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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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wrcooper - 10:53pm Dec 17, 2002 EST (# 6816 of 6822)

Bombs Away: Bush's indefensible missile-defense plan
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, December 17, 2002, at 4:06 PM PT
Slate Magazine

And so it begins—or, rather, begins all over again. President Bush announced today that he has ordered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to start the process of actually deploying the long-awaited "missile defense" system. By the fall of 2004, Bush wants 10 anti-missile interceptors (i.e., missiles designed to shoot down incoming missiles) fielded at the new test site in Ft. Greeley, Alaska, with another 10 by 2005 or '06 and many more beyond then. Defensive missiles will also be put on the Navy's Aegis cruisers, while missile-detecting radars will start going up on the ground, at sea, and in outer space.

What the president did not say is a) that we've been through this before, many times, with equal exuberance, enormous investments, and no returns; b) that as recently as 18 months ago, the program's top general said it was still at an early stage and warned against rushing things; and c) that, no matter how good defenses might get, any "rogue" with enough sophistication to build and launch a ballistic missile can easily maneuver around those defenses. On this last point, it is worth noting that U.S. weapons scientists and intelligence analysts have known about these maneuvering tricks for more than 40 years; that no one has the slightest idea how to deal with them; and that Bush's current test program does not even attempt to do so.

One common fallacy, propagated by some officials who know better (as well as many who don't), is that the case against missile defenses has been purely doctrinal in nature—a reluctance, on the part of arms-control theorists, to give up the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction. During the Cold War, holding each other's population hostage—the essence of MAD—was seen as the way to deter either the United States or the U.S.S.R. from launching a nuclear first-strike. Mounting a defense against nuclear strikes, some argued, might erode deterrence. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which sharply limited (and, in later revisions, banned) missile defenses, is viewed in this light as the apotheosis of MAD. Bush perpetuated this notion in today's speech: "The United States," he said, "has moved beyond the doctrine of Cold War deterrence reflected in the 1972 ABM Treaty."

In fact, though, MAD was never actual U.S. policy or the motive behind the treaty. The U.S. nuclear war plan has always emphasized destroying Soviet military targets and, from 1961 on, featured options that explicitly avoided hitting cities. The United States (and the U.S.S.R.) gave up on nuclear defenses—not just ABMs, but also nationwide fallout shelters—not out of obeisance to deterrence theory, but because the calculations were clear that offense would always beat defense. And because the technology seemed out of reach, the effort seemed fruitless, in any case. That's why Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev—neither arms-control softies—signed the ABM Treaty.

The treaty reflected an acceptance of analysis conducted over the previous 15 years, not by doves but by Pentagon engineers and White House physicists, many of them hawks who despaired over their findings. The process began in 1958, under President Dwight Eisenhower, when a Pentagon technical panel concluded that the Army's Nike Zeus, the first ABM system, could easily be defeated by multiple warheads, decoys, or clouds of metallic chaff that could confuse the system's radars.

In 1961, Kennedy's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered his own study, with similar results. The prospect of a "really effective" missile-defense system, the 55-page report concluded, "is bleak, has always been so, and there are no great grounds for hope that the situation will markedly improve in the

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