- 4 months ago
A look at the battle between the U.S. and Soviet Union to turn outer space from a world of exploration to one of strategic defense, including the then-recent introduction by U.S. President Ronald Reagan of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
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00:00major funding for frontline is provided by the corporation for public broadcasting
00:16additional funding is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide
00:21and by the chubb group of insurance companies for over 100 years providing worldwide business
00:27and personal insurance through independent agents and brokers let me share with you a vision of the
00:33future which offers hope what if free people could live secure in the knowledge that we could
00:40intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our
00:48the arms race is leaving the planet earth and reaching up into outer space
00:52tonight on frontline we look at who will win this race for the high ground
01:13from the network of public television stations a presentation of kcts seattle wnet new york
01:20wpbt miami wtvs detroit and wgbh boston this is frontline with jessica savage
01:34three weeks ago president reagan called for a massive push to develop space weapons it startled
01:40everyone critics called it star wars thinking science fiction fantasy the soviet union charge
01:47it opened the floodgates to a new more dangerous arms race it's not science fiction the technological
01:54capability is real as real as this this is an actual laser that is a model of a satellite
02:06watch everybody ready okay
02:09that's only a small laser that's the kind routinely used in research and industry it is sure not
02:22the one luke skywalker used to blast darth vader this one here is about as primitive as the beginning was
02:28and say kitty hawk to the jumbo 747 jet how large a leap is it from this laser to a battle station in space
02:37and while carrying the arms race out there make us any safer down here tonight you're about to see
02:43a film which explores these questions it's called race for the high ground it's produced by the bbc
02:50and by judith vecchione for frontline it traces the evolution of technology and the arms race
02:56in 25 years we've gone from designing satellites to designing weapons to blast them out of the sky
03:02during that quarter century the u.s and the soviet union have used space peacefully for communications
03:09and surveillance
03:13but now military strategists believe space should be thought of as the high ground the critical area
03:19of battle that each side needs to control and they say the weapons in this new battleground will be
03:25particle beams and lasers there have been a number of people who have known for some years in this
03:33country that if you could get a laser into space and a particle beam into space and project it back
03:40toward the earth one of the byproducts that we discovered accidentally is that both produce a giant
03:48bang a blast impact on a ground target
03:55now the significance of that is that in one or two orbits a few stations could probably destroy
04:02every ship at sea every airplane in the world manned or unmanned and every missile the ultimate defense
04:10the previous president of the united states i am advised was shown satellite photography
04:22of the world's largest laser device and the world's first particle beam prototype weapon deployed at a
04:31weapons test center seri shagan seri shagan is near the chinese border only the intelligence community
04:39knows what exists at this remote research station but this is a drawing of what general keegan believes is there
04:46a huge accelerator capable of producing highly energized beams of positively charged particles protons
04:57general keegan claims it's a prototype for beam weapons that could work inside or outside the atmosphere
05:02what we learned apparently from this new deployment is that the power generation devices
05:10that have been developed for these are probably a generation ahead of where i thought they were in 1977
05:20one power or another is going to seize that strategic high ground of space and then dominate what else is on
05:29the globe now this can be the soviets with a pox sovietica or it can be a consortium of the western world with a pox occidentalis
05:37but it's going to be one or the other it's not a who knew high ground from which one country is going to dominate the earth
05:44what i see it is is a new battlefield for the nuclear arms race a place that we can
05:49move with great expense but with no greater security a place where
05:57the danger of nuclear war will not be reduced as some say but will be increased
06:02so there is a debate and as one air force general recently put it space is not a mission it's a place
06:09it's a theater of operation but the militarization of space has not happened overnight
06:16this year the pentagon space budget is two billion dollars more than nasa's the agency set up to
06:21exploit space peacefully and the soviet union is spending billions too so space has become an
06:27extension of the u.s soviet rivalry here on earth where are we headed it's helpful as well as fascinating
06:35to look back now into the history of the superpower arms race
06:38the arms race and the space race have always run side by side
06:52repeatedly over the last 30 years we've worried that the soviets were ahead
06:56in 1952 america exploded the first hydrogen bomb at anawetok atoll in the pacific
07:14three years later western experts were shocked the soviets tested an h-bomb too
07:18that same year 1955 american scientists heard of a gigantic particle accelerator being built at dubna
