:49:36We're working on scientific principle,
00:49:40which will eventually be developed into something very different at some point.
00:49:46Bill, did a phase change at all there?
00:49:48Something changed.
00:49:52Did you see anything?
00:49:54We're lazing. We're lazing.
00:50:00It's taken three or four hours of tweaking to get the laser to work,
00:50:04and its performance isn't what was hoped.
00:50:07The last time we lazed about as well as we would have expected.
00:50:10This time we did a lot of work to upgrade our accelerator.
00:50:14We did measurements on the accelerator. It works much better.
00:50:17And so we expected to laze much better.
00:50:19Now it's not lazing much better.
00:50:21It's lazing about the same, maybe a little worse.
00:50:24But this is the nature of basic research.
00:50:27The team isn't discouraged by their machine's performance.
00:50:30The task now is to understand and learn from it.
00:50:33To get either to SDI or our own goals,
00:50:35we have to do very well on what we're doing right now.
00:50:38It's a stepping stone to either way.
00:50:40And so we're committed to doing a very good job on that, and we do.
00:50:44So we're lucky that way.
00:50:46We're not split yet. We're not torn yet between conflicting goals.
00:50:51What do we do when we are?
00:50:54That'll be when we'll see what kind of human beings we are, I guess.
00:50:59A laser is the ideal boost phase weapon.
00:51:02But once the boost phase is over, lasers are much less useful.
00:51:06They work by heating the surface of their targets.
00:51:09That can be enough to destroy a rocket, a thin-skinned tank of explosive fuel.
00:51:13But warheads, once they've been deployed, are a very different matter.
00:51:16Warheads are tough.
00:51:18They can be destroyed only by weapons that actually throw things at them.
00:51:22One such weapon, called a neutral particle beam, throws atoms.
00:51:30Atomic accelerators are fairly common on Earth,
00:51:33where they are the basic research tool of high-energy physics.
00:51:36This half-mile-long atomic accelerator at Los Alamos is typical.
00:51:40It generates the sort of beam that could be very useful in a space weapon,
00:51:44a beam of very high-speed hydrogen atoms.
00:51:47They go almost like bullets.
00:51:49And they will propagate over the vast distances of space,
00:51:52where there's no air to stop them.
00:51:54And consequently, they can deliver their energy in a tightly focused spot to a target,
00:52:01tremendous distances away.
00:52:04This stack of 20 steel plates was recently put in front of a neutral particle beam.
00:52:08Unlike a laser, which would have to melt through one plate at a time,
00:52:12the beam of atoms is able to penetrate and melt the 20 plates almost simultaneously.
00:52:19If a particle beam could get close enough to a warhead in space,
00:52:22it could totally destroy it.
00:52:24But even at longer ranges, its effect on a warhead could still be lethal.
00:52:28If my neutral particle beam gets into the electronics components of a system,
00:52:32it can upset them and cause a malfunction in computers or other electronic systems
00:52:37on board an offensive weapon.
00:52:39In fact, it's well known that we have several satellites in orbit right now
00:52:43that are upset by cosmic rays, which are just extremely high-energy particle beams.
00:52:50But neutral particle beams could still be very useful in a strategic defense system,
00:52:54even if they can't destroy warheads.
00:52:57Once the warheads have been thrown free into space,
00:53:00the biggest problem for the defense
00:53:02is spotting the warheads among the cloud of decoys that will certainly accompany them.
00:53:06There are many ways to make a decoy look like a warhead,
00:53:09but one difference is fundamental.
00:53:11Decoys are light. Warheads are heavy.
00:53:14So if only the defense could weigh each object, it could tell them apart.
00:53:22A neutral particle beam could weigh objects in space.
00:53:25Here at Los Alamos, a warhead is being lined up in front of a neutral particle beam.
00:53:31The red spot is from a laser showing where the beam will hit.
00:53:37Once the beam has been turned on,
00:53:39radiation detectors behind the room's massive walls
00:53:42will peer at the warhead to see how it responds.
00:53:47In the same way, a neutral particle beam in space
00:53:50would be shown at a cloud of warheads and decoys.
00:53:53The beam would pass right through the lightweight decoys,
00:53:55but the heavier warheads would absorb the beam
00:53:58and glow with radiation as a result.
00:54:01So a defensive weapon that could home in on radiating objects
00:54:04could pick out the warheads among the decoys and not waste its shots.
00:54:10Such a weapon might be a form of high-power rifle
00:54:13that shot so-called smart bullets.
00:54:19But before a neutral particle beam can be useful in a space battle,
00:54:22it has to be up in space.
00:54:24Particle beams can't penetrate the atmosphere.
00:54:27But here's the greatest problem.
00:54:28The original Los Alamos particle beam, for instance,
00:54:31is a half mile long and weighs thousands of tons.
00:54:35The very challenging problems are packaging that
00:54:39into a volume and a weight
00:54:43that's compatible with our ability to put things in orbit
00:54:47and do that at low cost
00:54:50and then have automated controls that are good enough and reliable enough
00:54:55that once the thing is in orbit and waiting,
00:54:58and I don't know whether it's been launched years in advance
00:55:01or weeks in advance in a time of crisis,
00:55:03but it's up there on station,
00:55:05that it will be able to work when you turn it on
00:55:08without a half a dozen technicians running up and down the hall
00:55:11adjusting all the knobs.
00:55:13Project White Horse at Los Alamos
00:55:15is aimed at building a particle beam
00:55:17light and sturdy enough to do the job.
00:55:20Several of the most important ideas for making it compact and efficient
00:55:24came from an unlikely source.
00:55:26Many of these advances, in fact, have come to us
00:55:29from what we read in the Soviet literature.
00:55:32Next to me here I have the radio frequency quadrupole.
00:55:36This is a new kind of particle accelerator
00:55:39developed by the Soviets, proposed by the Soviets,
00:55:42in 1969 in an article we saw.
00:55:45We know the first one operated sometime in the 1970s in the Soviet Union.
00:55:50It's a revolutionary kind of device
00:55:53in the perspective that it replaces a four-story building.
00:55:56This is what the new device replaces.
00:55:59The Los Alamos team is confident the rest of the machine
00:56:02can also eventually be made small enough to fly in space.
00:56:06The midcourse of a missile's flight
00:56:08is where a neutral particle beam would be of most value,
00:56:11but those warheads that escaped destruction here
00:56:14are now only minutes from impact.
00:56:16Once they near re-entry, the defense has one last chance to get them.
00:56:21Most of the SDI's research on terminal defense
00:56:24involves updated versions of the Spartan interceptor rockets
00:56:27used in the old safeguard system.
00:56:29The big difference is that the new rockets
00:56:31don't use nuclear explosions to destroy the incoming warheads.
00:56:34Instead, each rocket deploys a smart bullet
00:56:37that homes in on a warhead
00:56:39and spreads a 50-foot diameter net in its path.
00:56:42Such a device was successfully tested in June 1984
00:56:45at the Kwajalein test range.
00:56:47But just like the old safeguard interceptors,
00:56:49the new ones, too, can be deceived by decoys.
00:56:52So, just as in safeguard,
00:56:54a lightning-fast backup system is needed.
00:56:57And that is literally what's being explored here
00:57:00in the New Mexico desert
00:57:02by the Air Force and Sandia National Laboratory.
