Past articles from: Space and Security News

Top of Page
Return to News Index

STAR WARS II:
GEORGE II REINVENTS NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE
by Dr. Robert M. Bowman, Lt. Col., USAF (ret)

The coronation (or inauguration) of George II as President of the United States has brought with it a new national security team and a new attitude toward foreign and defense policy. One of the most important changes is a commitment to a new and different version of National Missile Defense (NMD). This change in policy will have the most profound consequences for national security, for world peace, and even for the search for social justice for the world’s billion plus most impoverished inhabitants.

We, as citizens of the United States, have the responsibility to understand the issue and the probable consequences of the new Bush policy.

BALLISTIC MISSILES

Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) is the generic term for what was known as the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI under Reagan, numerous acronyms under George I, and NMD under Clinton. It has a long history, going back almost as far as the ballistic missile itself. Before discussing some of the forms BMD has taken, it is important to point out that all these forms can be divided into two broad classes — booster intercept (Category I BMD), and warhead intercept (Category II BMD). These classes differ markedly in technology, strategy, cost, legality, morality, and impact on our national security. The emphasis in the Pentagon has shifted back and forth between these two categories. The enormous potential impact of the current policy shift is that it represents a dramatic change from a pure Category II program to one emphasizing Category I.

To understand the differences between these categories, it is necessary to examine the path of a ballistic missile, and in particular, that of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

A ballistic missile is one whose flight path is wholly or primarily determined by gravity and inertia alone. Once leaving its launcher (a gun, a booster rocket, a bow, a slingshot, or a hand, for example) it has no propulsive power of its own. A bullet, William Tell’s arrow, David’s rock with which he killed Goliath, and one of Dan Marino’s forward passes are all ballistic missiles. Today, however, the term is generally reserved for a weapon launched by a booster rocket.

Ballistic missiles are classified by range. Short Range Ballistic Missiles (SRBMs) have ranges of less than 1000 km (621 miles). Of the 38 nations which have ballistic missiles, 27 of them have only SRBMs, and 22 of them (like Iraq) have only aging Scuds, missiles of very limited military utility with ranges of 300 km (186 miles) or less. Such nations can threaten no one but their close neighbors.

Medium Range Ballistic Missiles (MRBMs) have ranges from 1,000 to 3,000 km (1,864 miles). In addition to the five recognized nuclear-weapons states, only India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have MRBMs. A few years ago, North Korea tested its MRBM Taepodong-1. Its third stage failed, but the test has been used as an excuse for accelerating work on NMD.

Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) have ranges between 3,000 and 5,500 km (3,417 miles). There are only 20 of these missiles in the world (China’s DF-4 missiles deployed in 1981 to threaten India). The US and the Soviet Union destroyed all their IRBMs as a result of the INF Treaty, the US destroying 846 and the Soviet Union 1,846. For a while, Iran was attempting to develop a Shahab-5 IRBM with Russian help. North Korea, in a bid to normalize relations with the West, has abandoned development of the Taepodong-2 IRBM.

InterContinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) have ranges in excess of 5,500 kilometers (3,417 miles). Only the five nuclear weapons states (the US, Britain, France, Russia, and China) have them. From a peak of nearly 10,000 nuclear warheads on ICBMs, Russia is down to about 5,000, and is on its way down to 2,000. China has kept its 20 DF-5 ICBMs as a deterrent and (unless we do something stupid) has no plans to build more.

ICBMs & THE THREAT

ICBMs are the only ballistic missiles that can threaten the United States mainland. NMD and Star Wars are designed to protect us from these missiles. Since Russia and China are the only ones having them, you can’t blame them for being upset at the prospect of us being able to protect ourselves from their retaliatory forces.

"Don’t worry," we tell them. "This is for North Korea." But photographs of North Korea’s facilities taken in 2000 show a very primitive missile program incapable of launching more than one missile at a time. ICBMs must be launched with powerful rockets capable of accelerating to high speeds. They must be built of low-weight, high-strength metal alloys, not the steel skins used in missiles of lesser range. They must have superior guidance systems if they are to hit the target country, let alone a city. They must have an advanced nuclear warhead small enough to fit in the reentry body and capable of withstanding the enormous acceleration of launch and the heating and vibration of reentry. North Korea has none of these. Moreover, there does not appear to be the technology or manufacturing base to enable them to develop ICBMs in the foreseeable future. What’s more, they have indicated a willingness to abandon any attempt to develop either nuclear weapons or ICBMs in exchange for normalized trade relations. Still, we are preparing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to protect against their non-existent weapons. The threats from Iran and Iraq are even less believable. Is it any wonder Russia and China are skeptical?

