SPUTNIK OF THE SEVENTIES $1 Issued by the U.S. Labor Party Contents 2 Preface The Science to Survive 4 How Kissinger and McNamara Wrecked U.S. Military Capabilities 13 The Science Behind the Soviets' "Superweapon" 16 I. Soviet Welding Breakthroughs 19 II. MHD: From Nuclear Explosion to Electricity 23 Appendix to I and II Project PACER: Unravelling the Myth of "Uncontrolled" Nuclear Fusion 27 III. The Relativistic Electron Beam Angle 3 1 IV. Collective Acceleration: How the Beam Works 34 V. Beam Guidance and Propagation 36 On the Political-Strategic Debate in the USA 40 Bibliography Some ol the articles in this report originally appeared in New Solidarity. 1977 by Campaigner Publications. All rights reserved- Published by Campaigner Publications 231 West 29 Street New York. NY. 10001 Printed in the United States of America Edited by M. Minnicino. K. Stevens. T. DeCarlo Designed by Efthalia DeGroot New Solidarity International Press Service Vol. VIII. No. 25. Special Report No. 2 May 31.1977 X-523 PREFACE The Science to Survive Despite public admission by So\ iet plasma physicist for this is no mystery; as we have outlined fully I i Rudakov of basic scientific breakthroughs in elsewhere, it lies in usurpation of political-economic thermonuclear fusion research which put the Sovijet policy by the Rockefeller family and their voracious Union on the verge of developing directed particjle looting in the interests of preserving themselves from beam weapons in July of 1976, informed experts jin literal bankruptcy. In our elaboration of the array of government, the military, and the scientific com­ technologies outlined by Keegan from primarily a munity allowed this fact of vital Soviet strategic ad­ military applications standpoint, we properly empha­ vantage to be covered up for nine months. Now that size the tremendous revolutionary industrial implica­ the May 2 Aviation Week magazine has elaborated tb.e tions available to this nation and the world if the work of retired Air Force Intelligence chief Major political will of the United States forces a recommit­ General Keegan detailing precisely the Soviet ment to technological progress in the form of an Inter­ capability adduced by the Fusion Energy Foundation national Development Bank and its national concomi­ from the Rudakov work nine months previous, the tant, the Th ird National Bank. issue of U.S. scientific capacity has finally become a What we are discussing is the creation of the proper center of rational debate. political climate to spur equivalent and greater scien­ This debate comes not a moment too soon. Spewing tific progress in the United States than in the Soviet a smokescreen of rhetoric and lies about U.S. Union. Despite all sorts of epistemological flaws in the "superweapon" research and mutually assured Soviet outlook, it has been the retained principle of destruction, the Carter Administration has proceeded progress which has forced and fostered an epistemo­ to bring the world to the brink of a thermonuclear logical rigor in Soviet basic sciences. confrontation which the U.S. cannot survive. Hence General Keegan's results — elaborated in this pamphlet on the basis of Soviet scientific work in The Case of L.D. Landau the public domain and of the FEF's original work in plasma physics — demand immediate action in two This essential point is appropriately illustrated for areas The first is military strategy; the war of our purposes here by considering the scientific career national suicide now being prepared by the David of Soviet physicist Lev Davidovich Landau (1908- Rockefeller-controlled Carter Administration must be 1962). The work of Landau provides a "crucial exper­ stopped. The U.S 's chief NATO partner, West Ger­ iment" for evaluating Soviet science policies and capa­ many, has already begun to dissociate itself from this bilities both because of Landau's critical position as policy, as the Wehrkunde reprint in this pamphlet the leading link between the anti-reductionist initia shows. To destroy the Rockefeller threat, however. tors of Soviet physical science (most notably V.I. Congressmen must force hearings on the Keegan Vernadsky) and the present generation of physicists, findings, reassert their control over foreign policy, and the coherent line of his scientific investigations and tailor that policy to long-range economic and during three and a half decades. In fact, one of the scientific collaboration with the Soviet Union, ambng best pieces of evidence to consider in "documenting" other nations, which will eliminate the danger of wirld General Keegan's allegations is The Collected Papers obliteration. of Landau (Gordon and Breach, New York, 1965). The second crucial area for action is the scientific From Landau's 1931 paper (with