Interviewer: LET'S GO BACK TO THE EARLY YEARS OF THE ADMINISTRATION, '81–'82, WHAT SEEMED ( ).
Canavan: Well, you have to remember at the end of the Carter Administration there was an enormous push to try to develop and deploy lasers as a strategic defense.
Canavan: That was rejected...and politically.
Canavan: And, so, when the Reagan Administration started that evaluation largely carried over to the...people that had carried it out.
Canavan: And there was very little talk about strategic defense per se.
Canavan: Most of the attention for the first year or so of the Reagan Administration was almost totally strategic-offense.
Canavan: And I think it was only when the President went to the...business of trying to figure out some way to base the MS survivably, that that's when people were allowed to go back and try to look at something beyond that.
Canavan: And that's when the science adviser started a committee, a small committee to study the issue which I was put on because I had built one of the biggest lasers around.
Canavan: And they wanted some expertise in that area.
Interviewer: WHEN WAS THAT AND WHAT DID THE COMMITTEE DO?
Canavan: Well, it was 1982 —- The committee was started in 1982 and it was started quietly and informally as a panel of the White House Science Council.
Canavan: It was chaired by Dave Packard of Hewlett-Packard, who was a wonderful chairman, a very broad view of (??).
Canavan: And had a number of world-class scientists on it and a few junior people, like myself, for sort of technical help.
Canavan: The committee set about the task of looking — about what should you do next in strategic forces.
Canavan: The President had formulated a program of strategic offense force modernization and the question was what do you do next.
Canavan: And I think the idea was that there would be new things to do in strategic offensive forces, but after the r first monthly meeting, it was agreed, pretty much to a man, that there wasn't very much more to do in that direction until you did something about strategic defenses.
Canavan: And we went off in that direction and spent from, oh, March of '82, through monthly or more frequent meetings, through — to the President's speech on what could be done on strategic defense.
Interviewer: YOU SAID STRATEGIC OFFENSE HAS GONE ABOUT AS FAR AS IT COULD GO, THAT WE NEEDED TO THINK ABOUT —- EXPLAIN THAT A LITTLE BIT.
Canavan: Well, my last job in the Air Force was personal assistant to the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and I spent a year or two years, on and off, doing two things, negotiating...involved in the negotiations of SALT II in which we never could really figure out how to trade offensive forces against offensive forces.
Canavan: And the other thing was finding out a survivable way to base MX missiles so that the Soviets could not attack it, just like all the rest.
Canavan: That was a terribly difficult problem.
Canavan: I think that during '78, '79, '80, I probably thought about those issues about as hard as anybody could, a very large number of smart people were working that problem.
Canavan: And nobody could really come up with a system that was really compelling.
Canavan: It had better than a factor of two margins for error and what the other side might do.
Canavan: And, so, in that sense, what I'm saying is it became clearer that as long as all you could do is wind up your offensive missiles and then hope that there'd be enough left after his attack to do something with the remainder, the offense — the strategic business was becoming a very sterile game and also one that was potentially dangerous because as the survivability levels turned down, there was growing concern that they — that might provide an incentive for some sort of interaction.
Canavan: That's worse than not having the forces at all.
Canavan: That's where things stood, oh, say, '80–'81.
Canavan: When the Reagan Administration came into office, I think they legitimately felt like they could do a lot of things to fix these problems, because they'd been on the outside and they could— I think a lot of people on the outside had been using...they could fix all these problems if only you vote me in.
Canavan: Then you get in and then you see how terribly difficult it is to come up with any solution at all.
Canavan: And that was a real sobering thing -— I think it was a very hard year, '81, for President Reagan, trying to work the MX basing.
Canavan: And, I mean, finally when people grasped just how difficult problems were when you're looking at a pure offense balance ( ), that's when they all of a sudden decided that it would be a useful thing to broaden the mix, to go back and see if there was something that could be done in strategic defense.
Interviewer: DIFFICULT BECAUSE POLITICALLY OUR COUNTRY WON'T ACCEPT THE KIND OF BASING MODE THAT WOULD BE ADEQUATE, OR DIFFICULT TECHNICALLY BECAUSE BASING MODES...?
Canavan: Well, if there was an adequate basing mode, I certainly had a hard time finding it.
Canavan: There were lots and lots of basing modes put forward.
Canavan: But the problem was always that there you were terribly uncertain about the threat when you're trying to build a — some sort of a surroundable basing mode for MX.
Canavan: If you base it on a finite number of silos or bases...then the other side can not only overwhelm that-- and if you try to base your survivable basing on deception, having many artificial aim points, then unless you go to something like the Midgetman, which has now been worked, you're always terribly sensitive to the fact that well they just might have a factor of two more weapons in the works.
Canavan: Just a factor of two more and they could afford to take everything out.
Canavan: And it's a very marginal game.
Canavan: The strategic offensive...is hard to get with fixed shelters, particularly, which were thought to be the only kind acceptable in this country.
Interviewer: DO YOU REMEMBER BACK TO MARCH 23RD, '83, YOU HEARD ABOUT THE PRESIDENT'S OR READ ABOUT IT THE NEXT DAY OR WHAT — CAN YOU JUST TELL US WHAT YOUR REACTION WAS AND MAYBE THAT OF YOUR COLLEAGUES.
Canavan: Well, we had had a flurry of activity of the science community waiting, sort of up to preparing a report and the report had been prepared and put forward and as far as we knew delivered.
Canavan: And I got a call mid-day — excuse me, I got several calls that there were lots of things going on, that something was in the wind and then I went over to a friend's house and watched — another member of the team — and watched the speech.
Canavan: And listened very patiently through the whole speech, which I thought was a nice speech, and then there were a few lines about calling on scientists to do something strategic defense as well as strategic offense.
Canavan: And I thought it was a very nice gesture and a very nice thought and called for doing a little bit of research.
Canavan: I thought it was nice in that it sort of legitimized doing research in a field that had been cast into disrepute by repeated rejections and failings.
Canavan: And, so, I thought it was a very nice thing, a very sweet thing.
