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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Remember when the SDI ("Strategic Defense Initiative"), "Star Wars", Reagan's fraudulent ballistic-missile defense project, was considered impossible to implement because (as reported by David Parnas) it would take a million lines of code to implement, and (more importantly) would have to work right, on the first try?

The program was believed-in by the Soviet military, which spent so much on countermeasures it crashed the Soviet economy, bringing down Gorbachev and, ultimately, the USSR itself. Which seemed OK at the time (people talked about a "peace dividend" -- joke was on us!), but now we have Putin. And Trump.

But I got a free trip to Hungary, in 1987, to report on research in point semiconductor defects, paid for by a grant from the US Air Force out of their Star Wars budget.

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That doesn't make any sense. The reason SDI is suicide to build is because the countermeasures are ridiculously cheap and compensating for them is ridiculously expensive. It will always be an order of magnitude (or ten) cheaper to build more almost-free decoy warheads than it will be to expand the tracking, targetting, and interception capability of the system shooting down the 'warheads'. You just deployed a system that can handle 100 warheads at once? Next month I'll roll out 100 decoys and 50 legitimate warheads. It'll cost me $2 million and for you to handle an extra 50 will take you years and cost $2 billion. If you want your system to be effective, you have to agree to your own death by economic attrition.

Do you understand what "fraudulent" means?

I believe the use of the word "fraudulent" was indeed correct here. It was a program initiated by the post-WW2 military industrial complex to use a national crisis (the Cold War) to profit and regularize excessive defense spending, as per standard neoliberal tactics of the time.

The program spent a lot of money, made a lot of large visible moves, and in the end, did not produce one single thing, offensive or defensive. Tax dollars (not) at work.

Maybe this is a stupid question but how does the Star Wars initiative relate to the movies if at all?

Senator Ted Kennedy is credited with creating the nickname "Star Wars" to mock the project:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090227050446/https://www.smdc.a...

The nickname does indeed refer to the movies, which were released a few years earlier.

SDI was the actual initiative, Star Wars was the derogatory nickname. Star Wars involved a science fiction plot taking place in space which critics believed described SDI perfectly. It was also timely since Return of the Jedi would be released a few months after the SDI announcement in 1983... so Star Wars was already on people's minds.

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