ICBMs & INTERCEPT CATEGORIES

Figure 1 was taken from my 1985 book "Star Wars: Defense or Death Star?" (Please excuse the Cold War details. They don’t matter.) It shows the typical path of an ICBM. There are three phases of the flight, boost phase, coast phase, and terminal phase. Category I BMD goes after the booster in the boost phase. Category II BMD goes after the warhead in either the coast phase or the terminal phase.

Category II BMD Systems:

The earliest BMD systems were Category II systems, starting with the Nike-Zeus interceptor in 1955. These early weapons used nuclear bombs in an attempt to damage or destroy the warhead in the terminal phase or late coast phase. Nike-Zeus was followed by Nike-X, Sentinel, and Safeguard systems. The Safeguard system, using nuclear-tipped Spartan and Sprint missiles was deployed at Grand Forks, North Dakota to protect our ICBMs there. Safeguard became operational on October 1, 1975. The next day, the House of Representatives voted to close the site! The next month, the Senate followed suit, and our only operational BMD system was scrapped.

Why was Safeguard scrapped? A lot of it had to do with the fact that it was a Category II system, going after warheads on the way down. Congress correctly judged that it could be easily overwhelmed by multiple warheads (to say nothing of decoys), was vulnerable to attack, and suffered from a problem typical of Category II systems. These systems are supposed to protect the hardened military targets they guard (Minuteman silos) by creating nuclear explosions high up in the atmosphere or above it, instead of at ground level. But those high-altitude explosions blind the radars the system depends on for guidance, threaten to damage the missiles they are supposed to protect, and do one heck of a job on soft targets (like people). The most recent Category II system, Clinton’s National Missile Defense (NMD) tries to get around this drawback by using a direct collision to kill the incoming warhead, rather than a nuclear blast. Still, if the warhead is impact fused, a high-altitude nuclear explosion will result anyway. Besides, NMD suffers all the other drawbacks of Safeguard. It could be easily overwhelmed, and can’t tell the difference between a warhead and a decoy. With Safeguard, you could argue that decoys didn’t matter, because a single nuclear explosion would destroy all the targets around, warhead and decoys alike. But NMD is different. If the interceptor goes after a decoy, the warhead gets through unscathed. For NMD, failure to be able to tell decoys from warheads is a fatal flaw.

Testing of the kill vehicles for NMD has been pretty dismal. The only so-called success was achieved by having it go after a dummy warhead accompanied by a huge, brightly-illuminated balloon. At first, it couldn’t find anything, but then it spotted the balloon and homed in on it. At the last second, it also saw the tiny warhead and switched to it, scoring a hit. It had been programmed to attack the smaller target. In other words, the balloon wasn’t a decoy at all, but a beacon allowing the interceptor to find the warhead. But if the Chinese or whoever use decoys, my guess is that they will make them the same size as the warhead. They will probably deploy dozens of identical balloons, with the warhead inside one of them. In the vacuum of space, it will be impossible to tell which balloon contains the warhead. TRW research scientist, Dr. Nira Schwartz, was fired for refusing to falsify test data which showed that the NMD kill vehicle can’t tell the difference between a warhead and a simple decoy. The Pentagon and its contractors have faked test after test. (Most of them have failed, anyway.) In one, they put a radio beacon on the target and a receiver on the kill vehicle. In another, they heated the target to greatly increase its visibility to infrared sensors. In another, they used two decoys, one on either side of the target, and programmed the kill vehicle to go after the middle of the three objects.

So the main problem with Category II BMD is that the targets are small, cold, and numerous, and the warhead is encased in a heat-shield designed to withstand the fiery reentry of the earth’s atmosphere in the terminal phase. This makes it hard to kill, even if one can find it and sort it out from the decoys.

Category I BMD Systems:

In Category I BMD, on the other hand, the target is essentially a huge tin can full of highly volatile fuel. It has a fiery exhaust making it instantly visible to existing sensors. And decoys would cost about as much as the real thing, so they don’t make sense.

There are operational differences as well. (See Figure 1.) Category II BMD takes place over the target nation, while Category I BMD takes place over the launching nation. Category II weapons, effective or not, are primarily defensive. Category I weapons, on the other hand, whether or not they were effective against ICBMs, would automatically have enormous offensive capabilities against an opponent’s satellites and even targets on the ground. Most importantly, it was determined by the US and the Soviet Union in 1972 that a limited number of Category II interceptors, while possibly protecting a retaliatory capability, could never (because of the drawbacks described above) protect an aggressor country from retaliation. But Category I weapons (should they ever become feasible) would tend to protect one’s entire nation (however imperfectly) and be most useful to an aggressor. So in the ABM Treaty (as amended), the US and the Soviet Union were each allowed a single Category II BMD site with 100 interceptors. Category I BMD was outlawed altogether. Any kind of weapon that could possibly have a Category I (anti-booster) capability was prohibited. This includes space-based, air-based, sea-based, and even mobile land-based weapons. Even the development or testing of components for such a system was (and still is) prohibited.

