[HN Gopher] Brilliant Pebbles (2001)
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Brilliant Pebbles (2001)
Author : keepamovin
Score : 35 points
Date : 2024-03-30 12:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.llnl.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.llnl.gov)
| keepamovin wrote:
| Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles
| nabla9 wrote:
| It was one of Edward Teller's increasingly insane projects. He
| could really sell crazy weapon concepts.
|
| 1. Conceive brilliant and super expensive system.
|
| 2. Don't think about basic countermeasures that could invalidate
| the plan.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Also, require multiple technologies that hadn't even reached
| TRL 1 [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Teller really did become a nuclear quack after the Manhattan
| Project. WRT SDI, he went to White House and told Reagan there
| he had an X-ray laser that could destroy warheads in flight.
| Reagan, got excited about it and encouraged Project Excalibur.
|
| The laser didn't exist. Nor did Teller tell Reagan what would
| power the laser. It's power source? A nuclear bomb.
|
| That guy really wanted to put nuclear bombs _everywhere_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Teller's work on the hydrogen bomb (after the Manhattan
| Project) probably solidify his mind set. Immediately post
| WW2, Teller was in the minority view of believing that
| hydrogen bombs were feasible. But we all know how that ended
| up.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You can see how that would affect a person. Advocate
| exploring a far out idea against resistance, then be
| dramatically proved correct when an unexpected advance
| makes the goal achievable.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| It wasn't a goal with achieving.
| philwelch wrote:
| I disagree. Nuclear deterrence has prevented direct
| warfare between great powers for the longest period since
| at least the Roman Empire.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Nuclear deterrence was perfectly capable with fission
| bombs
| lupusreal wrote:
| Who was more of a quack in that situation? Teller for
| dreaming up sci-fi bullshit powered by nukes, or Reagan for
| not even thinking to ask questions before buying into it?
|
| I saw something interesting recently, some short propaganda
| films in the style of news broadcasts created by the CIA
| specifically for consumption by Reagan. Apparently the man
| was a half-wit who disliked reading and easily mesmerized by
| video; a typical TV-watching zombie.
|
| https://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/03/ronald-reagan-
| cia-...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > Apparently the man was a half-wit
|
| I would say that seems to be the norm for many of our
| presidents since then. Maybe it always has been.
| lupusreal wrote:
| JFK at least was reputed to be an extremely proficient
| reader. His reported speed reading is probably somewhat
| exaggerated but conservative estimates would have him
| reading the script of one of those CIA brief videos in a
| small fraction of the time it took for Reagan to watch
| them. Being good at reading obviously isn't a sufficient
| qualification to make somebody a good president, but I
| think it's a necessary prerequisite.
| abecedarius wrote:
| Don't most of us read a transcript many times faster than
| its video?
| lupusreal wrote:
| Those of us who can bear reading in the first place at
| least.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| He repeatedly gave multiple speeches where he confused
| reality with roles he played, or movies he saw. Most
| famously, he repeated told the story of a B-17 pilot that
| was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for staying
| with the plane to comfort a trapped ball turret gunner
| until it crashed.
|
| This was climax of the film, "A Wing and a Prayer".
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1984/01/01/
| w...
| keepamovin wrote:
| Your comments here are interesting so just curious what
| do you think the solution to Geo political conflict is?
| How does it play out in your mind?
| robocat wrote:
| I wonder whether the same problem would occur with enough
| focus on what any one of us says?
|
| If we recorded your words over a period of a few years
| and then had thousands of people looking for errors in
| the transcripts, what errors would be found in your
| memory or thinking patterns?
|
| It is certainly common enough to see some doozy mistakes
| from smart people within the comments on HN.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Well, he did have Alzheimer's, a degenerative brain
| disease that affects memory. And we're supposed to
| believe that he had no symptoms of until January 21,
| 1989.
|
| As a person that had a grandmother and aunt that
| developed it, that's... mighty suspicious.
| opo wrote:
| >...Apparently the man was a half-wit who disliked reading
| and easily mesmerized by video; a typical TV-watching
| zombie.
