[PaulHoule]

Yes, David Wright, the guy who wrote that article, recycles the same opinion piece about how the Patriot Missile wasn't very effective in Gulf War I and never mentions that every part of that system has been upgraded 2 or 3 times since then.

[Finnucane]

Yeah, I guess you could argue that the SDI program wasn't a complete failure, just oversold, and did waste a lot of time and money pursuing ideas that never panned out.

[PaulHoule]

Robert Jastrow wrote a book titled "How to Make Nuclear Weapons Obsolete" and quite a bit of that happened with the application of cybernetics and advanced technology to war.

For instance there was the old doctrine of holding back a Russian invasion of Europe with small yield tactical neutron bombs. Then weapons like this were invented:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBU-97_Sensor_Fuzed_Weapon

A stick of those dropped from a B-52 will do more damage to a tank division than a single 1kt warhead. Similar sorts of devices were demoed but not fielded for use on land (think of a vehicle that can fire and control hundreds of anti-tank missiles from concealment with no detectable radio signature made from off-the-shelf parts)

Progress on lasers has been steady like progress in semiconductors, sometimes I am shocked at how easy it is to buy a dangerous laser. There have been very good laser weapon demos since the 1990s the main practical problem has been moving away from dangerous chemistry to fiber laser modules that can be integrated with the rest of the weapon and duplicated to increase output. These are being fielded now against drones.

There are handheld anti-personnel lasers that will heat the outermost 1 mm of your clothes to 20,000 K which has an effect like a flash bang and also makes an electromagnetic pulse that directly stimulates pain sensations: it can knock you down (e.g. with the impact of expanding plasma) and discombobulate you pretty bad without causing much tissue damage.

Word of it got out and the fear that people would use it as a torture device shut it down.

If SDI failed at anything it was replacing the Space Shuttle.

[ncmncm]

SDI (Reagan "Star Wars") spent a great deal of money to little direct effect other than enormously enriching recipients, but freaked out the Soviet military to the point that they crashed the Soviet economy, resulting in the collapse of the USSR and ultimately the rise of Putin. It is hard to say whether it is an improvement, for us or for the citizens of the former SSRs.

I traveled to a semiconductor conference in Hungary on SDI money dispensed by US AFNOR. The paper was on migration of point defects in semiconductors. Defect research was of great interest to Soviets because their devices had a much higher concentration of them than the West's, and they hoped to make them work anyway.

Arguably the actual purpose was the enrichment, and crashing the Soviet economy an unpredicted result. Billionaires generated by the program, as by the Iraq invasion, have been reliable providers for corrupt politicians since.

[Finnucane]

> but freaked out the Soviet military to the point that they crashed the Soviet economy

No, that was not really the cause of the collapse of the Soviet economy.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

And I thought it was Chernobyl.