00:57:05This huge water tank houses a series of electronic accelerators.
00:57:09This machine, called RADLAC,
00:57:11produces what is, in essence,
00:57:13a highly controlled and enormously powerful lightning bolt.
00:57:20The current goal of the research is to see
00:57:22how well the electron beam propagates through the air.
00:57:25This tank is the test chamber
00:57:27into which the electron beam will be shot.
00:57:33Six inches more.
00:57:35Good.
00:57:41Before each firing, the researchers leave the beam area itself
00:57:44because of the intense, short-lived radiation the beam produces.
00:57:49Eighty-one.
00:57:50Eighty-one.
00:57:51Eighty-two.
00:57:52Disconnect.
00:57:53Disconnect.
00:57:54Three, two, one.
00:57:55Fire.
00:57:57That's a good shot.
00:57:58The idea behind RADLAC is to produce an electron beam so powerful
00:58:02it can be fired from the ground at warheads
00:58:04once they've re-entered the atmosphere
00:58:06and the decoys have burned up.
00:58:08The research is still at a very early stage
00:58:10and has yet to grapple with problems
00:58:12like pointing the beam accurately
00:58:14while the Earth's magnetic field is trying to bend it.
00:58:18And there's no guarantee the beam can be projected
00:58:21the several miles needed to hit incoming warheads.
00:58:24The RADLAC is built on a hill
00:58:26in the hope that one day its beam will be able to reach out across the desert.
00:58:32We've seen weapons that, in principle,
00:58:34could attack warheads at all phases of their 8,000-mile flight.
00:58:38Lasers that could blow up missiles while still in their boost phase
00:58:41when every hit destroys many warheads.
00:58:44Particle beams that could pick out warheads during the midcourse
00:58:47and perhaps also destroy them.
00:58:49An electron beam that could help a terminal defence
00:58:52get any warheads that leaked through the earlier defences.
00:58:55And there are other weapons, some of which we'll be seeing later.
00:58:58Weapons based in space have one unique problem.
00:59:01For much of the time, they're in the wrong place.
00:59:04Remember, they're in orbit,
00:59:05not hanging conveniently in place like our models.
00:59:08And their orbits take them over places like Antarctica and South America
00:59:12where they wouldn't be much use in a space battle.
00:59:15The only solution is to have so many weapons in orbit
00:59:18that enough are within sight of these Soviet missiles' flight paths at all times.
00:59:23But weapons alone aren't sufficient.
00:59:25A weapon is no use unless it can find its target,
00:59:29point at it accurately from hundreds of miles away,
00:59:31track it, fire,
00:59:33know whether it's hit and killed its target,
00:59:35or whether it should fire again.
00:59:37All this involves, as well as the weapons,
00:59:40a host of sensing and tracking satellites like these.
00:59:44Most of all, it involves some ability to manage and coordinate the whole defensive system.
00:59:50In the last year, there's been a lot of debate in computer circles
00:59:54about whether the computer program needed to manage a space-based strategic defence like this
00:59:59could ever be written,
01:00:01or at least written in a way that we could be sure it would work perfectly
01:00:05the first and presumably only time it was ever used.
01:00:09That debate continues today.
01:00:11But the SDI's biggest hurdles remain those that eventually brought down the old Safeguard ABM system.
01:00:17Remember, Safeguard could hit warheads all right.
01:00:20Its problems were that it was itself highly vulnerable to attack,
01:00:24and that it could easily be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
01:00:27It would have cost the Soviets less to throw over a few more warheads
01:00:31than it would have cost the United States to expand Safeguard to cope.
01:00:35Any new strategic defence system has to avoid these traps.
01:00:39It mustn't itself be vulnerable,
01:00:41and it must be cheaper to expand its abilities than it is for the other side to expand its offence.
01:00:48The administration's top arms control advisor, Paul Nitze,
01:00:51acknowledged the reality of these criteria in a speech last year,
01:00:55and they now pose a serious challenge for those working on the Strategic Defence Initiative.
01:01:06All serious people owe Paul Nitze a vote of thanks
01:01:10for having, let's say, rationalized much of the SDI debate
01:01:14by simply pointing out what the two focal points should be.
01:01:17It is true that to achieve a defence that can underwrite a major change in our defence strategy
01:01:24requires that we make those defences both survivable and cheaper than offence.
01:01:31The president has viewed adherence to these two principles of invulnerability
01:01:36and of cost-effectiveness as very important,
01:01:39and he has signed his name to decision directives
01:01:42which require those to be observed throughout the program.
01:01:46So the administration is committed to the principles of invulnerability and cost-effectiveness.
01:01:51They are principles, however, that are very difficult to achieve with a defensive system based in space.
01:01:58Everybody knows that it's not a nice place to be militarily, to be over enemy territory,
01:02:05nor is it a nice place to be in space.
01:02:10There's nothing around you to protect you, there's nowhere to hide.
01:02:14It's very expensive to get there and to put all of yourself and your armor up there.
01:02:21So if you had to pick a military environment from which to wage wartime operations,
01:02:28the last place on earth you'd pick, Apriori, is in outer space over the Soviet Union.
01:02:34The vulnerability of the space-based weapons is, I think, their real Achilles heel
01:02:40because those defences are in space,
01:02:44they are on orbits that Isaac Newton could have told you about with total precision,
01:02:50they can therefore be attacked at will, if one wants to do that,
01:02:56and if one is launching a serious attack, they can be attacked with nuclear weapons.
01:03:02No, they don't need to be attacked with directed energy weapons or other snazzy American high-tech.
01:03:09They can be attacked with some monstrous, clumsy nuclear bomb,
01:03:14the kind of thing the Russians specialize in, and just be knocked to smithereens.
01:03:19One option for the Soviet Union is to launch a space mine every time we launch a defensive weapon
01:03:24and simply park the mine alongside until needed.
01:03:27It's an option taken particularly seriously by a nuclear weapons expert
01:03:31who is also a prominent critic of the SDI, Richard Garwin.
01:03:36If there were, for instance, in the SDI context, a launch of large numbers of nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union,
01:03:45then had they space-mined our defensive satellites,
01:03:49that launch would be accompanied by a command to the space mines to blow up and to destroy the defence.
01:03:56Space mines are obviously intolerable to anybody who has space weapons on which he wants to rely.
01:04:04And so our defensive satellites would themselves have to be defended,
01:04:08probably with rocket-armed outriders like destroyers protecting a battleship.
01:04:13You may simply announce that we will enforce a keep-out zone of 100 yards, a kilometer, I don't know what it would be.
01:04:21Anything that gets closer than that we will assume is an unfriendly object and either take evasive action or shoot at it.
01:04:27If one defensive satellite shot one space mine, there would be many more of these ASATs, anti-satellite weapons,
01:04:34launched at that one defensive satellite.
01:04:37And the result would be that we would have war in space in what would be otherwise peacetime when nobody wanted a war.
01:04:45The obvious danger is that such a war would not long be confined to space,
01:04:50putting military assets of unprecedented value in a place where they can easily be destroyed,
01:04:55in peacetime or in advance of an attack is clearly imprudent.
01:04:59And the SDI is now actively researching ways to increase the survivability of satellites
01:05:04by giving them armor or the ability to maneuver.
01:05:08The director of the SDI is confident the problem can be solved.