Canavan: I shouldn't say sweet, but I mean, it was the right thing to do given our thoughtful evaluation.
Canavan: And, of course, the next morning, there was all this discussion about Star Wars this and Star Wars that and right away I became concerned.
Canavan: Not about the mechanical things that the President would like to see done, but about the fact that I've never seen opposition to a technical build-up or built up quite so fast.
Interviewer: THERE'S BEEN A LOT OF DISCUSSION ABOUT WHAT THE PRESIDENT MEANT IN THAT SPEECH.
Interviewer: THE IMPRESSION THEY HAD WAS HE WAS SAYING IMPENETRABLE DEFENSE FOR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE AND MAYBE FOR WESTERN EUROPE AS WELL.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST IMPRESSION WHEN YOU HEARD THIS? WHAT DO YOU THINK PEOPLE SHOULD HAVE TAKING AWAY FROM- WHAT COULD BE HOPED FOR IN TERMS OF STRATEGIC DEFENSE?
Canavan: Well, I think the President had a fairly realistic objective of how hard it was.
Canavan: I think that what he was actually calling for ...that if I looked into his words directly and if I also remembered the different interactions that had gone ( ), it seemed to me; what he was calling for was research at the very top in a very important area could take 10 years, it could take 20 years, it could take 50 years.
Canavan: But you ought to start it now.
Canavan: And I think that the President had a very nice and a very balanced appreciation of the difficulties and the potential and one that he has largely held to up to today.
Canavan: The problem was, I think that there were so many people who clarified what the President meant.
Canavan: I mean, the people from the Pentagon, Secretary Weinberger, the science advisers.
Canavan: A lot of people sort of jumped and I think they were trying to help and they were trying to be useful and ' they were trying to say things that would amplify and make the whole business more palatable.
Canavan: But, unfortunately, they said a lot things like Astrodome this and perfect that, which did not help anybody.
Canavan: It played with the public but went down terribly badly with the technically informed public.
Interviewer: NOW, A LOT OF YOUR COLLEAGUES, OR SOME OF YOUR COLLEAGUES, I DON'T KNOW WHAT PERCENTAGE, WERE HORRIFIED FROM THE VERY BEGINNING AT THE NOTION OF STRATEGIC DEFENSE.
Interviewer: ERGO — OF COURSE, IN CONGRESS THEY CALLED IT STAR WARS.
Interviewer: CAN YOU EXPLAIN TO US WHAT IS THAT DISPUTE ABOUT.
Interviewer: WHY —
Canavan: Why is there—
Interviewer: WHY IS IT SO CONTROVERSIAL?
Canavan: Well, you can look at it on several different levels.
Canavan: And let me go back in time and move forward.
Canavan: I mean, there's been a very deep schism in the scientific community in this country, going all the way back to World War II and to the Manhattan Project, to this very site.
Canavan: And there are a lot of people who have very strong feelings that what we did was right then or whatever and that was not helped, of course, by the old argument — the need to argue over the development of the hydrogen bomb, the Oppenheimer affair and successive disillusionments of what we might expect from the Soviets in this period.
Canavan: There was a terribly polarized discussion.
Canavan: The, polarization was carried forward to — to the late '60s when the debate over the ABM broke out into the public.
Canavan: There'd always been a debate inside the community, but that's when it broke out and scientists went out openly in opposition to it.
Canavan: It happened to be the same...
Canavan: scientists who had taken one side on all the previous nuclear debates.
Canavan: There was a debate and it reinforced things and it created a terrible new impression, which is that the government can't stop thing and, therefore, the only way to stop program, which have technical flaws is to go public.
Canavan: So that happened.
Canavan: When the ABM system, when the safeguard, so-called, ABM system went down, "then there was another debate about five years later over deploying just the parts of the system which might work in a very limiting way and the antagonists and protagonists were all chosen and lined up and the argument took off again.
Canavan: It's just like it hadn't stopped.
Canavan: Then there was the third round of those debates, when the so-called gang of four was used in which, as I said earlier, they -- a group of technologists were advocating just lasers as a way of stopping just missiles.
Canavan: It was actually not a crazy proposal.
Canavan: Technically it would have had some merit ...thought through very carefully and was sold real badly.
Canavan: But, again, it ran into this same division.
Canavan: And, so, every time things were about to heal, the wound would be reopened.
Canavan: And so it was not surprising that when the President made his speech that the same people who had always thought that defense is no good, that...is the answer, that technology never works, that lasers are no good or whatever, we're all ...to attack.
Canavan: I mean, the technical opposition was up much faster than the technical support, just because they were sort of prepared by these previous steps.
Canavan: And then, of course — I think that they would have had a very hard time attacking the President's program as stated in the speech, but as soon as it was clarified by some of the Presidential advisers, then — then there were all of these things, these objects that they could go an attack and, thus, indirectly attack the President.
Canavan: And there were things that they knew how to attack because they had the key argument in the previous debate.
Canavan: And it just—[ I guess they were spring loaded to attack.]
Interviewer: ...THE FLETCHER PANEL NEEDS TO MAKE ITS RECOMMENDATION AND THEN A YEAR LATER IN MARCH OF '84, OF COURSE, THE FIRST CONCRETE PROPOSAL COMES OUT.
Interviewer: AND VERY SHORTLY AFTER THAT THE CONGRESSIONAL OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT ISSUES ITS REPORT.
Interviewer: GENERAL ABRAMSON THEN, I THINK — THE RESPONSE.
Interviewer: WERE YOU INVOLVED IN THAT?
Canavan: Well, yes and no.
Canavan: I mean, it's a— let's see — first of all you have to understand that things did go on.
Canavan: It was probably good for the publicity.
Canavan: But the problem is that the study that was commissioned by the President basically just went through to look at the technologies very quickly to see if anything was good or bad or whatever, made a recommendation.
Canavan: I didn't see anything that you would call a...
Canavan: or anything or anything that could just stop you in your tracks.
Canavan: And, therefore, you ought to go out and do this research program.
Canavan: The DTS commissioned a set of volumes, seven volumes, I think —- The Defensive Technology Study put together a set of about seven volumes that set down in one place what they had learned and where they thought the whole business of strategic defense was.
