power supply level is about 13 million watts, not more than 1,000 million watts. Furthermore, the free-electron laser beam power levels which begin to be of real defensive interest are about 4 million watts not the 1,000 million watts cited by the Report. Indeed, free-electron lasers with power levels substantially greater than 4 million watts are under active investigation by the SDI. The study erred here in two independent respects: in optical and electrical engineering and in military applications. In the engineering area, it apparently miscalculated both the brightness of a freeelectron laser beam required to kill a booster in a specified, reasonable time interval-for example, 1 second-and also the electric power supply needed to operate the corresponding free-electron laser. With respect to military applications, it tacitly assumed that a single free-electron laser should be powerful enough to destroy the entire Soviet force of a thousand ICBMs. This makes no sense from a military point of view because it violates one of the cardinal principles of military engineering; namely, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." In addition to posing intolerable single point failure risks, this single-laser defensive system concept required the creation of a much larger free-electron laser than is actually needed to create a much more robust defensive system, one which would use several smaller lasers at greatly differing locations to share the booster-destruction work-load. This rather pervasive hypothesis is the origin of the single largest error in the Study's estimates of directed energy system power levels required for utility in strategic defense. Indeed, this particular military applications blunder was repeated in several other places in the Report in which the utility of other directed energy technologies was analyzed, with comparably pessimistic consequences. With respect to free-electron lasers-whose potential importance for National defense was formally recognized by the HASC several years prior to DOD's observing the same promise-it is also interesting to note that the specific technology issues highlighted in the report as particularly challenging ones had already been successfully addressed by SDI researchers by the time the Report appeared. In addition to providing yet another example of physicists' highly uneven record of forecasting technological progress, these advances were known to have been made by more than one member of the Study Group well before the Report's release, but were not acknowledged or commented upon in the Report. One of the most notable aspects of the APS Study was its explicit recognition-in one of its key figures-that fast-burn boosters, a much-discussed hypothetical counter to many strategic defense technologies, are actually of very limited utility to the offense, as compared with ordinary boosters. This figure, on the Report's page 50, illustrates clearly that, no matter how quickly and at how low an altitude a booster may be made to complete its burn, it cannot deploy effective decoys or other "penetration aids" to complicate the work of the defense below an altitude of about 150 kilometers, due to the readily observable effects of residual air drag on the light penetration aids. If such aids are deployed too quickly, air drag separates them from the real warheads and they simply become of no aid to the offense at all. Unfortunately, authors of an adjacent section of the Report, concentrating on the physics of energy beam transmission through the atmosphere and apparently completely ignoring the profound military applications significance of the information in the figure less than a dozen pages away, propagated the by-now-familiar technical myths about the fabulous utility of fast-burn-boosters in evading directed energy defensive weaponry. The Report thus presents its readers with the untidy spectacle of declaring at the conclusion of a section on the upper half of page 38 that fast-burn-boosters are immune to attack by two major classes of directed energy beams because, it asserts, these beams can attack missiles only down to altitudes of 80-120 kilometers, while noting two paragraphs later, in a new section beginning on the lower half of page 38, that no missile can gain even a measure of concealment-from-defensiveattack via deployment of penetration aids until it has ascended to altitudes in the neighborhood of 150 kilometers. The most charitable interpretation that can be placed on this spectacle is that the two sections were written by two different people, each of whom failed to recognize that his section contradicted the adjacent one, and that the resulting Report was then neither critically edited as it was compiled nor carefully reviewed before its release. The Report's treatment of fast-burn-boosters also provides yet another example of the distinction between-and the domains of validity of the viewpoint of the physicist and the engineer. Speaking of its hypothetical fast-burn-booster, the Report states, "What is required for intercontinental velocities at a burnout altitude of 80100 km is a peak acceleration of 30-40 g's vs. the 8-15 g levels of current boosters. This difference does not represent a drastic change." To a physicist, a factor of 2-5 increase in peak acceleration certainly isn't a drastic change. To engineers, who are called upon to make things which will work in the real world, however, matters often appear differently. Some of America's best missile engineers have been working for several years to execute a first-level design of a fast-burn-booster, after the Fletcher Commission called for such a design to define the limits of the technically possible. Through the present time, they have concluded that a 30 g ICBM booster cannot be plausibly created on the current technology base for several independent reasons: the required rocket motor gas pressures are dauntingly high, the aerodynamic loadings on its outside are unacceptably great, the steering requirements exceed what is technically feasible, and the guidance errors appear likely to be too large. While a physicist might argue that none of these problems arises inextricably from the operation of natural law and thus should be subject to successful attack with enough time and effort, the engineer's compelling response is, "Perhaps so, but not in my time, or in yours." According to present technical knowledge, the fast-burn-booster seems destined to remain mythical for at least another two decades. Finally, I must speak briefly to three basic defects of form in the creation and release of the Report. First, the APS Council did not seek critical commentary or peer review of the Report, either from individual researchers in the strategic defense area or from the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. (Contrary to formal APS statements, the SDIO did not review the Report for technical content or accuracy prior to its release-but only for compliance with government security classification rules-nor did the APS request such a technical review from the DOD.) This pair of omissions was a basic departure from