Star Wars Sequel: Firestorms and Nuclear Winter from Missile
Lasers
By Taylor
Trowbridge
Evangelists of the Strategic
Defense Initiative -- more appropriately known as Star Wars -- paint for us a
picture of an idyllic heaven-on-Earth in which the great powers have military
defense and no military offense. They paint a world of nations safe within
shields like the force-fields of science fiction, with no ability to commit
nuclear aggression upon one another.
Returning to reality, it is known that even
if Star Wars is possible, which remains extremely controversial, every Medieval
knight in his suit of “defensive” armor knew that defense is a
powerful aid to offense, even though indirectly. But beyond even this myth of
benign defense, evidence has emerged that a Star Wars system of infrared lasers
can be used for offense directly. And that offensive use would be as destructive
as a nuclear attack itself -- even to the point of initiating a “laser
winter.”
Under a
“Defense” Department contract, two scientists, Latter and Martinelli
of the research firm R & D Associates of Marina Del Rey apparently had shown
that such a Star Wars system of lasers in space could be used to start 100
million fires on the surface of the Earth. Little news of the study had become
public when the Defense Department censored it.
However, the study is not difficult to
perform and does not require a big expense account. Dr. Caroline Herzenberg of
Argonne National Labs, and a number of other scientists experienced with
analysis of laser weapons, have performed the calculations on their own.
One of these is your author who has
the experience of 15 years with the Defense Department analyzing the performance
of a variety of laser weapons systems. He has been told that he has gone even
further than the Latter and Martinelli study -- his study additionally considers
how much the laser beam deteriorates as it passes down through the Earth’s
atmosphere -- which could have invalidated all previous
studies.
But you don’t have to be
a weapons scientist to imagine the offensive potential of a fleet of hundreds of
space-borne lasers each the size of a football field. And equally awesome and
deadly would be its pointing abilities. It would have to be able, within
minutes, to zap thousands of missiles rocketing at thousands of miles per hour
from thousands of silos across the endless steppes of Asia.
Our studies confirm that such a Star
Wars system could easily be designed to include the capability to start fires on
the Earth’s surface. And with such incredible pointing capability, each
laser beam could strobe over a city leaving dozens of separate fires every
second. The result, hundreds of thousands of precisely located individual fires
spread over hundreds of cities, is an awesome offensive
threat.
But we find much more than even
that. Closely spaced individual fires in large numbers can become much more than
their sum. As few as 500 fires in a city may start what is called a firestorm.
In Dresden and other cities during World War II, thousands of fires from Allied
incendiary and high explosive bombing united to form a single vast fire. The
firestorm generated hurricane winds to fan its own flames and united all of the
fires to form a single, gigantic column of flame and smoke extending into the
stratosphere.
The “nuclear
winter” studies show that smoke from cities ablaze from a nuclear attack
would darken the skies for months or years and turn summer into winter. Massive
crop failures and environmental chaos would threaten possibly the survival of
the human species. The nuclear winter studies also show that the most dangerous
smoke is that injected into the stratosphere by firestorms in cities. They find
that the burning of as few as 100 cities (with only 5% in firestorms) would
trigger nuclear winter effects. Our studies find that the Star Wars system could
initiate firestorms in more than one thousand cities. This shows that Star Wars
could indeed be capable of bringing on a “laser winter.”
The idyllic world that Ronald Reagan
fantasized in his Star Wars Speech would be vulnerable to a Star Wars war of
equally severe consequences -- immediate consequences comparable to a nuclear
exchange, followed by a laser winter. After some trillions of dollars, rubles,
marks, franks, and so on, the world would be no better off it is than now.
Actually, it would be worse off. Now
the world benefits from some nuclear “stability” because each side
knows that if it attacks first the other side can retaliate. There is some
stability because there is a disincentive to attack. In contrast, if both sides
were to have Star Wars systems, one system could attack the other system at the
speed of light and destroy it utterly. Each side would know that if it presses
the button, then poof, the other side would be disarmed, could not retaliate,
and would have to surrender or face a nuclear like annihilation. Incentive to
attack would be infinite and stability zero.
The author (ap886@lafn.org)
is a retired laser weapon system analyst of the Defense Department. He is on the
Executive Board of Southern California Federation of Scientists (SCFS)
<www.scfs-la.org>, a public interest science organization that since 1953
has been preforming alternative technical analyses related to pressing public
issues.
Posted: Sat
- April 1, 2006 at 04:15 PM