Canavan: The OTA had a — occasional paper commissioned by a Professor Carter at Harvard.
Canavan: They got access to most of the information from the DTS.
Canavan: He wrote up a report and then it was — it was made' public, which was — there's been enormous surprise, because' everyone had thought that all of the detailed arguments, as opposed to the overall assessment of feasibility — that all those arguments were highly classified and, therefore, you could not possibly write about them.
Canavan: Well, I was sent a copy of his report and asked for a critique.
Canavan: This was by the SDI or SDIO (?).
Canavan: And I asked, what do you think about this and what are the problems? Well, I'm — we're a little bit out here in the field and I didn't know all the subtleties about classification, and, so, I first worked out an outline of what I thought the problems were with the report and what the distortions were.
Canavan: And then I wrote a memo which was about, I don't know, 20 or 30 pages, or something like that.
Canavan: And sent it around to the laboratory to get other people's comments.
Canavan: And the memo then, unbeknownst to me, was then sent immediately to Washington.
Canavan: And then — where the SDI put a fancy cover on it and, you know, sent it over to Congress.
Canavan: And, so, my report, my little internal report got a lot more notoriety than it had expected to receive.
Canavan: I think the reason that was done is that everyone knew that there would be some sort of a fallout and no one j had any idea that when the first negative report came out that, (a) it would be so negative; (b) it would be picked up I by the press so strongly; and, (c) it could claim a certain authority in that it had access to all of these various input documents from the technology studies.
Canavan: What that meant then is that there was —Well, they didn't realize it would be so negative and they didn't realize that they would have authority, because the author had had access to these classified documents.
Canavan: And people were aghast because — I mean, there were technical problems all the way through the document on virtually — well, literally on every page.
Canavan: What you have to say is not unusual.
Canavan: It's one person.
Canavan: And when the study tried to survey the whole field in, oh gosh, six months all together or more, you know, the whole field was 60 people or whatever.
Canavan: It was almost impossible to cross check everything and make sure that everybody's story was consistent and that you didn't say something that was wrong by accident.
Canavan: And, of course, when one person then goes in, even if they're fairly careful, they're going to make an enormous number of errors, so some people were concerned.
Canavan: And it was thought terribly important to somehow rebut this stuff, but since it was formally classified as far as DOD was concerned, it was very difficult to comment on.
Canavan: And, so, here I came along with my little memo...
Canavan: not knowing how hard all this was.
Canavan: Sent it up to...it wound up in Washington.
Canavan: It was used in rebuttal, just plain rebuttal.
Canavan: And the reason it was used in rebuttal was that the potential for damage was thought to be very real unless something was said.
Canavan: And if you bought an enormous report that has all kinds of technical details in it, you can't rebut everything and expect anybody to read it.
Canavan: You have to just go in and find one fatal flaw and just nail it.
Canavan: And it turned out that report had a failure — a fatal flaw — in that its scaling arguments, which were the ones that were purported to show that strategic defense was just hopeless were wrong.
Canavan: I mean, they just simply were not mathematically correct, the results — the scaling results and cost and what not couldn't be supported.
Canavan: And the memo that I did in a little bitty appendix at the end pointed that out.
Canavan: And, so, what there really was a little bitty appendix at the end of my report being used to rebut the totality of the OTA report, but with rest of my memos just sort of stuck on there to give it sufficient weight.
Canavan: And it was on both sides the reports basically just rolled up and used as clubs.
Canavan: They were hardly read.
Canavan: But they were used to try to — on the side of the OTA, I think, report, they were trying to restore a balance to an argument that had through various discussions come to make SDI look too easy.
Canavan: And, instead, they went too far and provoked a counter stroke which was intended to show that the OTA report had no value at all.
Canavan: And I think both of those were probably excesses.
Interviewer: WHAT HAPPENED AT THE END OF THE CLUB FIGHT...
Canavan: Well, it was a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing and it was that — the end of the club fight was in perhaps, oh, June or July of that year, about three or four months after the report went out.
Canavan: And the OTA had been very badly damaged having their — by then a ...of people saying the report had real flaws.
Canavan: And, so, the — what the OTA did was they convened a panel of experts, I mean, an obligatory retired general or an ex-under secretary of something or other and Nobel prize winner.
Canavan: And they said, well, this report...end of it.
Canavan: And...the end of it for the OTA per se, although the — interestingly enough, just at the time that OTA had finessed the whole business and probably could have backed out very gracefully, the — one of the spokesmen for the Union of Concerned Scientists decided to step and to defend their report, which I'm sure at that point they have just as soon he wouldn't have done.
Canavan: Now — and then that went to like a, oh, a year or so long series of exchanges back and forth which finally— at least if it didn't stall, that it highlighted the main technical issues and, you know, you learn something else.
Canavan: Can I tell you an amusing story — or an amusing story to me — and that is — almost nobody knows this.
Canavan: I take my pleasure in small things.
Interviewer: [TAPE CHANGE AND DIRECTION]
Canavan: To me it's amusing and that is that the OTA finessed the problem that they were in with the initial report and they finessed it by convening a panel with an obligatory general, an ex-under secretary of something and a Nobel prize winner and — who read the report over — you know, overnight.
Canavan: And then said, "The report looks pretty good to us.
Canavan: We don't see any problem.
Canavan: Therefore, OTA is okay." And then the debate went off — to a debate — with other people — picked up the OTA ...and defended them much to OTA's chagrin.
Canavan: The amusing aspect of it, though, is that the OTA was then and now — is being — American Physical Society report, which is sort of like an expanded, 20 person version of that initial OTA report and which — which came out much fanfares and many negative things.
Canavan: And, once again, I generated a little memo.
Canavan: It's not a joke and it got sent by the laboratory back to us and used.
Canavan: And then I was embroiled in a debate with the American Physical Society.
Canavan: Which is a good thing, because it really made most of the early OTA overview, just more carefully worded.
Canavan: And in the second debate then, the APS, then, also tried to use a — some of the senior advisers to finesse the criticism by saying that this report was just fine, there's nothing wrong with it.
