this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Fun fact: Reagon spent over $250B on a space laser program during the cold war. It failed and nothing useful was gained from it.
Space lasers work and are a great way to destroy other sattelites. His SDI program was way crazier though, X-ray lasers fueled by shaped charge nukes to shoot down ICBMs.
Still more reasonable than Project Pluto. I can't believe how far we got in that particular mistake.
ETA the x-ray lasers were only a part of it. They were throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
Have you seen the nuclear ramjet submarine? Like project Pluto but even less sane https://youtu.be/CDLOXv3yN3A?si=B9X1pUA5VYktvxNl
Ok it's official. You had to be clinically insane, and think like a bond villain to work for the nuclear commission in the 50s
Is the CIA still messing around with psychics?
Probably.... Does anyone know what the CIA is currently doing?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative
I wouldn't say that nothing useful was gained. It appears to have furthered our sensor technology quite a bit. True, it was never going to work as intended, but Reagan didn't know that. This is the same guy that was terrified by the film WarGames, so of course he wanted the SDI program. He was a shitty president for many reasons, I wouldn't say that SDI was one of them.
Sure he did. Do you really think he didn't have any advisors or scientists telling him what a stupid idea it was? The point was never for it to work, just to funnel money weapons contractors.
I don't know how much he understood due to the Alzheimer's. It wasn't obvious in his first term, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was being affected.
Given that he called it the Star Wars program, I'm pretty sure what happened was that he just saw Return of the Jedi at the cinema and thought it'd be great if you had his own death star.
I wouldn't be surprised if his crazy dementia filled ass, tried telling people the Darth Vader was going to come down from the planet Vulcan and fry his brain even further if he didn't get his damn Death Star.
For anyone interested, Jacob Geller made a video about this specific topic
To be fair, this was not based on science, this was based on Ronald Reagan having just seen Return of the Jedi, I'm thinking it would be cool to have his own death star. I mean he literally called it the fucking Star Wars program.