07:32near moscow it was bigger than anything we had a physics gap had opened the soviets were not just even
07:40but well ahead in physics research and at a military parade in moscow that year western observers spotted a new
07:49long-range bomber the bison
07:54the pentagon believed the soviets would soon have 700 of them there would be a bomber gap
08:00then on october 4th 1957 the soviet union astounded the world by being the first nation to launch an
08:13artificial satellite into space sputnik
08:21a month later it was another russian first a live animal the dog laika in outer space
08:30american scientists had been planning a satellite launch for some time
08:34they finally got the go-ahead on december 6th 1957
08:45the failure nicknamed kaputnik fed american fears of technological inferiority
08:54on april 12 1961 another humiliation for the american space program
09:00soviet cosmonaut yori gagarin became the first man in space
09:11there was now no doubt that the soviet union was a scientific superpower of the first order
09:16american attention also focused on something else the rockets that launched the russian satellites
09:31if a rocket could lift sputnik into orbit it could easily carry a nuclear bomb from the soviet union
09:36to the united states president kennedy declared a missile gap
09:46early u2 reconnaissance photographs suggested the soviets were already building silos to house these
09:52rockets our response to this gap was a massive program of research and development
09:57by the early 1960s a huge fleet of titan and minute man missiles had been built and deployed
10:06those were the american perceptions that pushed us into the space race
10:10but what were the facts how real was this threat of soviet superiority
10:15let's look at that history again the nuclear accelerator at dubna did not allow the russians to get ahead in physics
10:26in fact it took until the 1960s to shake the bugs out of it
10:34as for the bison bomber the russians had flown their bisons around red square in circles
10:39to create the illusion of greater numbers the bison was incapable of flying the long distances it was
10:44designed for so the russians actually built very few of them
10:51nothing typifies the american overreaction more than the case of the soviet nuclear airplane
10:56in 1958 the journal aviation week began publishing articles about it they printed diagrams of how the nuclear
11:04power plant worked and how the plane was likely to be deployed the air force which had been toying with
11:10the idea for several years was stung into action congress appropriated funds and a number of different
11:16designs for the american version emerged a billion dollars eventually was spent
11:26but fiction had replaced fact in defense circles the russian nuclear airplane never even existed
11:32the most impressive example of soviet technological supremacy however seemed to be the space race
11:44but now there's a book that claims the russians owed their astonishing sputnik launch
11:48to the shrewdness of one man rocket designer sergey koraliev
11:55he uh was given piles of references piles of articles
12:02from american magazines where the americans described in minute detail their um satellite
12:11which was to be launched during the international geophysical year 1957-58
12:17so koraliev suddenly got a brilliant idea he found his way to khrushchev and offered to
12:26undercut the americans with the satellite he personally supervised the production of this sphere
12:34of this little sphere the sputnik one and they fitted into it nothing but a simple radio bleeper
12:44the bleeper had psychological impact far out of proportion to its technological merits
12:49when such competence in things material is at the service of leaders who have so little regard for
12:58things human and who command the power of an empire there is danger ahead for free men everywhere
13:07that my friends is the reason why the american people have been so aroused about the earth's
13:12satellites it's not widely known i suspect that when sputnik was launched both to impress washington dc and
13:19also to over awe many of khrushchev's own political opponents within within the kremlin
13:26this was the height of the cold war and khrushchev knew he could exploit the space program for political
13:32ends as the years went by he kept demanding more and more of these very impressive spectaculars
13:38to coincide with his 1960 visit to new york he planned another first a space shot to mars
13:48but he was stretching his rocket scientists too far too fast two rockets were launched and both failed
13:55they fell back from the edge of space the last rocket was attempted to be fired it didn't work at
14:00all it didn't even leave the launch pad rather than doing the safe procedure of waiting drain the fuel
14:05and inspecting the rocket later instead apparently according to several different reports including
14:10khrushchev's own memoirs later the men were went were ordered out to launch pad to inspect the vehicle
14:16while it was still fueled
14:19the missile detonated or caught fire or fell over exploded killing several dozen people
14:28khrushchev continued to push the russian space program for political gains
14:35a prime example of how science technology and safety had gone completely out the window by then for
14:49the soviets was the flight of vosh god one in 1963. it was done because the americans announced the germany
14:58program and the germany had to be flown by a team of two so khrushchev called karalev and said send three
15:09and karalev tried to explain to him that that would be absolutely impossible