01:05:12Space is very, very big.
01:05:15And the assumption that something that is in space is inherently less survivable
01:05:23is something that has to be really carefully looked at technically.
01:05:27And you have to ask the question, survivable against what kind of an attack,
01:05:33survivable under different scenarios and different circumstances.
01:05:39So that is indeed a very fundamental part of the research.
01:05:43It's also the most highly classified.
01:05:45So it's a little difficult to deal with what I think are very simplistic kind of arguments that have been made.
01:05:53It's ironic that many of these arguments have been made by one of the architects of strategic defense.
01:05:58A wonderful suggestion.
01:06:01Let's have our defensive means deployed in space.
01:06:08One trouble.
01:06:11It seems to me probable, not certain, but probable,
01:06:17that it will be more expensive to put something up in space and keep it there
01:06:23than slowly in due time to destroy it.
01:06:30Space defense is vulnerable to countermeasures.
01:06:36And unless we find a way to make deployment less expensive than removing these space defenses,
01:06:50it's not worth trying to do it.
01:06:52Whatever we do must be effective in the sense that it should not be more difficult than the countermeasure.
01:07:02Edward Teller helped found the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory 35 years ago.
01:07:07Today of the National Weapons Laboratories working on the SDI,
01:07:10Livermore is closest to the Teller doctrine that space is not the place to put the weapons of a strategic defense.
01:07:16Here the ruling principle is to design weapons of unprecedented power and keep them on the ground.
01:07:22This, for example, is Livermore's version of the free electron laser we saw earlier at Los Alamos.
01:07:28While Los Alamos is trying to design a free electron laser small enough to fly in space,
01:07:32Livermore's design is for a laser thousands of times more powerful.
01:07:36Powerful enough to stay on the ground, project its beam up through the atmosphere and out 22,000 miles in space,
01:07:43where a relay mirror would reflect it back to a second mirror in orbit over the Soviet Union.
01:07:48This battle mirror would then point the beam at missiles rising from their launch sites.
01:07:53This concept is currently the SDI's favorite among all the weapons systems being studied.
01:07:57We have made so much progress on that.
01:08:00We now think that that is the most viable, perhaps the most cost-effective one,
01:08:07and therefore, and that would be one that was based on the ground,
01:08:11that fires up through the atmosphere, bounces off some mirrors,
01:08:15and strikes the booster then as it's coming into the upper atmosphere.
01:08:20That's one that the progress has just been extraordinary.
01:08:24Supporters of the ground-based laser see it as the answer to meeting the NHTSA criteria of cost-effectiveness and survivability.
01:08:31Each of these lasers could, if we are successful in our research goals and we have high confidence today,
01:08:40could, in principle, destroy from 100 up to even 1,000 ballistic missiles per minute from each laser.
01:08:50And we believe and are pursuing technologies that would allow us to make these lasers sufficiently cheaply
01:08:59that we could envision having dozens of them deployed.
01:09:03Now, if you have dozens of them deployed, or more, and an actual boost duration of a missile is 5 minutes,
01:09:11and I said you could perhaps destroy 1,000 per minute from just one,
01:09:16we have overwhelmed the Soviet offensive missile capability by factors of tens.
01:09:22And you see, now we begin to see what we mean by survivability.
01:09:28The sheer redundancy, I said dozens of lasers and hundreds if not a thousand mirrors in space,
01:09:32you simply can't destroy all of this simultaneously.
01:09:38George Keyworth has long been the ground-based laser's most enthusiastic advocate,
01:09:42and paints a uniquely optimistic picture of its abilities.
01:09:45Killing 1,000 boosters a minute, for example, would involve each battle mirror pointing,
01:09:50blowing up a missile, then retargeting again some five or six times faster than this animation.
01:09:56These technologies that I talk about would have been science fiction five years ago.
01:10:00But today, I'm just thoroughly confident we can do it,
01:10:03and I think what we're doing is searching for the best way to do it.
01:10:06One problem to be solved is affordability.
01:10:09Apart from the cost of a dozen ground-based lasers, each with power needs approaching that of a major city,
01:10:14each of the 1,000 mirrors would cost, at today's prices, several billion dollars.
01:10:19And they can be attacked by means even cheaper than Soviet nuclear bombs.
01:10:24One way would be for them to put up a satellite on a course opposite to these mirrors,
01:10:37and then let this satellite just throw some sands into space.
01:10:44And that sand, when it hits the mirror, maybe 1,000 grains of sand will destroy it.
01:11:00There are many ways the Soviet Union could greatly complicate the task of a strategic defense.
01:11:05Since the ABM Treaty banned such defenses, offensive missiles haven't had to change much.
01:11:11If the SDI poses itself the task of destroying the current Soviet ICBM arsenal,
01:11:18it's only a matter of time before it succeeds.
01:11:21Technology gets better and better, and if the Soviets just continue to have the same arsenal they do today,
01:11:28we'll be able to shoot it all down eventually.
01:11:31Now, you can argue about when. Will it be the year 2000, 2010, 2050?
01:11:35It's only a matter of when, though.
01:11:37What makes assessment of ballistic missile defenses so difficult is that the offense is not static.
01:11:43The offense is responding, is improving itself with technology.
01:11:47It's what the Russians do is what counts, and not what we only do.
01:11:52What we do is important, but what the Russians can do is all important.
01:11:56And there are several things the Russians can do.
01:11:59One is simply to make their missiles shiny, so that a laser beam would bounce off.
01:12:04Or to make them spin slowly after launch, so the beam couldn't dwell on one spot.
01:12:09Both these countermeasures would increase the length of time a laser would have to shine on the booster to destroy it.
01:12:15Another countermeasure would be to drastically shorten the vulnerable boost phase.
01:12:19Current Soviet missiles burn for five minutes.
01:12:22The latest U.S. missile, the MX, takes less than three minutes.
01:12:26And most rocket experts agree the boost phase could be reduced to less than one minute,
01:12:30using the sort of fast-burn rockets developed 20 years ago for the Sprint ABM missile.
01:12:35Fast-burn boosters would give the defense much less time to work with in the critical boost phase of a missile's flight.
01:12:45Many critics of the SDI, and even many scientists working on it,
01:12:48believe not enough attention is being paid to the countermeasure problem.
01:12:52At Lawrence Livermore, for example, Chris Cunningham has devised a computer game
01:12:57to demonstrate the drastic effect of even simple countermeasures.
01:13:01His simulation assumes the U.S. has 55 laser weapons in orbit,
01:13:05each able to kill some 40 Soviet boosters a minute.
01:13:08The Soviet Union employs all 19 of its launch sites in a massive attack on the United States.
01:13:14The defense successfully shoots down 100% of the missiles during their boost phase.
01:13:20The first countermeasure that I'm going to show you,
01:13:25and it's actually quite an effective one in a lot of cases,
01:13:29is simply to move the mobile SS-24 boosters closer together.
01:13:36Concentrating all the launches from a single site means that many fewer lasers are in a position to get in a shot.
01:13:44You can see by the scale on the right hand of the chart
01:13:48that about 40% of the warheads were killed in this example.
01:13:53The defense killed 100% of the warheads when the launch came from 19 sites.
01:13:59Next, Cunningham assumes the Soviet boosters are left in their present locations,
01:14:04but are upgraded to complete their burn in only 50 seconds.
