High Frontiers of Strategic Defense
O'Lessker, Karl
Karl O'Lessker HIGH FRONTIERS OF STRATEGIC DEFENSE The fate o f the earth could be survival. With its request in the fiscal 1985 budget for $1.8 billion for development of a ballistic...
...In an unnervingly short time they did so--and then proceeded to surpass us in the single most critical area of nuclear warfighting capability, counterforce, which is the ability to strike at the other side's armed forces, as opposed to countervalue, the other side's cities and industries...
...Under these circumstances it is clear the Soviets will use the full weight of their propaganda and diplomatic apparatus to try to delay American development of an antinuclear capability...
...Yale and Rita Kramer THE NARCISSIST GENERATION HITS THE SCREEN From beads t o n e o - B a b b i t t r y , the 1960s crowd ages...
...And because of the advantage accruing to the attacker, their leadership would be well out of the line of fire by the time our retaliatory warheads started falling...
...Graham and his collaborators assume deployment of a second layer of space-based defense of just the sort envisioned by the Fletcher Commission...
...High Frontier's preliminary engineering studies indicate an awesome 90 percent kill probability for such a space-based BMD...
...But there is one compelling argument 2Some insight into the Byzantine bureaucratic ways of the Pentagon on this issue may be gleaned from two recent articles: Gregory A. Fossedal, on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal of Dec...
...And they could accomplish this by using less than half of the 6,170 warheads presently installed on their ICBMs (not including their more than 1,800 submarine-launched ballistic missile warheads and some 300 nuclear bombs carried by intercontinental bombers...
...These facts of Soviet strategic superiority, especially in counterforce capability, are what impels the Reagan Administration toward a new doctrine: strategic defense...
...we have plenty of evidence as to the significant advances they have made in everything essential to an operational BMD, from radars to space platforms to lasers...
...The studios were not in the morals business...
...But now President Reagan has decided to proceed with development of a strategic defense system to shield our retaliatory forces against a Soviet surprise attack...
...They can be under no illusion ~bout our technological superiority...
...In order to achieve an 85 percent probability of destroying a given warhead, the system would need to launch somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 rockets against it...
...strategic doctrine of the last two decades...
...It can take a variety of configurations but the likeliest, called SWARM JET, consists of two major components: low-cost, range-only radars a couple of miles downrange of the missile silos to be protected...
...Graham likes to say, an aspirin tablet could shatter an ICBM...
...The crucial difference between them, of course, is timing: High Frontier puts a BMD in place--and one dependable enough to restore deterrence--within two years...
...In the face of an all-out attack, the kill probability would necessarily drop well below 85 percent...
...That decision not only discards the reigning doctrine-mutual assured destruction, or MAD--of the last twenty years, it represents the first step toward abrogaKarl O'Lessker is senior editor of this journal and professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University...
...And that "whatever" might well include a preemptive nuclear strike along the lines of the nightmare scenario sketched at the beginning of this essay...
...Yale Kramer, M.D...
...C l e a r l y , then, the fundamental question about acquiring a BMD is not technological or financial but strategic: Would our security interests be better served by continuing to pursue arms control within a strategic context of mutual assured destruction or by seeking to make ourselves invulnerable to nuclear attack and rendering arms control nice but inessential...
...With something to say about the Human Condition...
...against it and not so easily dismissible as some proponents of a BMD would like to think...
...And while our immediate concern is to protect our retaliatory forces against a surprise attack--an attack which only the Soviet Union will be capable of launching for the foreseeable future--the day may not be too far off when other, less technologically advanced nations might acquire the capability to hurl nuclear-tipped rockets at our cities...
...Significant...
...And they will at the same time put on a diplomatic full-courtpress at least as determined as the one they mounted to prevent deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe...
...The U.S...
...A group of friends, separated since the end of their college days, meet for the funeral of the leader of their old campus group, a one-time radical activist who has l~illed himself...
...For all its weight and seriousness, it can be countered by at least one large fact and one bold proposal...
...Headed by former NASA director James C. Fletcher, it issued its report last October, concluding that "with vigorous technology development programs, the potential for ballistic missile defense can be demonstrated by the early 1990s...