15:16despite karalev's protests three it was but vosh god one was merely an adaptation of the only
15:22spacecraft the russians had available the one-man vostok so according to oberg and vladimirov
15:28the ejection seats had to be ripped out the safety parachute was discarded there was only enough
15:33food and water for one day in space and because of the bulk the cosmonauts weren't even given
15:39spacesuits it's a miracle they got back alive vosh god one was khrushchev's last bluff during that
15:47flight he was replaced by leonid brezhnev
15:5018 months later karalev died according to oberg any hopes the soviets had of beating the americans
15:59to the moon died with him 60 seconds lights on and in july 1969 apollo 11 touched down in the sea of
16:10tranquility
16:11breaking up some dust forward forward drift into the right a little
16:18contact light okay engine stop the eagle has landed
16:33america had won the race to the moon and our pride was restored as american technology proved
16:39itself superior
16:52why had the soviet bluff worked so well for so long
16:57one reason was the americans did not come face to face with the soviet space technology for years
17:02in fact until 1975 the apollo soyuz linkup the americans had to design the docking module and do
17:09the docking maneuvers soyuz simply couldn't carry enough fuel and they rendezvoused in the lowest earth
17:15orbit the americans had ever experienced it was as high as soyuz could go contact
17:23if before the apollo soyuz the americans still had some illusions about the state of art
17:33in the soviet space then after that project being not stupid they understood well nigh everything
17:42they came crazy back and said look they have a drum a revolving drum
17:50inside a sort of a prehistoric uh program appliance
17:55oh where uh all the the flight program is somehow recorded on that drum and the drum is revolving slowly
18:04and that was their substitute for a computer in many areas their technology is still more crude than ours
18:15but it is important to remember that the soviet space program can do what it needs to
18:21they continue to put their soyuz salut stations into orbit
18:24they had 45 men in space in the six-year hiatus between our moonshot last moonshot and the shuttle
18:36and they weren't up there trying to set records in the guinness book they were up there for serious reasons
18:44what were the soviets doing in those six years some defense analysts think they were and still are
18:51preparing to test laser and beam weapon technologies
19:00this again is a small laser laser and particle beam accelerators are basic tools of physics research
19:07enlarged developed military strategists are fascinated by their potentials they could disrupt delicate
19:13electronics disable engines fuse warheads and all of this quite literally in a flash traveling at the
19:21speed of light itself now in theory a missile would move only a few feet before a laser or particle
19:27beam arrived from thousands of miles away to destroy it and this brings us to the debate over president
19:33reagan's call to develop space weapons can these weapons be developed how long would it take would they work
19:43two and a half billion dollars have already been spent on directed energy research in this country
19:48among the first takers the navy it wants beam weapons to defend its aircraft carriers
20:00the project was started in 1974 at the lawrence livermore laboratories in california
20:06the project leader is dr richard briggs and this is his prototype accelerator
20:12we can think of the accelerator as a kind of giant gun which uses electrons as its subatomic bullets
20:19the electrons are produced in this end of the accelerator
20:26powerful magnetic coils force the electrons into a tight beam which is then energized to five million
20:32electron volts
20:33when the electron bullets are shot into the air their tremendous energy creates a magnetic field
20:42theoretically this holds the beam together like a color but it also creates problems
20:50a beam which is held together by its own magnetic field in an air media like this
20:56can undergo kink-like disturbances and begin to thrash about inside the tube in fact under some conditions
21:04we find that the beam hits the side of the tube and can damage it as happened in this case
21:13the electrons in this prototype system just don't have enough energy for the magnetic collar to hold
21:18them together so briggs has built a much more powerful accelerator near livermore capable of
21:24delivering 10 times as much energy but to get the higher energies he's paid a penalty in size
21:32the whole thing is as big as a factory
21:38i think there are certainly a number of things one could do to
21:42to scale down both the size and the weight of these kinds of machines
21:46will we ever be able to fit an accelerator into an aircraft carrier
21:50oh i think it's uh there's no doubt that this is not going to be some
21:55extremely miniaturized device in the future i think that's quite correct
22:00so electron beams will work on earth but as weapons they're not very practical
22:08will they work in space if so they could be the perfect anti-ballistic missile system
22:18the scientists working in this field say no they say that equal and opposite electric charges would
22:30build up on the accelerator nozzle and the beam would probably be pulled back into it
22:39even if you could solve that problem the electrons would repel each other so strongly in space
22:44that the beam would diverge significantly over a range of a thousand miles or so there wouldn't be
22:49enough energy to knock over a feather
22:56and no charged beam could possibly be targeted on a missile
