- 6 weeks ago
Documentary, Pandora's Box Part 2: by Adam Curtis To The Brink Of Eternity
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Three seconds, two seconds, one second, blast off!
00:16The age that we have just left, the 45 years since the end of the Second World War,
00:22was overshadowed by a strange partnership between science and fear.
00:25It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world.
00:32But then a group of men who were convinced they could control the new danger
00:38began to gain influence in America.
00:40They would manipulate terror.
00:42To do so, they would use the methods of science.
00:46Out of this would come a new age, free from the chaos and uncertainties
00:51that had led to terrible wars in the past.
00:55They believed, I think honestly at the beginning and fraudulently at the end,
01:14that they could create a better world and have control over this process
01:21of recreating the world through their science and their mathematics.
01:28Because it all sounded so damn rational and so damn reasonable as to be unassailable.
01:36Stout.
01:46Their opportunity came on October the 4th, 1957,
01:49when the Soviet Union suddenly launched the first ever satellite, Sputnik.
01:53It was amazing to the American people that here was this spacecraft up in the sky,
02:03and suddenly the American people realized that the Soviet Union was not as they were supposed to be,
02:08a backward power that was capable of providing us with caviar and ballet companies,
02:13but had no business being up in space.
02:15It was shocking to find out we'd been so wrong about them.
02:19It was shocking to discover that perhaps we had something to fear.
02:24Two months later, the Russians struck again.
02:26Sputnik, too, carried into space a dog called Laika.
02:30Change to Laika.
02:33As the Soviet Union flaunted its success, American politicians panicked.
02:39If Russia wins dominance of this completely new area,
02:43well, I think the consequences are fairly plain.
02:46Probable Soviet world domination.
02:53A sense of vulnerability swept America,
02:55for Laika could just as easily have been a nuclear warhead.
02:59To the military, it was a nightmare.
03:04Russia was their enemy,
03:06yet they had no idea how to defend themselves
03:08against this new weapon that might descend suddenly from outer space.
03:17But 3,000 miles away, on the California coast,
03:20scientists believed they had the answers.
03:23They worked at the RAND Corporation.
03:26RAND stood for research and development.
03:29It was the first scientific think tank.
03:32RAND was funded by the Air Force,
03:34but staffed by young academics who believed the scientific method
03:37could help bring the Cold War back under America's control.
03:41You're here at RAND in Santa Monica, California, on the Pacific Ocean,
03:45where groups of engineers, scientists, mathematicians, political scientists,
03:52all came together to begin working on problems originally of national defense and national security.
03:58The principal issue they were dealing with was trying to understand the future of American security in the nuclear age.
04:05It involved questions of technology.
04:08What would technology offer?
04:10How could it be harnessed to serve America's security?
04:14Science of the rigorous mathematical sort.
04:18The techniques that they were developing were generally categorized as systems analytic techniques.
04:29And what this consisted of was getting an enormous mathematical model
04:34that could be calculated thanks to the advent of these high-speed computers.
04:39Next, we can store a program to compute the required factors.
04:43We had a combination of technologists, economists, mathematicians,
04:50who could piece all of these disciplines together and feed their inputs into this huge, complex mathematical model.
05:00It meant that the world could be understood to a degree where it could be calculated and predicted.
05:08And that's what these systems analysts proceeded to do.
05:13To the scientists at Rand, the Cold War was a totally new system of conflict.
05:19Past experience and politics were no help in predicting how the other side would behave.
05:24They turned instead to a method of predicting behavior in uncertain situations, the theory of games.
05:31It had been developed by the famous mathematician John von Neumann, who had worked at Rand.
05:37In the 1920s in Berlin, he had watched poker games and seen how each player's strategy depended on what he thought the other side would rationally do.
05:48Von Neumann had shown how to give numerical values to the different choices and so decide on the best move.
05:55It was seen like a game.
05:58A game in which there were rational players and in which each side had certain information about the capabilities of the other side.