...The SALT I and ABM treaties sanctioned the new imbalance and did nothing to discourage the Soviets from increasing it as fast as they could...
...They understood that they were there not to preach but to comfort...
...Graham holds greatest promise of defusing the risk of a preemptive strike: We should offer might well regard it as an intolerable threat to their own security--and act accordingly...
...Films became art...
...We cannot know until we make it...
...and William H. Gregory, "Reagan's Space Challenge," Aviation Week & Space Technology, Jan...
...His earlier movie Body Heat, released in .* 1981, was a neat little thriller with a twist in the tradition of Double Indemnity...
...This they understood well, the studio bosses...
...The combined kinetic energy of the warhead and the swarmjet rocket is so great that a single one of the latter would destroy the former upon impact...
...Not as surely as we should like...
...Lawrence Kasdan, however, a relatively new directorial talent, has made the transition from entertainer to moralist in one quantum leap...
...At least one response is in order, however...
...and both would involve abrogation of the ABM treaty...
...The plot of The Big Chill is a variation on the class-reunion situation...
...former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and deputy director of the CIA...
...Fellini in fantasy and the grotesque, Resnais in epistemology-philosophers, moralists, all...
...In the old days things were different in Hollywood...
...sensor, and communications package that would enable the rockets to attack Soviet missiles in their lift-off or boost phase at distances up to 1,000 miles...
...As in allegory, then, it is not necessary THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 15...
...The third phase of High Frontier's total BMD involves the sort of exotic technologies envisioned in the Fletcher Commission report: high-energy lasers, particle beams, high-power microwaves, or electromagnetic pulse weapons...
...As noted earlier, a space-based BMD can defend cities as well as missile silos--and against Chinese or Libyan missiles as well as against Soviet or American...
...We may be sure they will qsn't it odd how it's always the U.S., never the Soviet Union, that does "destabilizing" things...
...This of course is the hard kernel of reality embedded in the cant word "destabilizing" that opponents of a strong America so tirelessly use...
...This is the approach that has been designed and is being pushed by Project High Frontier, a team of scientists, engineers, and military analysts headed by Lt...
...It was clearly meant to be a big movie...
...Rightly or wrongly, the present administration derided and then abandoned the "race track" system proposed by its predecessor...
...We would then have only the options of devastating their cities at the cost of even greater devastation to our own--or of surrendering...
...But in cost/benefit terms--the benefit in this case being the elimination of any real possibility of nuclear holocaust--that amount of money is derisorily low...
...One involves a sort of "quick fix," utilizing off-theshelf technology to put a ground-based BMD in place within as little as two years and the first layer of a spacebased system by the end of the decade...
...Almost twenty years ago, under the guidance of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson decided to jettison the unchallenged nuclear superiority this nation had enjoyed since the dawn of the atomic era...
...By itself, this fact of diplomatic stalemate should not be taken as a decisive argument against further negotiations...
...We unilaterally froze the size of our strategic delivery systems (though not yet the number of warheads) and in effect invited the Soviets to catch up...
...I should perhaps emphasize that none of the three layers, or indeed all three together, is contemplated as being "leakproof...
...And this is an outcome that would leave them with the most hideous of Hobson's choices: a r e s t o r a t i o n of America's unchallengeable nuclear superiority or a possibly suicidal effort to prevent it...
...They talk about their lives--mostly in terms of disappointments and disillusionments--and about their dead friend...
...There are only two practicable ways: One is to make our ICBMs mobile (as of course they are on submarines), thus complicating impossibly the attacker's targeting problems...
...When values appeared in the old studio productions they were there more to lift the moral tone of the studio than that of the audience...
...It deserved a two-Moundsbars-rating...
...SALT II would merely have set the Russian superiority in legal concrete...
...both are well within our range of capability...
...From such equations as this deterrence does not flow...
...The total BMD system now advocated by the High Frontier group looks like this: President Reagan has decided to proceed with development of a strategic defense system to shield our retaliatory forces against a Soviet surprise attack...
...and swarms of small, non-nuclear rockets, one to three inches in diameter and I0 to 15 inches long, fired from launchers in one-second bursts and intercepting incoming warheads at an altitude of perhaps 4,000 feet...
