From “The Nation” Magazine

January 28, 2002

Missile Shield or Holy Grail?

by Walter C. Uhler

Nike-Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel, Safeguard, Star Wars, X-ray lasers,

spaced-based neutron particle beams, Brilliant Pebbles, Ground-Based

Midcourse National Missile Defense, Midcourse Defense Segment of Missile

Defense. Over the past fifty years America has poured approximately $100

billion into these various programs or efforts to shield the country

against long-range ballistic missiles. Yet not one has worked. Not one.

Nevertheless, except for the constraints imposed by his own "voodoo

economics," President George W. Bush appears poised to pursue the development

and deployment of a layered missile defense--as a hedge against more

failures--that would force taxpayers to cough up as much as another $100

billion. In December Bush formally notified Russia that the United

States was withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in order

to "develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue

state missile attacks."

Russian President Vladimir Putin labeled Bush's decision a "mistake," a

mild reaction that should not disguise the fact that much of Russia's

political elite is seething at the withdrawal. Already sPetrettig from

America's broken promise not to expand NATO and the US-led NATO bombing of

Yugoslavia in 1999 (which violated the 1997 "Founding Act" between

Russia and NATO), the coincidence of America's success in Afghanistan

(obviating the need for further Russian assistance) and withdrawal from the

ABM treaty is viewed as yet further evidence of American duplicity.

President Clinton diplomatically explained the Republicans' obsession

with missile defense when he observed: "One of the problems they've got

is, for so many of their supporters, this is a matter of theology, not

evidence. Because President Reagan was once for it, they think it must

be right, and they've got to do it, and I think it makes it harder for

them to see some of the downsides." That's a nice way of saying that

the conservative wing of the Republican Party abounds with

missile-defense wackos. I've participated personally in two missile-defense

conferences and was astounded by their right-wing, faith-based atmospherics.

Which is why Bradley Graham's engaging narrative of politics and

technology during the Clinton years, Hit to Kill: The New Battle Over

Shielding America From Missile Attack, seems destined for popular success,

notwithstanding its serious conceptual limitations. Graham ably recounts

the excessive exuberance of Republicans as they schemed to realize their

missile-defense dreams. But he is equally critical of the Clinton

Administration's attempt to actually build a missile defense: its

"three-plus-three" ground-based midcourse program.

Offered in the spring of 1996, in part to undercut the Republicans,

"three-plus-three" provided for three (or four) years of development,

after which, if then technologically feasible and warranted by a threat,

there would be deployment within another three years. In early 1998,

however, a sixteen-member panel, led by retired Air Force chief of staff

Larry Welch, condemned the plan as a "rush to failure."

But two overdramatized events later that year demanded even greater

urgency. In July, the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to

the United States, led by Donald Rumsfeld, asserted that America's

intelligence agencies had woefully underestimated the capability of "rogue"

regimes, such as those leading North Korea and Iran, to attack US

territory with ballistic missiles within five years. It concluded: "The

threat to the United States posed by these emerging capabilities is

broader, more mature, and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in

estimates and reports by the intelligence community."

When North Korea subsequently launched a three-stage Taepodong 1

missile past Japan in August 1998, many Americans put aside not only their

qualms about the role Representatives Curt Weldon and Newt Gingrich had

played in creating the commission, but also their suspicions about the

blatantly pro-missile defense bias of most of its members. Although

Graham generally portrays the commission's deliberations as unbiased, he

does provide evidence that some of its briefers were not.

For example, one intelligence official betrayed visible irritation

during his briefing of commission members, prompting General Welch to ask,

"You're not happy to be here, are you?" The official replied, "No, I'm

not. I'm ticked off that I have to come down and brief a bunch of wacko

missile-defense advocates." His outburst infuriated Rumsfeld, who

"stalked" out of the room.

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld's report and the launch of North Korea's missile

frightened Americans and galvanized Republicans. Graham's investigative

reporting gets inside the subsequent political war waged against a

Clinton Administration that, itself, was slowly awakening to the

possibility of a more imminent ballistic missile threat.