01:14:07Now the defense has much less time available to hit the missiles in their boost phase,
01:14:11and its effectiveness drops drastically to only 30%.
01:14:17If Cunningham hardens his Soviet missiles so that it takes longer for the lasers to kill each one,
01:14:23then, all else being unchanged, the defense gets only 25% of the missiles.
01:14:32Finally, Cunningham combines all three countermeasures,
01:14:35clustering hardened fast burn boosters in a single launch site,
01:14:39and assumes further that the Soviets have knocked out one of the 55 laser satellites.
01:14:43The result? The defense now fails to kill a single missile.
01:14:48The point of Cunningham's simulations isn't to explore a specific defense, such as space-based lasers,
01:14:53but to show how a defense that is theoretically perfect can be rendered useless by even simple Soviet countermeasures.
01:15:00Obviously, a lot of people would like to see SDI be a reality,
01:15:06and there are a lot of people who present results still considering SS-18s and SS-24s as their standard threat,
01:15:16and showing how great defense works, and I think that's not correct.
01:15:22Everything you do is vulnerable to countermeasures.
01:15:27The question is whether the measure is easier, or the countermeasure is easier.
01:15:34Any shield is vulnerable to a sword, but the question is which is more effective.
01:15:43Edward Teller believes he has the answer.
01:15:45A shield so awesomely powerful that it could be effective against the Soviet nuclear sword.
01:15:51It was the prospect of such a shield that did much to convince President Reagan to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative.
01:15:57Yet today, the weapon on which Edward Teller's shield is based has become by far the most controversial component of the whole Star Wars program.
01:16:11The nuclear age began with the atom bomb, the first generation nuclear weapon.
01:16:15The second generation was born when Teller built the hydrogen bomb, and for years now, he has dreamed of a third generation of nuclear weapons.
01:16:23A third generation nuclear weapon is an arrangement where the great power of a nuclear explosion is used to convert that power into a stream of energy,
01:16:44for instance, the energy of an X-ray laser.
01:16:49And that is directed against a sharply defined object that may have left enemy territory,
01:17:02or is at any rate at an altitude where its destruction will not do any damage on the ground,
01:17:10or else it may be an object approaching us, or else it may be an object in space.
01:17:16And the energy of the nuclear weapon is directed toward that one attacker.
01:17:28And so it is in reality not a weapon, but an anti-weapon.
01:17:36The man mainly responsible for trying to make Edward Teller's dream a reality is theoretical physicist Lowell Wood.
01:17:43The way that a number of us became interested in X-ray lasers for strategic defensive purposes is when we began to look about for the most effective way,
01:17:54from a technical standpoint, that one could conduct a strategic defense.
01:17:58You know that you're confronted with 1,000, 2,000, perhaps ultimately 3,000 ballistic missiles coming from all over everywhere,
01:18:06and it's required to knock down these ballistic missiles or the warheads they carry in a period of minutes, perhaps a very few minutes,
01:18:14and to do so in a fashion which is very robust, where you can know that they haven't been destroyed.
01:18:20You need very, very powerful means to do that.
01:18:23After all, you're talking about destroying a capability that the U.S. has spent a trillion dollars to create,
01:18:29and the Soviet Union has spent perhaps two trillion dollars to create,
01:18:32an enormous inventory of offensive striking power, of destructive power.
01:18:37You need very powerful means for doing that.
01:18:40So you don't think in terms of anti-aircraft guns or something like that.
01:18:44You think in terms of very, very powerful means, and X-ray lasers were one of the means that fit that bill.
01:18:50An X-ray laser is powerful because at its heart is a hydrogen bomb.
01:18:54As the bomb explodes, a fraction of its enormous power is channeled into focused beams of X-rays,
01:19:00each of which can be pointed at a Soviet booster.
01:19:02So the X-ray laser self-destructs every time it is fired, but can take with it, in principle, dozens of Soviet rockets.
01:19:09The attempt to build such a weapon is one of the most tightly classified SDI projects.
01:19:14The government allows the following stipulations to be made about X-ray laser technology,
01:19:19that the country has an X-ray laser program, that is to say, X-ray lasers pumped by nuclear explosives,
01:19:26that this technology is being explored for its strategic defense applications,
01:19:32that an X-ray laser can generate a multiplicity of beams at one time,
01:19:37which can be independently aimed at different targets.
01:19:46And that's it.
01:19:49The laboratory for developing the X-ray laser is the underground nuclear test site in Nevada.
01:19:54Most tests here are of new warheads for our offensive missiles.
01:19:58But in the last few years, several tests, the exact number is classified,
01:20:02have been to see whether a nuclear explosion can be used to drive an X-ray laser.
01:20:07Working on these experiments was Livermore researcher Tom Ramos.
01:20:11Inevitably, right before the experiment, you're working late nights, seven days a week,
01:20:16making sure that your section is working, is working correctly.
01:20:19You don't get a second chance at it.
01:20:21So you're very fatigued, just tired, and then you get out to Nevada,
01:20:28you watch the emplacement of it, go in and have large canisters,
01:20:32the thing's about seven stories high,
01:20:35and you go crawling up and down each of those stories,
01:20:37and you're looking at the pipe that your signal will be going up,
01:20:41and you're looking for anything that might go wrong, and it's buried.
01:20:44It takes several weeks to bury it.
01:20:46And you come back when it's fired.
01:20:4810, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
01:20:58The hardest part is picking out any X-ray lasing
01:21:01from the immense pulse of radiation generated by the explosion.
01:21:05These background signals are not trivial.
01:21:07I mean, it is a hydrogen bomb that's going off,
01:21:10and you want to somehow subdue all of the radiation, all of the signals,
01:21:13all of the neutrons, gamma rays, and everything else coming out of that thing.
01:21:16And so the spectrometers and everything, the whole set-up,
01:21:20is extraordinarily complicated and specially designed
01:21:23to look for what it is you're looking for.
01:21:26So you have to convince yourself, you know, not only convince ourselves,
01:21:29but be able to prove to others that we are indeed lasing
01:21:33and we're doing what we say we're doing.
01:21:36Last fall, some Livermore scientists claimed the detection equipment
01:21:39wasn't good enough to tell whether lasing was in fact occurring.
01:21:44Only a few physicists outside the program were cleared
01:21:47to receive top-secret briefings from the Livermore team,
01:21:50and at least one of them agrees with the anonymous internal critics.
01:21:53Hans Bethe.
01:21:55So far, there has not been any test of that X-ray laser which is reliable.
01:22:04This was pointed out to them.
01:22:07It was recognized by other people at Livermore other than Teller and Wood,
01:22:15but they refused to change their detection system before the next test
01:22:25because they were in such a hurry to have the next test.
01:22:29The unfortunate thing is that if they don't change the detection equipment,
01:22:35nobody would or should believe the answers.
01:22:40We have presented evidence that we have achieved lasing,
01:22:43and that evidence was available to authorized people.
01:22:47I don't think there's, I really don't think there's any doubt
01:22:50that we've achieved the lasing.
01:22:53But those arguments, the arguments that you read in the newspaper,
01:22:56I don't know, they've been kind of overblown.
01:22:58I wish I could go into it, but I can't.
01:23:00What's being said in the media is literally something which all of us
01:23:03are forbidden to comment on.
