aboard orbiting satellites to protect the nations of Earth from
nuclear missile attack was both a symbol and a realistic
extrapolation of technology. In science fiction, such a scientif-
ic concept can be used both as a symbol and as a part of the
authentic technical background for a story.
I knew in 1965 that a space-based defense against ballistic
missiles was inevitable. I was working then at Avco Everett
Research Laboratory, in Massachusetts, where the first truly
high-power laser was invented. We called it the Gasdynamic
Laser, and the first working model was built and operated
under the supervision of the physicist with whom I shared an
office. In its first ten seconds of operation, that crude labora-
vi
tory "kluge" produced more output power than all the lasers
that had been built everywhere in the world since the first one
had been turned on, five years earlier.
By January of 1966 I was helping to arrange a Top Secret
meeting at the Pentagon to inform the Department of De-
fense that lasers were no longer merely laboratory curiosities.
It was clear, even then, that a device which could produce a
beam of concentrated light of many megawatts power could
be the heart of a defense against the so-called "ultimate
weapon," the hydrogen-bomb-carrying ballistic missile.
The meeting we set up in the Pentagon was snowed out
by one of the worst blizzards ever to hit Washington. If you
ever want to take over the government, wait for a two-foot
snowfall. You can then take ail of Washington with a handful
of troopsўif they have skis.
In February 1966 we finally met with the Department of
Defense's top scientists and stunned them with the news of
the Gasdynamic Laser. Seventeen years later an American
President authorized the program that the media snidely calls
Star Wars. I have told the story of the history, and future, of
the Strategic Defense Initiative in a nonfiction book, Star
Peace: Assured Survival, published by Tor Books in 1986.
But long before then, I used the very-real facts about
laser-armed satellites as the background for my novel Millen-
nium.
I had never given up on Chet Kinsman. He was too much
a part of me, too deeply ingrained in my subconscious mind, I
watched my first, unpublished novel become history as the
Soviet Union did indeed put the first satellites and the first
human space travelers into orbit and the United States roused
