When Geniuses Lie

Is Lowell Wood a genius? Totally. You can read his fascinating story at Bloomberg Business, “How an F Student Became America’s Most Prolific Inventor”, just a wee bit of a bullshit title, since Lowell was not an F student for very long. But that’s okay, because Lowell, even though a very real, and very serious, genius, has a little bullshit in him too.

Today Lowell has 1,085 patents, more than old Tom Edison, and, while none of them are nearly as famous as Tom’s biggies, Lowell has done extraordinary service to humanity, and his story is well worth reading. But, alas, like so many of us, Lowell’s story has a few features that Lowell would like us to, well, to not understand.

Back in the day, Lowell was a protégé of Edward Teller, the once-legendary “Father of the Hydrogen Bomb.” Teller was a passionate anti-communist, and a passionate foe of Cold War détente during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. During the Reagan Era, Teller was second only to Reagan himself a cheerleader for Star Wars. Whenever a proposed Star Wars technology was exposed as inherently flawed (this happened a lot), Teller would immediately propose a new one, leaping from “Smart Rocks” to “Brilliant Pebbles” without a second’s hesitation.¹

Did Teller (and Lowell) believe all that shit? Well, no. As credulous Bloomberg reporter Ashlee Vance “explains”

Wood is quick to suggest that he knew all along that the system, while technically feasible, was too complex and expensive to be practical. It was mainly for show, he says—a feint that broke the enemy’s morale and treasury. “I went into it with my eyes wide open, and I did the job,” he says. “I got the result that I wanted. The Soviet Union collapsed. Check. It’s done. The Evil Empire is no more. My colleagues and I helped to make it so, and it was just what was aimed for.” For Wood and his wife, who also worked at the lab, the end of the Cold War was a great relief and an opportunity. “When we finally watched the hammer and sickle come down on Christmas Day of ’91, I told my wife, ‘We’ve just been given our lives back.’ What a stunning Christmas present.”

I’m sorry, Lowell. You’re the genius, not me, but none of the Star Wars proposals were even “technically feasible”, unless in the sense that it’s “technically feasible” to accelerate an object the size of the Moon to 99.99999% of the speed of light. Even thirty years later, anti-missile systems only work on short-range clunkers, not high-speed ICBMs. None of the proposals were technically feasible at all. For Teller and for Lowell, Star Wars was a “feint”, but not to break the enemy’s morale and treasury, but rather to destroy the allure of détente by convincing the American people that all chance of nuclear disaster could be elliminated, not by treaty but by an anti-missile system that would protect us “as a roof protects us from the rain,” as Ronald Reagan put it.

Reagan was the one person in the country who really believed in Star Wars. Cold Warriors like Teller and Wood loved it not as an anti-missile system but as an anit-détente system, while the military loved it as the ultimate cash cow, a role that it continues to fulfill to this day. It’s a (very) blessed irony that the weapons system that many hoped would help perpetuate the Cold War forever led to the “super détente” that ended it.

But let Lowell have his not so little lie. The guy has done wonders, and has some ideas for counteracting global warming that are probably too technically feasible, and too cheap, and too simple, to appeal to the apocalyptic scientists who want to run, and ruin, our lives in the name of Mother Earth. So, yeah, read the article.