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     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Wednesday, October 15, 2003
18:59 - Project Crossbow
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/simberg200310150845.asp

(top) link
In reading this Rand Simberg piece on the various pro- and con- and indifferent-to- takes on the Chinese space program (congratulations on a safe landing to taikonaut Yang Liwei, by the way), I was reminded of something that had occurred to me earlier today:

This is not to say, of course, that we should be totally complacent about Chinese space activities. While it doesn't justify a surge in NASA budgets, it should cause concern from a military standpoint.

We've seen recently how valuable, even critical our space assets are to our military capability. In the middle of a war on a new form of fascism in the Middle East, of uncertain length and a cloudy trajectory, we cannot risk the loss of the satellites that not only save many of our soldiers' lives, but those of innocent noncombatants as well.

The Chinese were also no doubt watching, with the rest of the world, the precision devastation that we wreaked on first the Taliban, and then, even more precisely, on Saddam's regime, often destroying individual tanks while leaving civilian vehicles parked right next to them unscathed. They know that our power to do that comes from orbit, and that if they can come up with systems that can negate that advantage by blinding our eyes in the sky, and silencing our guidance signals, our military ability will be crippled, and back on more of a parity with other powers, including themselves.

If they can do so, then there will indeed be a danger, but it's not at all obvious that their present manned space program puts them on a path to that goal, any more than it puts them on a path to the Moon, in any timely or affordable fashion.

What I suddenly thought of was one of my all-time favorite movies, Real Genius.

Never mind the utterly joyous 80s nostalgia that it evokes, for anyone who's seen it (the scene at the end, with "Everybody Wants To Rule the World" playing over the slow-motion college conspirators cavorting in torrents of popcorn, then fading to the nice brief understated credits that movies had back then, actually brings a tear of lost youth to my eye); never mind, even, the fact that the "Pacific Tech" depicted in the movie was in fact meant to represent my own alma mater in Pasadena, where the sights and sounds and events and wall-scribblings in 1994-99 were so languidly parallel to the 1985 analog-synth geekery seen throughout the movie that I feel better represented by Chris Knight and Mitch Taylor than by any icon of the post-Internet-revolution world.

No, what I was thinking of, with some startlement, was the general premise of the movie.

HOLLYFELD: I've been thinking about your laser solution. I figure you've increased the output to six megawatts.

CHRIS: Yeah.

HOLLYFELD: What would you use that for?

MITCH: The applications are unlimited. Industrial for one.

HOLLYFELD: With the power source you've come up with, the beam would only last fifteen seconds. What good is that?

CHRIS: I don't care, Laslo. I graduated.

MITCH: Let the engineers figure out a use for it. That's not our concern.

HOLLYFELD: Maybe somebody already has a use for it, one for which it's explicitly designed.

JORDAN: You mean Hathaway had something in mind all along?

HOLLYFELD: Looks at the facts: Very high power. Portable. Limited firing time. Unlimited range. All you'd need is a big spinning mirror and you could vaporize a human target from space.

CHRIS: ...This is not good.

Turns out the mega-laser the pure young geniuses have been working on all this time is meant to be made into an orbital beam weapon, as cooked up in a dimly-lit, smoke-filled Pentagon boardroom in the movie's opening scene. And when the realization dawns on Chris and Mitch that they have somehow not been able to detect this possible use for the thing, the project being directed by Evil Dr. Hathaway (sponsored by DEI, of course), the reaction-- on their part and on that of the audience-- is horrified shock. "How could you build that mirror? Chris shouts rhetorically to the absent Kent. The protagonists are betrayed, their very ideals shivered to the core. The scientific breakthrough they've achieved, to them for the pure love of contour integrals and radiatively coupled ground states, is headed into space to be used against... well... against...

...See, that's where my mind was hanging up this morning; it's where the Tears For Fears soundtrack started skipping a beat. What, exactly, was the movie saying was so evil about the antagonists, Dr. Hathaway and his DoD bosses?

Was it... their betrayal of the kids' pure scientific motives for personal gain?

Was it... Chris' realization that he is only graduating because he did the professor's bidding, and not because of his actual academic merit?

Was it... hmm... let's see...

Was it simply that the United States was building a weapon that could target and destroy a person at will, anywhere on the planet?

Forgive me for saying so, but these days, Project Crossbow sounds like a dandy idea.