06:11The notion of Kriegspiel evolved at Rand, which was the game of chess in which you don't see the opponent's pieces.
06:24You have two chess boards, each complete, with a blind between them.
06:31And you have to presume from indirect information where the opponent's chess pieces are and then make the best judgment you can to get more information.
06:42Rand's strategists studied every piece of information they could find about the Soviet Union.
06:49They even wrote their own operational code of the Politburo and commissioned the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead to study the Russian attitude to authority.
06:57From this came complex mathematical models that showed the Air Force the best possible moves.
07:05But in the process, the idea of the Cold War as a political conflict that could be resolved was fading away.
07:12It became instead a mechanical system in which all parts worked according to rational laws, and that included the enemy.
07:19So the strategist's job was to keep it balanced in equilibrium.
07:25The most influential figure at Rand was Albert Wellstetter, a mathematical logician.
07:30He was also a devoted fan of modern architecture and abstract design,
07:34and a close friend of the famous architect Le Corbusier.
07:39Wellstetter saw the system of conflict as dangerously unstable.
07:42He was convinced the Soviet Union might attack, not because it wanted to,
07:47but because the rational logic of the system would force it to pull the trigger first.
07:52I drew the analogy with the Western gun duel.
07:59The gunman and the sheriff were not necessarily morally, were not morally equivalent in any sense,
08:11but they each might find themselves in a position where they had to draw first in order to survive.
08:21And this would be a rational act if they found themselves in that position.
08:30And so I wanted to design the posture where it would never made sense for an adversary, in his own terms, to attack.
08:49Wellstetter invented what were to become the familiar icons of the nuclear age.
08:56He proposed that hundreds of missiles should be protected in concrete silos underground.
09:01Fleets of bombers were to be in the air 24 hours a day, controlled by a system he designed called Failsafe.
09:08The aim was to convince the Soviets that if they attacked, America would always have enough missiles left to destroy them in return.
09:15The Cold War would become safer by stabilizing what Wallstetter called the delicate balance of terror.
09:23There are some instances where you may be ahead of us. For example, in the development of your, of the thrust of your rockets for the investigation of outer space.
09:36There may be some instances, for example, color television, where we're ahead of you.
09:40But in order for both of us, for both of us to benefit, for both of us to benefit...
09:47As America's politicians became increasingly intimidated by the Soviets, the strategists exercised a restraining influence.
09:54They argued that the enemy was dangerous, but rational. It was not a satanic monster that had to be destroyed.
10:01We have the resources, intelligence and courage to make the correct decisions.
10:07There were real dangers, real dangers of the subversion or attack on, or military attack on Europe.
10:21Our aim was to design a more stable balance.
10:31But the rise of the strategists was only part of the changes brought about by the Cold War.
10:36After Sputnik and the Cold War started, then they started developing all of these missiles.
10:43All of the companies would bid for them and build them, and they'd bring them out here and test them.
10:49From, like, the Patriots, 16 years, and it's been tested, still testing it.
10:55They're adding to it now to make it reach out further.
10:59Here is the cruise missile. It was here. That was the meanest-looking one that I've ever seen.
11:13To see something like that was out of this world. It was unreal.
11:17Lift off.
11:19In 1961, the influence of the men from Rand increased dramatically.
11:23The new president, John F. Kennedy, turned to them to impose order,
11:27not only on nuclear strategy, but on the arms race, which was threatening to run out of control.
11:32Kennedy was convinced the scientific method was the key to solving the problems of modern industrialized societies.
11:50I believe the Soviet Union airs first in outer space.
11:56We may have made more shots at the size of their rocket thrust and all the rest.
12:00You yourself said to Khrushchev, you may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we're ahead of you in colour television.
12:05I think that colour television is not as important as rocket thrust.
12:14Leading members of the Rand Corporation were asked to become the aides of the new Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara.
12:21McNamara had previously run the Ford Motor Company and used systems analysis to rationalize production.
12:27Now he told the strategists to do the same with America's defence.
