Reply to thread

It's important to remember that there was always a significant amount of politics (if one is inclined to be charitable) or outright fraud (if not) in all of the big-ticket, blue-sky projects of that era. With enough hype and big enough unaccountable black budgets, you could make anything a national security/economic imperative. Witness the "Star-Wars" missile defenses (and no, I don't believe that Teller's data was merely cherry-picked), surviving nuclear war by burying our cars, yellow rain, and the Soviet "bomber base" in Grenada, not to mention all the insider trading in defense stocks that such claims facilitated.