Canavan: Except that it so happened that the Nobel prize winner who had come down on the OTA side in the — in the first debate with the OTA papers — came down with the...in the American Physical Society report.
Canavan: They happened to have switched sides.
Canavan: My side had not changed.
Canavan: On the one hand, he said that the scaling issue, the OTA is right, so A must be wrong.
Canavan: And then in the next debate he said, "Well, everybody knows that this is the result —" not recognizing that it was my same old results that was being used.
Canavan: And, so, you don't get to catch somebody good that cleanly.
Canavan: And it also -- I will say —- might illustrate -— one is that I have very little respect for authority in the business of strategic defense and in science policy in general.
Canavan: If somebody can't really show you, then chances are he's just blowing smoke like the next guy and flipping from one side to the other without knowing it.
Interviewer: I WANT TO GO TO SOME OF THE CRITICISM.
Interviewer: ONE OF THE KEY THINGS THAT SDI IS — THE ATTEMPT OR POSSIBILITY OF INTERDICTING SOVIET MISSILES IN BOOST PHASE.
Canavan: Right.
Interviewer: AND THAT REQUIRES HAVING ASSETS IN SPACE.
Canavan: That's right.
Interviewer: EITHER MIRRORS, IF IT'S A GROUND BASED LASER SYSTEM, OR ACTUALLY SOMETHING THAT ZAPS IT FROM SPACE.
Canavan: That's right.
Interviewer: AREN'T THOSE SPACE ASSETS ENORMOUSLY MORE VULNERABLE THAN THE SYSTEMS THAT THEY'RE DESIGNED TO DEFEND AGAINST? MORE EXPENSIVE, MORE VULNERABLE MORE DIFFICULT TO MAINTAIN?
Canavan: Well, this is not intrinsically more expensive overall, but the — whenever you put something in space that's a terribly difficult — I mean, that's the right question: Can you make it survivable long enough to do its job.
Canavan: And, if so, can you make it survivable affordably? And that's been an issue that I was concerned about going back as far as '82–'83 and have continued to have a debate back and forth on with — with a variety of different opponents over the years.
Canavan: I would have to say that the survivability of space assets is, neither as easy as the advocates would make nor as hard as the opponents would make.
Canavan: The opponents would dismiss almost anything as being helplessly impractical or too easy to beat.
Canavan: But then when you get down into these very detailed arguments, well, you can harden things a little bit more and you can maneuver out of the way of an attacker and you can —- you can send back a little hand grenade and destroy the attacker.
Canavan: And you -- or you could hide yourself in a cloud of decoys.
Canavan: And you could make a story that for large classes of satellites, including most of the satellites that are of current interest, all the ones that are being put forward for any sort of an initial deployment, that you can make them survivable enough to be effective, so that the survivability is ...20 percent correction not a total correction.
Canavan: And the -— I guess that as time has gone people inside the government have come around to sort of an appreciation of that and also a lot of senior advisors.
Canavan: One of the people that I started out debating against was Dr. Edward Teller, who initially that, well, anything in space is easier to shoot down than it is to put up.
Canavan: And the reason that I'll see him at Stanford on Monday is because we'll be working on a paper that we're writing together trying to lay all these things out about what you can do and what you can't do.
Canavan: And I think that Dr. Teller and I tend now to agree that except for very low — excuse me — very large satellites which much intrinsically be at very low altitudes, it looks like the survivability of most satellites is something that you work on and worry about, but is not necessarily a show stopper.
Interviewer: WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT —-
Canavan: It's a very understandable view to a guy like me who spent as long as I did in the military.
Canavan: The— there are no perfect airplanes.
Canavan: There are no perfect tanks.
Canavan: There are no perfect ships we now know.
Canavan: They're — everything is you do the best you can, you try to have a fighting chance.
Canavan: You make up the difference on tactics.
Canavan: And on the whole, military platforms are performed much better than they ought to ...for analysis.
Canavan: And what's happened is really just that the ideal system and the perfect...have now sort gradually moved around to a situation that's now...ship or airplane or tank.[ If it does the right things, it has a chance.]
Interviewer: ...IN ORDER TO HAVE SPACE PLATFORMS OVER THE SOVIET UNION AT A TIME WHEN THEY'RE NEEDED.
Interviewer: THEY NEED A LOT MORE ( ).
Interviewer: THEY NEED TO BE IN ORBIT, YOU NEED A LOT OF THESE.
Interviewer: RIGHT?
Canavan: That's right.
Interviewer: ISN'T IT POSSIBLE, IF WE HAD TO PUT A LOT OF THEM THEN AS A DEFENSE, THE SOVIETS COULD JUST PUNCH A HOLE THROUGH ANY POINT OF THAT FABRIC, RIGHT.
Interviewer: AND — WHAT THE REST OF THEM ARE — THE REDUNDANCY — THE COST OF THAT MUST BE ENORMOUS.
Canavan: I understand what you're saying and the redundancy is significant even now.
Canavan: If you look at today, today's Soviet launch areas in, say, lasers that were designed to meet those missiles, you're looking at a factor of five ( ), which means that the satellites, the defensive satellites, would have to be destroyed or everyone in the battle would have to destroy at least five times the value to make the whole ...come out effective.
Canavan: But the interesting thing is that they do.
Canavan: And after the OTA debates, there were a long series of debates with some of the OTA spokesmen, which pushed parameters in one direction and the other.
Canavan: But finally the answer came back that strategic defense would on the raw numbers be effective by a factor of f maybe ten to one if the other side could not concentrate it's forces in a space and time and try to punch a hole as you say.
Canavan: And the — if there is a -- if I have a major concern about, say, the initial kinetic energy, the consolation is that they are particularly sensitive to that, that the more compact, the faster the missiles and thus it gets — the less time there is for these little missiles to fly in.
Canavan: And because they have a finite speed, they can only come in from so far.
Canavan: The ones that can contribute...would be smaller and smaller.
Canavan: And that's a problem.
Canavan: It's not...problem and it's a problem that people are sort of working on solutions to.