|
| Your source says:
|
| >...While Reagan found the videos helpful and asked for
| more, the original idea for the televised briefings was the
| CIA's. The president still received regular written and in-
| person briefings, Dujmovic writes.
| habosa wrote:
| Had wacky ideas for sure but calling him a quack after the
| Manhattan Project isn't fair. Besides his foresight on the
| hydrogen bomb, he also was one of the first major names in
| science to raise the alarm about climate change:
|
| https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/climate-
| consensus-97...
| jonathankoren wrote:
| The hydrogen bomb is a quack idea though. The whole purpose
| is just to destroy cities. It has no legitimate military
| value. Just because it can be
|
| That is why he was controversial in the post war.
| adastra22 wrote:
| The hydrogen bomb is why the Cold War stayed cold.
| Deterrence is a military value.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
| adonovan wrote:
| > The whole purpose is just to destroy cities. It has no
| legitimate military value.
|
| Well, destroying cities was also the military purpose of
| the first two atomic bombs.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| It was the largest bomb ever until then, yes. But to
| equate a fission bomb to a fusion bomb is a disservice.
| We're talking multiple orders of magnitude more powerful.
|
| If you want to know the difference, I suggest nukemap. To
| put it in perspective, we're talking about destroying
| lower manhattan with the Fat Man, versus incinerating all
| five boroughs and shattering windows in White Plains, NY.
| I'm not talking about dick waving stunt like the Tsar
| Bomba, I'm talking about _deployed_ weapons.
| m4rtink wrote:
| That is far too shortsighted - its a perfect propelant
| for in space propulsion - the best we know of right now:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_prop
| uls...
|
| Also there are much more eficient ways to use a fusion
| bomb, than destroying cities:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_shaped_charge
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > However, before program cancellation, SDIO carried out the
| Clementine Deep Space Experiment, spectacularly demonstrating
| Brilliant Pebbles technologies.
|
| Well apart from the effectors actually required to rapidly
| intercept and destroy incoming missiles [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The only long-term result of the incredibly expensive Star Wars
| programs championed by Edward Teller was that other countries
| developed systems that would defeat it - and some military-
| industrial contractors got wealthy.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Apart from bringing the USSR to its financial knees you mean,
| thereby hastening its demise and with that ending (that phase
| of...?) the cold war?
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| If the SU was a gas station with an army, King Fahd probably
| did far more on the financial knees front.
| myself248 wrote:
| The book _Eccentric Orbits_ makes the point that the Iridium
| satellite constellation relies heavily on the basic
| technologies which were devloped, in some fledgling form, for
| SDI.
|
| Specifically, communications satellites before that were as
| dumb as possible, the 'bent pipe' model -- whatever goes up on
| one frequency, comes down on another. The satellite neither
| knew nor cared about the payload. The majority of electronics
| were actually analog.
|
| But with SDI, satellites had to communicate with each other.
| They had significant processing on-board. They made their own
| in-space mesh network, though that term wouldn't be used until
| later. They had to cope with possible loss of a satellite and
| keep the data flowing between the others.
|
| That's exactly the fundamental concept behind Iridium and
| several more constellations since, Starlink perhaps most
| familiar to the most HN readers.
|
| Motorola did a lot of the dev work for SDI, and after the
| project was scrapped, Motorola went on to build Iridium. Brooks
| argues in the book that the fundamental R&D for Iridium
| wouldn't have been practical without the groundwork laid, and
| paid for, by SDI.
| kortilla wrote:
| >That's exactly the fundamental concept behind Iridium and
| several more constellations since, Starlink perhaps most
| familiar to the most HN readers.
|
| This isn't at all a fundamental concept special to space.
| This happens all over the ground (smart networks tolerant to
| faults). Routing protocols, packet switching, multiplexing,
| link layer authentication, etc were all before SDI.
|
| Any special sauce for iridium or Starlink has nothing to do
| with the nodes being active routers.
| adastra22 wrote:
| That's how all communication satellites since the 60's have
| worked.