12:30They were no longer advisers to the military, they had become the masters.
12:37But they had hardly begun work when they received some astonishing news.
12:41A new reconnaissance satellite showed that far from having 600 missiles, as the Air Force had claimed,
12:47the Soviets had only four.
12:49It was severely embarrassing for the strategists, because the Air Force figures had been the basis of much of their work.
12:55The Air Force intelligence inputs were mainly parochial, and they were designed to make out the enemy, principally the Soviets, at their very worst.
13:08Because if they did that, the Air Force would get ever so many billions of dollars to build more airplanes, more missiles, more everything.
13:16And so these analysts were being misled from the very beginning.
13:22For years the Air Force had been showing slides of Russian monasteries and war memorials claiming they were missile silos in disguise.
13:31The awkward question now was whether Rand studies were equally fictitious.
13:35But the strategists were undeterred.
13:39The Russians had fewer missiles, and the satellite showed where they were.
13:44So it would be possible, if a nuclear war happened, to mount selective strikes and thus control and even win the conflict.
13:51This was combating the notion that there was only one big spasm kind of war, and once things started, all you did was shut your eyes, close your ears, fire everything.
14:03I was once doing a study in the Pentagon with the people who were responsible for gathering all the data about nuclear detonations anywhere on the continent.
14:16And I asked the question, how do you tell when the war is over?
14:19And it looked as if the question had never occurred to them before.
14:22And I thought, well, this is important, that somebody must be attending to how the war will be ended, as well as simply to how to start it efficiently.
14:33Under the strategists' new plans, Soviet military targets would be annihilated first.
14:39America's remaining missiles would be held back to threaten Russia's cities and force the Soviet government into submission.
14:46The most notorious proponent of these plans was Herman Kahn.
14:50He had left Rand and set up his own think tank, the Hudson Institute, near New York.
14:56He was convinced a controlled nuclear war was possible.
15:00Just because you go to war, that itself may be an irrational act, or may not.
15:04But even if you irrationally decide to go to war, that doesn't mean you have to fight it in a wildly irrational fashion.
15:10Many people feel that even if they survive a nuclear war, that things are going to be so awful and life is going to be so destroyed everywhere that they'd actually rather be dead.
15:20That's a almost completely standard reaction, and it's really a reaction to try to prevent thinking about the subject.
15:26And I make a comment which always gets me into a great deal of criticism. Let me make it anyway.
15:30Objective studies literally indicate that the post-war environment, while hostile to human life, more hostile than the pre-war environment, will not be so hostile as to, quote, preclude normal and happy lives.
15:42The Institute is now deserted, but in the early 60s it was full of men and women working out what to do if the worst happened.
15:50Cities on both sides were given precise values.
15:54Then scenarios were constructed, like equations, showing what to do in any eventuality.
15:58There's an accident. We drop a bomb on Kiev. It was a fluke. We didn't mean to. The Russians believe we didn't mean to. Then there's a negotiation about where can we drop a bomb on something that's of equal value of Kiev. If we drop the bomb, we can stop now. You know, if we destroy something equal, you've got a sort of a status quo.
16:18But if you escalate, if you go from our equivalent of Kiev to our equivalent of Moscow, it's a very big escalation.
16:29In a controlled nuclear war, populations of cities would become like pawns in a game of bargaining with nuclear weapons.
16:36So the strategists persuaded America's leaders to take civil defence seriously.
16:41Now that we're convinced that Russia can deliver a devastating weapon here to the San Fernando Valley, and that the majority of the radioactivity is short-lived, how can we protect ourselves against this particular hazard? We must have concentrated...
17:01Herman Kahn believed that America's cities would have to be evacuated two or three times a decade as America played brinkmanship with the Soviet Union.
17:10Everyone would have to be taught to think rationally about nuclear war.
17:15I can remember growing up having dinner table discussions about, let us assume something happens.
17:22We go down in our bomb shelter. We can support six or ten or twelve people in the shelter.