22:59because the beam would bend wildly as soon as it came into contact with the earth's magnetic field
23:05the only type of beam that could avoid those problems would be a beam with no charge at all a beam made of neutral particles
23:15but the problem is that a neutral particle is invisible to the electromagnetic fields that transfer energy
23:22an accelerator gun can't shoot a particle bullet unless the particle has a charge on it
23:27here at los alamos laboratory they've designed a neutral beam to get this gun to shoot the scientists
23:36attach charged electrons to the neutral hydrogen bullets accelerate them and then strip the electrons
23:42back off again as they fire them this is how they intend to accelerate the beam after the negative hydrogen
23:51ion beam comes from the ion source and is uh uh confined and focused and prepared it enters the first new
23:58piece of accelerator apparatus that we have in this test facility that is a device called the radio
24:03frequency quadrupole there are four poles located uh as such forming a channel down which the particle beam
24:10can move these four poles are charged producing an electric field which holds the particle beam very tightly to the axis
24:18also in this on these four poles are ripples which are machined in the surface which serve to
24:27also produce a wave which accelerates the particles making them go faster
24:34the ion source is very compact and efficient but the basic design is not american the one that we're using
24:42right now for our test accelerator in this program is in fact an adaptation of a design that
24:48was developed at the novosibirsk laboratory which we copied from the literature the open scientific
24:54literature which we've read that laboratory is at akadem grodok in the soviet union there they build
25:02accelerators to do anything from waterproofing cables to treating grain
25:09could they also be building in secret an accelerator that could be used as a weapon
25:14as far as i know uh from my understanding of uh of uh my friends in the soviet union uh they do their
25:24accelerator work and uh more or less open laboratories sometimes they're open sometimes they're closed but
25:29uh there's no uh secret uh uh very large facility which is devoted to this sort of work in my uh in my knowledge
25:38uh dr knapp isn't even sure neutral beam weapons can be built
25:47it may very well be that this particular kind of technology doesn't provide a weapon system
25:52it may very well be that it could be used as a weapon system i think it's very very important that we
25:56understand if it can or if it can't or what the limitations would be in the technology if this were
26:01to be used that way it's too too many too much a lot of difficulties to solve such a problem as fires
26:11understand dr sidhorov is not sure that russian technology can solve the problems of designing a
26:18beam weapon either from physical point of view possible but from technical not for our days
26:31but a 1978 report for the department of defense surveyed all known russian particle beam work and
26:37concluded research and development seems to be much larger than that required for thermonuclear reactions
26:44it seems reasonable to infer other objectives such as directed energy weapons
26:54there's another more promising way to make a beam weapon high power lasers
27:01this is a carbon dioxide laser the carbon dioxide is pumped into the lasing chamber and excited by a
27:14powerful electric current in this form it emits photons of light which can be focused by mirrors into a
27:22laser beam the mirrors are an important part of laser technology
27:26this is a block of titanium weight for weight one of the toughest metals in existence it is used in the skin of airplanes
27:40the laser beam will be fired at it for just four seconds
27:56the laser beam the laser beam will be fired at it for two seconds
27:58but that's in the laboratory since 1974 scientists at the air force weapons lab in new mexico have been
28:06trying to shoot down moving targets with lasers although the laser aiming device is compact enough
28:12the laser itself is enormous
28:27so
28:33so
28:39not all scientists find these tests convincing
28:54there are significant very serious difficulties
28:58which even in clear weather will prevent you from
29:01having an effective beam a few kilometers away
29:04now of course if you are just a few hundred meters away or even
29:07tens of meters away and you have a very slow moving target which you've painted red
29:11conveniently so that you can absorb the infrared light
29:14then of course you can make the spectacular pictures that you see
29:17presented by the department of defense but an uncooperative target
29:21which is very shiny which moves very fast
29:23which emits smoke therefore it shields itself from from the light so on
29:27it will be very difficult to hit the air force continues to test lasers
29:31about one-third of this converted boeing kc 135 is taken up with an enormous carbon dioxide laser
29:38it fires through a turret on the top of the aircraft
29:43before each test it takes the equivalent of a small chemical factory to get the aircraft ready
29:48the system is impractical for anything but testing purposes
30:00all the sensitive optics and tracking equipment must be kept dust free during servicing
30:05the plane has to be isolated in an environmental chamber
30:08all equipment has to be taken in through an airlock
30:23in june 1981 the laser laboratory flew to the china lake testing ground in california
30:29to shoot down a sidewinder air-to-air missile in flight
30:33it didn't work some of the subsequent trials have worked others haven't the exact figures are classified