The reason President Reagan’s SDI was so controversial was because it was a multi-layer system primarily dependent on outlawed Category I BMD weapons. Now, almost 20 years later (and with the Cold War over), President George W. Bush is abandoning Clinton’s Category II treaty-compliant scheme and planning a return to Category I BMD. He is funding the Navy to develop shipborne interceptors to shoot at boosters from positions off the coast of the launching country. He is funding the Air Force to build airborne laser systems in modified 747s which have to get within 300 miles of the launch site to shoot at the boosters. And he is funding the resurrection of laser battle stations in space, weapons which pass over every city on earth and can incinerate them much more easily than they can destroy even a few boosters.

All these Category I weapons are characterized by their great vulnerability. All must get within about 300 miles of their target booster to shoot at them. All are sitting ducks. So all would be eliminated by any aggressor before he launched his missiles. Category I weapons are useless to an innocent party waiting to be attacked. But they could be extremely useful to an aggressor with the element of surprise on his side. That’s why most military officers, including all the generals and admirals on my advisory board, want to see the ABM Treaty, which specifically outlaws such weapons, preserved.

EVALUATING BUSH’S STAR WARS II

Bush’s total concept is still being developed, but it will not cost the $60 billion to $200 billion the Clinton system would have cost. If ever built, it will cost more like a trillion dollars, maybe much more. To see some of the weapons he has in mind, reread my 1985 book. I just did, and it’s uncanny how up to date it is. "W" has taken us back in time to the height of the Cold War.

Whatever the final configuration of Bush’s Star Wars II, and whatever its final cost, it will from the outset be in direct violation of almost every paragraph in the 1972 ABM Treaty, The SALT I Treaty which was tied to it, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty which preserves space for peaceful purposes only, and the understandings underlying all of the START agreements. It will strategically and philosophically cut us off from our European allies. It will cause both Russia and China to maintain many times the number of nuclear ICBMs that they would otherwise. It will increase our apparent absolute military superiority. It will heighten the fear and hatred of our government in the Third World which causes us to be the target of terrorists in the first place. It will starve the federal budget of money desperately needed for rebuilding our infrastructure and providing for the health and welfare of our people. And yet it will do not one single thing to protect us from the real nuclear threat facing the American people.

I’m reminded of the old story of the drunk crawling around on his hands and knees on the sidewalk under a lamppost. A man came by and, overcome by curiosity, asked the drunk what he was doing. "I’m looking for the quarter I dropped," replied the drunk. So the other man gets down on his hands and knees to help him look. After several minutes, the man says, "It doesn’t seem to be here anywhere. Are you sure you dropped it here?" "Oh, no," replied the drunk. I dropped it in that vacant lot across the street." "Then why are you looking here?" asked the man. "Are you kidding?" said the drunk. "There’s no light over there and the weeds are waist deep. How am I supposed to find anything over there?"

In a way, that’s what Ballistic Missile Defense is like (whether it’s NMD or Star Wars II or whatever). We’re crawling on our knees under a lamppost looking for something that isn’t there. We’re planning on spending thousands of dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country for a system that does not even address the real threat to our security. For years, I’ve said that if a terrorist or tin-horn dictator finally got his hands on a nuclear bomb, the last thing he would do would be to start a fifteen-year development program to build him an ICBM. To use such a high-tech, costly, complex, visible, traceable means of delivery would be the height of stupidity. He would just float his nuke up the Potomac on a barge, or fly it into Red Square in a Cessna, or smuggle it into the country wrapped in a bale of marijuana, or deliver it to its target in a Ryder rental truck. If it was China, they wouldn’t have to use one of their 20 ICBMs. They could just put it in one of the ten million containers that come into this country every year without inspection.

Now listen to what Robert Walpole, the CIA analyst responsible for the National Intelligence Estimate said in Congressional testimony last year: "In fact, we project that in the coming years, U.S. territory is probably more likely to be attacked with weapons of mass destruction from non-missile delivery means (most likely from non-state entities) than by missiles, primarily because non-missile delivery means are less costly and more reliable and accurate. They can also be used without attribution." (This testimony was given before the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation, and Federal Services on February 9, 2000.)