17:27The neighbors start banging on the door. Let us in. Let our children in. Who do we let in?
17:34That's sort of unthinkable when you're ten years old or nine years old.
17:38I mean, that's what I remember growing up discussing things like that, because it was possible.
17:43If it was possible, it was worthy to talk about, you know, rather than just saying, well, you throw up your hands and say it's unthinkable.
17:49These analysts were human beings. They were no ordinary human beings. They had more than a smattering of megalomaniacs.
17:59Herman Kahn being one of them. Albert Wollstetter, another megalomaniac.
18:05It was this feeling that they could gain control and a huge degree of power by doing these studies.
18:15And so these analysts indeed achieved their grandiose dream. They were in full control.
18:23Then, as if on cue, a crisis occurred that seemed the perfect test for these theories.
18:32In October 1962, America discovered the Soviet Union was sighting nuclear missiles in Cuba.
18:39The question was how to force them to stop. To the strategists, it was a clear opportunity for their scenarios.
18:45While journalists waited outside, President Kennedy's cabinet met to decide whether to attack Cuba.
18:54Their discussions were recorded.
18:56The tapes show a group of men facing the reality of a nuclear crisis.
19:01As the strategists had told them, it was a game of bargaining.
19:05But confronted by the need for action, they found they had no idea how the other side would respond to any move they made.
19:10They weren't even sure if the other side was rational.
19:15It seems to me, almost certain, that any one of these forms of direct military action will lead to a Soviet military response.
19:24Of some type, some place in the world.
19:27But they may be thinking that they can either bargain Berlin and Cuba against each other.
19:33Or that they could provoke us into a kind of action in Cuba, which would give an umbrella for them to take action with respect to Berlin.
19:44And if they could provoke us into taking the first over action, then the world would be confused and they would have justification for making a move somewhere else.
19:53For the first time in the beginning, really to wonder whether Mr Khrushchev is entirely rational about Berlin.
20:00Because if they shoot those minions, we are in general nuclear war.
20:04As the crisis escalated, the prospect of nuclear war became very real.
20:09If it happened, the strategists' elaborate plans were supposed to offer the President ways to control it.
20:13Well, I must say I was scared to death that we were going to get ourselves in a nuclear exchange.
20:20And I wasn't sure until the final culmination of the thing that we were going to escape that.
20:28I think we took a hell of a chance.
20:31If that nuclear exchange had happened, do you think it could have been controlled in the way the strategists argued?
20:36No, I think we had testimony from these characters day and night on how do you contain a nuclear exchange.
20:46I never believed any of it.
20:48Half or three quarters of Los Angeles is being destroyed.
20:51Well, how are you going to continue to live?
20:53Well, the first thing we have to recognize is that if half of Los Angeles is destroyed,
20:58maybe 80, 90 percent of the people will be dead and there will be fewer mouths to feed.
21:02And those of us who will survive will have more water and food to divide up.
21:07Well, isn't this a very good argument from a purely selfish point of view of not wanting many people to make shelters?
21:14This is true, but on the other hand, those of us who have been building shelters,
21:19we believe for the most part that if we as citizens do something to demonstrate that we are prepared to withstand an attack,
21:26the Russians, or whoever it is, will be less likely to launch an attack against us.
21:32In the end, President Kennedy ignored any idea of controlled war.
21:37Instead, he told the Russians that if they launched just one missile from Cuba,
21:41he would retaliate with America's entire arsenal.
21:44To the strategists, this threat was irrational and humiliating.
21:48My only recollection is of one of disappointment.
21:53I mean, President Kennedy indicated that the United States had the capability to engage in massive retaliation,
22:01which led several of us to wonder why he had used this particular language and why he hadn't gone to what at least we thought of as the more powerful and rational approach to deterrence.
22:19It seemed to me that it would be utter folly for us to go in what one of my colleagues, Herman Kahn, called a wargasm and try and destroy everything we could,
22:34because, in effect, that would sign the death warrant of the United States.
22:39The Russians backed down, and America celebrated.