...The problem lies in all those u~used warheads in the Soviet arsenal, especially the 3,000 or so on their SS-18 and SS-19 ICBMs...
...But MX will be no less vulnerable to a surprise attack than the present Minuteman II...
...So runs the "destabilizing" argument against our acquiring a BMD...
...Although movies in those days had a moral point of view, their intention was not to be morally visionary but only morally comforting, so that pleasure was possible without guilt...
...the second is to defend them against enemy missiles by some sort of ballistic missile defense system (BMD...
...2 Whatever the causes, such costconsciousness somehow lacks the force of conviction...
...But we should not view this as having to make the best of a bad bargain, for a BMD has one decisive advantage over missile mobility: It can protect cities as well as silos...
...There are essentially two approaches to acquiring a BMD...
...As striking as that difference may appear to be, what matters most is that the longer-range approach by no First, and most readily available, is the ground-based "point defense" system...
...No doubt both nations would continue to seek ways to regain the strategic edge that each once held for a few years...
...The estimated $90 to $100 billion cost of such a ~ystem has of course provoked cries of outrage from opponents of a BMD...
...European directors became auteurs and as such became specialists in high seriousness: Bergman in the darker side of human nature...
...Nor can we doubt that, if the roles were reversed, and though not even the maddest of them could suppose that any American President would use such an advantage to dismantle the Soviet empire and deCommunize the world, they would see it as an irredeemable setback to their hopes and efforts of the last forty years...
...The Big Chill is in another league...
...And it foresaw deployment of a multilayer BMD by the year 2000 at an aggregate cost of $92 to $94 means precludes an immediate commitment to High Frontier...
...They reminisce about--and in some cases renew--old rivalries and old romances...
...Bleary-eyed from three hours of a double feature and stuffed with a Mounds bar and a box of Raisinets, one could leave the theater after a movie like The Life o f Emile Zola with a sense of moral uplift instead of just a lot of extra calories...
...But eveia if it were much lower--say 50 percent--it would, in conjunction with point defense, ensure the survivability of far more U.S...
...In the catastrophic event of an all-out Soviet nuclear attack on the U.S., some warheads would undoubtedly reach their targets...
...Undaunted, the President set up a senior interagency task force to explore the feasibility of a space-based BMD...
...they cried...
...Here is where an idea first suggested by President Reagan and subsequently endorsed by former President Nixon and Gen...
...Truffaut in appearance and reality...
...is a psychoanalyst and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Rutgers Medical School were shrewd psychologists and therefore pragmatic moralists...
...But how is that to be done...
...For our part, we can hardly doubt the consequences of a breakthrough that would render the Soviet Union wholly invulnerable to a nuclear attack: They would take over, or at the very least Finlandize, the world...
...With its request in the fiscal 1985 budget for $1.8 billion for development of a ballistic missile defense, the Reagan Administration has at last moved toward implementation of the most dramatic shift in U.S...
...According to the now-familiar scenario that haunts American defense planners, the Soviet Union could launch a surprise attack on our ICBM silos, bomber and submarine bases, and command and control centers, with a high probability of destroying up to 90 percent of our ICBMs, 70 percent of our long-range bombers, and about half of our nuclear submarines...
...The sleek fat old boys who ran the studios in those days Rita Kramer's most recent book is In Defense of the Family (Basic Books...
...Some way must be found to ensure the survivability of our land-based ICBMs against a surprise attack...
...Neither involves nuclear or other "exotic" weaponry (lasers, particle beams, etc...
...and all subsequent arms control efforts have ended in failure...
...Pershing II is destabilizing, but not the SS-20 to which it is a partial counter...
...The alternative to developing an American BMD is not "stability" but surrender, and in the not too distant future.3 No doubt that is all the reason we need to move ahead on a BMD program, but it still doesn't dispose of the fear that an early success on our part might drive the Kremlin to desperate to cooperate in the development and share the technology of a BMD with Soviets, so that both sides would acquire it, in effect, simultaneously and neither side would enjoy the incalculable advantage of unilateral invulnerability...
...A film that made just about everybody's list of the Ten Best of 1983, and nominated for several Academy Awards including best picture and best original screenplay, it is a wistful look back at the sixties from the vantage point of the eighties...