Canavan: It's thought now to be a problem not of the initial deployment but of some...when the Soviets change their missiles significantly, which they actually can't do overnight, take them a 10 or 20 year cycle just like us.
Canavan: Well, the — you know, but — for some things the issue is more serious.
Canavan: For some things, the issue...serious.
Canavan: There was a very nice exchange of papers and that by Dr. (??) of IBM and myself, trying to debate the issue which more or less resulted in an actual numerical analytic solution, a solution that everybody could believe and just put their own numbers on to it.
Canavan: And the result was, as I say, maybe a factor of five now for kinetic energy weapons.
Canavan: You're concerned because that factor can become much worse.
Canavan: The interesting thing about directed energy weapons is that because they can interact so fast, I mean, they fly at the speed of light — that means that they are much less sensitive to that sort of concentration of space and time.
Canavan: And even in concentration — for the Soviets to concentrate as far as they could — would only cause about a factor of, oh, four - five degradation in the — in this...
Canavan: that satellites available, which doesn't erode their — it hurts their efficiency or effectiveness, but it does not toss it out all together.
Canavan: That's one reason I've sort have been tenuously— or tenaciously — defending all of these directed energy platforms at a time when most of our colleagues would go off and talk about kinetic energy weapons, which are a lot simpler.
Interviewer: WHAT ABOUT THE POWER REQUIREMENT BOTH TO MAINTAIN READINESS ON THESE SPACE PLATFORMS...AND THEN THERE'S THE ENORMOUS POWER REQUIRED AT THE MOMENT OF ZAPPING.
Canavan: Well, "zapping" colorful phrase.
Canavan: The power requirements are pretty badly misunderstood.
Canavan: The power requirements during non-active operation, that is when they're just sort of sailing around, are sort of like those of other satellites that are in space.
Canavan: And those are matched with solar panels and five or ten or so kilowatts of power is not a — is not really stressing on the volt power from that point of view.
Canavan: The mode of operation in which you, as you say, rev up and sap somebody, that's a different story, but it's also a different sort of power and that is that suppose you had a neutral particle beam like the one behind us.
Canavan: It takes mega watts of power when it's operating, but you have to remember that mega watts — only a few thousand horse power and they are — there are turbines that are a lot bigger than that, that are — that operate as fuel pumps on the — on space craft, on boosters that fly today.
Canavan: So, when you -- when you need a lot of power, you can a lot of power just by burning some fuel and running it through turbo generator just like always.
Canavan: And the little amounts of power are actually no bigger than today's.
Canavan: What you have to do is you have make sure — you have to be very careful where you bridge from going to a sort of a peacetime mode some sort of alert status into a -- into a fighting mode, so that you don't somehow come up short on power right now.
Canavan: I — that's regarded as a serious problem that I-- it seems to me it's kind of an engineering detail in that you have all the pieces.
Interviewer: WE DON'T NEED TO USE NUCLEAR POWER TO GET SUFFICIENT POWER FOR THESE THINGS UP THERE?
Canavan: Well, you don't need nuclear power — any nuclear reactors — just to put anything that is being talked about in the elements that are now being demonstrated, I think they're called....
Canavan: very modest power requirements modest even compared to the five or ten kilowatts that I was saying.
Canavan: That — and, you know — and a missile has no electrical power requirements at all, when its operating.
Canavan: The issue about nuclear power is kind of a confusing one.
Canavan: And I don't think anybody has a really clean story here, which is not new.
Canavan: This country has never really had a good understanding of why you would nuclear power in space.
Canavan: The real issue for going to nuclear power is either because you have a brand new radar, or something.
Canavan: [INTERRUPTION WITH BACKGROUND NOISE] The issue on nuclear power for space things is — for military space things, I'm sorry is not just a matter of brute watts.
Canavan: Until the day when you want to put some sort of enormous radar in space or something like that, which we don't have in any approved program like that at all, you don't need very large powers and, therefore, the argument for nuclear power once we get back to something — it's basically a survivability issue.
Canavan: If you have a satellite which you would like to be able to hide as best you could and, you know, maneuver around all over the sky and stuff like that — well, then a nuclear reactor, a nuclear power supply...reactor on board is very useful.
Canavan: It could be very useful, because then it lets you continue to perform those functions for a very long period of time.
Canavan: But on the other hand, there — you know, there are known satellites that have to go those extremes, either now or — and the things that are being developed.
Canavan: And, therefore, it's sort of an option.
Canavan: And I have to tell you it's a kind of a funny and sort of a perverse system.
Canavan: I mean, the military would like to build systems that perform better and, therefore, they would like to have the capability downstream to use nuclear reactors in a very huge satellite, very far away, if that makes sense.
Canavan: And, so — but people then say, well — that — you need a lot of power, therefore, you must need a nuclear reactor which (a) isn't right and (b) scares everybody, so that it knocks the option out of the military being able to exercise that power to fly in space if they need it.
Canavan: And it really is a totally perverse thing and almost totally emotional, even with the American Physical Society.
Canavan: Their arguments were — I don't want to say they were yellow journalism, but — and their power requirements were basically overestimated by factors of ten or a hundred.
Canavan: That's just inexcusable.
Canavan: It's not that hard to understand what the real requirements are.
Interviewer: BECAUSE OF DIFFICULTIES OF MAINTAINING SPACE ASSETS SOME PROPONENTS OF SDI HAVE ARGUED...MAY BE FIGHTING MIRRORS OR RELAYING FIGHTING MIRRORS ( ).
Interviewer: WOULD YOU COMMENT UPON THAT?
Canavan: You have to separate two different issues.
Canavan: There are people like the science — the previous science adviser who would argue that he would like to have kinetic energy platforms because they're low and maybe not survivable, so you put them higher.
Canavan: And as I was saying — as you can ask Dr. Teller about when you see him — we found that there — you know, there are strengths and weaknesses in all altitudes and, you know, you — there's no free lunch in the survivability business.
Canavan: The people who take it the next step are those who argue that there should be nothing in space at all.
Canavan: And those people are — you know, they're not just necessarily critics of the program, they're people who say two things: One, is if it's on the ground, if it's sitting on the ground, it ought to be a little cheaper — stuff that sits on the ground generally is cheaper than space-qualified hardware.