Graham brings an open mind to the hotly disputed technological merits

of missile defense. Nevertheless, he cannot avoid the conclusion that

George W. Bush's decision to expand missile defense beyond Clinton's

ground-based midcourse program constitutes an acknowledgment that, after

fifty years, "military contractors had yet to figure out how best to

mount a national missile defense."

In theory, a ballistic missile can be intercepted during its

comparatively slow, if brief, "boost phase," before its "payload"--warheads,

decoys and debris--is released. Speed is of the essence during the boost

phase. So is proximity to the target. According to Philip Coyle, former

director of the Pentagon's Office of Operational Test and Evaluation,

"The process of detection and classification of enemy missiles must begin

within seconds, and intercept must occur within only a few minutes. In

some scenarios, the reaction time to intercept can be less than 120

seconds."

Compounding concerns about boost-phase intercepts are questions about

the ability of an interceptor to distinguish quickly between a missile's

flame and the missile itself. Finally, boost-phase missile-defense

platforms would invite pre-emptive attacks against those platforms by any

state bold (and foolish) enough to launch ballistic missiles.

The "terminal phase" of ballistic missile flight is the final minute or

two when the payload re-enters the atmosphere. Detection of the warhead

is comparatively simple, but designing a missile fast enough to catch

it and hit it--given the problems associated with sensor degradation in

intense heat--is extremely difficult. Countermeasures, such as

maneuvering capability or precursor explosions, would further complicate

defensive efforts. Finally a terminal-phase missile defense can, by

definition, protect only a limited area, perhaps one city. Thus, many such

systems would be required.

The "midcourse phase" of ballistic missile flight is the period during

which the payload is dispersed in space. It remains there more than 80

percent of the missile's total flight time. The Clinton

Administration's ground-based midcourse program (continued by the Bush Administration)

is designed to strike the warhead in space with a high-speed,

maneuverable kill vehicle--thus Graham's title: Hit to Kill.

Easily the most developed of all programs, as recently as December 3,

2001, the midcourse program demonstrated the awesome technological feat

of destroying a warhead hurtling through space--hitting a bullet with a

bullet. Yet such a feat constitutes but the commencement of an arduous

technological journey, not its endpoint.

As a "Working Paper" issued recently under the auspices of the Union of

Concerned Scientists noted, America's ground-based midcourse program

has not been subjected to real-world tests. Five hit-to-kill tests have

resulted in three hits. But each test: (1) used identical test

geometrics (the location of launches, trajectories of target and interceptor

missiles); (2) released the same objects (payload bus, warhead and decoy);

(3) occurred at the same time of day; (4) made the lone decoy obviously

and consistently different from the warhead; (5) told the defense

system what to look for in advance; (6) attempted intercept at an

unrealistically low closing speed; (7) kept the target cluster sufficiently

compact to aid the kill vehicle's field of view; and (8) provided the kill

vehicle with unduly accurate artificial tracking data.

Any ground-based midcourse missile defense system has to contend with

virtually insurmountable countermeasures, especially the decoys that, in

space, are quite indistinguishable from the warheads. Yet the three

successful hits did not have to contend with even the countermeasures that

a missile from a "rogue" regime would probably employ.

A National Intelligence Estimate in 1999 determined that

"countermeasures would be available to emerging missile states." In April 2000 a

"Countermeasures" study group from the Union of Concerned Scientists and

the MIT Security Studies Program concluded: "Even the full [National

Missile Defense] system would not be effective against an attacker using

countermeasures, and an attacker could deploy such countermeasures before

even the first phase of the NMD system was operational." Consequently,

"it makes no sense to begin deployment."

Craig Eisendrath, Melvin Goodman and Gerald Marsh (Eisendrath and

Goodman are senior fellows with the Center for International Policy in

Washington; Marsh is a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory) state the

problem even more starkly in their recent book The Phantom Defense:

America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion: "This is the bottom line: the

problem isn't technology, it's physics. Decoys and warheads can always

be made to emit almost identical signals in the visible, infrared, and

radar bands; their signatures can be made virtually the same."