The tenor of the movie, mired in its Reagan-era cynicism about "Star Wars" and the rapidly vanishing Soviet threat (though the "Project Crossbow" promo video shown to the Pentagon brass featured an anonymous South American drug boss of some sort-- all the more ominous, it's meant to be, since it's just some guy relaxing by the pool with a drink, zapped from his chair while the butler's back is turned-- he wasn't hurting anybody, was he?), keeps coming back to the very idea that a weapon of any kind is evil incarnate. Cut the crap, Kent! You built a weapon! shouts Mitch into Kent's head, tapping into his rival's braces to amplify his voice and embody himself as the sepulchral presence of Jesus. And this horrifies even the weaselly Kent, who from that point on goes from sneering, hated nemesis to sympathetic, shuffling dupe who is redeemed by the purity of his faith in his professor. The very idea! A weapon! As though the top private universities in America aren't dedicated to pushing the limits of science first and foremost in the interest of national defense advances. I mean, who's fooling whom? I never even thought about this until just today-- which is really weird, since I've watched the movie at least a couple of times on DVD recently-- but perhaps the least credible concept in the entire movie (except for that dumb-ass line from Mitch about "liquid nitrogen", in reference to the solid cylinder of ice from which Chris saws a quarter-sized chunk for the vending machine-- a visually clumsy piece of flubbed direction that made a lot more sense on paper) is the idea that nobody in the group-- not Chris, not Mitch, not Jordan, not Kent, not even Laslo until his steam-tunnel epiphany-- even considered what the practical purposes of a six-megawatt laser would be.

Of course it makes sense once you think about it, as Laslo illustrates. What else could it be?

But this is the turning point in the movie, when the antagonist role shifts from the Kent-Hathaway Axis of Arrogant Lab-Politics to the decidedly more sinister Department of Defense brass and their B-1 test harness for the laser, targeted at a dummy motorcade (intended probably to represent Gorbachev and his retinue, but looking suspiciously like Kennedy in Dallas). Our Heroes dedicate their brains toward defeating the ones who are revealed to be the true villains: the US Government and their diabolical plans to attack unspecified bad guys from orbit. It's a moral imperative.

Which, of course, they do. And there was much rejoicing, amid mounds of popcorn in the ruins of Hathaway's new house.

And the Evil US Government is foiled again. It'll have to look elsewhere for its weapons of death, thankyouverymuch.

This is 1985's view upon the nature of war and its role in the technological future: We have far too much death and destruction right now, thank you. Kindly keep your Death Beams out of the skies, Mr. President. We have no need for such things in the modern world.

Just imagine, though, if Clinton had had such a thing at his beck after the 1993 WTC bombing.

Nowadays we're seeing the benefits of the God Button-- Predator drones icing terrorists in their cars who didn't even know they were in danger, unmanned bombers taking out ground targets painted by forward observers with GPS units, those concrete-filled Acme Guided Anvils that eviscerated Saddam's T-72s without even the need to explode. We have the technology now, and it's being used against the bad guys-- who are seeing more and more that the more omnipotent their enemy appears, the more futile their own cause is and the less incentive they should have to pursue it. As it should be.

Yet somehow I get the suspicion that if Real Genius were to be remade today, the writers would look surreptitiously for a somewhat different prototypical Evil to hang the story from than the Pentagon and its ludicrous mad quest to find ever better and more effective and more targeted weapons against those unspecified, anonymous, third-world, cave-dwelling supervillains who might want to wreak their maniacal plans against American interests. (Scoff, scoff. <cough>)

So now I get a better idea of the kind of memes that I grew up with, the kinds of ideas that seemed-- even until this very morning-- to be so unremarkable as to fail to raise one of my eyebrows. Weapons are bad, says the movie, and I nod and laugh at the caricatures. Of course weapons are bad. And of course the Pentagon is evil for wanting more of them.

If only we could live in a world where science nerds got megamillion-dollar funding to build six-megawatt lasers purely for the joy of discovery and scientific advancement, right?

Sheesh. Goes to show, I guess, that grads of that little temple of learning on California Boulevard who go on to write movies about their transcendental experiences there on campus might indeed be real geniuses... but their senses of reality are impaired to the point of catastrophic material failure by the surreal atmosphere of the place.

First-hand experience tells me that it's no stretch for such a thing to happen to a guy. (The student who snaps and freaks out in the study hall in one of the montages-- one of the best scenes in the whole movie-- could have been taken straight from one of the South House lounges on any given Thursday night.) That doesn't, however, excuse him from snapping out of it once it's all over.

UPDATE: John writes to point out that we do have these kinds of weapons now, sorta. (And also sorta.) He's right, too-- in a world where someone is eventually going to have weapons like this, I'm glad it's us. I think the world could do far worse (and has done) than to trust us to be the keepers of the flame.


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© Brian Tiemann