Canavan: It ought to be a lot more survivable and it's not forever.
Canavan: I mean, there's nothing out there for them to shoot at or worry about.
Canavan: And I believe that all of those things...and those arguments are really powerful.
Canavan: The question is are they powerful enough.
Canavan: If you want to try to strongly just make a token dent in the Soviet attack, but actually somehow really decrease the number of weapons that could come into this country by a large margin, even having two or three layers of defenses is — is not, you know — there's not very much margin in it.
Canavan: And the – the folks who say well, we should just put everything on the ground — implicitly what they're saying is we'll just use this layer, throw away those two and hope the residual is good enough.
Canavan: And it will be good enough for some things and could have some problems with other.
Canavan: I think it'll probably be on the order of a year before enough is known about the performance of all these different system and in the particular the big bugaboo of such systems, which is heavily decoyed threat — threats that makes their weapons — and some sort of phony objects — to try to dilute your effectiveness.
Canavan: You really won't know that for about a year and then you can make an informed decision, I think.
Canavan: Until then it's just a matter of what your preference is, how much are you worried about political pressures, what you're worried about cost.
Interviewer: CAN YOU GIVE US ANY OVERALL BROAD TIMETABLE ON THE NEUTRAL PARTICLE BEAM CONCEPT?
Canavan: The — I could tell you what I think technically can be done.
Canavan: I just finished writing a paper on it so I hve some confidence in my ability to assess where they stand.
Canavan: Probably some time in the mid-'90s — if they work very aggressively and did their experiments properly they, would have something — they could produce that would something that would pass as a prototype.
Canavan: That is they would have flown something in space that could be sort of at almost at full power, maybe not at full current.
Canavan: And I think it would be a very useful thing and a very practical thing.
Canavan: It would not be a strategic defense all in itself.
Canavan: You would have to have a dozen or a few dozen of them to do that, but it would be a fairly capable thing as a beam.
Canavan: And if experiments go well ...danger...then the business of beam handling, pointing the beam, identifying targets...could have been demonstrated successfully.
Canavan: And then you would have something very positive.
Canavan: So, I would say that the timetable is sort of— for having an initial demonstration...timetable for having a useful defensive capability, not just a...where it would be sort of five or ten years later, something like that.
Canavan: And the -— there are all kinds of technical risks and I can tell you what all -— what each and every detail is.
Canavan: You're shaking your head no.( ) that the overall risk is that the program would be delayed and probably will be delayed simply because people are still trying to grapple with the very difficult problem of how do you mix or how do you trade off initial kinetic energy systems versus longer-term directed energy systems.
Canavan: You need those.
Canavan: People now understand that.
Canavan: But just when do you need them and how fast — and — in a funds limited environment, in a very limited environment.
Canavan: It's always the follow-on, the thing that comes next that tends to get delayed and delayed disproportionately.
Canavan: And that's probably the big risk.
Interviewer: DO YOU HAVE ANY SENSE OF WHAT KIND OF MONEY WE'RE TALKING ABOUT FOR THOSE STAGES OF THE NEUTRAL PARTICLE BEAM?
Canavan: Well, to go through the prototype study, as you characterize it, and any of these systems, particularly ones that are in space — not space — will be in space— they typically — almost anything involves a cost between a billion dollars and ten billion dollars for developmental expenses.
Canavan: The costs for the whole compilation, you can't give with any kind of confidence until such a time as you've actually ...R and D and you know what the performance costs are.
Canavan: But on the basis of experience today and on the— everybody's ability to sort of estimate costs in going through this review, it looks to me like you're talking somewhere between a quarter of a billion to half a billion dollars a platform for its life cycle cost.
Canavan: And, so, if you had — if you had to ...those two numbers — and 20 plus ones — then you'd be talking about some tens of billions of dollars to put that compilation up to do defense.
Canavan: And that's -- that's not unaffordable.
Canavan: I mean, it's -- the cost of that is, oh, perhaps a tenth of what would be involved in the missiles that we'd be defending against.
Canavan: So, it would be very cost effective and they're not – they're not very sensitive to our counter measures, things like compacting the launch down.
Canavan: But, there are lots and lots of different way that things can go wrong.
Canavan: Costs can go wrong.
Canavan: Performance can have problems.
Canavan: You won't know it until you try it.
Canavan: That's why you do research.
Interviewer: ( ) BOTH OF YOU SAY NOT THAT MUCH DIFFERENT.
Interviewer: I MEAN, BOTH — THE PROBLEMS — COST A LOT OF MONEY.
Interviewer: A LOT OF THINGS TO WORK OUT.
Interviewer: ONE GROUP SAYS THAT BY GOSH WE'RE GOING TO DO IT AND IT'S GOING TO BE GREAT.
Interviewer: THE OTHER GROUP SAYS IT'S ABSOLUTELY - IT'S LUNACY, IT'S MADNESS, IT'S GOING TO BANKRUPT THE COUNTRY AND WE'RE CRAZY TO GO AHEAD WITH IT.
Interviewer: HOW DO YOU GET THAT FAR APART? WHAT'S THE ESSENCE OF THIS DEBATE?
Canavan: Well, I think you've said it just right, that smart people say seemingly very similar things and then they come to a different conclusion.
Canavan: I'll give you an example, in the American Physical Society report the derivations that they did were not different than mine.
Canavan: In fact, a lot of them were mine.
Canavan: I mean, they credited me with having ( ).
Canavan: And, you know — and, yet, somehow they come to a different conclusion.
Canavan: And there are sort of, oh, two or three different factors.
Canavan: One is that scientists who are outside of the program tend to be much more skeptical and assign a much higher risk to things, in part because there will be things that have already been done and they just don't know about it.
Canavan: Right.
Canavan: Sometimes they're right in being skeptical.
Canavan: But sometimes, you know, they just don't know what's been done and, therefore, they think that you got to do ten things in a row and they don't know that seven of them have already been done.
Canavan: So, one is an issue of risk.
Canavan: The second point is an issue of counter measures.