If such information troubles Defense Department officials responsible

for missile defense, they seldom admit it publicly. However, they're not

nearly as irresponsible as the political and "scholarly" cheerleaders

who remain unmoved by a half-century of failure and the physics of

countermeasures. I encountered one of them last June at a missile defense

conference in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Representative Weldon delivered the conference's keynote address to

more than 220 participants from the Defense Department, the military

industry, think tanks, various universities and the press. Weldon is the

author of HR 4, legislation that made it "the policy of the United States

to deploy a national missile defense." (Senator Carl Levin was able to

add amendments to the Senate bill on missile defense that made the

program dependent upon the annual budget process and tied it to retention

of the ABM treaty; Weldon referred to the amendments as cowardice.

Nevertheless, they remained in the Missile Defense Act that President

Clinton signed on July 22, 1999.)

Weldon told the audience that the United States requires a

missile-defense system to protect its citizens from an intentional missile attack

by a "rogue" regime presumably undeterred by the prospect of an

overwhelming American nuclear retaliation. He even displayed an accelerometer

and a gyroscope, Russian missile components allegedly bound for a

"rogue." He then displayed an enlarged, poster-size photograph of Russia's

SS-25 ICBM. Russia possesses more than 400 such missiles, he asserted,

and any one of them might be launched accidentally against the United

States, given Russia's deteriorating command and control capabilities.

It was a "no-brainer." Both threats demanded that America build a

national missile defense system, capable of intercepting such missiles, as

soon as possible.

However, when I asked Congressman Weldon to shift from the SS-25 and

contemplate whether his modest missile-defense system could prevent the

penetration of an accidentally launched TOPOL-M ICBM from Russia, he

responded, "I don't know. That's a question you should ask General Kadish

during tomorrow's session." Extending the reasoning, I asked Weldon

whether his modest missile-defense system could shield America against a

missile, launched by a rogue regime, that was capable of TOPOL-M

countermeasures. Weldon again answered that he did not know. But rather than

let such doubts linger at a conference designed to celebrate missile

defense, Kurt Strauss, director of naval and missile defense systems at

Raytheon, rose to deny that Russia possessed such countermeasures.

Presumably, Strauss was unaware of the work of Nikolai Sokov, a former

Soviet arms control adviser and author of Russian Strategic

Modernization: Past and Future. Sokov claims that the TOPOL-M features a booster

intended to reduce the duration and altitude of the boost phase,

numerous decoys and penetration aids, a hardened warhead and a "side

anti-missile maneuver."

Strauss's uninformed denial hints at a much bigger problem, however:

the prevalence of advertising over objectivity in a society where the

commercialization of war and the cult of technology have reached historic

proportions. In The Pursuit of Power historian William McNeill traces

the commercialization of war back to mercenary armies in

fourteenth-century Italy, pointing out the "remarkable merger of market and military

behavior." And Victor Davis Hanson, in Carnage and Culture, sees much

the same reason behind the decimation of the Turkish fleet, some two

centuries later, by the Christian fleet at Lepanto--"there was nothing in

Asia like the European marketplace of ideas devoted to the pursuit of

ever more deadly weapons." McNeill concludes that "the arms race that

continues to strain world balances...descends directly from the intense

interaction in matters military that European states and private

entrepreneurs inaugurated during the fourteenth century."

Post-cold war America, virtually alone, luxuriates in this dubious

tradition. Yet it was no less than Dwight Eisenhower who warned America in

his farewell address: "This conjunction of an immense military

establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The

total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every

city, every Statehouse, every office of the federal government."

Who could have been surprised, then, when Matthew Evangelista

conclusively demonstrated, in Innovation and the Arms Race (1988), that

commercial opportunities within America's military-industrial complex, much

more than any Soviet threat, propelled innovation--and, thus, most of the

arms race with the Soviet Union. A year later, the highly respected

defense analyst Jacques Gansler identified the uniquely American

"technological imperative" of commercialized warfare: "Because we can have it,

we must have it." Such impulses caused the United States to run

profligate arms races with itself both during and after the cold war. They also

explain America's post-cold war adherence to cold war levels of

military expenditures and, in part, our missile-defense obsession today.