22:45But Cuba had shown, like a flash of lightning on a dark night, how the Cold War really worked, through fear, not reason.
22:53Robert McNamara began to back away from the elaborate plans for controlling nuclear war.
22:59Yet the strategists remained influential.
23:02Politicians found their rational approach irresistible.
23:05I think the Americans have made a kind of theology about using scientific means to solve political problems.
23:15The belief that this is a kind of substitute for religion, that you turn to these mysterious forces which were now begun to harness for the first time,
23:25and we can use them and therefore we become the master of everything and we don't have to worry about others.
23:29Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents.
23:40It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.
23:50It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body...
23:59In 1964, President Johnson promised a new approach to government, which would solve deep-rooted social problems, such as poverty.
24:06Its architects were to be the systems analysts from RAND.
24:09President Johnson had a vision of a society which would be glorious.
24:16And he saw in the analytical strength, the rationality that was being applied in some of the military problems, an aid, a force that could be applied also in the civilian areas.
24:28And so we were apostles. We were apostles of rationality. We were to go out and apply those techniques and methods of thinking to civilian problems, to bring to bear systematic rational thinking to them.
24:46And we believed that they were solvable problems. They were not insoluble.
24:50On the President's orders, many of the men who had gone from RAND to the Pentagon now moved on into other areas of government.
24:59They had become all-powerful courtiers in an age of reason. Their methods were being used to build a better world in America.
25:07As their power increased, so did their ambitions. Their techniques, they said, could even predict the future.
25:13This is not a crap game. It's a serious game.
25:27Rolling the dice is Dr. Olaf Helmer of the RAND Corporation.
25:31He is conducting a simulation exercise.
25:33A panel of experts has studied a list of possible 21st century developments, from personality-controlled drugs to household robots.
25:43They have estimated the numerical probability of each.
25:46The current fascination of a new intellectual breed, the futurists.
25:52We wind up with a world which has the following features.
25:56We have fertility control, 100-year lifespan, controlled thermonuclear power, continued automation, genetic control, man-machine symbiosis, household robots, wideband communications, opinion control, and continued urbanization.
26:13I would guess in a hundred and certainly less than 200 years, if things go all well, 90-95% of the world's people will be living at higher than the current American standards of living.
26:21Young men will go from everywhere poor, everywhere in danger of hunger, starvation, to a life in which the technology largely insulates you from nature.
26:33But at the very moment when the men from RAND were promising America a utopia, their whole approach was about to meet its nemesis.
26:40In 1965, Lyndon Johnson began a bombing campaign of North Vietnam.
26:51The targets were chosen for their psychological value, pawns in a game of persuading the Communists to withdraw from the South.
26:59It was inspired by the work of RAND's leading exponent of game theory, Thomas Schelling.
27:04It was a war in which we were attempting to intimidate an enemy into discontinuing what he was doing, in which it was believed that if you made it painful enough for the North Vietnamese, they would call off their campaign.
27:22So I think there may have been plenty in my writings that people thought applied to this kind of war because this was a vicious, violent bargaining process.
27:37And the effort was to convince the other side that we could tolerate more pain and damage than they could.
27:45But the Communists did not behave in a rational way and retreat. Reluctantly, the strategists in the Pentagon agreed to send thousands of American troops to Vietnam.
27:55Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die! Glory, glory, what a hell of a way to die!
28:03By now, the systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon.
28:07McNamara's whiz kids were convinced that the battle against the Viet Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way.
28:13Indeed, they could see no other way.
28:18The problem with the Vietnam War was that it was not a war for territory.
28:24What American policymakers needed, what the Pentagon needed, was some way of, how do you tell if we're winning or not?
28:31In the absence of being able to take Hanoi or something like that, they had to find other indicators.
28:37And what came out of that was a whole array of statistics.
28:43It ranged from the body count down to number of missions flown, tonnage of bombs dropped, number of enemy structures destroyed, tonnage of food captured from the enemy.