Canavan: Machines don't fight wars.
Canavan: I mean, people interact and they — you know, they design how things will be done and there's always the danger that the other side could do something which could get around your whole system and you wouldn't know about it and wouldn't that be terrible.
Canavan: And counter measures loom very large on the — in the minds of the various people who work these issues.
Canavan: One, for instance, that you hear about over and over again decoys — decoys —...the decoys on deep space systems in particular or systems that are in space.
Canavan: And it really is a terrible problem and the assessment – I mean, the people look at the same objective data and they'd say well we think that means that the Soviets could certainly bypass it.
Canavan: And the other people say, well, we certainly think that our idea will, you know, stop the ( ).
Canavan: So, counter measures are a terrible thing.
Canavan: And in some areas you'll know the answer...and some-- and some areas you won't know the answer until the end of five years, say, the end of the demonstration phase that people are working on now.
Canavan: And, so, that's kind of tough.
Canavan: And then there's the third thing.
Canavan: The third thing is that there really are two different groups of scientists in this country.
Canavan: We're friends.
Canavan: I get along with almost every one of them.
Canavan: But we really are worlds apart when it comes down to saying, you know, what is the likely outcome when you consider the Soviet responses and how the world can get more dangerous and more unsettled and why don't you just leave things just the way they are right now.
Canavan: They're good — they're terrible but they work.
Canavan: I personally am — having been involved with strategic systems for, oh, 25 years or more, feel that things are — it's...
Canavan: not that things have worked, it's things that the strategic system that we have has not failed yet.
Canavan: And we haven't had a terrible accident of any kind between the super powers.
Canavan: And — but if you can do something, and I happen to think you could do something, then you ought to try everything that you can to — you know, to see what you can do to reduce risks there.
Canavan: Other people say that you might make it worse.
Canavan: Stay where you are.
Canavan: We know what happened the last time around, the first ABM debate and you were trying to give us a system which — you know, which demonstrably could have made things ( ).
Canavan: And it's a hard call.
Canavan: You have to understand that I'm regarded as a big advocate of strategic defense.
Canavan: In the previous three ABM systems, I ultimately voted down.
Canavan: I voted, no.
Canavan: Because they would not work and should not be done.
Canavan: On this one, I think it ought to be given a chance, because it has learned from previous failures, but I — if things came out badly, if all the demonstrations ...with it, that things are too hard to fix and cost too much, I'd be the first one to honestly back off it.
Interviewer: WHEN YOU HEARD —-
Canavan: Could I say something...a political answer or scientist answer — it is that by sheer accident, I had — I've had sort of equal careers in the— you know, as a research scientist, as a military officer and as a — and serving in a political function, working in the White House in Washington.
Canavan: And it really is very interesting that people are most skeptical of things they have no experience in.
Canavan: And once you've served in the NSC or something or once you've served in the Pentagon or Department of Energy, then you understand ( ).
Canavan: Once you worked with State you understand.
Canavan: There's a very interesting reversal in space and that is it's very nice to have people in space.
Canavan: They can do all kinds of one of a kind functions...on instruments,...experiments, you know, look through telescopes and it's really a very valuable thing.
Canavan: But for years and years, there's been a -- an argument about the role of people in space for military operations and when you got through the analysis, it always comes out cheaper to put the...the hardware...rather than people.
Canavan: And you probably don't know what historically our biggest problem as been with space platforms of various kinds.
Canavan: The biggest problem that we've had is not down needing to be fixed all the time.
Canavan: The problem we've had is that the damn things won't die, they last too long.
Canavan: For a warning satellite that gives us information on missile launches and things like that, it was a terrible embarrassment about ten years ago because the things were lasting so much longer than they should have, that they just barns of the things waiting to be launched.
Canavan: And there were so many there that a satellite designer was afraid that — that before — before he — before they were all used up and they could get his satellites in there, he would have ( ).
Canavan: And, so, it is interesting and it's not a trivial point that, in fact, things in space last a lot longer than they should even.
Canavan: The second thing, though, is that they cost too much.
Canavan: The cost — the cost of objects in space is, you know, ten times what it should be.
Canavan: I mean, you should be able to put things in space that — for — you know — three or four times the cost of launch.
Canavan: Instead it's ten or twenty times that.
Canavan: And there's no real good reason for it except the people are very conservative about the point that you make.
Canavan: They are concerned about things needing fixing or ...and, therefore, they're over designed massively.
Canavan: And there's a terrible challenge.
Canavan: There's a very real challenge in the whole business-- There's a tremendous challenge there and the challenge has to do with taking a tremendous excess in reliability that you have and scaling down the costs, to making a trade-off there and doing it in a way that doesn't over shoot and just turn into some sort of expensive junk, which is what some space programs have managed to generate.
Canavan: And it's a very difficult problem and it's a sophisticated problem.
Canavan: It's one that this country should be very good at.
Canavan: But it's one that I think is going to take a lot more effort.
Canavan: It's not making them work.
Canavan: The damn things will work.
Canavan: The thing is going to be making them work affordably.
Interviewer: WHEN YOU HEARD GORBACHEV SAY QUITE CLEARLY AND OPENLY THAT I GUESS WE'RE DOING...RESEARCH AND WE BELIEVE ( ).
Interviewer: DID YOU HEAR THAT?
Canavan: Yes, I did.
Interviewer: WHAT WAS YOUR REACTION?
Canavan: Well, yeah, I'm very impressed with Mr. Gorbachev overall and I thought that was a very nice, disarming...and it disarmed tensions here and it — and I think it also helped him in negotiations in this country.
Canavan: Everybody who works at satellite photography or who pays any attention to what the Soviets are doing or who reads The New York Times knows exactly what they're doing.
Canavan: And understands that they're doing things that are — it's very much comparable to what we're doing.
Canavan: And for them to then stand up and say, well, we're doing this for medical research, it offends us and it just— it's offensive.
Canavan: And it — it has been a problem and impediment and it's really hindered US-Soviet relations because, you know, you don't — you don't like to deal with those people who treat you in an — treat you like idiots.
