The thirtieth anniversary of Strategic Defense Initiative

It was thirty years ago this week that President Ronald Reagan gave a historic speech proposing, for the first time, a space-based anti-ballistic missile system for the United States.  The plan, once developed, would utilize ground and space-based weaponry to blast apart incoming nuclear missiles.  The basic premise was an array of missile-launching satellites around the Earth.  A far more radical design called for the deployment of platforms in orbit: either carrying anti-missile lasers or particle beams, or as part of an adaptive-optics system which would focus a surface-generated laser onto a moving target anywhere around the world (see illustration).

The official name for the concept was Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI.  But for reasons apparent to everyone it was quickly labeled "Star Wars" by the mainstream press and the name stuck.

SDI gained notoriety overnight, as much from many people in the United States as from the government of the Soviet Union.  Reagan's political enemies swore and declared that "Star Wars" was a ridiculous fantasy that would never work.  Soviet officials were outraged: among other things, claiming that SDI was a violation of the SALT II treaty.

The thing is, Strategic Defense Initiative did work.  But not at all in the way that it was advertised.  And out of all of Reagan's accomplishments, it is SDI that stands as the most genius.  Because SDI didn't have to function at all as Reagan had proposed.  Instead, it was the very idea of SDI that compelled the Soviet government to pour an insane amount of money into its military budget in an effort to "catch up" with the United States.  It was money that the Russians didn't really have to begin with and the rush to build up that country's military and technology took a severe toll on an economy that was severe enough already.

In short: SDI was one of the biggest reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union.  It drastically accelerated the Russian's bankruptcy and inability to contain its own people as it had for many decades.

I'll put it in even shorter terms: Ronald Reagan is the man most responsible for ending the Cold War.  He did it with SDI.  And he did it without a single shot being fired by either side.

Like I said: genius.

There are a number of retrospectives about the thirtieth anniversary of Strategic Defense Initiative, but one of the better ones I've found is a series by Jay Nordlinger running all this week on National Review's website.  It's recommended reading for anyone interested in the very rare crossing of politics, technology and history that is SDI.

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The strange Cold War bar codes across America

The "bar code" at Walker Field, Maryland

Adjacent to the runway of a Navy airfield in Maryland is a paved rectangle.  And within that area are a series of quadrilaterals painted bright white, in pairs and ascending in size.

By itself its existence would be a mystery, or at least a curiosity.  Except that it is one of dozens to be known throughout the United States, with most of those found near military bases and other restricted facilities.  Some remote locations have entire arrays of the "bar codes" stretching for miles toward the horizon.

So what are these test pattern-ish arrangements?  Based on available evidence, they seem to have been put in place by the government during the first few decades of the Cold War.  With tensions high between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the advent of high-altitude aircraft reconnaissance - and then "spy" satellites - became an important asset of military intelligence.  And as with any other system of optics those high-flying cameras needed a means of determining that they were properly focused.

The rectanglular codes, therefore, are apparently intended to calibrate the zoom and resolution of aircraft and satellite photography.  F'rinstance: letting an SR-71 use one to adjust its precision camera before sending it to fly across the Iron Curtain.

From the original article at Mail Online...

Consisting of a concrete pad measuring 78ft by 53ft and coated in a heavy black and white paint, they are decorated with patterns consisting of parallel and perpendicular bars in 15 or so different sizes.

This pattern, sometimes referred to as a 5:1 aspect Tri-bar Array, is similar to those used to determine the zoom resolution of microscopes, telescopes, cameras, and scanners.
The targets function like an optician's eye chart, with the smallest group of bars discernable marking the limit of the resolution for the camera being tested, according to the CLUI.

'For aerial photography, it provides a platform to test, calibrate, and focus aerial cameras traveling at different speeds and altitudes,' the CLUI adds.

'The targets can also be used in the same way by satellites.'

Ironic, aye?  That military secrets from fifty years ago are now wide-out in the open because of that same technology and Google Earth.  Anyone with a desktop or tablet can now view what likely had been classified top secret by the CIA.

I wonder what else might be on the ground across the fruited plain, waiting to be discovered...

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THREADS: A British movie that will scare the hell out of you

Working on a few things behind the scenes, but felt like posting something tonight. And that's when I discovered that YouTube is hosting Threads.

Sure, why not.

I first saw this movie in July of 1986 but it wasn't until I was in college a long time later that I found out the title. We were visiting family in Florida and playing a game of Monopoly in our motel room with my cousins and we thought we'd put some TV on. It was a PBS station showing... some very dark and gritty film about nuclear war in England.

I was 12 years old. I soon lost all interest in Monopoly and became transfixed to this film. The image of the young woman chewing through her newborn baby's umbilical cord is something that has haunted me to this day.

Threads originally aired on BBC Two in Great Britain in September of 1984. That wasn't very long after the network ABC aired The Day After here in America. If you've seen The Day After, well that's mild compared to Threads. And that's sayin' something. I was 9 when The Day After broadcast and it made darn near everybody watching (which was, well... darn near everybody) turn white with fright.

Threads, however, is a far more gruesome beast.