28:56This is a chart that was used by one of the think tanks to demonstrate how to neutralize an enemy village.
29:08Showing a flow of how action can be taken to neutralize an enemy force.
29:14Is this village loyal to the belligerent? Consider the next village. Is this village loyal to the opponent?
29:22No. Based on reliable information, what does this village perceive as its major problem?
29:28It's almost like a game of monopoly, isn't it?
29:31To Mr. McNamara and his brain trust of whiz kids, this was probably equal to the U.S. Constitution. It was the ultimate document.
29:39If one thinks of a political and military aggression...
29:46I will tell you, for example, that long sessions that we used to have on Vietnam, when McNamara would be urging a certain measure,
29:56and the president would say, well, Bob, what do you think the chances of success are?
30:00Oh, he would say, I think it's 55% and 45% failure.
30:05And I would speak up and say, Bob, are you sure it isn't 47% and 42%?
30:10You know, I mean, this was a frame of mind.
30:14And nothing was ever expressed, except in quantitative terms, as far as McNamara was concerned, and he spoke for the whole Defense Department.
30:22Let me give you an example of the way the numbers worked.
30:27I happened to be on a patrol in late spring, early summer of 1967, where we spotted, observed a Vietnamese national some hundreds of meters away from us, running away from us.
30:43And standard procedure at that time was to, you could fire on anybody running away from you.
30:54When we got to the body, we discovered that it was an unarmed older woman, 55, 60 years old.
31:01And in the intelligence summary that I prepared the next day, I put in exactly what happened.
31:08By the time that that report reached the division level, that dead woman had become an ageless, genderless Viet Cong with a Chinese Communist grenade.
31:21And these numbers, these reports, these statistics directly obscured the reality and presented a picture that was 180 degrees removed from reality.
31:39And yet when you take all those numbers and dump them in the Pentagon, those guys sit there and they count up the numbers and they can go, we're winning.
31:46In 1967, Robert McNamara resigned in failure.
31:53Before he went, he made a speech in Montreal.
31:56He ended it by asking, who is man?
32:00Is he a rational animal?
32:02If he is, then the goals can be achieved.
32:05But if he isn't, then there is little point in making the effort.
32:08I don't even know.
32:09I don't even know.
32:15McNamara had been the patron of the strategists.
32:18Without him, much of their power disappeared.
32:20They and their think tanks became targets for the mass protests against the war.
32:26Hundreds of people protested and marched up the driveway and planted crosses in the front yard of the Institute.
32:34And it made, it made me and many of us here very angry because they were making assumptions about what we thought and they wouldn't even check.
32:43They thought we were warmongers up here.
32:46There's no question about that.
32:48They offered us jobs to go other places.
32:52As we, when we would leave the driveway for lunch, they'd stop and offer us jobs if we'd leave Hudson Institute.
32:59None of us ever did.
33:00America's politicians had originally been attracted to the strategists because they promised a rational, controllable world.
33:17But in Vietnam, their methods had been used to create a fiction.
33:22The scientific approach had been corrupted to preserve the politicians' power.
33:26When we started all this systems analysis business, all these many, many years ago, we stepped through the looking glass.
33:40Where people did the weirdest things, had the most perverse kind of logic imaginable, and yet claimed, you know, to have the most precise understanding of everything.
33:55And would give these perversely, superbly rational, you know, logical explanations as to why they were doing all of these perverse and irrational things.
34:07That was a world that's always existed.
34:09It's always been a perverse, irrational world.
34:12That was the world that these systems analysts stepped into.
34:16That's the mirror.
34:17That's the mirror.
34:18They should have stayed on the right side.
34:20That's the mirror.
34:21They should have stayed on the right side.
34:22What they left behind was mad.
34:37Mutual assured destruction.
34:39A giant system of nuclear defense with the two sides locked together, watching each other for the slightest move.
34:44But by the mid-70s, it seemed to have become an end in itself.
34:49We are part of the Aerospace Defense Command.