This technological imperative had its origins in America's

"exceptional" historical experience, which it continues to serve. Indeed, so the

argument goes, Why should a country on a mission from God sully itself

with arms control agreements and other compromises with lesser nations,

when its technological prowess will provide its people with the

invulnerability necessary for the unimpeded, unilateral fulfillment of their

historic destiny?

Such technological utopianism, however, has its costs. In their book

The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050, MacGregor Knox and

Williamson Murray demonstrate the very secondary role that technology has

played in past military revolutions. They conclude: "The past thus

suggests that pure technological developments without the direction provided

by a clear strategic context can easily lead in dangerous directions:

either toward ignoring potential enemy responses, or--even more

dangerously--into the dead end, graphically illustrated by the floundering of

U.S. forces in Vietnam, of a technological sophistication irrelevant to

the war actually being fought." (In Hit to Kill, Graham has little to

say about military strategy or the commercialization of warfare.)

In hawking a missile defense shield, Representative Weldon traveled in

the first dangerous direction when he assured the defense conferees

that although Congress was not ignoring the threat posed by terrorists

with truck bombs, "when Saddam Hussein chose to destroy American lives, he

did not pick a truck bomb. He did not pick a chemical agent. He picked

a SCUD missile.... The weapon of choice is the missile."

Unfortunately, on September 11, America learned that it is not.

Potentially worse, however, is the Reaganesque theology propelling the

Bush Administration's decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic

Missile treaty. Putting aside the question of whether withdrawal

requires formal Congressional approval and other questions of international

relations, one must ask why any administration would destroy the

cornerstone of strategic stability. The ban on national missile defenses not

only prevents a defensive arms race but also obviates the need to build

more offensive missiles to overload the enemy's. Why would a country

withdraw from the ABM treaty without knowing whether its own

missile-defense system will even work, and before conducting all the tests

permitted by the treaty that would provide greater confidence in the system's

ultimate success?

Readers of Keith Payne's recent book The Fallacies of Cold War

Deterrence and a New Direction, might guess the probable answer. Payne, chosen

by the Bush Administration to help shape the Defense Department's

recently completed but still classified Nuclear Posture Review, writes about

a new, post-cold war "effective deterrence," to which even an imperfect

missile-defense system might contribute: "In the Cold War, the West

held out the threat of nuclear escalation if the Soviet Union projected

force into NATO Europe; in the post-Cold War period it will be regional

aggressors threatening Washington with nuclear escalation in the event

the United States needs to project force into their regional

neighborhoods.... In short, Washington will want effective deterrence in regional

crises where the challenger is able to threaten WMD [weapons of mass

destruction] escalation and it is more willing to accept risk and cost."

The real concern, then, is less about protecting America from sneak

attacks by rogue states ruled by madmen, and more about preserving our

unilateral options to intervene throughout much of the world. Thus,

President Bush's speech at The Citadel in December was disingenuous. His

rhetorical question asking what if the terrorists had been able to strike

with a ballistic missile was primarily an attempt to steamroller

frightened Americans into supporting missile defense. The speech simply seized

upon the wartime danger to compel a military transformation that has

been debated for almost a decade and resisted by the services and the

military industry since the beginning of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's

tenure.

Lest we forget, China hasn't disappeared either. Its muted criticism of

America's withdrawal from the ABM treaty was accompanied by a call for

talks to achieve "a solution that safeguards the global strategic

balance and doesn't harm international efforts at arms control and

disarmament." Failing such talks, China may feel compelled to increase its

offensive arsenal to insure penetration of an American missile defense,

which could provoke India, and consequently Pakistan--perhaps rekindling

tensions that have already brought them to the brink of war.

Russia, for its part, believes it has little to fear from America's

current missile-defense programs but is awaiting the inevitable: the

moment when the technological utopians push America to expand its modest

system into a full-blown shield. How will Russia respond then?

To court such reactions by withdrawing from the ABM treaty before even

testing against decoys is pure strategic illiteracy--which only a

Reaganesque theology (founded on exceptionalism, commercialized militarism,

technological utopianism and righteous unilateralism) shrouded by the

"fog of war" might explain.