One of the more interesting irritances at the Pentagon are the people who stump the halls and haunt the phone lines promoting bad ideas.

A Phd from Alaska has this neato plan for an office building with a large solarium at his personal university fiefdom. Someone decides it would make a good place to test deeply penetrating nuclear warheads. I had to agree the guy’s proposed new office would make a great test target but there was the small matter of us not having a deeply penetrating nuclear warhead program. Besides, he might not be in when we launched.

A fellow from Pass Christian, Miss just wanted a few of the Minuteman II ICBM’s we were decommissioning. “Just 1% of the total” was the way he put it, namedropping around Washington DC in a manner that would impress Robin Leech. He desperately needed these rockets to launch satellites to gather information on Global Warming and the Ozone Holes. Never mind the orbital capability of a Minuteman II (it is Zero, by the way) or the weight and size of these hypothetical satellites (TBD), just gimme the missiles please. And, oh, by the way, provide the launch crews and suitable launch facilities also. You got plenty and will never miss them.

Those were the little guys. The middle sized and big dogs came up with ideas that more even more costly and often had even less merit.

All of the people were trying the gambit where they convince DC to do it and thereby eliminate the need to make their case in the marketplace or in the lab. Often they were people whose programs had been cancelled and they were trying to keep them going by means of a new application. Sound familiar? Global Warming.