Brilliant Pebbles
Brilliant Pebbles was a space-based ballistic missile defense (BMD) system proposed by Lowell Wood and Edward Teller of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 1987, near the end of the Cold War.
Brilliant Pebbles is named as a play on "Smart Rocks," a concept promoted by Daniel O. Graham under the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
[2] Smart Rocks envisioned large orbital battle stations equipped with powerful sensors and carrying numerous small missiles.
However, deploying at least 423 stations to maintain coverage over the Soviet Union was impractical due to limited space lift capabilities at the time.
But after their own project, Excalibur—an X-ray laser system powered by a nuclear warhead—failed critical tests, Teller and Lowell Wood recognized the limitations of directed-energy weapons.
Wood introduced "Pebbles," proposing that advances in sensors and microprocessors allowed missiles to operate independently without central stations.
Consequently, a constellation of many thousands of pebble satellites evenly distributed around the Earth is necessary to ensure sufficient coverage, making it inherently a global system.
[5] Pebbles replaced Rocks as the baseline SDI design and in 1991 it was ordered into production and became the "crowning achievement of the Strategic Defense Initiative".
[10] Whatever the source, Reagan was convinced that mutual assured destruction (MAD) was ridiculous, dismissing it as the international equivalent of a suicide pact.
[11] Reagan asked Daniel O. Graham, his military advisor during the 1980 presidential campaign and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to look for possible solutions.
Additionally, it was noted that there was no effective way to protect the stations against attacks by anti-satellite weapons (ASATs), and the Soviets could easily afford to launch one for each platform.
Nuclear explosions give off massive amounts of X-ray energy, and it appeared possible these could be focused down into narrow beams as the basis for a long-range laser weapon.
[16] In February 1981, Teller and Wood traveled to Washington to pitch the idea of a Manhattan Project-level development effort to produce these weapons in what they called Project Excalibur.
[17] Teller was also a member of the High Frontier group and began attacking Graham's Smart Rocks as "outlandish",[3] and suggested his own Excalibur be used in its place.
[18] On 23 March 1983, Reagan gave his famous "Star Wars" speech that called on the scientists of the United States to build defenses that would render nuclear weapons obsolete.
Compiled by a number of notables in the laser and physics community, including Nobel laureate Charles H. Townes, the lengthy report stated in no uncertain terms that none of the concepts were remotely ready for use.
[21] In a sudden reversal, in late 1986 Abrahamson and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger agreed to proceed with a deployment option for a system that was for all intents and purposes an updated version of Smart Rocks.
But now the system added more critical elements, especially the high-orbit sensor satellites which not only had to survive, but had to be able to transmit their information at high speed to the interceptors.
[33] At the speeds the interceptors and ICBMs would be approaching each other, the mass of the projectile had six times the energy of an equal weight of TNT, meaning no warhead would be needed.
But if one considered armored ICBMs, a practical lower limit would be a burnout weight around 1.5 to 2.5 kilograms (3.3–5.5 lb), in order to have more than enough impact energy to destroy any conceivable fuselage.
During a briefing for reporters and congressional staff members, Charles Infosino, deputy director of the SDI architecture and analysis office, was quoted as saying "You may have seen Lowell Wood, who is responsible for this program, running around town with [a mockup] ... on a little cart.
[27] Abrahamson's replacement, George L. Monahan, Jr., planned a rapid series of studies with the goal of moving to approval for deployment by the end of the year.
Considering the major changes to the strategic outlook with the ongoing dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cooper stated that the massive attack that SDS was designed to defeat was no longer the only concern, or even the main one.
But it also stated that the immediate goal was to produce a Limited Defense System by 1996 what would be fully compliant with the Treaty, meaning it could have a maximum of 100 ground-based interceptors and they had to be in the vicinity of Grand Forks Air Force Base.
I don't know the motive for that, but that's what it looks like to me.In defending his priorities, Cooper stated that the budget for these items was actually within the guidelines laid out the year before, about 11% for Pebbles and 14% for the other components of the space-based portion.
The shell itself was intended to provide protection from laser strikes and pellets from the known Soviet anti-satellite weapon, part of the Istrebitel Sputnikov program.
One of the explosive bolts that was supposed to separate the rocket fired 81 seconds into flight, much earlier than planned, causing the fairing to flip over to one side and pull the pebble partially out of the airframe.
[35] As the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out early in the SDI program, any system that relied on boost-phase attacks had to be able to reach the target while the missile's motor was still firing.
The report went on to explore the ultimate end of such a "fast burn" approach, concluding that it was possible to build a missile that would launch and disperse its warheads in as little as one minute.
Critics noted that this meant the SDIO was arguing that Pebbles would lead to an offensive arms buildup, precisely the opposite of what they had previously claimed was the point of the entire SDI concept, and contrary to the Nitze criterion.