the methodology of the Society's highly successful study of the safety of nuclear power reactors a dozen years ago and, in retrospect, was a most unfortunate lapse. The unprecedented failure to technically peer-review material of a controversial nature has in turn resulted in the unprecedented spectacle of the Society publishing formal technical criticism in one of its journals of a major article appearing contemporaneously in another of its journals. If the Council were to administer professional discourse and publication in this manner as the rule rather than as a first-of-its-kind aberration, American physics would quickly dissolve into chaos. Second, the APS Council created a senior review group to supervise the Study and to attest to its results, and populated this group with six senior physicists, none of whom had any first-hand knowledge of directed energy weaponry and five of whom had taken public positions in opposition to the SDI. Now each of these six gentlemen-most of them known to me personally, moreover as being of extraordinary intellect and integrity-indeed may have been capable of developing completely informed and objective views of the technical content of the Study and then of acting to assure the high professional quality and even-handedness of its Report. However, the Council's disregard of the elementary American notions of fair play and impartiality-in-judgment in populating such a supervisory group for this Study is incredible. No American judge would impanel or accept a verdict from a jury with such qualifications, and I am more than slightly surprised that a Congress populated largely by lawyers would seriously regard a verdict on any matter which was rendered by a panel and a process with such prima facie deficiencies. Third, the APS Council used the occasion last April of the release of the Study Report to issue an all-inclusive condemnation of near-term options for strategic defense, though it was very widely understood that directed energy is not planned for any significant roles in near-term strategic defense options, and that the APS had not studied any aspects of strategic defense other than those involving directed energy; Publicly taking a political position unsupported by research results while simultaneously proffering to the lay public a tome of research results which, from a distance, appears to support the espoused political position confers a most unsavory aroma on any professional society. I was one of many Society members who were deeply embarrassed by this unprecedentedly poor behavior by the APS Council. It was therefore heartening to see that 11 of the 17 members of the APS Study, including Drs. Bloembergen and Patel, were sufficiently dismayed to write jointly to the APS Council in protest of this strikingly graceless action; such protest is also unprecedented in the Society's nine-decade history. The APS Study on Directed Energy Weapons will not be one of the brighter chapters in the history of the Society's attempts to participate in the political life of this country. It is remarkable that the Rasmussen Report on nuclear power safety and the current Report have appeared so close together in the Society's history and yet are so far separated in the fairness and the openness of their procedures and thus in their likely long-term impact on public policy. It seems that even physicists are human. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. SPRATT. A statement from Dr. Canavan to submit for the record, has been received. Opening Statement Of Dr. Lowell Wood' Before The U.S. House Of Representatives Defense Policy and R&D Subcommittees 15 September 1987 Introduction and Background. I certainly appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today to clarify somewhat the role of directed energy in strategic defense, and specifically to comment on the Report of the American Physical Society's Study Group on the Science and Technology of Directed Energy Weapons. I am privileged to appear in the distinguished company of Dr. Edward Gerry, one of the most successful American pioneers in the physics and technology of directed energy weaponry, as well as that of Drs. Nicholas Bloembergen and Kumar Patel, two of America's most eminent research physicists. Systems which generate and project powerful energy beams are widely recognized as being a class of weaponry which is likely to be especially effective in destroying the various components with which strategic nuclear missile-borne attacks may be conducted. Indeed, because the basic physics underlying the operation of such weapons is well-understood, considerable attention has been given to directed energy weaponry, both within defense planning and research communities and by the public at large; we understand the essentials of how these directed energy systems can possibly work, and know the bounds on what they can and cannot do, due to advances in the human understanding of physics during the past several decades. What is currently at issue regarding directed energy for strategic defense purposes is how quickly, with what costs and how certainly such physics understanding can be expressed in effective defensive systems. It is very important that political decision-makers understand clearly that the resolution of this fundamental issue of practicality of directed energy weaponry is almost entirely an engineering matter, one to which physicists-as-physicists can contribute relatively little. Physicists made the contribution for which they are professionally preeminently qualified when their researches established the feasibility-in-principle of these directed energy weapons; engineers are now making the contributions for which they are most professionally qualified, as they determine the costs and times required to implement the pertinent physical principles and natural laws in hardware sufficiently powerful to perform useful defensive missions. In spite of this fundamental incongruity between the set of innate professional qualifications and the subject matter, the governing Council of the American Physical Society-a Society of which I am proud to have been a member for 22 years-decided three years ago to study and publicly report on the science and technology of directed energy in the strategic defense context. The American engineering communities-the aerospace, mechanical and electrical engineers who form the overwhelming majority of the professional effort presently researching the question of strategic defense-have generally ignored this foray into their domains of expertise. It is interesting, however, to contemplate the probable outrage with which the American physics community would greet a decision by a major engineering professional organization to study the scientific and technical aspects of America's need for the Superconducting Supercollider. *The speaker is a technical staff member of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and leads the Special Studies Program there. He is not appearing in any official capacity from his Laboratory, and the opinions he expresses are not necessarily those of anyone other than himself. |