OT: Upper limit on Lasers, range and power....

[rdouglass]

C'mon. They're all defensive weapons anyways, right?

[ToddT]

The space treaty, was a hedge by botht h us and the USSR. the laying came to territory, was sometthing the soviets wanted because of possibilty The US would beat them to it. (even you as a private citizen can't claim anything)
US was more for the no nukes in Space, sadly that didn't included scaled neclear eators of which the sovits put several in space, one even crashed in Canada. I'm not talking about the puny radio istope Generators, but real, small scale reactors.

[PvK]

Well, during the Cold War, and perhaps still today, an anti-missile shield is also a threat. Imagine you are a NATO commander during a tense part of the Cold War. The USSR starts deploying a defensive system that will remove your ability to hit the USSR with ballistic missiles, but of course it won't remove their ability to use theirs. It works both ways. Of course, there are huge obstacles to actually achieving a real feeling of safety when the opponent is as over-armed as the USA or USSR with MIRV ICBMs, cruise missiles, etc. Then there are the considerations that people can sneak weapons around on the ground (one supposed current concern), and for a nuclear superpower, the fact that they can still achieve Mutual Assured Destruction merely by threatening to detonate their arsenal even in their home country, since the environmental effects would destroy the world anyway.

As for the original laser questions, mirrors reflect some percentage of the light, and a certain amount of energy is required to melt the mirrored surface and distort it so it stops reflecting, and then a different amount of energy is required to burn through the surface beneath the mirror. So there's both a dividing factor and a threshold. Late 1980's discussions included ideas such as rotating, mirrored ICBM's. Eseentially though, like much of the Reagan/Bush/Bush military operations, the Star Wars program was more of a "look how scary nuts we are" and "let's dump tons of money into our supporters' corportations" plan, than really a "let's be Buck Rogers and really protect the Free World (tm) from the Evil Empire" plan.

PvK

[scJazz]

PvK said:
<SNIP>
Eseentially though, like much of the Reagan/Bush/Bush military operations, the Star Wars program was more of a "look how scary nuts we are" and "let's dump tons of money into our supporters' corportations" plan, than really a "let's be Buck Rogers and really protect the Free World (tm) from the Evil Empire" plan.

PvK

It is worth noting that the dump tons of money and scary nuts elements caused the USSR to try to keep up in an ultimate game of the "Jones's". Totally crushing the USSRs already floundering economy and forcing the collapse of the rotten house of cards.

[PvK]

My impression is that the degree of cause and effect there is doubtful, even if some people try to say so. The USSR was paranoid about the cold war and embarking in severe and often self-destructive defense policies continuously for a very long time (since Stalin, at the very least). Attempts to develop various Anti-(Anti-)Ballistic Missile technologies in the USSR, and massive military investments, went back way before Reagan. The problems with the Soviet system were much more pervasive and complex than whatever effect Reagan and Star Wars had (or didn't have) on them. Seems to me the Soviet bloc inevitably crumbled from within and Reagan and Star Wars were just coincidental wacko corruptions on our side of the fence.