01:23:05Indeed, all of the anonymous scientists who spoke to the reporters
01:23:09who write those stories were forbidden to speak to them and make those statements.
01:23:13Those people violated their oath and their contract with their government,
01:23:17and it's an ancient principle of Anglo-American law
01:23:21that a witness once impeached is not reliable thereafter.
01:23:25Those people were oath breakers,
01:23:27and any information that they provided by leaking to the media
01:23:30should be considered as tainted.
01:23:33Apart from the controversy over the research,
01:23:35there's also a question as to where to put an X-ray laser if it is ever built.
01:23:39Keeping many X-ray lasers permanently orbiting the Earth doesn't appeal to anyone.
01:23:44Apart from their vulnerability,
01:23:46the notion of having hydrogen bombs always overhead wouldn't sell politically.
01:23:50The alternative is to keep them on the ground till needed,
01:23:53and then pop them up by rocket if the Soviets launch an attack.
01:23:56But since X-ray lasers only shoot in straight lines,
01:23:59if they are launched from the United States,
01:24:01they must climb very high very quickly if they are to see around the curve of the Earth
01:24:06and catch the Soviet rockets while they're still in their boost phase.
01:24:10Moving closer to the Soviet Union means not having to get so high,
01:24:14but also involves basing the X-ray lasers on rockets in submarines,
01:24:19perhaps under the Arctic ice pack,
01:24:21and having the submarines close to the surface,
01:24:23so that the X-ray lasers could be launched within seconds of a Soviet missile launch.
01:24:27That would make the subs very vulnerable.
01:24:30If the Soviets switch to fast burn boosters,
01:24:33the response time for launching the pop-up X-ray lasers dwindles to just a few seconds.
01:24:38Compounding this problem is the fact that X-ray lasers can't penetrate very far through the atmosphere.
01:24:43So if a fast burn booster completes its burn entirely within the atmosphere,
01:24:48the X-ray laser won't get a chance to shoot at the missile while it's still in its boost phase and easy to find.
01:24:54As if all these weren't problems enough for the X-ray laser,
01:24:57it has one more major drawback.
01:24:59It is powered by a nuclear explosion.
01:25:02And President Reagan has repeatedly emphasized that the shield he wants is to be non-nuclear.
01:25:08I certainly share President Reagan's view or vision
01:25:12that the ideal strategic defense system would be completely non-nuclear in nature.
01:25:18The aesthetic and political considerations there are very strongly attractive.
01:25:26However, it may be the case that for a substantial period of time
01:25:31that the most effective means of defending oneself from strategic attack,
01:25:36which is after all a nuclear attack,
01:25:38will involve very substantial elements, indeed maybe central elements,
01:25:44which are nuclear energized in their nature.
01:25:47It's a non-ideal world and you take the best that you can get.
01:25:51And I suspect that for the near term, through the end of the century at least,
01:25:57that the nature of the available technological options
01:26:01will be such that nuclear energy will play a very central role in strategic defense.
01:26:08But if Lowell Wood remains optimistic about the X-ray laser,
01:26:11the official administration position is that it is not being seriously considered as an SDI weapon,
01:26:17even though the research is being actively supported.
01:26:20One asks, why are we examining that when our hope is that we can build a non-nuclear system?
01:26:27And that clearly is what the president would like and what we would all like.
01:26:31However, we do know that the Soviets are working in many of these same areas
01:26:35and we must understand how far that particular technology can go
01:26:41and whether or not it could be used against us.
01:26:44It is a weapons concept that fits into Soviet doctrine.
01:26:48It's an inherently more aggressive concept
01:26:54or at least possesses a powerful offensive capability against satellites, for example.
01:27:00So we need to understand it better.
01:27:03So the main argument for understanding the X-ray laser better
01:27:06recognizes its power not so much as a strategic defense weapon,
01:27:10but as an incredibly powerful anti-strategic defense weapon,
01:27:13able to destroy a whole constellation of defensive satellites in a single blast.
01:27:20What's more, it could knock out more conventional satellites,
01:27:22crucial in the time of war for communications and surveillance.
01:27:25The United States is more dependent on such satellites than the Soviet Union.
01:27:30We have a very great interest in having these satellites survive.
01:27:34Rather than racing the Soviet Union to see who can make the better X-ray laser ASAT sooner
01:27:42and test it out, no doubt, in violation of the limited test ban treaty,
01:27:47we ought to try to avoid creating these threats to our own satellites.
01:27:52That is, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
01:27:57We all know that.
01:27:59But they shouldn't spend a lot of time and money showing other people how to throw stones either.
01:28:04A ban on nuclear testing would ensure that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union
01:28:09could develop an X-ray laser.
01:28:11The Soviet Union has proposed discussing such a ban.
01:28:14But the current U.S. position is that underground nuclear testing at Nevada needs to continue.
01:28:24Lawrence Livermore Laboratory remains at the center of SDI research,
01:28:28and funding for the X-ray laser program is due to increase by over 100% in next year's budget,
01:28:34to over half a billion dollars.
01:28:36But not everyone at Livermore is an SDI enthusiast.
01:28:39One of the senior physicists who oppose the SDI is Hugh DeWitt.
01:28:43I think most people at this laboratory are very skeptical that anything like this will ever happen,
01:28:49and indeed doubt that it's even possible.
01:28:52However, the Strategic Defense Initiative, i.e. Star Wars,
01:28:56is largely welcomed here at this laboratory because it provides enormous new funding
01:29:02for research that keeps the laboratory in business for many years to come.
01:29:06And particularly in the nuclear field,
01:29:08because nuclear weapon design for the last 25 years has reached a state of maturity,
01:29:13and there isn't too much left to do that's exciting and different.
01:29:16The Star Wars program has now provided opportunity for research on exciting new and different ideas,
01:29:22and this has the lab in a state of excitement and interest that we've never seen before.
01:29:26Basically, you know, this sounds a bit smug, but the facts are on our side.
01:29:31We go to Washington from time to time, and we present what we have done, what we are doing,
01:29:36what we believe that we can do in such and such a time frame for such and such a cost.
01:29:41And the people that we speak to in government, both in the executive and the legislative branches,
01:29:46say, that's great, keep it up, here's more money.
01:29:49So the folks who are opposing strategic defense can really only oppose it effectively politically,
01:29:57because from a technical standpoint, their objections have failed.
01:30:02Keeping the money flowing for the Strategic Defense Initiative in the age of the Graham-Rudman Amendment
01:30:07has become a major preoccupation of the SDI organization.
01:30:11Last year's budget request was reduced by Congress from $3.7 billion to $2.7 billion.
01:30:17This year, the SDI is earmarked for $4.8 billion in the Defense Department's budget request,
01:30:23with another $600 million in the Department of Energy's.
01:30:26Congress is now debating these requests.
01:30:29Well over half the SDI money is slated for the defense industry,
01:30:33mainly the big defense contractors like Hughes, Rockwell, Boeing, TRW, Lockheed.
01:30:38For example, General Motors, having recently bought Hughes,
01:30:41has so far been awarded over half a billion dollars in SDI contracts.
01:30:45Lockheed is close behind, while Boeing, TRW, and McDonnell Douglas are all in the one-third billion dollar range.
01:30:52Not surprisingly, the defense industry tends to be the biggest contributor.
