…when ideology reigned over science in arms control debates. With the new START about to pass through the Senate, here’s a classic from San Fransisco’s KRON Channel 4 back in 1986:
Jon Western has spent the last fifteen years teaching IR in liberal arts colleges at Mount Holyoke College and the Five Colleges in western Massachusetts. He has an eclectic range of intellectual interests but often writes on international security, U.S. foreign policy, military intervention, and human rights. He occasionally shares his thoughts about professional life in liberal arts colleges. In his spare time he coaches middle school soccer, mentors the local high school robotics team, skis, and sails.
I spent 1987-88 as a fellow at Stanford's CISAC, surrounded by a lot of scientists. They hosted numerousf talks about SDI in those days and I clearly recall the strong disbelief around the table when a Reagan administration official briefed the group about a particular SDI architecture that included a wide array of space-based assets. In short order, Sally Ride destroyed the speaker's credibiilty with a couple of simple questions about the scale of the drawings and the imagined payload capacity of the rocket needed to put the various materials in space. It turned out the US didn't have any rockets that could put the payloads in space. IIRC, it wasn't even a close call — science fiction (or perhaps ideology) more than science.