| inejge wrote:
| The same Lowell Wood whose group dreamed up the Brilliant Pebbles
| concept later came up with a return-to-the-Moon/Mars exploration
| scheme using some zany technology, including inflatable
| spacecraft, which the critics proceeded to name "Brilliant
| Condoms".
| pfdietz wrote:
| Was that the scheme that used the rocket engine with piston
| pumps?
| keepamovin wrote:
| An excellent bit of trivia!
|
| As if spacecraft particulary Rocketships weren't phallic enough
| already
| paulsutter wrote:
| Below shows the shortsightedness of government programs. They
| decided almost 40 years ago that the technologies were "not
| remotely ready for use", and stopped working on them
|
| Obviously we should have started anyway, and by now we'd be 40
| years further along. But apparently they can only think in
| election cycles (quote from the Wikipedia article on Brilliant
| Pebbles)
|
| > Teller and Wood initially proposed their own BMD system,
| Project Excalibur. This used an X-ray laser driven by a nuclear
| warhead that could attack dozens of ICBMs at once. In 1986,
| Excalibur failed several critical tests. Soon after, the American
| Physical Society published a report stating that none of the
| directed-energy weapons being studied by SDI were remotely ready
| for use.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Sometimes I wonder how much stuff was actually air quotes
| stopped working on, and how much stuff simply went black and
| became a classified program that's not released.
|
| Or a waived bigoted special access program that effectively
| doesn't have congressional oversight. or even the corporate
| side of those programs that doesn't even have government
| oversight necessarily.
| sillystuff wrote:
| Careful what you wish for. Missile defense is going to be
| viewed as an offensive weapon by any adversaries (and probably
| most/all of the folks pushing for it domestically as well).
|
| If you can destroy most of your target's counter-strike,
| deterrence against starting a nuclear war from mutually assured
| destruction is no longer a consideration. With an effective
| missile "defense" the US can first-strike nuke whomever they
| please with "acceptable" consequences for those in power
| (hiding in their bunkers). We have had presidents since Reagan
| who have lamented that they couldn't use our nukes.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I wouldn't characterize the history that way.
|
| First, there are multiple reasons that SDI was not pursued,
| beyond concerns around its feasibility. Most notably, bilateral
| agreements were signed with the Soviet Union to cease
| development of ballistic missile defense technology. Those
| agreements held until only very recently, and they seem to have
| been effective in mitigating the worst of the Cold War by both
| preserving the status quo around nuclear deterrence and heading
| off another extremely expensive large-scale development
| program. Both the US and the USSR agreed to only field two BMD
| systems and actually fielded only one at most during the Cold
| War; SDI just didn't fit into the political/military climate of
| the time and there were good reasons not to push that envelope.
|
| Besides, the extreme cost of SDI meant that there was
| _enormous_ opportunity cost. One of the criticisms of SDI is
| that it was such a sink of money and political capital that it
| delayed the development of other approaches to missile defense
| and broader nuclear security.
|
| Second, BMD efforts in no way stopped cold after the failure of
| SDI. SDI survives to the present day, after a couple of
| renamings as the Missile Defense Agency. MDA continued to
| develop many of the more practical aspects of SDI and these
| serve as the basis of BMD countermeasures today. The problem of
| BMD is very challenging considering adversarial countermeasures
| and even modern systems show poor efficacy, but that's not to
| say that MDA efforts haven't produced outcomes. Major
| improvements in fire control technology came out of the
| program, perhaps most significantly the development of phased-
| array and electronically scanned radar, and attendant broad
| improvements in microwave electronics.
| alexjplant wrote:
| And here I thought this was going to about the hi-fi snake oil
| "Brilliant Pebbles" [1]. Interesting to know that the guy selling
| these named them after a government program.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070929015257/https://machinady...
| some1else wrote:
| In December 2022, SpaceX announced Starshield[1], a separate
| Starlink service designed for government entities and military
| agencies.
|
| [1] https://spacenews.com/with-starshield-spacex-readies-for-
| bat...
| nradov wrote:
| Starshield won't be used directly for missile defense.
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