I'm posting this because Threads is a fascinating example of Cold War cinema. That was a very different time for those of us who grew up during it. We were the last of the children who came up scared about nuclear holocaust breaking out at any moment. And it could have happened...

Why didn't it? I've no doubt that history will remember that communism in Russia, could not sustain itself. Its people wanted to be free. An unsustainable economy failing to provide for a citizenry wanting better is a perfect combination for a government's collapse. We can see that in hindsight perfectly. But at that time...

Well anyway, here it is: from British television in 1984, a horrific yet intriguing relic of a world that nearly was: Threads.

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Raoul Wallenberg and Dan Cooper: New clues in two massive mysteries

Sixty-six years after he disappeared into the prisons of the Soviet Union, new information has been discovered about the fate of Raoul Wallenberg.

Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who became one of the most revered heroes of World War II. At the height of the Holocaust, Wallenberg was able to rescue and shelter tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who would have otherwise been dispatched to the concentration camps. When the Soviets liberated Budapest early in 1945, Wallenberg was taken into custody by the Russians on suspicion of being a spy for the United States. His fate remains unknown to this day. The Soviets reported two years later that Wallenberg had died in his cell... but there are reports that he was seen alive as late as 1987.

Now two researchers who have studied the case for decades have announced that they have discovered old Soviet files pertaining to Raoul Wallenberg: files which the Russian government has long claimed did not exist.

Meanwhile, there may (or may not) be new developments in the mystery of one of the most celebrated criminals in American history...

It was Thanksgiving eve
Back in 1971
He had on a pair of sunglasses
There wasn't any sun
He used the name Dan Cooper
When he paid for the flight
That was going to Seattle
On that cold and nasty night

-- from "The Ballad of D.B. Cooper"
by Chuck Brodsky

This coming November will mark the fortieth anniversary of Dan Cooper's daring skyjacking of that Boeing 727 between Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. It was on the night before Thanksgiving in 1971 that a man calling himself "Dan Cooper" (often erroneously reported to be "D.B. Cooper") boarded the Northwest Orient Airlines flight, then claimed in mid-flight to have had a bomb. Upon landing Cooper demanded several parachutes and $200,000 in unmarked bills. The plane took off again and somewhere over the northwestern wilderness Cooper, laden with a parachute and the cash, jumped out of the plane into freezing rain and American legend. He was never seen again.

And now a woman has come forward with apparent evidence that Dan Cooper was her uncle. Federal investigators are looking into it.

The Dan Cooper mystery is something that I have been following since I was nine years old. Every few years it seems that there is a new development in the case. Personally, this is one mystery that I'd just as well prefer to see forever unsolved. Cooper never actually hurt anyone and his stunt... well, that took some serious brass ones to even conceive the plan for, never mind that he actually pulled it off, seemingly. Yeah he broke the law bigtime, but there aren't too many scoundrels that it can honestly be said were "heroic" in their misdeeds.

Dan Cooper... or whatever his real name might be... is one of them :-)

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How did a thirty-year old scrap of Richmond newspaper get into my driveway?

For two days now this has been wigging me out. Think y'all will understand why as you read on...

Saturday afternoon my girlfriend arrived at my house. It's about a hundred miles or so between where we live (only an hour and a half of drive time, and less if the Virginia state troopers aren't looking :-P). She came at 2 and we were hanging out here when a short while later in the afternoon we noticed something on the front bumper of her car.

At first we thought it might be part of some animal that she had hit (though she couldn't remember ever hitting one, which is better than can be said about Yours Truly, but anyhoo...) But when we went out to look at it, it wasn't long before we had wished that it was a piece of roadkill, 'cuz we can not figure out how this ended up stuck in her car's bumper and then survived the trip down here.

That's a photo of it. "It" being a scrap of newspaper from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. And from the April 14th, 1981 edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch at that.

How does a piece of newspaper from thirty years ago make a few hundred miles' worth of journey across the state of Virginia and along the highway to arrive at my house in north-central North Carolina, and not only that but in remarkably intact and un-faded condition?

But that's not the craziest thing that we found about this newspaper fragment. It's from the op-ed section. The lead editorial is an essay about the space shuttle Columbia. The Columbia launched on the very first space shuttle mission, a test flight, on April 12th 1981. It landed a few hours after this edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch was published.

Just over thirty years later, this piece of newspaper with the complete essay about the first shuttle flight arrived in my driveway, a day after the orbiter Atlantis launched the very last space shuttle mission.

Quite the peculiar coincidence, aye?

There are numerous other aspects of this piece of newspaper that make it quite fascinating. A column by William Safire (who died in 2009) addresses the role of the marketplace in the freedom of speech. Below that is an editorial cartoon about the Columbia launch, poking fun at the Soviet space program (note the "CCCP" Cyrillic initials for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) evokeing especially strong reminiscing of those days when we were still embroiled in the Cold War. Nestled between that and another cartoon - an incomplete one about the Warsaw Pact - is an essay by one John Chamberlain warning why Russia would be making a mistake to intervene in Poland's Solidarity movement (Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, is noted). At the very bottom of the page is the start of a piece about gun control. Still another piece notes the passing at age 88 of General Omar Bradley: one of the United States' most honored commanders of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II.