30:43developing laser weapons to use inside our atmosphere seems difficult
30:48so why not move to where there's no atmosphere in space it is theoretically possible to build a laser
30:55that can fire across a few thousand miles of space but to focus the laser over such vast distances
31:02would take a mirror at least four meters wide about 13 feet it's not easy to make big laser mirrors
31:11this technician is polishing a copper laser mirror one of the biggest currently available it's only a half
31:17meter wide he's been working on this mirror alone for two months it is so optically perfect that one
31:24speck of grit or dust would totally ruin two months work
31:33could a larger mirror be built
31:38now a one meter mirror is reasonably
31:41accessible technological in this country and
31:43there have been mirrors that one meter that if cooled will take
31:47about a thousand kilowatts or two thousand kilowatts per square centimeter power
31:52and that's certainly possible they're expensive but they're possible
31:55a two meter optical mirror one that will transmit light but will not take these enormous amounts of
32:01energy on it will cost it's debatable whether you can build it it takes a very long time to build it
32:07it will probably cost over 200 million dollars a 2.7 meter mirror will cost i know 400 million dollars
32:16i don't think there is anyone in this country who can claim that they can make a three meter mirror
32:20another problem this type of mirror will have to reflect enormous power
32:25each square inch of this dish would reflect thousands of kilowatts of energy
32:29one microscopic flaw and some of that energy would be absorbed
32:36in addition sipis argues it will be impossible to use chemical lasers as an anti-ballistic system
32:42an abm because we won't be able to supply them with the fuel they need
32:47if this is going to be used as an abm a laser on a platform out in space say a thousand kilometers above
32:53the ground trying to attack ballistic missiles as they rise you need more than one
32:58platform because the platforms are not stationary above the earth they rotate and they move
33:04so you need 30 or 40 platforms each one with a laser that should be able to
33:10emit a few thousand pulses each pulse now needs 20 tons of consumables therefore what you need
33:19is a hundred thousand tons of consumables per platform now a shuttle has to go and then come back
33:24and be refitted and so on so let us assume that a shuttle makes two trips a year so a shuttle can carry 60 tons
33:33now how many shuttles you're going to have you're going to have 10 shuttles suppose you have 10 shuttles
33:37then you have 600 tons of coolant and fuel moved into into outer space per year
33:44if you need six million tons then you need about 100 000 years to move the coolant out there
33:51now that it seems to me is a rather unrealistic weapon system because by the time you move all
33:55the coolant up there will be obsolete the defense department is developing other designs it claims
34:00minimize these problems but there are more basic criticisms that apply to laser abm systems
34:05the main problem is that we've projected building this fantastically complicated and as you probably
34:12know expensive system um and the question is what are the soviets doing while we're building the
34:18system and putting it up and the answer surely is is indeed they've already declared that they're
34:23going to do whatever they can to neutralize it to keep us from so to speak disarming them unilaterally
34:29and there are a whole range of countermeasures available to them which the pentagon's already aware
34:33of one thing we talked about is simply to spin the missile as it's going up so that you distribute
34:37the energy from the laser around the missile and and it's harder to burn a hole in one section of it
34:44another that's been talked about is to have a stream of smoke or some kind of particles coming out of
34:49the tip of the missile forming a kind of coating outside the surface of the missile and and deflecting
34:55the light in that way from the standpoint of the missiles again another thing you could do
35:01is to have a series of of decoys you could build many many uh phony missiles which could be quite
35:08cheap because they would require no guidance system and no warheads but would just have the rocket engines
35:13which would uh which would confuse the infrared sensors that you'd probably be using to try to keep
35:21the laser uh tracking the missiles so far particle beam research has cost 350 million dollars laser research
35:31has cost two billion as we look at the rising costs of this race we rarely ask the question how much are
35:38we prepared to pay the military which provides the money to develop these new weapon systems sets the
35:46time tables and the priorities not the scientists not the civilians some people feel this will mean the
35:53same pattern of design flaws and cost overruns that the pentagon has been criticized for in the past
36:01dina razor heads a consumer group that investigates defense spending it is called the project on military
36:08procurement the problem of defense is that there's usually only one buyer and say for example you go
36:18out in the market place and buy something like say calculator this calculator has been developed gotten
36:23simpler cheaper and basically has less cost and yet it has more function defense we tend to get more
36:31more complex more sophisticated and the cost keeps rising also when you buy something like a car that
36:39has a guarantee when something goes wrong that is fixed by the company unfortunately with defense it turns
