LIVERMORE, Calif. — They don't change their diets to cabbage and borscht or move to cold climates and wear fur hats, but they do read every Soviet scientific journal they can find and pore over satellite photographs of weapons testing sites in Siberia.
They're the Red Team, a key element in Pentagon planning for "Star Wars," and their job is to think how the Soviets could foil President Reagan's dream of a Star Wars missile defense.
"We Red Team everything. Our job is to find if there is something that would prevent this program from being useful," said Robert Perret, a scientist and Red Team member at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Scientists at Livermore, a federal weapons laboratory, are working in lasers, particle beams and other exotic devices that might be part of the ground- and space-based system envisioned for "Star Wars," known formally as the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Soviet Technology
The main Red Team efforts, Perret said, are determining what technology the Soviet Union is capable of devising to outsmart potential U.S. strategic defense and what similar weapons the Russians would be able to deploy.
The results "are among the most closely held information in the 'Star Wars' program," Perret said. The Livermore team started examining possible countermeasures to strategic defense even before Reagan called for stepped-up research in the area in March, 1983.
"Not that we don't believe that the other side can't figure them out for itself. But we don't want to effectively help the other side find defenses against weapons that are in the development stage," he said.
To play the game, the Pentagon enlists help not only from physicists at labs like Livermore, but also from experts at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, and from political scientists at universities and research institutions.
Private Planning Firm
Helping to coordinate the overall effort is the Systems Planning Corp., one of whose top executives, Sayre Stevens, spent much of his 20 years at the CIA analyzing Soviet defenses.
"The first stage of Red-Teaming is to do an analysis that will look for fatal flaws, any real embarrassments," Stevens said in an interview at his suburban Washington office. "You really need a bunch of inventors to focus on that problem."