01:30:56Surprisingly, the defense industry tends to be among SDI's most enthusiastic supporters,
01:31:02and every now and then an opportunity comes along for the director of the SDI organization
01:31:07to demonstrate the administration's commitment to the program and to industry's role within it.
01:31:19Today it's the turn of the Martin Marietta plant near Denver, Colorado,
01:31:23a state that sees great economic opportunities in the Strategic Defense Initiative.
01:31:27SDI Director Abramson has come to dedicate a facility designed to help develop
01:31:31the extremely accurate pointing and tracking abilities a space-based laser will need.
01:31:37Our commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative.
01:31:40Congratulations to Martin and to all of us, and frankly to the nation.
01:31:45I thank you very much.
01:31:47Much of Abramson's talk addresses the need for the SDI,
01:31:50as well as the new rapid retargeting and precision pointing facility.
01:31:54And I know it's just awful that what it's called is R2P2.
01:32:04And, you know, that has got to be the ultimate relation to the movie that we don't like to talk about
01:32:13and relate our program to Star Wars.
01:32:17But the one good thing, and I've said this and maybe some of you have even heard me say it,
01:32:21the one real relationship to not only that movie, but perhaps others,
01:32:26is that the good guys won.
01:32:28And the good guys won because of the force that was with them.
01:32:32What you see here today amongst the people that are working on this facility
01:32:40and have created technical marvels before that,
01:32:45the force that is going to make this secure world really possible.
01:32:53A large part of General Abramson's job involves occasions like this,
01:32:57where his skills as a salesman for the program are at least as important as his ability to run it.
01:33:04The large defense contractors like Martin Marietta,
01:33:07which is one of the finalists in a competition to design the overall Star Wars system,
01:33:11aren't the only beneficiaries of the SDI.
01:33:14In San Diego, for instance, is a small company for whom the SDI is a golden opportunity.
01:33:19Its president is Dr. Alan Kolb.
01:33:22We see the SDI program as kind of a unifying theme that brings together our diverse technologies.
01:33:31I'd be less than candid if I didn't tell you SDI from Maxwell could be very good for our business.
01:33:37Maxwell's most promising SDI project is a rail gun, or electromagnetic launcher,
01:33:43a concept for a weapon that could shoot projectiles much faster than conventional bullets.
01:33:48Inside the gun are two copper rails.
01:33:51A two-ounce plastic bullet is driven down the rails by a massive surge of electricity
01:33:55and leaves the gun at a speed of two miles per second.
01:33:59A space-based rail gun could be a very useful part of a mid-course defense.
01:34:04The bullets it fires, perhaps hundreds a minute, would slam into and hopefully destroy warheads,
01:34:09provided it could find them.
01:34:13This is Jim Ionson, director of the SDI's Office of Innovative Science and Technology,
01:34:18and one of the funders of Maxwell's rail gun research.
01:34:21He is visiting today to see the gun in action.
01:34:24It's a trip that's been planned for months.
01:34:26Ionson has brought with him the national media, and the goal is to get the rail gun on the evening news.
01:34:32For Alan Cole, that's meant keeping his engineers up most of the night to be sure the gun fires flawlessly.
01:34:38Well, the virtue of this electromagnetic launcher is that it is the most reliable,
01:34:44high-power test launcher in the free world,
01:34:47and it is designed to help us understand the basic physics of converting electromagnetic energy
01:34:53into energy of projectile motion.
01:34:56This electromagnetic launcher and its successful operation are for the world to see.
01:35:02For the media, this is a rare opportunity to see the SDI up close.
01:35:07There's no doubt that impact kill will be more lethal than death rays or things like that.
01:35:14What makes this particular launcher so virtuous is that it is incredibly reliable,
01:35:19so reliable that rather than giving you an edited DOD film, you're here in real time.
01:35:26This is the first time they've ever shown it to the public, so here we are.
01:35:29This is basic journalism. You go where new things are happening.
01:35:32That's the whole nature of news.
01:35:34For safety's sake, everyone stays outside during firing.
01:35:37Now we'll arm the crowbar trigger generators.
01:35:40Crowbar trigger generator high voltage coming up.
01:35:42And as soon as they come on, you'll hear the single klaxon.
01:35:45We'll start charge. It takes about 15 seconds.
01:35:48You'll hear two klaxons, and then you'll hear the bang.
01:35:51Ready to go.
01:35:53About three seconds.
01:35:59That's it.
01:36:05About 15 minutes before you get back in the building.
01:36:13That was a great shot.
01:36:15Again, it underscores our wanting to be open with our successes
01:36:21and our courage that if there is a failure, then we will let everyone know about that also.
01:36:28Once the smoke has cleared, everyone moves inside to take a look at the damage done by the gun.
01:36:33You might be able to get a good shot.
01:36:36Go right down through the hole here.
01:36:39Watch out. Watch out. It's hot.
01:36:42Having punched a hole in a one-inch steel plate,
01:36:45the Maxwell Railgun gets its two minutes of national air time.
01:36:49In California today, another successful test of a technology for the Star Wars Missile Defense Program.
01:36:57It was the first public demonstration of a device called an electromagnetic launcher.
01:37:02The projectile travels more than 6,000 miles an hour,
01:37:05smashing a hole like this in a one-inch thick steel plate.
01:37:09Scientists here say they have made impressive strides during the past nine months developing the railgun.
01:37:14But it's likely to be ten years, they say, before it could be ready for possible use
01:37:19as part of the Star Wars defense system.
01:37:21The next morning, Maxwell engineers clean out the gun barrel for another firing.
01:37:26While yesterday's was at low power to be sure of success,
01:37:29today's will push the gun to its highest power yet.
01:37:32We are, for the first time, attempting to shoot through one and a half inches of steel,
01:37:37a one-inch plate and a half-inch plate behind it.
01:37:40We're exploring an area today that we haven't been in before,
01:37:43and it's a part of the program to keep pushing up
01:37:46to try and find out what all the physics are about in this system.
01:37:50Something may break, a bolt may tear loose, the projectile fall apart,
01:37:55but that's what we're trying to find out.
01:37:58Firing.
01:38:00There it is.
01:38:04Now let's go find out what bolts broke.
01:38:08While technology demonstrations like this provide valuable experience for the engineers,
01:38:13everyone here is well aware that punching a hole through a steel plate
01:38:17is but one very tiny step toward a functioning space-based strategic defense weapon.
01:38:22But if a visiting congressman is moved to enthusiasm, then that can be valuable too.
01:38:27We certainly should quiet many of the critics that say it can't work.
01:38:33We're proving day by day that it does work.
01:38:36I think this has got great potential for the country
01:38:40in terms of advancing this strategic defense initiative,
01:38:45and good news for Americans who all sleep better at night.
01:38:49This incredible team has been able to tame nature,
01:38:54and let's just hope that this tool can someday be used to tame warfare
01:38:58and perhaps even someday eliminate the threat of nuclear destruction.
01:39:02So I propose this toast to that end result.
01:39:06This is an unusual opportunity for Jim Ianson.
01:39:09Most of the research he funds doesn't provide such a satisfying payoff as a hole in a steel plate.
01:39:15Universities are where he spends much of his almost $100 million annual budget,
01:39:19sponsoring innovative and unusual research that may provide major breakthroughs for the SDI.