34:53We want to maintain surveillance of all these satellites to continually know where they are, and also to determine if a new satellite is up there.
35:03Why is that information required?
35:06Well, you got me.
35:10The system of deterrence had begun as rational.
35:16It now seemed a dangerous trap.
35:18If either side decided to attack, it would mean the end of the world.
35:22Then a politician came to power who believed that this was just what the Soviets were about to do.
35:28Ladies and gentlemen, the next president of the United States of America, Ronald Reagan!
35:34In 1980, on the campaign trail, Reagan came face to face with the delicate balance of terror.
35:41He visited NORAD, the North American Air Defense Command, to see what they did.
35:46And he went and they showed him all these magnificent warning systems.
35:50And then he said, after you get the first warning, what do you do?
35:53And they said, well, we follow these incoming missiles a little further and keep track of them better.
35:57And he kept asking, and the answer he wanted to hear was, and finally we shooed them down.
36:07But they never got to that, because, in fact, there was no missile defense.
36:13We had missile warning, but we had no missile defense.
36:17And he thought, like a lot of people thought, that that's kind of crazy.
36:21I mean, that's got to be fixed. We've really got to work on defense.
36:25If science can do all these wonderful things that it's done in the past,
36:29it surely can accomplish this if we will just unleash it.
36:34But this was an age of disillusion with science.
36:37And the people who came forward with the solution the president wanted were zealots.
36:42Scientists like the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller.
36:45He had long dreamt of a defensive missile shield in space.
36:50A lobby group was formed that proposed such a defense could be assembled
36:54using the new space shuttle.
36:56It was led not by strategists, but by two science fiction writers.
37:01We ended up as the kitchen cabinet on space and military technology.
37:05We had access to the president, and because we had that access,
37:11nobody refused an invitation to come to the meetings, but it amounted to.
37:16So we ended up with a bunch of four-star generals and captains of industry
37:21and the entire military industrial complex of the United States
37:25in Larry Niven's living room.
37:27And in fact, Jim Ransom pointed out that one RPG through the plate glass window
37:34of Larry's thing would have pretty well crippled the United States technologically
37:37for 20 years, and he was probably right.
37:41And science fiction writers, by the way, turned out to be very key to this process
37:46because they could write the documents that were understandable by the president.
37:53Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope.
37:57It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat
38:02with measures that are defensive.
38:03Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base
38:10and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today.
38:14What if free people could live secure in the knowledge
38:18that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles
38:22before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
38:24My fellow Americans, I ask for your prayers...
38:34Many of Reagan's cabinet, including his Secretary of State,
38:37had had no advance warning of this proposal.
38:39As they watched in the White House that night,
38:42they quickly discovered this was not going to be a magic escape from the cycle of terror.
38:46Just another twist.
38:47During dinner, I happened to sit next to the then Secretary of State, George Shultz.
38:53And he said, is it possible to put a laser up in the sky with fission power
38:57to knock out a Russian ICBM?
38:59And I said, yes, it is possible.
39:02Well, he said, doesn't that really make a tremendous difference?
39:07I said, not necessarily.
39:09If I were the Russians, I would be thinking about carrying a mirror
39:13and you shine your high-powered light at me that can destroy me
39:16and you'll get it back in your face.
39:18Well then, it's no good.
39:21What you're saying, this is an offense versus defense battle
39:24that has always gone on.
39:26For every offensive weapon, there's a defense.
39:28And then when there's a defense, there's an offense that beats the defense.
39:31And this goes on into infinity.
39:33And this is just some more of the same.
39:34From arrows to rockets, this city built its fame.
39:41After Reagan announced the laser was coming to Oro Grande,
39:47it was a cold war all over again.
39:49They were moving it out here to intercept any big, small bombs
39:55that would come in to our properties.
40:00It became known as Star Wars.
40:02Dramatic tests of different high-powered lasers were shown on American television.
40:07But behind the scenes, there were serious problems,
40:10especially with the grandiose promises of Edward Teller
40:13working at the Livermore Laboratory.
