Excerpts: McAleer on Clarke - Chapter 28 (Part Two)

Excerpts from
Arthur C. Clarke: The Authorized Biography
By Neil McAleer

THIS PAGE: Chapter 28 (Part Two)

Permission to reprint these excerpts was granted to MysteryVisits in 2004 by Neil McAleer. MysteryVisits is proud to be able to make this material available online. For the full account about Sir Arthur, however, please obtain the complete book, published by Contemporary Books (Chicago USA) and Victor Gollancz Ltd. (London UK).

Foreword by Ray Bradbury
Foreword by Sir Patrick Moore
Preface by McAleer
Chapter 1: New Moon over Somerset
Chapter 28: 1984 [Part One]
[Part Two] – This page
Recent photos of Sir Arthur
Editorial reviews

Return to introductory page

Chapter 28: Nineteen Eighty-Four [Part Two]

In August 1984, Clarke videotaped a presentation that was shown before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on September 17, 1984. His video speech was followed by an in-person presentation by General Thomas Stafford, the American commander of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project – the only rendezvous in space between a U.S. and USSR spacecraft in the twentieth century.

Cooperation between the two superpowers in future space missions has been one of Clarke’s important and consistent themes over the years. In the second half of his speech he advocated a joint American/Russian mission to Mars (and at the same time got in a good plug for his latest novel and the movie adapted from it).

“As you doubtless know,” he told the senators, “the novel 2010: Odyssey Two describes a joint US-USSR mission – though to Jupiter, not Mars! – and at this very moment Peter Hyams is filming it at MGM/UA.”

He went on to confess that he was currently in disgrace in the Soviet Union (an exaggeration) because someone “has noted the extraordinary coincidence that all seven Russians in 2010 are named after well-known dissidents.”

Clarke named his presentation “A Martian Odyssey,” a title he admittedly borrowed from the American science fiction writer Stanley Weinbaum, whose 1934 story by that name became his best remembered.

Before addressing the subject of cooperative space missions (what he called “technological decency”), Clarke opened his fifteen-minute video with a discussion of his views on Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI; “Star Wars”) weaponry (in one context referred to as “technological obscenities”).

“I have also talked with many of the experts involved – hawks, doves, and those who, like myself, might be classified as anxious falcons,” he said, before telling the senators that, yes, he believed that ICBMs could be intercepted and destroyed by projectile or beam weapons but that a 90 percent success rate would be astonishing: “I doubt if any informed person really believes that such a figure is possible.” But if it were, he went on – if nine out of ten missiles were effectively stopped – the remaining ones that got through would unleash a destructive power equivalent to a World War II every ten seconds: “The result would make ‘The Day After’ look like an optimistic exercise in wishful thinking.”

The cost of a manned Mars mission, hopefully a joint venture between the United States and Russia, would be less than just the research into anti-ICBM systems, he told the senators, and actual deployment costs would be “orders of magnitude greater.”

“I am not so naive as to imagine that this could be achieved without excruciating difficulty, and major changes in the present political climate. But those changes have to be made, sooner or later, and I commend your Committee for its courage in recognizing this fact.”

Four months later, following the well-received premiere of 2010, Clarke found himself in a more conservative setting. A group of approximately forty people met at the home of writer Larry Niven in Tarzana, California. It was Saturday, December 8, and they were all members of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, a group organized in 1980 by Jerry Pournelle. The membership consisted of scientists, professors, and aerospace and military men who advocated and promoted a space defense posture for the United States. Most of them were politically conservative and were strong proponents of the military concepts that would become popularly known as “Star Wars” and formally designated as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Portions of President Reagan’s Star Wars speech of March 1983, in fact, originated from a similar meeting of the council in 1982.

“About fifty of the top experts in the country were in the room,” says Jerry Pournelle. “they were not just space enthusiasts, but people like Max Hunter, General Daniel O. Graham [author of High Frontier], Lowell Wood, Edward Teller’s chief deputy, and so on.

“Arthur arrived at about eleven o’clock in the morning, when the formal meeting was still going on. He was not a member of the organization, but he had been invited and was there on his own behalf, and I introduced him.

“Well, Arthur had published this article in which he had said that no idea was ever dumber [than SDI] because there were extremely simple ways to destroy this thing. Almost everybody there had read it. So, he walked into the room and looked at Max Hunter and said, ‘I think I’m in trouble.’ And Max said, ‘Why?”’ And Arthur says, ‘Because I learned all I know about orbital mechanics from you, Max.’ And Max said, ‘You didn’t learn enough, Arthur.’”

The article in question was “War and Peace in the Space Age,” first published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in March 1982. Two years later it was reprinted in the collection of essays 1984: Spring. The pro-SDI group objected to what Arthur presented as an “absurdly cheap and simple” means of destroying such SDI laser fortresses in orbit.

“Assume that there’s an unfriendly object in a two-hour orbit – that’s about seventeen hundred kilometers up. To destroy it, you launch your counterweapon into exactly the same orbit – but in the opposite direction. And you do it on the other side of the Earth from your target, so you won’t be detected.’

“Your warhead is rather cheap; it’s a bucket of nails.”

Clarke was telling people that any multibillion-dollar orbiting SDI system could easily be knocked out by launching a bucket of nails in a retrograde orbit to the Star Wars hardware.

Says Jerry Pournelle, “This doesn’t turn out to be true. It doesn’t work for the simple reason that space is big, very big. As a matter of fact, if you just take cross-sectional areas of the orbits of the objects and a bucket of nails, you will discover it’s not true.”

Several of the people there pointed out this position to Clarke, telling him that his understanding of celestial mechanics was somewhat less than perfect. It was not a heated discussion or debate at this time, although at one point the word imbecile was used against him.