01:39:25The University of Texas' Carl Collins is one of the scientists Ianson is funding.
01:39:30Collins is searching for materials from which might be made a gamma-ray laser,
01:39:34able to store prodigious amounts of energy.
01:39:37If you were to have a rod like this that were completely made from some of the candy
01:39:43that were completely made from some of the candidate gamma-ray laser materials,
01:39:47you could produce a pulse of power of the order of 10 to the 18 watts.
01:39:52This means something like 10 times the total power received on Earth from the sun at any particular time.
01:39:58Pulse would be very short, but these are unparalleled levels of power.
01:40:03A gamma-ray laser could be charged with its energy on the ground,
01:40:07then sent into space where it would remain charged and ready to fire for decades.
01:40:11Such a device could truly be the basis of a magic shield,
01:40:14so deadly it could shoot down anything in space.
01:40:17But no one knows whether materials from which such a weapon could be made even exist.
01:40:22Collins' search for candidate materials could take 30 years.
01:40:25With SDI money, a special machine, this is a prototype, could cut the screening process to 18 months.
01:40:32Collins is interested less in defense applications
01:40:35than he is in potential uses of gamma-ray lasers in microelectronics and biology.
01:40:40But at this stage in his research, the SDI's interests and his own are identical.
01:40:45The really exciting thing is the intellectual challenge in this area
01:40:49and the opportunities it provides students to participate right on the frontiers
01:40:53of technology, intellectual discovery.
01:40:57There are so many things to be done here that surely there are tremendous opportunities
01:41:01for dissertation projects, major discoveries,
01:41:05and then, of course, it's very gratifying to expect that some of these
01:41:09will move on out into commercial utilization.
01:41:14At the Austin campus of the University of Texas,
01:41:16a drive is underway to encourage physicists and engineers
01:41:19to reject Collins' reasoning and sign a nationwide petition.
01:41:25The petition declares that strategic defense is infeasible in the foreseeable future
01:41:30and that accepting SDI money amounts to misleading the public.
01:41:33Do you want to sign the petition? Are there any students or faculty you'd like to sign?
01:41:38The goal of the petition is to discourage scientists from turning to the SDI
01:41:42to fund even very basic research, since this could be taken as an endorsement of the SDI.
01:41:48I could expand my research program, ensure continued funding by applying for this money,
01:41:58and I think it would be unconscionable to do so
01:42:02considering how poorly thought out SDI is as a plan,
01:42:06even though it's very appealing as a dream, as a plan that stinks on us.
01:42:12To date, over half the physicists at several major universities
01:42:15have signed the petition rejecting SDI funding.
01:42:24While making this program, we asked many people to define the Strategic Defense Initiative.
01:42:29We got many answers.
01:42:30Formally, it is a five-year research and development program
01:42:33to explore the possibilities of strategic defense
01:42:36so that a future president in Congress can make a decision about deployment in the early 1990s.
01:42:42But for most SDI advocates in the administration, it is much more than that.
01:42:46It's a declaration that America has already decided to base its security on a new strategy.
01:42:52Most opponents see it as a major threat to our security for that very reason.
01:42:56In our final segment, we explore some of the consequences
01:42:59of pursuing the president's vision of the Strategic Defense Initiative
01:43:03as he stated it again a year ago in a speech to the National Space Club.
01:43:13Two years ago, I challenged our scientific community to use their talents and energies
01:43:18to find a way that we might eventually rid ourselves of the need for nuclear weapons,
01:43:24starting with ICBMs.
01:43:26We seek to render obsolete the balance of terror, or mutual assured destruction as it's called,
01:43:33and replace it with a system incapable of initiating armed conflict
01:43:38or causing mass destruction, yet effective in preventing war.
01:43:43Now, this is not and should never be misconstrued as just another method of protecting missile silos.
01:43:49The Strategic Defense Initiative has been labeled Star Wars.
01:43:53But it isn't about war.
01:43:55It's about peace.
01:43:57It isn't about retaliation.
01:43:59It's about prevention.
01:44:01It isn't about fear.
01:44:03It's about hope.
01:44:04And in that struggle, if you'll pardon my stealing a film line, the force is with us.
01:44:09The president has set an ideal.
01:44:11That's fine.
01:44:13A leader should give you an ultimate goal and say, go in that direction.
01:44:18It doesn't necessarily mean you can climb the highest peak he's set out for you,
01:44:22but by moving in that way, you're doing something good.
01:44:24The president has set up the ideal of an absolute foolproof defense,
01:44:28or at least so good that we would not have to rely on any form of retaliation,
01:44:34that we could say to the world, in essence, give me your best punch, I'll survive, and it won't matter.
01:44:40I don't know how to do that today.
01:44:42I do know how to set us along the path towards that,
01:44:45because, of course, technology advances rapidly, exponentially,
01:44:49and we build on what we've learned in the past.
01:44:53So I wouldn't preclude that someday we'll get that good.
01:44:56I just don't know how to do it yet.
01:44:58Stephen Rockwood's cautious assessment of the prospects for a perfect defense
01:45:02is typical of most scientists working on the SDI.
01:45:05Meanwhile, the managers of the program interpret President Reagan's goal
01:45:09in more familiar and achievable terms.
01:45:11I've seen a great many discussions, learned and otherwise,
01:45:15about the fact that if it's not absolutely guaranteed, a thousand percent perfect,
01:45:19that there's no point in doing it.
01:45:21I think that's silly, because I think anything that adds to the uncertainty
01:45:26that the Soviets would have, that a first strike or a nuclear strike could succeed,
01:45:32helps deterrence.
01:45:33It will be such a problem for the other side, for the targeteer on the other side,
01:45:39to be able to know, and know with confidence, that he can achieve a military objective,
01:45:46that he will say, he'll have to turn to his boss and say,
01:45:50I can't guarantee the results.
01:45:52And under those conditions, when you're talking about the fate of the world
01:45:57and certainly a nuclear exchange, people are going to be conservative,
01:46:02and you will deter the potential use of that system.
01:46:08And then it is perfect.
01:46:09The President views perfect as deterring an attack at all,
01:46:13not as one which, if there is an attack, captures all incoming weapons.
01:46:19What's interesting about these arguments is that they shift the emphasis of a strategic defense
01:46:24away from protecting people toward protecting our ability to retaliate.
01:46:29After all, the point of a Soviet first strike would not be to destroy Americans,
01:46:33but to destroy American missiles so that we couldn't strike back.
01:46:36I have examined those options. I have ruled them out.
01:46:41President Nixon made the same argument almost 20 years ago
01:46:44while announcing why he decided to abandon the protection of people in favor of protecting our missiles.
01:46:50It does not provide defense for our cities.
01:46:55The only way that I have concluded that we can save lives,
01:47:01which is the primary purpose of our defense system, is to prevent war.
01:47:06And that is why the emphasis of this system is on protecting our deterrent,
01:47:11which is the best preventive for war.
01:47:15Yet while President Nixon was explicitly arguing for protecting our deterrent, our missiles in their silos,
01:47:21President Reagan is equally emphatic that the SDI is not about protecting missiles,
01:47:26despite what the program managers say.
01:47:30A further contradiction lies in the President's expressed desire
01:47:33to replace our current doctrine of deterrence through the threat of retaliation,
01:47:37while the most likely outcome of the SDI will be a defense that will be able to ensure our ability to retaliate.
