Here's what's possible when you get the science and technology right. The left has always been wrong about science and technology because they follow their hearts (and flawed ideology) to the exclusion of all other possible paths (see the Climate Hoax for the latest version of this).
We had a guy on the rugby team back in the day who earned his PhD in Physics at Tech who worked on the insulation problem for space based anti-missile weapons. I asked him once what he did and in the driest of voices Bill said "I could tell ya', but then I'd have to kill ya'" then we laughed our asses of.
Yet another example of Reagan getting it right and the left getting it completely wrong. As they did throughout the Cold War......
The Godfather of Missile Defense
Jay Keyworth endured liberal derision but was vindicated by history.
A Thaad interceptor is launched during a successful intercept test in this undated photo. PHOTO: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY VIA REUTERS
By
The Editorial Board
Sept. 5, 2017 7:30 p.m. ET
83 COMMENTS
When President Ronald Reagan asked physicist George A. Keyworth II to start thinking about how to shoot down an enemy’s ballistic missiles, few imagined a world in which a chubby dictator’s missiles and bombs would pose a threat to the U.S.
Jay Keyworth, who died on Aug. 23, became Reagan’s science adviser in 1981. Reagan believed that the Cold War needed to end, and part of his strategy for ending it was developing a technology to shoot down ballistic missiles in flight. It is hard to overstate the derision that greeted Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. The day after Reagan announced SDI, Sen. Ted Kennedy mocked the President’s “reckless Star Wars schemes.”
Used relentlessly by the press to describe SDI, the Star Wars name stuck, and Jay Keyworth’s job was to convince skeptics that Reagan’s idea of shooting down missiles in flight wasn’t Hollywood science fiction.
The opposition to building antimissile defense systems never relented. To his credit, and the country’s good fortune, Jay Keyworth was tireless in publicly supporting the effort as scientifically achievable. It eventually gave us systems like Thaad, which can effectively intercept short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and is now deployed on the Korean Peninsula.
In a remembrance posted last week on the website of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Tekla Perry recalled a remarkably prescient comment of Keyworth’s about the original rationale for SDI. “We have got a second-class nation,” Keyworth said, referring then to the Soviet Union, “virtually a developing nation, threatening the existence of the United States, threatening the entire free world . . . I think it is a pretty frightening set of circumstances, and the more I look forward into the future, the more unstable I see it.”
To the extent the North Korean nuclear threat is at all containable, we have Jay Keyworth to thank for it.
Appeared in the September 6, 2017, print edition.
We had a guy on the rugby team back in the day who earned his PhD in Physics at Tech who worked on the insulation problem for space based anti-missile weapons. I asked him once what he did and in the driest of voices Bill said "I could tell ya', but then I'd have to kill ya'" then we laughed our asses of.
Yet another example of Reagan getting it right and the left getting it completely wrong. As they did throughout the Cold War......
The Godfather of Missile Defense
Jay Keyworth endured liberal derision but was vindicated by history.
A Thaad interceptor is launched during a successful intercept test in this undated photo. PHOTO: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, MISSILE DEFENSE AGENCY VIA REUTERS
By
The Editorial Board
Sept. 5, 2017 7:30 p.m. ET
83 COMMENTS
When President Ronald Reagan asked physicist George A. Keyworth II to start thinking about how to shoot down an enemy’s ballistic missiles, few imagined a world in which a chubby dictator’s missiles and bombs would pose a threat to the U.S.
Jay Keyworth, who died on Aug. 23, became Reagan’s science adviser in 1981. Reagan believed that the Cold War needed to end, and part of his strategy for ending it was developing a technology to shoot down ballistic missiles in flight. It is hard to overstate the derision that greeted Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. The day after Reagan announced SDI, Sen. Ted Kennedy mocked the President’s “reckless Star Wars schemes.”
Used relentlessly by the press to describe SDI, the Star Wars name stuck, and Jay Keyworth’s job was to convince skeptics that Reagan’s idea of shooting down missiles in flight wasn’t Hollywood science fiction.
The opposition to building antimissile defense systems never relented. To his credit, and the country’s good fortune, Jay Keyworth was tireless in publicly supporting the effort as scientifically achievable. It eventually gave us systems like Thaad, which can effectively intercept short- and medium-range ballistic missiles and is now deployed on the Korean Peninsula.
In a remembrance posted last week on the website of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Tekla Perry recalled a remarkably prescient comment of Keyworth’s about the original rationale for SDI. “We have got a second-class nation,” Keyworth said, referring then to the Soviet Union, “virtually a developing nation, threatening the existence of the United States, threatening the entire free world . . . I think it is a pretty frightening set of circumstances, and the more I look forward into the future, the more unstable I see it.”
To the extent the North Korean nuclear threat is at all containable, we have Jay Keyworth to thank for it.
Appeared in the September 6, 2017, print edition.