40:15There were a small number of X-ray laser tests done underground in Nevada,
40:20but these tests were failures as weapons.
40:24No way could this thing have been made into a weapon for use in space.
40:28In that sense, there were failures.
40:29Yet, in spite of this, Edward Teller wrote glowing letters
40:34to high government officials under President Reagan.
40:37This X-ray laser is a remarkable invention.
40:44And I am not allowed to tell you more.
40:47I wish I would be allowed and I think I should be allowed to tell you more
40:50because the Soviets know about it anyway in detail.
40:55Teller wrote,
40:56For instance, a single X-ray laser module the size of an executive desk
41:02which applied this technology could potentially shoot down the entire Soviet land-based missile force
41:09if it were to be launched into the module's field of view.
41:11Now, this kind of statement is absolute blithering nonsense.
41:16It is science fiction.
41:18It's fantasy.
41:20I also think it's dishonest.
41:22It was a corruption of science technology
41:25to promote a fantastic idea that could not ever work.
41:28But to those who had first persuaded the president, such problems were irrelevant.
41:40Yeah! Blow him away!
41:43Just kill him!
41:45Yee-haw!
41:46As it became apparent that the Soviet Union was close to collapse,
41:50they claimed that all along the idea had really been to bankrupt the evil empire.
41:55I love these little machines.
41:58Got him!
42:00Son of a gun!
42:01It worked!
42:03You know, we...
42:05We were putting together a...
42:07We used all the rational analysis we could to put together a strategy
42:11to bring down the evil empire, and we did it!
42:14It happened!
42:16Four...
42:17Three...
42:18Two...
42:19One...
42:20We literally took a set of scientific concepts,
42:23turned them into a policy, got it adopted,
42:26and used it to bring about, in my judgment,
42:28one of the key events of the 20th century.
42:31Science did that!
42:33It brought down the evil empire!
42:35Challenger, they're adding down the range.
42:38There were many reasons why the Soviet Union finally collapsed,
42:41but few people would count Star Wars among them.
42:45For 40 years, the world had been frozen by the two superpowers locked in conflict.
42:51The men from RAND had seen this as a system simple enough to control with the methods of science.
42:56When America's adversary crumbled, that simple world was replaced by complexity and chaos, far beyond the reach of their abstract theories.
43:14We here at RAND believe that the last 40 years, the period from the end of World War II until 1989, was really a very unique period in history.
43:30Most of the history of Europe, or of the world, has involved shifting balances of power and constant warfare.
43:42Whereas the last 40 years, the balance of power was fairly rigidly frozen.
43:47And now we're seeing the balance of power is going to now become more complex the way it was before, in the 18th century and 17th century.
43:56Suddenly, the Soviet empire collapsed.
44:14What had kept me going through all these many, many years of professional activity disappeared.
44:24There was no enemy.
44:27We've returned to what we'd never left. Human normalcy.
44:35And we're going to be in for more surprises. I don't know what.
44:39We're going to be in for more wars. Of what kind? Of what magnitude? I don't know.
44:46The strategists were part of an age that believed political problems could be solved by the application of knowledge.
44:53Their success in preventing Armageddon seemed proof that it worked.
44:58But they were lucky enough to inhabit a world that was simple, frozen by the deadlock between the superpowers.
45:04That odd moment in history is over.
45:07And with it has gone the optimistic faith that the world was being changed for the better.
45:12We are about to take off on the highway of tomorrow.
45:15Stand by.
45:17Tomorrow, tomorrow, our dreams will come true.
45:31Together, together, we'll make the world new.
45:45We'll be the most balanced and present.
45:47We'll do better.
45:49We'll be the best.
45:51All right.
45:53Then we will be the best.
45:55We'll be the best.
45:57We'll be the best.
Recommended
45:55
|
Up next
44:06
45:52
45:52
45:07
0:12
59:03
51:50
0:45
2:06
45:49
1:28
1:48
Be the first to comment