36:46out that we buy something it does not work and the taxpayer ends up paying again to have it fixed the
36:52mcdonald douglas f-15 is an example of the taxpayers paying for a military miscalculation
36:57the f-15 was built with very powerful engines and radar to match the russian mig-25 foxbat the foxbat
37:06was thought to have a top speed of over mach 3 but when defecting soviet pilot victor belenko landed
37:11one in japan in 1976 and the plane was taken apart on the tarmac a different picture emerged it was made of
37:18steel not titanium and it used valves instead of transistors it couldn't fly faster than mach 2.3 and it
37:26used fuel so rapidly that it could only operate 186 miles from home
37:34but aiming for that supposed soviet performance has made the f-15 very unreliable because of problems
37:41with its engines and electronics it's out of action for 38 percent of the time
37:46another example this is our most expensive air-to-air missile the phoenix each one costs 2.5 million
38:02the phoenix has proven its performance time and again against a variety of targets in a variety of
38:08tactical situations scoring an unprecedented 85 success rate according to one pentagon official
38:15those figures are meaningless because the phoenix has rarely been tested at all it's too expensive and
38:21it has never been tested for simultaneous firing against several targets while the plane is being
38:27electronically jammed a potential combat situation everyone agrees that directed energy weapons will be
38:34even more speculative than the phoenix both we and the soviets continue however to pour hundreds of
38:39millions of dollars into this research but space is already becoming a battleground with the development
38:46of anti-satellite weapons known as asats why are satellites important targets
38:54well the military especially in the united states but also in the soviet union have come to rely on
38:59satellites for important military functions about two-thirds of long-distance military communications in the united states to its troops abroad are by satellite
39:13the communication satellites would be used as a means of communicating with our strategic forces in a nuclear war
39:23we have as you know reconnaissance or spy satellites keeping track of what the soviet union is doing militarily
39:28and incidentally finding targets that we would aim our weapons at in a war
39:34since 1968 we've been monitoring a series of satellite launches that don't fit the known soviet mission
39:41patterns the defense department has now decided the soviets are testing a hunter-killer satellite
39:47they are definitely ahead of us on asats anti-satellite systems
39:51here is how it works in their current system the cosmos interceptor satellite identifies a target satellite
40:02maneuvers up beside it
40:06then it simply explodes blowing the target and itself up a crude system effective only for satellites in low orbit
40:15the soviet asat has only worked about half the 20 times or so that it's been tested
40:22um it is launched by a big large bulky liquid-fueled icbm so far it's only been tested in one direction from one of the three main soviet launch sites
40:33uh it's uh
40:36by all indications it's still rather slow and ineffective and rather crude
40:40last week i asked the secretary of defense about asats how serious do you believe the soviet asat
40:48threat to be well i think it's very serious it's it's evidence of the kind of work they've been doing
40:53which is in the specific field of the that the president talked about the the idea of securing a
40:59very reliable defense uh but quite different kind than we have now against incoming missiles
41:05and one of the first uh steps of this is in effect to try to put out our eyes which is to kill the
41:11satellites that give us as much information as we can to get so we're developing an asat-2
41:18our design has many advantages over the soviets one is that ours can be launched by any of our f-15
41:25fighter planes the launch system will be tested this summer and the defense department plans to start
41:32deployment in 1987 at air force bases in virginia and the state of washington
41:40if it works as advertised ours is going to be vastly superior it's a much smaller weapon and much more
41:46flexible and that can be launched from any f-15 aircraft anywhere in the world in great numbers of
41:51once should we so choose uh it is so fast that it can attack a satellite from any azimuth from any
41:57direction it can catch up with it from behind it can hit it from head on uh it certainly will represent
42:04to the soviets something a challenge which they're going to have to try to catch up with
42:08and what would the soviet response be well i have no idea what their response would be they have the
42:14they have the capability now they would probably uh are without any regard to whether or not we did
42:19anything not as a matter of response but simply following their historical pattern they would be as
42:24indeed they are now trying to improve what they have not not because we did it but simply because
42:29that's the nature of the beast simply because they they do keep on improving things all the time
42:36the f-15 asat our satellite killer weapon is now at the center of a fight which starts this week in
42:42congress three resolutions have been introduced calling for negotiating a verifiable ban or limitation
42:50on space weapons in general asat in particular senator paul songas is one of the leaders of this movement
42:59well our concern is that there seems to be a great deal of enthusiasm now in washington to
43:05enter a new arms race this time to do it in outer space that we're going to spend billions of dollars
