Did SDI Win the Cold War? Subject: Re: Reagan & SDI. Winning with bluff Date: 9 Jun 1997 21:17:19 GMT From:kennel@nospam.lyapunov.ucsd.edu (Matt Kennel (Remove 'nospam' to reply)) Reply-To: kennel@nospam.lyapunov.ucsd.edu Organization: University of California at San Diego Newsgroups: alt.politics.economics, sci.econ, soc.history, soc.history.war.misc, soc.history.what-if :Colin McElroy wrote: : :> Some respected scientists thought the a-bomb :> was impossible.. : Hi, A good point. I recall that J. Robert Oppenheimer even had a "proof" that the H bomb could not work. It was based on a deuterium fusion bomb. Teller built the H bomb, but based it on Li-H fusion.--jeb Matthew B. Kennel: No, that wasn't the important change, surely Oppenheimer et al knew about Li etc. (the fusion x-section is lower still, so Li6-D fusion is *more* difficult than D-D or especially D-T). Ulam + Teller made a radical breakthrough in the design of the fusion weapon, a staged radiation/ablation implosion. The first test of this design was a deuterium fusion system, but was militarily impractical. The achieved fusion rate was good enough that a dry Li-D design would be feasible. The previous design ("classical Super") had been worked on for many years ('44 at least)--far longer than the first fission bomb--and was not promising for many very good scientific reasons. That's probably what the quote was about. The point was that many considered the H-bomb intrinsically immoral, since it was far more destructive than necessary for any legitimate military use---it was only an instrument of genocide. The financial expenditure was also vast. (At one point a good fraction of the free world's supply of mercury was used in one of processing loops at the Oak Ridge Y-12 plant, and now the residue is a substantial environmental hazard.) Ironically, it turned out that the large atmospheric tests urged by Teller provided the scientific information necessary for the Soviets to deduce and confirm key features about its design, leading them to develop their own bomb in an amazingly short time. The breakthrough was originally considered so amazing by the US. government that nobody else would think of it for at least 20 years; unlike fission bombs, the key design features were not declassified until the 90's. -- Matthew B. Kennel/Institute for Nonlinear Science, UCSD/ Don't blame me, I voted for Emperor Mollari. Hi, Thanks for the technical details. But the bottom line is that Oppenhiemer and those who did not want the H bomb were able to prove that it could not be built. Teller and those who did want the H bomb were able to build one. I think the lesson is clear, and can be applied to SDI. -- ,,,,,,, _______________ooo___( O O )___ooo_______________ (_) And this: I've been reading Khrushchev's memoirs, written in the late 1960s. In them he makes the point that while in power he cut the size of the Soviet military considerably, and planned to cut it more. His reasoning, he says, was simply that the soviet union did not need, and could not afford, the army they were supporting at the time. In his view, given the number of nuclear weapons they had (and he did not want to cut that arsenal), they could do well with two million men less in the military, and no navy other than some submarines and light surface ships. Under Brezhnev, this policy was reversed. Khruschev warned that the expense was unsustainable. So perhaps Brezhnev should get credit for unintentionally aiding the overthrow of the soviet system? William Hyde Dept of Oceanography Texas A&M University OTHER COMMENTS: >Carey Sublette wrote: > These SDI claims are simply a case of the ancient logical fallacy "post > hoc ergo propter hoc" - after this, therefore because of this. Alexander Solzhenitsyn thought otherwise. In New Yorker Magazine he said, "The Cold War was essentially won by Ronald Reagan when he embarked on the 'star wars' program and the Soviet Union understood that it could not take this next step." Solzhenitsyn is certainly not an expert on the technical possibilities of a missile defense system, but he does know a thing or two about how the Soviet Union worked. Jim Henderson jhenderon@aol.com And why do we have so many Russians now saying that it was Reagan and Star Wars that did them in?