01:47:44If what you're trying to do is enhance deterrence by defense,
01:47:48then what you're trying to do is assure that your nuclear weapons are the opposite of impotent and obsolete.
01:47:55You're trying to make sure that they're potent and timely.
01:47:59That's why you defend them.
01:48:01Now, if we can think of a way simultaneously to make nuclear weapons more effective and less effective,
01:48:09then we really have something magic on our hands.
01:48:13And I think the people that think of this, they have the solution.
01:48:16It's that the Americans have a defense like this, and the Soviets don't.
01:48:21So that our nuclear weapons are more effective, their nuclear weapons are less effective.
01:48:27We've made some nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete, theirs.
01:48:31Meanwhile, the Soviet Union sees the United States modernizing and upgrading its strategic offense,
01:48:37with weapons like the highly accurate MX missile,
01:48:40which to Soviet eyes seems as much a first strike weapon as their SS-18 seems to ours.
01:48:46The new Trident submarine missile also has the accuracy needed for a first strike weapon.
01:48:51These new missiles, coupled with a Star Wars defense,
01:48:54viewed from the Soviet perspective seem to imply a U.S. first strike policy.
01:48:59Our new missiles hitting as many of their missiles as possible,
01:49:02the strategic defense taking care of those that remain.
01:49:05By the gruesome logic of nuclear strategy,
01:49:08fear of a U.S. first strike might make the Soviet Union strike first.
01:49:16The president has stated emphatically his view that a unilateral deployment by either side,
01:49:26because it would give that side both offense and defense,
01:49:32and implied to the other side that they might someday face a first strike,
01:49:40thus giving that side, in this case the Russians, a good reason for attacking us first.
01:49:46He acknowledges that that must not happen.
01:49:50And to prevent it from happening, to assure the Soviets we don't seek a first strike ability,
01:49:55the president has suggested sharing our defensive technology with the Soviets.
01:49:59But why not do what I have offered to do and ask the Soviet Union to do?
01:50:04Say, look, here's what we can do.
01:50:07We'll even give it to you. Now, will you sit down with us and once and for all get rid,
01:50:13all of us, of these nuclear weapons and free mankind from that threat?
01:50:18I think that would be the greatest use of a defensive weapon.
01:50:21I think the notion of sharing the technology is absurd on its face for many reasons.
01:50:28Perhaps the most obvious of which would be that,
01:50:31if I were an engineer looking for a way to defeat the other fellow's defensive system,
01:50:36there is nothing you could give me that would be more helpful than to give me the technology.
01:50:40If you tell me precisely how it works, I can figure out how to beat it.
01:50:45So, if we really do give the Soviets the technology, that would render our defense impotent and obsolete.
01:50:53To avoid that problem, some in the administration propose sharing not just the technology,
01:50:58but a single, jointly operated defensive system.
01:51:02The concept of shared defenses that simply make ballistic missiles obsolete,
01:51:08by saying, if one pops up, the shared defenses are going to destroy it,
01:51:12is absolutely central to charting the transition from pure offense to offense-defense.
01:51:20In a world that is cooperative enough to share this defensive technology in a completely open way,
01:51:29maybe we don't need the defensive technology.
01:51:31That is, if we and the Soviets are so buddy-buddy, and we share a common vision of the future,
01:51:38then maybe we don't need to deploy these defenses, or at least very fancy defenses.
01:51:45The only time you need very fancy defenses is if you don't trust the other side.
01:51:49We're not talking about trust or faith.
01:51:51We're talking about a clear perception of mutual benefit.
01:51:55Sharing of defenses is technically easy, because you do not take an active step when you're in the control of defenses.
01:52:03Defenses will be controlled by some sort of an enablement capability.
01:52:07A computer has to be in charge, because the time is so short.
01:52:10And a national leader would, I presume, at a sign of heightened tensions,
01:52:15would simply enable or transfer the control of the strategic defense system to computers.
01:52:22I think the notion is not only abstract, but from a technical point of view, is absurd on its face.
01:52:28And now what's happened is people are making up crazy worlds in which it might make sense.
01:52:33But in the real worlds that we can think about, it makes no sense at all.
01:52:37This is the central issue in the strategic defense debate.
01:52:40It's not whether this or that weapon will work, or whether the computer programs can be tested,
01:52:45or how much it will cost, important though those questions may be.
01:52:49But the real question is how can a strategic defense be deployed in a way that will increase our security and not decrease it?
01:52:57The only way, short of finding a guaranteed 100% effective shield, is with some sort of cooperative agreement with the Soviet Union.
01:53:05Jointly sharing a single strategic defensive system would surely be a security arrangement without parallel in history.
01:53:12But it is difficult, if not impossible, to envision an arms control mechanism by which each side could introduce its own defenses while reducing its offenses.
01:53:22Yet at the same time, be sure the other side wasn't cheating or gaining an edge.
01:53:27In other words, if we find a strategic defense, what are we going to do with it?
01:53:32On the other hand, can we afford not to look?
01:53:36Knowing the Soviet Union is exploring its defense options up to and arguably beyond the limitations of the ABM Treaty,
01:53:44clearly we shouldn't abandon research, if only to be sure we can respond if the Soviets decide to abandon the ABM Treaty.
01:53:52But should we now be placing such a high priority on pursuing a technology which may never fulfill the President's vision,
01:53:59especially if the pursuit itself has consequences we cannot predict?
01:54:04Or is the present system of deterrence through mutual assured destruction so flawed morally and in practice
01:54:12that the search for an alternative is worth whatever risks may accompany it?
01:54:18I believe deterrence is very robust.
01:54:21I cannot imagine a rational decision by a leader of either the Soviet Union or the United States
01:54:28where he decides that his nation is better off with a nuclear war than without one.
01:54:33That's very robust.
01:54:35But on the other hand, the system that supports it is not as robust as that.
01:54:40Do I believe that for the next 50 years, if we just keep going the way we're going,
01:54:45that these weapons will never be used?
01:54:47That there will never be an irrational calculation or an accident or an unauthorized use
01:54:52or an escalation of a conventional war that people didn't intend?
01:54:56Or by then, other countries have nuclear weapons and somebody else starts it.
01:54:59Am I confident that none of those things would happen over the next 50 years?
01:55:03The answer is no, I'm not. Not at all.
01:55:05So we must start the search, intensify the search for looking beyond this reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence.
01:55:14Technology may be part of that answer.
01:55:18Political accommodation will have to be part of that answer.
01:55:25Changing our attitudes about nuclear weapons may be part of that answer.
01:55:30But we should be rather careful before we dismiss ideas as crazy,
01:55:34given that all you have to do is prove it's no less crazy than the current system is.
01:56:55For a transcript of this NOVA Frontline Special Report, please send $4 to
01:57:01Visions of Star Wars, Box 322, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
01:57:24For a transcript of this NOVA Frontline Special Report, please send $4 to
01:57:30Visions of Star Wars, Box 322, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
01:57:36For a transcript of this NOVA Frontline Special Report, please send $4 to
01:57:42Visions of Star Wars, Box 322, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
01:57:48Major funding for this NOVA Frontline Special Report was provided by this station
01:57:52and other public television stations nationwide.
01:57:55Additional funding was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.