43:10throwing new weapon systems up into outer space and basically the resolution is an attempt to say to the
43:15president look let's be cautious about this thing let's negotiate out that new arms race and it's
43:22nothing more than that opposing senator songas senator malcolm wallop he's introduced resolutions calling for
43:30space weaponry his argument is that from the beginning we've always planned to exploit space militarily
43:36it bothered me when sputnik went up and we have been doing it ever since
43:41and it is totally unrealistic to say that this is a new threshold it is simply not we have been doing
43:49this every member of congress has spent the last decade voting for shuttle systems that they knew
43:56were as much military as they were peaceful it cannot be a surprise to them i find that to be
44:04if it wasn't so chilling it would be funny it's like someone who's got an enormous weight problem
44:10gorging himself on chocolates blaming the first lollipop his mother ever gave him as a reason for
44:17moving that direction i mean my god if that argument is is deemed to be rational by your view as we have
44:25a major problem in this country mr secretary i then asked secretary weinberger what the chances would
44:32be for negotiating a treaty on asats rather than testing one of our own how are we going to know without
44:38full and free access to the soviet union whether or not they really are complying with any kind of a
44:44treaty they might make with respect to anti-satellite weapons or indeed anything else we already have
44:50very good evidence that they have violated chemical treaties that they've made in the past
44:54and we have a number of other problems with treaties they've signed in the past
44:59so that it is essential that verification be complete and absolute
45:03is there any way that you see to stop this the secretary of defense is maintaining well we cannot
45:09possibly sit down and negotiate because how would we know how many of what they had what would be
45:15the verifiability of this the secretary is correct in the sense that you cannot verify these systems
45:21purely by technical means you would have to have some kind of on-site inspection
45:24now the general wisdom is the soviets would never allow on-site inspection well that's not true
45:31there are two minor treaties that are now before the senate or at least the president has yet to
45:36make his position known of them which we have been negotiated by other administrations with the soviets
45:41that includes on-site inspection so there's precedent for them and there's no reason to believe that if
45:46they're willing to do that on some of the other things they will not be willing to do it
45:49on this one as well why do you negotiate away the ability to protect of course there's a hope to do it
45:57but what interest is there in a country negotiating away its ability to take care of its own people
46:05we're not threatening to melt moscow nor they new york with these weapons we're threatening
46:12to make those things which terrify us all less effective that seems one among the most benign threats
46:19this country and this world has faced in two decades but the argument again is that once we
46:26deploy our more sophisticated asat system launched from an f-15 we'll be ahead of the soviet asat system
46:33launched from a missile that would then frighten the soviets causing them to respond in turn escalation
46:41now if you're a soviet and you see the united states about to deploy
46:46a system for the sake of argument let's say it works
46:50then you as a soviet have one choice you either go first before that system is deployed or you end up
46:57naked if you're a soviet leader no soviet leader in my opinion will accept that alternative
47:03your alternative is to go up and wipe out that system or to strike the united states first before
47:08the system is deployed it is a remarkably destabilizing environment
47:12why then are these various same people worried about us putting out their eyes when they have
47:20witnessed their tests of the soviet putting our eyes out who are these people do they want us totally
47:27defenseless now if the american public knows that we have the technical capability to protect ourselves
47:33and then rejects it that's one thing but if they reject it on the basis of a lot of emotional flim flam about
47:42star wars and buck rogers and and a renewed threat to do something in space that's been done all along
47:48then that's a bad kind of tear to cry well i i think they have a point that to equate it directly with
47:54star wars i think may be unfortunate because in star wars the technologies work
47:59in this case they're not all going to work i mean we we just had a satellite failure
48:03where the thing was supposed to go up and work perfectly did not go up and work perfectly began
48:07to tumble can you imagine a defense system tumbling in outer space i don't know any i don't know anybody
48:13with half a brain could not be scared looking at this thing and have some sense of where we're going
48:18i mean unless you can have a sort of a massive national program of lobotomies eventually people are going to
48:24react to it and they're going to demand that we get off this track well keep in mind what we're doing
48:33for the first time we're talking about weapons that do not increase the killing power
48:39not increase the the threat to mankind and the world we're talking about weapons that decrease that
48:46threat that don't kill people that save people's lives
48:52that has to be worth almost anything surely
48:56the general accounting office has projected that our asat project will cost tens of billions of dollars