---jeb >Who? Name names please! Precisely how did Reagan and Star Wars "do them >in?" I keep hearing this chant but have yet to see a shred of evidence to >support it! Well, how about: >"We understood that it [SDI] was a new stage, a new turn in the >armaments race... [If SDI were not stopped] we would have to start our >own program, which would be tremendously expensive and unnecessary. >And this [would bring] further exhaustion of the country." > ----Aleksandr Yakovlev, Advisor to Micheal Gorbachev And I will add here that at the famous Summit Meeting in Iceland, Gorbachev practically begged Reagan to drop the SDI project. He offered to give in to all of the US demands on arms control in exchange for a promise to end "Star Wars". But Reagan refused. And I think that is when Gorbachev knew the "Cold War" was over and that the USSR had lost....jeb > And if the USSR just could not succeed because of its "internal contradictions" (as Marx might say), why did it last 73 years and then collapse shortly after Reagan and Star Wars? Why THEN?---jeb > >It started to collapse in the late sixties as centralized economic planning >proved unable to provide economic growth to a developed industrial economy. > (Although, however, centralized economic planning, when combined with a >ruthless dictatorship, proved to be an excellent combination to turn an >undeveloped country into an industrial powerhouse.) The collapse of world >oil prices in 1985 removed a major source of cash that the USSR needed for >the purchase of foreign goods to sustain growth. No cash and no market >tools to move the economy beyond industrialization led to economic >collapse. And yes -- wasting a large chunk of GDP on the military helped >to, but it wasn't only Soviet military spending in the 80's that did that, >it was 50 years of Soviet military spending. > > -- Dennis > Note that the collapse of world oil prices in 1985 was not exactly an "accident", but engineered by Reagan and the King of Saudi Arabia, with some help from the fuel injector (that nearly doubled car gas milage)--jeb AND: This from trifec@mindspring.com (Robert Bruns): The quote used frequently in this thread is from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If you've been reading the posts you'd know this. Other Russians with similar views are Gorbachev and Yeltsin (if none of these names are familiar, well...). Sources? New Yorker magazine interview for Solzhenitsyn...Stern interview for Gorbachev (maybe he'll include further comments in the upcoming Pepsi commercials he's filming)...CNN for Yeltsin (1991, I think). Either Reagan precipitated the demoralization of the Soviet Union leadership with his flood of military spending/research, or they decided they could not hope to match the new technology and cost and folded their tents from pragmatic reasons. Fair's fair. If Clinton can lay claim to our current healthy economy, why shouldn't Reagain get credit for spending the Russians into oblivion? Otherwise, we might have to admit that only so much credit can accrue to any President, and we can't have that, can we? Before you know it, we might have to admit that Reagain only did exactly what he had promised he would do prior to his election by a landslide... Something Clinton will never be able to do... Ford wrote: > So is their any evidence that the Soviets upped their percentage of >GDP for the military as a result of SDI? Hi, You are treating the Cold War is if it were a chess game. But actually, it was more like poker. Faced with the need to increase spending to match our new system, they "folded" rather than "call". In poker, you can lose BECAUSE you failed to put more into the game. In chess, you can threaten, but you can't bluff. Since there is no way to repeat history, but with altered factors, there is no way to answer such questions. We can only offer explanations and judge how reasonable they seem. Future historians may have completely different explanations from any that have been offered so far. But SDI did not need to be a technical success to win the Cold War. It need not ever "work". So long as the Soviet leaders THOUGHT that it could work. And the Soviet scientists could hardly tell their political leaders that the SDI system cannot work (even if they thought that), since THEY were asking for money to build the same kind of system. Also recall that the Soviets were badly burned in the "space race". They had a commanding lead in space with Sputnik, and had sent a dog and people into space before the US even started. They were confident that a Russian would be the first to the moon. When 12 Americans had walked on the moon while they were still trying to get past earth orbit, they probably thought that we could do ANYTHING, including make an effective space based defense. -- ,,,,,,, _______________ooo___( O O )___ooo_______________ (_) jim blair (jeblair@facstaff.wisc.edu) For a good time call http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/4834 Mark Patrick Witte wrote: Well, we are a nation of poker players, the Russians favor...chess.. An interesting idea. Maybe the main reason that we won the cold war is the difference in the way the thought about things, based on the way the games we play shape our thoughts. --