Canavan: And I'd I like to say that Mr. Gorbachev's admission, that they're doing SDI is a step towards honesty and towards, candor, gets some sort of silly obstacles out of the way in negotiations and that was absolutely the right thing for him t to do.
Canavan: I think that people in this country who are running around and saying, well, you know, we told you all along, we told you along.
Canavan: Well, everybody knew all along anyhow.
Canavan: I mean, this is — do you understand what I'm saying.
Canavan: It's clearing the air and I — I think that he does that very well and in this case did it particularly well.
Interviewer: WILL THERE EVER BE A TIME IN THE FUTURE, I MEAN, ...WHEN STRATEGIC DEFENSE COULD BE SO GOOD THAT WE REALLY COULD – MANKIND COULD LEAN BACK AND HEAVE A DEEP SIGH OF RELIEF AND SAY, "MY GOD, THE SWORD OF ARMAGEDDON HAS BEEN RAISED FROM OUR SHOULDERS." I MEAN, IS THAT IN THE CARDS, OR WILL WE ALWAYS— WILL IT ALWAYS BE SIMPLY A KIND OF — MORE SOPHISTICATED DETERRENCE?
Canavan: It's certainly not being sophisticated about the kind of deterrence we have now.
Canavan: I mean, if you do anything to us, we'll bomb you back in the Stone Age and we'll go have...there.
Canavan: It's a fairly brutal thing and, so, can you move away from that is the question.
Canavan: And the answer is, yes.
Canavan: And to the point that it was really not very well understood a few years ago, but it's understood in a strategic defense debate quite well now, I think, and that is you don't have to stop every single one, yes, I mean, every one of the Soviets' missiles in order to have a strategic defense ( ).
Canavan: If you could be pretty sure of knocking out half or three-quarters or nine-tenths of the weapons that are coming at you, there would really be no point in a Soviet attack.
Canavan: You would have negated the utility of such an attack.
Canavan: And the difference between the deterrence by the threat of retaliation versus the deterrence by the ability —- demonstrated ability to overcome the other side's offensive forces — it's a very fundamental one.
Canavan: Not Just a moral issue to the Catholic Bishops, but I mean, militarily, and everything else.
Canavan: It means that you have — you have really started to...on their ability to plan on the use of those weapons and, therefore, you have — you've started to fight it ...develop some useful capability.
Canavan: Now, I can answer you with certainty that at some point, you know, you'll be able to move from where we are to something — to where nuclear war is a very remote and far less damaging possibility.
Canavan: And you will...in three stages.
Canavan: The — you know, an early stage, a middle stage and a long-term stage, which I can finesse by not telling you the duration of the phases.
Canavan: You won't know until you try.
Canavan: The initial phase is what people are talking about now.
Canavan: They would like to try to develop kinetic energy weapons.
Canavan: That could start to cut into the Soviet threat appreciably.
Canavan: That's – I mean, that's nice near term.
Canavan: We started out as always working on the long-term dream of what you might want to have and you want to get pulled back to reality when you're ...not to do ( ).
Canavan: But you could — I know you can do this.
Canavan: The next phase which seems to depend heavily or most heavily on directed energy systems, which we sort of know something about already, we know how to do that — and to get to a system in which nuclear weapons would be quite remote — then how to take it all the way to a, you know, to the impotent and obsolete level.
Canavan: That's a hard step.
Canavan: We may not even know the tools today as to how we would do that.
Canavan: I guess I sort of have a gut feel that you'll — you can continue to progress.
Canavan: I'll also say that you don't have to get very far along that path before both sides see an enormous incentive to channeling their energies into something other than these nuclear weapons.
Canavan: It's — (inaudible - engine noise) they are very aggressive, if militarily they're not much good once the other side develops a ten percent...defense.
Canavan: Then, you know – then all of a sudden people get to be much more reasonable.
Canavan: You may have noticed that.
Canavan: I can see a perversion.
Canavan: I can see a perversion in technology.
Canavan: I believe that technology can continue to drag us, you know, to higher and higher levels of ability.
Canavan: But you do have to understand that the Soviets being the society they are, doing their analysis the way they do, you know, they understand it as well as we do when they're-- when a particular type of weapon has been offset, has lived out its shelf life.
Canavan: Like the (?).
Canavan: If we had a reasonable defense, not a perfect defense, but a reasonable defense, a defense that could take out 50 percent or all the ten percent of their missiles — at that point their military utility would begin to diminish and I think the Soviets would be — would have a very strong incentive to move whatever effort they have in the military sphere into other systems and other weapons and...
Interviewer: AT A LEVEL OF FUNDING OF ABOUT $3–4 BILLION A YEAR, ANY SPECULATION ON HOW LONG IT WOULD TAKE TO REACH THAT LEVEL?
Canavan: Well, you're talking somewhere between 15–20 years, I think.
Canavan: And you have a number of technologies that you want to develop.
Canavan: After having said that, I have to say that I've spent enough time in the military and in programs to know that what really happens in the ...to slow everything down, you go through and start adding risk by chopping off things that — and trying to get there as soon as you can with the best shot that you have.
Canavan: And, therefore, the delay, you know, could be, you know, only a few years instead of a decade, but it might involve a lot more risk.
Interviewer: PERSONAL QUESTION.
Interviewer: YOU HAVE THE COST OF STAR WARS (?).
Interviewer: HOW DO YOU FEEL PERSONALLY ABOUT THE MORALITY OF WHAT YOU'RE DOING?
Canavan: The — the morality of strategic defense? Well, the morality is that — of strategic defense is impeccable, unimpeachable.
Canavan: Even the Catholic Bishops would agree to that.
Canavan: It's the — the problem is the alternatives that gives you moral qualms, more strategic offenses, the more missiles to destroy more and more of, you know, military systems and people.
Canavan: And that's where the moral problem is.
Canavan: And I think everybody — and even the critics would tend to say that it is a moral thing to do, to develop strategic defenses.
Canavan: The question is if you try and fail and...
Canavan: the Soviets to give them cause and make them do something untoward, then it is — could be destabilizing.
Canavan: But the attempt is not immoral.