War and Peace in the Nuclear Age; Interview with Gregory Canavan, 1987
Description:
Gregory Canavan served as Director of the Office of Inertial Fusion at the Department of Energy and Personal Assistant to the Air Force Chief of Staff, both in the 1970s. He began working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1981. He relates his work on the Packard Committee, formed in 1982 to study MX vulnerability. Prior to that he had worked on the same issue in the Air Force. He describes how difficult the task was on a purely technical level. He recalls President Reagan's Star Wars proposal as "a nice speech" and his surprise at how rapidly opposition to it built up. His understanding of Reagan's message was that the work might take as long as 50 years but should at least be started immediately. He describes his inadvertent role in the public debate about SDI, offering insights into the political dimensions of such disputes. He then addresses extensively some of the criticisms about SDI's feasibility and expense, adding a commentary on how different groups can arrive at very different conclusions about a program based on the same information. He acknowledges that he is very impressed with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and comments on some of the defense-related activities occurring in the USSR. He sees the possibility of moving away from the current stand-off to a point of greatly reduced nuclear threat. Asked about the morality of his work on strategic defense, he terms it "impeccable, unimpeachable."
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