49:02for critics it's the costs which are the bottom line
49:06they predict the kind of money required for these systems won't be appropriated
49:11it is that spending spiral perhaps which could destroy both societies ours as well as the soviets
49:17there is the possibility that if the soviets have to try and match a greatly increased american defense
49:25effort including further advances in advances in military technology that this could be a considerable
49:32strain on the soviet economy western policy makers may see this as a way of exerting pressure on the
49:38soviet economy exerting pressure on soviet society as a whole at least one western policy maker is suggesting just that
49:50in the first major address of his presidency ronald reagan focused on the soviet threat
49:55and last month in a classified document he ordered his administration to use economic pressures
50:01as well as political and propaganda strategies against the soviet union by squeezing their economy
50:07he hopes to force them to make tougher choices between military and civilian spending
50:14in this country in the united states if you try to tell the population well you're going to get
50:18you're going to starve because you want to build more missiles the population will of course repel
50:23but they cannot do that in the soviet union as a matter of fact
50:25because they are not told what the americans are doing they are very much afraid of the americans
50:29so the population will say well what can we do we're constantly being threatened by the americans
50:32therefore we have to give all our money to the military it's wonderful for the military on both
50:36sides it's terrible for the people on both sides and that's what the bottom line is at the
50:42lobadov institute in moscow dr nicholas bassov thinks the controversy is overblown dr bassov won a
50:49nobel prize in 1964 for his work on lasers you know you can say in the end of all
50:54so we can turn it into weapons and when we talk about mobile phones
50:59so we are talking about military weapons or military weapons
51:03so we can create a laser weapon that can be created
51:05it's not so simple but it can be done
51:07but it can be done
51:08laser weapon that costs huge money because it is
51:11because it is necessary for this to say
51:13it is scary as I can imagine
51:15it is a powerful laser weapon that needs a system that
51:18with very high accuracy
51:19we can also do this as we say
51:23it has to be done
51:23what like, so, so, as the American American
51:25letters said
51:27they have to be on the sputniks
51:29on platforms so
51:31so, so, so, so, so, so,
51:33so, in principle, this is possible
51:35but, so, you understand it was a, so, so,
51:37so, there is another way to
51:39bring, so, so, so, so, under the
51:40Obviously, so, so, so, so, so, so
51:42. So, so, so, so, so, so,
51:45so, so, so, so, so, let's.
51:48to improve the lives of people and try to create different kinds of weapons.
51:55I think this is the question.
51:58I think that a real laser weapon will be created not very quickly.
52:04It needs a huge amount of work.
52:07That's how I would answer this question.
52:18Because, you know, they are very secretive. They're foolishly paranoid about it.
52:23They are inferior, and that's why they're trying to keep themselves from being found out.
52:27And that's a wonderful way to have a bogeyman for the American public to be frightened by.
52:34So what you see with the gaps and everything else is a rather trivial application of basic psychology.
52:40If you cannot find what I'm threatening you about, whether it's true or not, I use it.
52:44So I threaten you, so you do what I want.
52:46It's a lovely kind of technique. It's worked so far. Why do you expect they would stop doing it?
53:04This Thursday, hearings begin before the full Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
53:08The topic, space weapons and the congressional resolutions to ban them.
53:13As one highly placed Defense Department official told me,
53:16when we opted to test our anti-satellite devices and space weaponry, the genie left the bottle.
53:22We can no longer discuss the possibility of an arms race in space. We are already in one.
53:28One final point. Proponents and opponents of these weapons agree.
53:32If we dedicate sufficient resources and people, we can in time solve the technical problems of particle beams and laser weapons and anti-satellite systems.
53:41They point to the history of the race for space, Sputnik, the moon landing.
53:47But that was man against the forces of nature. This potentially is man against man.
53:54Man against man using a sophisticated technology that could rapidly outstrip our intellectual capacity to understand and control it.
54:02In this race for the high ground, it is possible there may be no winners.
54:11Next week, on Frontline, a television first, you'll see the most intimate details of one of the most important decisions a woman can make.
54:19The scene is this abortion clinic. The story is about the people who work here, the women who come here, and the demonstrators who pray here.
54:32You will feel the anguish of two women who decide to have an abortion and two who choose to keep their babies.
54:41You may never again feel the same about abortion.
54:46So be upset because of that, okay?
54:55The program is called Abortion Clinic. It is next week, on Frontline. I'm Jessica Savage.
55:16We're coming, but I am甚麼 and I, as you look.
55:17Yeah, get over.
55:19All right, for several days, I will never again, go.
55:21You are going...
55:22Here, I am.
55:23You are going...
55:28Here, I am,órrar.
55:33You are going...
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