While there were no doubt other criticism of the article (Clarke also referred to General Daniel O. Graham’s High Frontier study as a “horrifying description of the next phase of space warfare …”), the main criticism was focused on Clarke’s proposed method of destroying the orbiting laser stations.

“As far as this technical discussion was concerned,” says Pournelle, “Arthur had no defense. He asked several questions, and at the end of it he admitted, ‘I clearly was wrong.’”

“I certainly have a more open mind [now] about the bucket of nails concept,” Clarke said recently. “Even if it isn’t viable, I’m sure it will scare the hell out of any manned fortresses. But even if these systems can work – and I think the reflecting mirrors and the laser stuff is utter nonsense for decades at any rate – they may be a bad idea because of their destabilizing influence.”

Soon after the formal session had ended and everyone had broken for lunch, a confrontation took place between Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein – what friends later called the “bloodbath sequence” or the “battle of the Titans.”

Heinlein had said nothing during the meeting itself, but he soon made up for it. Unfortunately, he had taken Clarke’s skeptical remarks personally.

“Arthur had made some statements about what the United States ought to do about strategic defense, weapons in space, foreign policy, and so forth,” recalls G. Harry Stine, who became acquainted with both men in the early 1950s. “And Robert Heinlein lit into him verbally. He just took Arthur apart. And all of us just sat there.

“I’ve never seen Arthur defensive. He really just sat there too. He made a few rather semidefensive comments, but he basically just almost withered from the scathing verbal attack from Heinlein. And after his blistering attack, Heinlein wouldn’t talk to him.

“I think what shocked Arthur as it shocked us was the fact that Robert Heinlein did this in public, among his own peers and Arthur’s peers.”

“He accused me of typically British arrogance,” says Clarke, “and he really was vicious. It really hurt me. I was very sad abut it.”

Science fiction writer Gregory Benford recalls that when Clarke stated his reservations about the very idea of strategic defense, Heinlein chose not to argue about it as a technical problem but rather to say something like “Look, this is a matter of the defense of the United States, and you’re not assisting the United States, and therefore you really don’t have call to have an opinion about it.” Heinlein continued in that vein, saying that if he were visiting England or Sri Lanka, he would not tell those people how to run their country.

At some point Clarke said that he had doubts about it as a moral issue. This outraged Heinlein, who then loudly told Clarke that he had no moral right to frame a moral argument about something in which he had no stake. This was a matter of national sovereignty, and Arthur C. Clarke was not a citizen.

“Heinlein was always big on freedom and the balance with responsibility,” says Gregory Benford. “I mean that’s what Starship Troopers is all about. You don’t get to vote unless you fight. And similarly you don’t get an opinion unless your skin is personally risked.”

After the Heinlein blast, people had lunch and conversations continued – at a normal volume. Clarke spoke to several of the group and then spent a lot of time talking to General Graham. When that conversation ended, he said to the general, “Well, you may be right.” This was hardly a ringing endorsement of the general’s SDI advocacy.

Later, when the meeting was breaking up, Clarke approached Heinlein and said, “I can’t help the British, but I’ll try to do something about the arrogance.” That’s the last time he ever saw Robert Heinlein, who died in May 1988.

Jerry Pournelle walked Clarke out to the car. “He looked at me, and he said, ‘I know that Robert thinks I am, but I’m really not inflexible, and I don’t really believe I’m infallible.’” And with those parting words, he was driven back to the Beverly Wilshire.

Months later friends said that the two “Titans” had reconciled their differences. As far as it went, this was a tribute to their long-standing friendship.

“Usually,” says Benford, “if you violated Heinlein’s standards, you went into Coventry. That didn’t happen to Arthur, and they patched things up. Robert told me the last time I saw him that they had exchanged some letters and had ironed out their positions. Heinlein said to me, ‘Arthur changed his position; I didn’t.’ Which I would gather, is the case,” says Benford. “Arthur’s always been a very friendly and gregarious person – not the recluse type that most prominent SF writers are. The amount of withdrawal you see among well-known SF writers is really an unexplained phenomenon. They tend to be hermitlike. But not Arthur, even though he lives in Sri Lanka.”

Robert Heinlein did not change his position – there’s no doubt about that in Clarke’s or anyone else’s mind. “And I wasn’t quite so arrogant about mine after that,” Clarke says. “I’m prepared to admit that there are certain aspects of SDI that made sense and, in fact, that may still do so. What I was attacking was the utter nonsense about putting an umbrella over the United States. That was the version I was attacking. You couldn’t even put an umbrella over a missile site. You could put a leaky roof over it, which might be worth doing.”

The reconciliation between Clarke and Heinlein was at arm’s length and not complete, it turned out.

“I did send notes to him,” Clarke says, “and Ginny acknowledged them. I do remember one thing. I came across a photograph of two bull elephants in a Congo scene, sort of butting each other, and I sent it to him and said, ‘Does this remind you of anything?’” Clarke laughs, then turns serious again. “I imagine he probably would have responded himself eventually, but it wasn’t to be, and of course we never discussed or mentioned SDI again.”

In a short tribute for a Heinlein memorial volume in September 1990, Clarke said that he was not resentful about the verbal attack. “I realised that Bob was ailing and his behavior was not typical of one of the most courteous people I have ever known.” He then bid a final farewell to his friend.

“Goodbye, Bob, and thank you for the influence you had on my life and career. And thank you too, Ginny, for looking after him so well and so long.”

End of Chapter 28

© 1992 by Neil McAleer

MysteryVisits is deeply grateful to Neil McAleer for permission to make
the above excerpt available to online readers. – John C. Sherwood

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