R. Peierls) on the development policy of the United States itself As breakdown of quantum mechanics in the relativistic U.S. Labor Party presidential candidate Lyndon H (i.e., high energy) domain to his final published paper LaRouche elaborates in this pamphlet, the military on "Fundamental Problems" in honor of the just- preparedness of this nation has undergone a disjmal deceased Wolfgang Pauli, Landau was consistently decline precisely as a result of abandoning the princi- ruthless in pointing out that in reality there is no such ' pies and practice of industrial progress upon which thing as the interaction at a point of extensionless the United States was uniquely founded. The reason particles. He properly viewed the "renormalization" techniques which mathematically (in some cases') developing new theoretical hypotheses and crucial remove the infinities from computations of point inter­ experimental tests of the relevant dynamic geometric actions and self-interactions as a mere "tech­ forms of energy transformation are the exceptions nological" trick compared to a theory which could who prove the rule of dogmatic attachment to a priori directly account for the actual geometry of physical particle or field theories. This particle-plasma physics interaction. From this standpoint. Landau developed gap underlies the purported rebuttal of Keegan's the perspective out of which flows the present scien­ assessment prepared by Dr. Richard Garwin of IBM tifically strategic advantages of Soviet research: for the Council for a Liveable World, which specializes "Particle" physics in its point interaction form is in funding the election campaigns of "arms control^ absurd and the Second Law of Thermodynamics oriented" Senators. Garwin's case boils down to this (increase of entropy or disorder) cannot be true of the circular argument: beam generation doesn't require physical universe as a whole or of many of its parts if all the energy produced in nuclear reactions, but if the it holds for any of its parts! ("On the Second Law of beam energy content is produced by conventional Thermodynamics and the Universe." Phys. Z. Sowjet. sources, it can be deflected from its target, so particle 4: 114, 1933; with M. Bronstein). Therefore, while beam ABM weapons aren't practical. The conversion continuum theories such as hydrodynamics, which are of the huge energy from a thermonuclear blast into a valid in the same domains of nature and to the same charged particle beam seems impractical to Garwin extent as are the "laws" of thermodynamics (con­ and other U.S. scientific defense analysts precisely cerning the distribution of energy among its possible because they are not committed to going beyond forms for various systems), are not rigorously particle accelerators to control of the nonlinear correct, they are the best approximations we have at regime of collective acceleration of ions in plasma. present to the actual (but not yet fully describable) This same qualitative distinction between U.S. and higher-order, nonlinear processes of energy stabiliza­ Soviet physics extends, as might be expected, to the tion and transformation. area of civilian energy research in the case of con­ Thus, Landau's work, in constituting a unified ap­ trolled fusion and related plasma technologies such as proach to the interactions in systems supposedly as MHD. The fact that U.S. and Soviet physics may different as free particle collisions, fluids, solids, apparently be interchangeable in perhaps 95 percent plasmas, and superfluids and superconductors — in of the scientific papers published in no way alters the each case seeking within existing physics the best strategic significance, militarily and economically, of possible representation of energy states and the critical national distinctions arising in research on associated geometrical configurations and of the energy-dense plasmas and beams and related co­ limiting circumstances where they break down — herent phenomena. directly lays the base for the unified scientific and technological approach required to coherently develop a high energy density, rapidly pulsed particle Which Way? beam device. Landau's many papers during the period 1940-1945 involving direct application of these The military circles around General Keegan have principles to military problems and related tech­ initiated a process which is crucial to this nation's nologies relevant to General Keegan's concerns (e.g., survival. They know full well that the policy which the "Determination of the Flow Velocity of the Detonation Carter Administration is carrying out will result in the Products of Condensed Explosives," C.R. Acad. Sci. nuclear destruction of this nation. While they have URSS. 47: 271. 1945: with K.P. Staniukovich) merely tended