Of Star Wars, Velcro And Bow Ties

April 8, 1985|By M.R. Montgomery Boston Globe

This week's justification for Star Wars (I know it's true, I read it in the newspapers) is that we're all going to get some nifty civilian products, just like the ones from the moon race.

The only civilian product that NASA gave us was Velcro, which made it possible for astronauts to stick to the floor and allows modern children to dress themselves without learning to tie shoes.

The Velcro revolution probably will make the bow tie obsolete. Hard as it is to believe, the bow tie is knotted like shoelaces, only around your neck. And bow ties require fiddling, which is not something you learn by slapping two pieces of Velcro together.

The Star Wars biggie will be the X-ray laser, if only they can figure out how to generate that much energy without setting off an atomic bomb, a messy event under the best of circumstances.

The general argument that military necessity produces civilian amenities is flawed from time immemorial. The reality is that domestic inventions, adapted to military uses, are the really powerful weapons, David vs. Goliath being just one example.

Wars, and rumors of wars, can speed up the development of purely civilian technology, but even then the general effect is not always beneficial. World War II hastened the production of penicillin and DDT. Penicillin made heroes out of family doctors, but DDT, although effective in emergency situations such as war-related typhus epidemics and tomato hornworms, was no lasting boon.

What wars do, by and large, is capture peaceful things, and make them dangerous. The diagnostic X-ray gone berserk is the heart of Star Wars. And hoping that its development will bring us to some frontier of science is a little like hoping that turning a gorilla loose in the china shop will teach us something about the tensile strength of porcelain. It might, but there ought to be a more focused way to run the experiment.

That is the trouble with war: It is headed in the wrong direction, and anything it drops along the way is of less benefit than we imagine, when the real cost is calculated. Useful things like weather satellites are not a benefit of the race for improved spy satellites and space weapons, but a sideshow, like the elephant rides you can hire after a circus.

Perhaps there would be no elephant rides without the circus, but there could be, if that's what people wanted. (Elephants are very prickly, by the way, in case you were thinking about buying one.)

The other problem with hoping for any spinoff benefits from Star Wars is, or ought to be, obvious. The few beneficial byproducts of war and space exploration are related directly to the purpose of battle and space travel, which is to keep friendly people in good health while they occupy dangerous places.

What we will get from our unmanned Star Wars weaponry is more technology, most of it stamped ''top secret.'' Civilians can only hope that something of limited strategic usefulness turns up accidentally, perhaps a replacement for the bow tie, or some inexpensive way to shave an elephant.

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