In the waning days of this fall`s election campaign, President Reagan, speaking in Colorado, gave an impassioned defense of his controversial Strategic Defense Initiative, which he hopes one day will be able to deter any nuclear attack with a space-based missile defense system.
Colorado has burgeoning defense and aerospace industries, and Reagan pulled out all the stops, touting Star Wars` potential to create a ”whole new technological age” and open ”whole new fields of technology and industry.” Not incidentally, he added, it would mean ”jobs for thousands.”
Reagan`s latest pitch for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) has added fuel to the debate about the economic fallout of Star Wars. A growing number of economists, high-tech business leaders and industry scientists are questioning the affordability of SDI and asking whether it will divert resources from the civilian sector. The total cost of Star Wars, now estimated at $1 trillion, worries many critics, who fear it could seriously impair U.S. economic competitiveness at a time when the trade deficit still tops $12 billion a month.
”It`s premature to talk about spinoffs (from military spending),” said Roland Schmitt, chief scientist at General Electric Co., who also heads the president`s National Science Board. ”There have always been some, but limited spinoffs. . . . I think the kinds of technologies they`re in will take a long time to reach the commercial stage.”
Bernard O`Keefe, president of EG&G Inc., a Boston high-tech firm that is a subcontractor on SDI, cautions that ”SDI projects siphon off both capital investment and research talent.”
And Jerome Wiesner, former science adviser to President John F. Kennedy and now professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, amplifies this view: ”When the government spends so much on SDI, it can`t spend as much on the steel industry. . . It`s my best judgment that a very substantial part of our current industrial backwardness is due to diversion of
resources.”
This year, Congress trimmed the administration`s request for SDI funds to just over $3 billion from $4.8 billion, but it still remains the biggest federal research and development program. SDI is requesting $34 billion in current dollars from fiscal 1987 to fiscal 1991.
Star Wars research is now underway in a broad range of fields in industry and academia, including lasers, optics, materials, infrared sensors, computers and much more. Many scientists argue that SDI offers exciting challenges to work in the frontiers of research and that SDI often pays more than industry or universities can afford.
Between fiscal 1983 and 1986, the nation`s top 20 SDI contractors received $4.2 billion of the $6.7 billion in SDI contracts, including such giants as General Motors Corp., Lockheed Corp., Boeing Co., TRW Inc., GE and EG&G. SDI funds also are going to many of the leading universities such as MIT, the University of Texas, Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, California State University and Pennsylvania State University.
Finally, the national labs including the Department of Energy`s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory have been major recipients of SDI funds.
Lt. Gen. James Abrahamson, director of the SDI Organization, shares Reagan`s optimism about the civilian benefits of the program. He has stated previously that SDI ”will so stimulate the economy it will pay for
itself.”
James Ionson, an astrophysicist who runs the SDI Innovative Science and Technology Office, calls SDI ”one of the greatest technical challenges of all time. . . . There are many examples of how our research will have spinoffs in optics, lasers and other fields.” Ionson is especially bullish about the potential medical and industrial applications from SDI research on lasers.
Ionson emphasizes that SDI is not designed primarily to boost the economy, but rather to create a defensive system to protect the United States from nuclear attacks. And Ionson acknowledges that ”any major government program can`t help but generate spinoffs.”
Col. James Ball, deputy director of the recently created civilian applications office at SDI, says he is working to identify all the potential commercial uses of Star Wars and compile them in a database over the next year. His office is focusing on four broad areas: biomedical; electronics, computers and communciations; energy transmission; and materials and industrial processes.
Ball explains that SDI will have another economic effect by placing new pressures on the Soviet economy. ”Our emphasis on pushing technologies creates a problem for the Soviets economically and in other ways,” Ball said. ”They`re very definitely concerned about our advances in technology. SDI is not a bargaining chip, but a lever to pressure the Soviets.”
Historically, there have been a number of cases where military R&D plus military procurement have helped generate new products, especially right after World War II and the Korean War. The civilian jet airliner, nuclear reactors and the early computer industry all received substantial boosts from the military, scientists and economists agree. In general, proponents argue that the military can afford very costly research and development that is often beyond the means of private industry, sometimes creating new markets and eventually bringing product costs down.
In the last decade, however, there have been fewer cases of major spinoffs and critics say this is because much of the recent military research has been devoted to increasingly arcane areas, romote from civilian needs.
Nathan Rosenberg, a Stanford University economist, argues that SDI will generate fewer spinoffs because the requirements of space are drastically different from those on Earth. Sensors, for instance, which are a big-ticket item for Star Wars, will have to be tested for survivability under extreme conditions, making them unlikely candidates for use in industrial robots in the near future. Similarly, Rosenberg sees little likelihood that X-ray lasers powered by nuclear explosions will find much use in the civilian sector.
More broadly, Rosenberg worries that the lion`s share of SDI funds are going for ”downstream military hardware applications,” as opposed to basic research, which many scientists and economists believe is the primary source of innovations and civilian benefits. Only 3 percent, or less than $100 million, of this year`s SDI funds are going for basic research. ”In sum,”
writes Rosenberg in an unpublished paper, ”secrecy and the large fraction of SDI funds that will be spent on DT&E (development, testing and evaluation) of esoteric military devices make SDI distinctly inefficient and unpromising as a support program for civilian R&D.”
Rosenberg also concluded: ”. . . It is likely that spillovers from the civilian to the military have for some years now exceeded the flow from the military to the civilian.”
And Jerome Weisner of MIT notes that SDI is relying heavily on the civilian sector to meet its computer needs.
Ralph Thomson a senior vice president with the 2,800-member American Electronics Association, added, ”There`s an undiscipline to military spending. In consumer markets, costs and quality considerations are life and death in international competition . . . defense has incremental costs. It`s infecting the civilian economy with inefficiency.” The specter of rising military costs worries Thomson. ”In the name of national security, we could lose our national economy.”
Richard Garwin, a physicist and high-level science consultant to International Business Machines Corp. agrees, noting that SDI ”introduces a different standard of quality, effectiveness and cost.” SDI technologies, like enormous lasers and particle beam accelerators, are ”very different”
from civilian ones, he says. ”I think it`s a real loser,” Garwin added.
A related concern is that SDI will bid up the costs of scientists and engineers in private industry, making their competitive problems still harder. The Council on Economic Priorities, a New York public interest group, recently concluded a two-year study of SDI indicating that in 1984 the program employed 4,800 scientists, engineers and technicians, but that in 1987 the number could reach 18,400, an increase of 283 percent.
Several recent studies have estimated that at least 25 percent of American scientists and engineers currently are doing defense-related work.
Schmitt of GE says that in general the defense build-up under Reagan has not put ”inordinate strain on engineering resources,” but that SDI could well strain the specialized sector of graduate students. ”SDI will put special demands on that higher echelon,” Schmitt said.
Simon Ramo, a founder of TRW, which is a leading recipient of SDI funds, concluded in his book, ”America`s Technology Slip”: ”In the past 30 years had the total dollars we spent on military R&D been expended in those area of science and technology promising the most economic progress, we probably would be today where we are now going to find ourselves arriving in the year 2000.” Last summer, more than 1,600 scientists, including a handful of Nobel Prize winners, wrote an open letter to Congress carrying a strong warning:
”In view of the international economic competition faced by the U.S., it should be asked whether the country can afford the diversion of research, especially scientific and technical manpower, that the SDI entails.”
