William Happer

And people used to talk, we need an office of science.

I thought that was a terrible idea, you know, to that means one point failure.

You know, there was someone in a position to throttles, you know, some important thing.

I think it was EPA or maybe it was – no, loans could have – must have been energy.

Well, having spent time in Department of Energy headquarters, it doesn't surprise me.

I believe you.

But I have to say, when I invited Dick to give his colloquium on climate in Princeton, which is a good university, and he gave a good colloquium, the next day a Nobel Prize winner from my department walked in and said,

What son of a bitch invited Linsen to give this talk?

I said, well, I'm the son of a bitch.

The point was he didn't know the first thing about the issue.

Not a thing.

Yeah.

But he was very left-wing.

Oh, the... Star Wars.

The sodium guide star?

Yeah, what Dick is talking about is that I got called to Washington because early in the Star Wars era, we were asked to look at every possible way to defend against incoming Russian missiles.

And so that meant trying to shoot them down with rockets and also trying to shoot them down with high-power lasers.

Right.

And so during a classified summer study in 1982, there were some people from the Air Force, some generals and technical people, and talked about the problem is if you even have a beautiful blue clear sky and you try to shoot a Russian missile that's coming toward Austin,

By the time the laser reaches the incoming warhead, it breaks up into hundreds of little speckles, not one of which has enough power to cause any damage to the target.