The reverse side of the Times-Dispatch page is no less intriguing, despite it being filled with nothing but advertising. The most interesting is an ad for Radio Shack's TRS-80 home computer: you can buy a TRS-80 with built-in 12" monitor, two 5 1/4" floppy drives and expandable to 48K of memory... all starting at just $999! The ad also makes sure to inform you that Radio Shack has other TRS-80 computers priced between $249 to $10,000.

In so many ways, the arrival of this piece of newspaper from three full decades ago has... totally mystified me: how far away it has come in both distance and time, the beautiful condition of the paper (apart from the tearing around the edges), the irony of it featuring an editorial about the first space shuttle mission even as the final one is currently underway...

...and how did it come to be stuck in the front bumper of my girlfriend's car?

We haven't a clue. But it is quite the neat mystery! Maybe someone reading this can suggest a hypothesis for how it came to be here, 'cuz I'm all out of ideas.

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25 years after Chernobyl

It was twenty-five years ago today, on the morning of April 26th 1986, that the Chernobyl disaster - the very worst nuclear accident in history - happened.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located at Pripyat in Ukraine, suffered a severe meltdown in Reactor No. 4 following an attempted experiment. The town of Pripyat was evacuated and thousands of firefighters and other workers died either during the immediate crisis or in the following weeks from radiation poisoning. The reactor ended up entombed within a "sarcophagus" and the entire area rendered a wasteland. It'll take several thousands of more years yet before human resettlement within what has come to be known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone will be possible again. The years since have seen some very tragic results, such as birth defects and an increase in cancer rates of those who were most in the path of the radioactive cloud (which wound up being detected all over the world).

One other effect of Chernobyl is that the disaster crippled the finances of what was then the Soviet Union. It is thought that the accident served to accelerate the collapse of that country's economy and led to the end of the Soviet government five years later.

Naturally, you can find out much more about the Chernobyl disaster on Wikipedia. But by far the most intriguing online resource about Chernobyl is the website of Elena Filatova, AKA "Kiddofspeed". A few years ago she rode her motorcycle through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and documented her travels, along with several photographs of what the area around Chernobyl looks like today. They might be some of the eeriest photographs you're apt to find on the Internet.

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50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight into space!

Longtime readers of this blog know that one bit of history that I'm particularly fond of is Russian space exploration. Say what one might about the policies of the Soviet government during those early years, I can't help but have huge appreciation for the engineers and pilots who took part in that endeavor. It wasn't politics that drove those men and women: just good ol' human adventure and tenacity.

So that said, The Knight Shift salutes the memory of Yuri Gagarin, who on this day in 1961 became the first human to journey into space... and not only that but became the first person to complete an orbit of the Earth! His flight aboard Vostok 1 would be his only spaceflight. And unfortunately a few years later Gagarin perished during a training flight in a MiG 15. He was only 34 at the time.

I don't look at it in terms of nationalities. I much prefer to see things on a larger scale. Gagarin was the first human to leave the confines of Earth's gravity and atmosphere. And just think: a little more than eight years later, we were walking around on the Moon.

Kinda makes you wonder whatever happened to that kind of gumption.

But on this day, we honor Yuri Gagarin: the first man in space.

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Fifty years ago today: The "Kitchen Debate" between Nixon and Krushchev

On July 24th, 1959, one of the more unusual events of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union took place. At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, visiting U.S. Vice-President (and future President) Richard Nixon accompanied Russian Premier Nikia Krushchev on a tour of a model "typical" American house, complete with all the modern conveniences of the late Fifties. It was meant to be a goodwill gesture on the part of both countries... but soon devolved (or escalated) into a rambunctious argument between Nixon and Krushchev about the pros and cons of their respective countries' systems of capitalism and communism. The impromptu discussion reached its climax in the kitchen of the model house, where Nixon enthusiastically pointed out American household appliances such as an automatic dishwasher.

And so it was that the "Kitchen Debate" received its more-or-less formal moniker.

Here's a newsreel clip of the event...

Fifty years ago, our country's leadership was arguing against government-run industry. A half-century later, and our "leaders" seem hellbent on running as much industry as they possibly can.

Kinda makes you pine for a simpler time, don't it?

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Ballard: Titanic search was cover-up for U.S. Government mission

Robert Ballard has come forward with something very interesting: his successful 1985 search for the Titanic was only a cover story for a mission from the United States Government.

The deal was: Ballard would assist the U.S. Navy in examining the wreckage of two American nuclear submarines - the Thresher and the Scorpion - that were lost at sea in the Atlantic during the 1960s. At the time, there was concern that the Soviet Union might somehow find and exploit the sunken subs. The expedition was funded by the government and upon completion, Ballard would be free to continue his quest for the Titanic. All fine and dandy... except few people expected him to find the thing! Some in the Navy were alarmed that Ballard's discovery might arouse suspicion, but because of all the publicity about the Titanic itself nobody dared question the purpose of Ballard's mission.

Head over to the National Geographic website for more on the story.

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