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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 07:53pm Jun 30, 2001 EST (#6358 of 6364)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

" Domestic pressures and the requirements of arms control negotiations forced Nixon to retrench. By 1970, "area defense" was no longer a significant operational goal; Congress would only fund a few sites for Minuteman defense. Also shaping ABM planning was a U.S. proposal, advanced during strategic arms limitations talks (SALT) in 1970, to limit ABMs to the defense of national capitals---National Command Authority (NCA). Apparently national security adviser Henry Kissinger expected the Soviets to reject this proposal but the Soviets had concluded that an ABM race was not in their interest; they preferred tight limitations on ABMs. Further, the U.S. plan would let them keep the Moscow ABM system. Over the next year or so, Nixon and Kissinger would backtrack on the NCA proposal and try to convince the Soviets to approve more sites. In the end, however, they had to accept a severely truncated ABM system.4

By sharply limiting anti-ballistic missile deployments, the June 1972 ABM treaty prevented an anti-missile systems race and may have marginally reduced the intensity of the offensive forces competition. Under the treaty, each signator could field only two sites; one for NCA defense, the other for defense of an ICBM base. In 1974, with the U.S. Congress refusing to fund an NCA site, Washington and Moscow agreed to limit their ABMs to one site. Thus, the Soviets would keep the Moscow system while the United States could go ahead with its Minuteman defense site in North Dakota. Within a year or two, however, Congress learned that the Army had decided to make the North Dakota site non-operational. Although the Ford administration wanted to keep the North Dakota site, it could not stop Congress from closing down the ABM, the first time that the legislative branch has independently terminated a nuclear weapons program.5

During the last several years, a growing volume of declassified documentation on the history of the ABM has become available at the National Archives, in the records of the State Department, the White House Office of Science and Technology, and the Nixon Presidential Materials Project. These documents serve as useful reminders of the significant elements of continuity between the ABM program and the current NMD project. For example, the "area defense" aspect of the Johnson-Nixon ABM program is particularly interesting in light of contemporary concerns. Some critics have suggested that a defense capability against the PRC's small ICBM force is the hidden agenda of today's BMD program. Even if that charge is untrue, that both the ABM and the NMD sought to provide a defense against supposedly irrational "rogue" nuclear proliferators--the PRC then; North Korea and Iraq today--suggests the enduring allure of expensive high-tech solutions to political and diplomatic problems.

Declassified documents also suggest that early in its history, missile defense has been vulnerable to informed criticism. Doubts about Safeguard were not limited to Congress and citizens groups; they were also expressed by insiders, Nixon's scientific advisers and Bell Laboratories. Well placed critics of the ABM argued that it had significant flaws, just as today's critics point to serious deficiencies in the NMD program. For example, Ted Postol of MIT, among others, argues that NMD cannot discriminate between reentry vehicles and decoys (e.g., balloons) that are designed to confuse defenses.6 This was a problem that also dogged the Nixon-era ABM. The technology was different but even the corporate contractors that devised the ABM system believed that its radars could not differentiate between decoys and reentry vehicles.

Today, the Russians, as well as the Chinese, are just as dubious of U.S. missile defense plans as they were thirty years ago. Then as now, Moscow (and Beijing) worries that Washington would "break out" of a limited NMD system and establish a more extensive one

rshowalter - 07:55pm Jun 30, 2001 EST (#6359 of 6364)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

"Then as now, Moscow (and Beijing) worries that Washington would "break out" of a limited NMD system and establish a more extensive one that could thwart Russian or Chinese ICBMs. Those concerns had a significant impact on Clinton's decision. Whether Moscow or Beijing will accept substantial modifications of the ABM treaty or whether the next administration changes course on missile defense or risks a new arms race remains to be seen. How George W. Bush addresses the problem of missile defense may be a defining moment in the early history of the twenty-first century

rshowalter - 08:01pm Jun 30, 2001 EST (#6360 of 6364)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Note especially:

" For example, Ted Postol of MIT, among others, argues that NMD cannot discriminate between reentry vehicles and decoys (e.g., balloons) that are designed to confuse defenses.6 This was a problem that also dogged the Nixon-era ABM. The technology was different but even the corporate contractors that devised the ABM system believed that its radars could not differentiate between decoys and reentry vehicles."

Does anybody who knows radar really argue that resolution is so much as a factor of two higher today than it was 30 years ago, after radar had been in intense development already for forty years?

And much worse that the resolution of space telescope?

Even if radar was as good as Space Telescope in resolution -- plotting ballistic trajectories would not be "a piece of cake" and discrimination of very large classes of decoys would be impossible at the distances and speeds claimed for the systems.

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