OK we all know science fiction writers wrote Star Wars the films*, but their role in Star Wars the Strategic Defence Initiative is less well known.

The recently passed Arthur C. Clarke was clearly a visionary whose futurology was based in hard science and helped sketch out elements of the space race as well as next stages in the human story as we make space our home. However, we previously noted the use of science-fiction authors by the military and an older example has just popped up on my hyperspace infradar. The article by Norman Spinrad looks at the period in the early eighties when the Moon landing was a fading memory and Nasa's budget was being slashed.

The golden age of human space exploration was over. The moon landing had been the end, not the opening act.

At this moment a sci-fi writer, Dr Jerry Pournelle, decided that something had to be done. He had been president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He had also worked in the American space programme. He had also worked in right-of-centre political campaigns, mostly for Republican candidates, and through his political work, he knew Richard Allen, National Security advisor in the incoming administration of Ronald Reagan.

Pournelle, in conjunction with sci-fi writers like Robert A Heinlein, Poul Anderson and his collaborator Larry Niven, space industry executives and scientists, the retired general Daniel Graham, the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and others, put together the "Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy".

While this seemed to be a private citizens’ space lobby group whose goal was to influence the incoming Reagan administration to create a visionary manned space programme, it evolved or devolved into something both more and less. The Citizens’ Advisory Council reported directly to Richard Allen through Pournelle, preparing reports for the incoming administration’s transition team, and continuing when Allen became National Security Advisor, giving it direct access to the highest levels of the Reagan administration.

...

there had been some talk of Pournelle becoming head of NASA. "I don’t want it," he told me with a laugh. "Better to be in a position with more power." He was only half joking.

Pournelle was dedicated to launching an age of human space exploration, as were most sci-fi people across the political spectrum. Many space lobby groups were trying to sell such a programme to the Reagan administration on naively idealistic grounds. But Pournelle had political experience and sophistication, an inside track directly to the National Security Council through Allen, and a rather Machiavellian strategy. NASA was just not going to get the budget to put humans in space in a big way. The biggest part of the funding would have to come from the military, who had a budget two orders of magnitude larger than NASA’s and much more clout when it came to getting project financing through Congress. How did he expect to get the Pentagon to finance a major human presence in space? Why would they do it? Pournelle came up with an answer: to defend the United States from Soviet nuclear missiles.

Hence the composition of the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy - sci-fi writers for the "vision"; retired military people with the ear of the Pentagon; and aerospace industry people representing economic self-interest in as big a budget as possible for what was to become the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), better known as Star Wars.

...

The covert strategy was to use the Star Wars programme to trick the Pentagon into financing a major manned space programme out of the military budget. Pournelle and the sci-fi writers believed that in the real world any such system would have to be space-based - orbital lasers, anti-missile missiles already in orbit and so able to intercept ICBMs (ballistic missiles) in their boost-phase, orbital neutron-bombs, and so forth. All this would require orbital detection, command, and control systems - with human crews.

So the military would have to build permanently manned orbital space stations with dozens, scores, perhaps ultimately hundreds, of personnel. This in turn would require the military to fund the development of the Earth-to-orbit logistical systems to put them there and maintain them. And so, before they knew it, the Pentagon would have financed the infrastructure need to for a true golden age of space: space stations, more advanced ground to orbit transportation vehicles and heavy freight lifters, orbital "tugboats" and "jeeps", and orbital fuel dumps.

Of course, none of this came to pass - and Spinrad is pretty damning about the influence the group had but can we look at it from a different perspective?

I'm intrigued by this because, with the exception of ACC, sci-fi authors don't necessarily make the best futorlogists but they make great memetic engineers. As we've seen, elements of the military seem very interested in using the Internet for spreading memes and some of this traces back to The Aviary, who have been doing this for a long time and were just shifting mediums. Their membership is interesting because it combines people with a background in weapons (often of the non-lethal kind) and an interest in UFOs and other strange phenomena - not arising from their own belief in such things but as a means to an end, as shown by Greg Bishop.

Now if you are planning on fighting an Info War and winning, you can deploy all the prophet holograms and infrasound generators you like, but you aren't going to be able strike a paralysing blow against the enemy unless you have a good script.

Now take another look at SDI - they never did deploy hundreds of hunter-killer satellites or ground-based interceptor missiles, they didn't have to. The story they span was big enough and just plausible enough to suggest that Mutually Assured Destruction might be about to be eroded. When applied at just the right point during the height of the Cold War it (along with other factors - like Reagan believing it was real, even if it is debatable that he ever knew the difference between the films and SDI) seems to have been just enough to make the Great Bear blink.

As the article says: "Soon after the break-up of the Soviet Union Pournelle and Niven declared on television that they had 'destroyed the Evil Empire' by forcing it into a space arms race it could not win, enfeebling it economically in the process." Perhaps that was the plan all along. The few tens of billions being thrown around were cheaper than building the whole system, which not only wouldn't have worked well enough to pull our collective fat out of the nuclear fire, but its deployment could have actually lit the blue touch paper (metaphorically, of course). So the victory doesn't go to The Strategy of Technology, but the Illusion of Technology. Perhaps science-fiction really did help save the world.

Source

Hat tip

Intriguingly, the big winners from this (other than us, by not being nuked) was the aerospace industry which scooped up a large slice of the money with nothing much to show for it. Such links between sci-fi authors, the military and the aerospace industry make one wonder about the move of a number of Aviary members (John Alexander, Jacques Vallee, etc.) to the NIDS, funded by Robert Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace (although, he made his money in hotels and moved into the field in 1999 after the period under discussion).

I'll end on the opening paragraph as it not only touches on the power of science fiction to map out the future but also resonates with concepts Grant Morrison and others have played around with like Hypersigils and fiction suits:

The French literary critic Michel Butor once suggested - quite seriously, it seems - that the world-wide community of science fiction writers get together, decide what the future of the world should look like, and, by setting all their novels and stories in that agreed-upon future, call it into being.

Of course, if they did do that we'd want to make sure we knew whose payroll they were actually on!!

* I will leave the debate over George Lucas was any good as a science-fiction writer to others - it did the job at the time!!

See also

• How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran, how American intelligence concocted a whole production company and appropriated a failed sci-fi film project (with Jack Kirby sketches!!).