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"The Crucial Frontier" is scattered with forward-thinking touchstones, including large-scale power production in space and permanent space stations in low-Earth orbit designed to foster asteroid-mining initiatives. There's also a proposed flyby of Halley's Comet and a reexamination of space treaties, with an eye toward resource exploitation on the moon. In fact, there's a call for total withdrawal of all space treaties -- especially those that restrict space weapons. In essence, the plan was simply to propel right-wing American agendas off Earth: extract resources and build military might.
"Our share of extraterrestrial resources would enormously increase our military strength. This in turn would give weight to your [President Reagan's] diplomacy in its quest for a genuine peace."
Being futurists, the group also identified what it believed to be incoming, technological threats: death rays from space, either taking the form of lasers (which use concentrated photon beams) or mass weapons (a stream of electrons). The report notes that while no one had actually launched these weapons into space, versions of them had been used with varying success on Earth, which meant it was only a matter of time before lasers from space started wreaking havoc in the wars of tomorrow.
"Deployed in high Earth orbit, one such station could potentially burn down all the missiles launched from whatever locations by one side during an all-out nuclear war, and then leisurely burn down all enemy bombers for an encore," the report states, going on to say that such a giant space death ray could assure victory and deflect any attack. "If such a space laser battle station could defend itself from all types of attack which enemies of its owners could direct against it, its ownership would confer the prize of a planet -- just as soon as it was put into orbit."
The document goes on to mention the ability of the Soviets to put large payloads into low Earth orbit, a capability the United States didn't readily have in 1980, and raises concerns about supposed "killer satellites" the authors claimed wielded space shotguns to deorbit satellites.
"Advanced reconnaissance satellites may contribute significantly to the stabilization of peace between the superpowers in the late '80s and '90s, if war-waging capabilities become comparable in that period," the space war portion of the report concludes. "These satellites will be valuable, but vulnerable. Space defenses are possible, but only for those who have a presence in space. US space capabilities may therefore be crucial for US survival."
It seemed like Star Wars might just be America's ticket to extraterrestrial domination.
In 1984, the US made its first show of strength beyond Earth when one US missile supposedly sought out another in space and annihilated the practice run threat. It seemed like Star Wars might just be America's ticket to extraterrestrial domination.
Except it was a completely fabricated moment. After three unsuccessful attempts, the United States' fourth mission switched from having one missile target the other to making the missiles hone in on each other, communicating their relative positions back and forth until they intercepted each other. This was revealed in a 1993 New York Times investigation, and was supposedly designed to convince Congress to inject more money into the program through deceit.
And even though right-leaning factions were riding high on Reaganism, they were far from the only voices crossing over from science fiction to politics. While Pournelle, Niven, and their associates favored a program like Star Wars, sci-fi authors Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov spoke out forcefully against it, and in much more clairvoyant terms. "I don't think Star Wars is feasible and I don't think anyone takes it seriously. It's just a device to make the Russians go broke. But we'll go broke, too. It's very much a John Wayne standoff," Asimov told the Chicago Tribune in a 1985 interview, while Clarke called some of the plans "technological obscenities." Still, 30 years later, Pournelle defended the SDI.
"The first benefit of SDI was that it eliminated the threat of a mad dictator -- or a mad defecting general -- with a missile or two," he wrote on his blog. "That sort of attack could be 100% intercepted, simplifying foreign policy."
If only it had ever actually existed.
In his speech, Pence didn't go so far as to announce a bold program like Star Wars, but the right-wing sci-fi writers who deeply influenced the policies of the '80s are happy to offer their expertise today, since virtually any national security effort seeks out innovative military strategies that need not have grounding in reality. In the years following 9/11, as George W. Bush surrounded himself with wonks from the Soviet era to wage a new war on terror, a familiar group of sci-fi authors joined the ranks. Calling themselves Sigma, writers -- including Pournelle and Niven -- found themselves advising the Department of Homeland Security on technological strategies for defeating terrorist threats.
One Sigma member, Arlan Andrews, told USA Today in 2007, "We spend our entire careers living in the future," while Pournelle called the group "well-qualified nuts," without mentioning, of course, that the writers' proposals over the preceding decades were monetarily out of reach. With the fundamental character of America left virtually intact -- subbing in new enemies, new leaders, and new technologies on top of a still-underdeveloped space program -- the same creative minds who cooked up Star Wars in the 1980s continue to reinvent their ideas for the current context. What remains to be seen is whether they can influence official policy with the same success and imagination they had during the Cold War.
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