" STAR WARS": THE POLITICS OF DEFENSE
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whether one can actually build x-ray laser weapons of sufficient
brightness to be useful against missiles in their boost phase, although
it's probably good that you can build x-ray laser weapons that will be
useful against ballistic missiles in their terminal or maybe even mid–
course phase. But the main purpose, of the SDI program, at the
present time, is to work on these three areas.
It
also has given in–
creased attention to software. I would just say, in rebuttal to what
Mr. Pike said, that although I'm not an expert on computer soft–
ware , I don't find the claim that you can't build reliable software for
strategic defense convincing. There are people, whose opinion I
would trust, who believe that it certainly can be done. A person like
Solomon Buchsbaum, who is vice president of Bell Telephone Labo–
ratories, as you can well imagine, has been very much concerned
with the question of building large complex systems run by comput–
ers. And it is a fact, incidentally, that the AT&T electronic switching
system has more than ten million lines of software coding. And it's a
fact that it worked almost perfectly from the instant it was turned on.
DANIEL ROSE: Can I ask for clarification, if you were speaking,
George , in favor of research, or design, or deployment?
GEORGE CHAPLINE: I feel strongly about the research, because
of the possibility that we might indeed develop an essentially perfect
defense against ballistic missiles. I don't agree that that's not at all
realistic, not part of the world of practical possibilities in the next
couple of decades . Technology has accomplished marvelous things.
It's a matter of orders of magnitude. Noone can predict to how many
orders of magnitude technology in any given direction will move.
One of my favorite examples is that in 1937 Hans Bethe published
an article in
The Physical Review,
a scientific journal for physicists,
purporting to prove that cyclotrons would never produce protons
with energy more than eight MeV. Well, as you know , now they're
talking about building particle accelerators with energies of twenty
trillion electron volts - a mere fifty years later. The point is that his–
torically there's just been case after case after case that demonstrates
that no one knows even to orders of magnitude how far you can push
technology in any given direction.
DANIEL ROSE: But are you speaking of research at this stage?
GEORGE CHAPLINE: I'm saying' that one of the motivations for
the research is the possibility that somewhere down the road there
may indeed be an essentially perfect defense against ballistic missiles.
I think there are immediate political reasons for the research pro-