There it is! The government knows what we’ve been claiming for years. A ballistic missile is the least likely mode of delivery of a weapon of mass destruction. No Star Wars weapons — even if they work — can do any good against any of the other means of delivery. Nor can they do any good against cruise missiles or low-angle ballistic missiles from submarines. Nor can NMD weapons even theoretically do any good against chemical or biological weapons delivered by any means whatsoever, even ICBMs. That’s because these C/B weapons will not be in one or a few warheads, but in hundreds of tiny bomblets designed to disperse the deadly agents over a wide area. Our security does not lie under the BMD lamppost.

But when I really think about it, the analogy isn’t that good. If we’re looking for national security, it’s more like we’re rummaging around in the dark amongst the tall weeds looking for something we dropped across the street under the lamppost. And we’re paying a bunch of guys a hundred bucks apiece to try to find our quarter.

Think about it. We’re going to spend 60 to several hundred billion dollars in a futile attempt to protect ourselves from nonexistent North Korean missiles, when North Korea has offered to halt their entire nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs if we spend maybe five billion dollars building them safe nuclear power plants and helping them launch communications satellites. We’re going to erect huge x-band radars around the northern hemisphere, put new infrared satellites into space, violate all our existing arms control treaties, and put weapons in space to protect us from the Islamic bomb, when we could buy up all the potential terrorists for one penny on the dollar and make them all our friends. What’s more, Bush’s grand expansion of NMD into Star Wars II, even if it were to work perfectly, would do not one single thing to stop a nuclear terrorist with a rental truck.

This does not mean that Star Wars II won’t do anything. It will. It will ensure the Pentagon the mastery of space it desires. It will line the pockets of the weapons manufacturers for decades to come (at the expense of "optional" domestic programs like education, health care, social security, the environment, and the rebuilding of our crumbling infrastructure). It will guarantee the multinational corporations and banks the protection of an unconstrained gunboat foreign policy, backed up by absolute military superiority. It will reverse decades of progress in arms control with the Russians. It will cause the Chinese to greatly increase their nuclear capability. It will drive a wedge between the United States and our allies. It will enormously increase the terrorist nuclear threat to the people of this country. And it will practically guarantee eventual nuclear disaster.

This is NOT just a waste of money. It is much, much worse.

DEALING WITH THE REAL THREAT

But if Star Wars cannot protect us from the very real threat of nuclear terrorism, what can? If we are rummaging through weeds in the dark, where are the lampposts capable of illuminating our security?

There are several answers. The first (whether we like it or not) is deterrence. The threat of retaliation will do no good against a terrorist with a suitcase bomb or other clandestine means of delivery (of course, neither will Star Wars). But it is probably still very effective against nation-states with ballistic missiles (which always leave return addresses — that is, our satellites always know exactly where they came from). Against the nonexistent missiles of North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, deterrence is perfectly adequate. After all, the reason they would like to have missiles is to be able to deter us from aggression against them — something they cannot now do.

Secondly, we can buy up the nuclear materials (plutonium and highly-enriched uranium) required to make bombs. We are doing some of this with Russia, but could (and can afford to) do much more. We can buy up the brainpower, paying nuclear scientists in Russia and other countries to help with the dismantling of weapons and the disposal of nuclear materials. They should not be forced to sell their services to potential terrorists in order to feed their families. We can even buy up the delivery systems. As Jack Mendelsohn (long-time U.S. arms control negotiator) has said, "The most effective way to render a ballistic missile ‘impotent and obsolete’ is with a screwdriver."

Finally, and most importantly, the long-range solution is to change our government’s policies and actions so we are no longer feared and hated around the world and are no longer the target of terrorists. As I have pointed out before, this will require having a government which serves the security needs of the people, not the financial interests of multinational corporations and banks. Overcoming decades and even centuries of injustice and bitterness will not be easy — but it can be done. The British (historical enemies of the Irish) have more recently taken a more evenhanded approach, and IRA terrorism has drastically decreased. The United States has been the target of Arab terrorists because we have taken the side of the Israeli government and of dictator lapdogs for the oil companies (like the Shah in Iran). In the last few years, there has been a half-hearted attempt to move toward a balanced approach. If both the U.S. and Israel were to make major moves toward justice for the Palestinians, terrorism would sharply decline. If, all over the world, the United States used its resources to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and cure the sick ... if we reigned in the multinationals who exploit people in developing nations ... if we used our military on behalf of oppressed people instead of capitalist dictators ... then we would find true national security under the lamppost of respect, friendship, and true greatness.

We cannot again be a great nation unless we are first a good nation. Star Wars II leads us in the wrong direction. We can — we must — do better than that

Top of Page