...When a movie opens with a death or a funeral, like Citizen Kane or The Third Man, one expects that the central character will turn out to be the dead one and that the development of the story will reveal that central character and the events that led up to his death...
...The hard demographic f ~ t is, our population is far more concentrated than theirs (half of all Americans live in 100 cities, half of all Soviet citizens live in 1,000 cities) and wholly lacking in anything resembling civil defense...
...But they are simple and cheap to manufacture and would be readily available in any numbers we desire...
...Daniel O. Graham (USA-ret...
...Count on Hollywood these days to provide the cutting edge of American morality...
...A third reason for thinking the Russians may well agree to joint development of a BMD is one that Richard Nixon pointed to in a recent Wall Street Journal interview: "They are awfully afraid of China, or some Third World country, getting hold of a few nuclear weapons, and we should be too...
...But surely the chances of achieving genuine arms reduction, rather than some illusory form of arms control, would be greatly enhanced in a world in which no one's finger rested nervously on the nuclear button...
...As Dr...
...So while in theory at least the option of a mobile basing mode remains available, in practice the administration has discarded it, leaving us with devising some form of missile defense as the way to restore deterrence...
...The second 'great advantage is that such a system defends cities as well as missile silos--an almost impossible task for point defense--and thus adds in effect a second order of deterrence against any Soviet blackmail threats against our population centers...
...In strategic terms, the two approaches are alike in one great respect but significantly different in another...
...On the contrary: As detailed in his most recent book' and in several earlier reports, Gen...
...But given their highly unpromising character over the past several years and for the foreseeable future, we ought at a minimum to explore other paths to enhance security...
...There are ample reasons for us to go ahead with deployment of a larger, more accurate ICBM...
...a movie out of the golden past...
...All told, the incentives for the Soviets to accept our offer seem to me to far outweigh any reasons they might have to reject it...
...Helen's sound by comparison like the popping of a toy pistol...
...for only then can we be confident of deterring such an attack...
...DevinAdair, $17.50...
...The time we've come to call the sixties has assumed a special place in the national consciousness, but nowhere has this period received a more impressive--a more persuasive, and therefore ultimately corrupting-treatment than in The Big Chill...
...A BMD can protect us against that sort of threat as well as against any Soviet threat arising out of a failure of deterrence...
...would still be left with well over 2,000 warheads on our own nuclear submarine fleet--more than enough to devastate every large and medium-sized city in the USSR...
...Our Minuteman II force having been effectively wiped out by a surprise attack, we would have no way to strike at the rest of their warheads...
...But even if not--even if he'erred by two or three years--we have every incentive to go ahead with it as quickly as possible, because any such space-based system has two decisive advantages over point defense: One is that by destroying an enemy missile in its boost phase we destroy not just one ballistic missile but as many as ten nuclear warheads, all independently targeted (or MIRVed...
...They would risk it only if they had a very high degree,of confidence that the U.S...
...1, 1983...
...Editorial cartoonists of the intellectual weight and scientific acuity of Herblock and Oliphant had a perfectly glorious time of it, while editorial writers and columnists clucked their tongues over Mr...
...It seems highly improbable that any American President would, or indeed should, choose the former...
...Karl O'Lessker HIGH FRONTIERS OF STRATEGIC DEFENSE The fate o f the earth could be survival...
...Reagan's budget request for FY 1985...
...After the funeral they stay on together for a kind of house-party at the home of two of the group who are married...
...would cave in rather than fight (this being the ,fundamental purpose of Soviet support for the "peace movement") or if they saw it as the only way to prevent the U.S...
...from gaining a literally unchallengeable nuclear superiority (the likeliest outcome of our successful development of a BMD...
...So while an all-out nuclear exchange would be disastrous for the USSR, it would be--literally--suicidal for the U.S...
...But there are plausible reasons for thinking they would...
...The simple point (though not simple enough for Robert McNamara to grasp...
...Would the Russians accept such an offer...
...tion of the ABM treaty of 1971...
...This is not the case in The Big Chill, because Kasdan is not quite as interested in telling a story and revealing character as in instructing his audience in the nature of the good life...
...Far more oddly, it led to testimony before a congressional subcommittee last November by the administration's own Pentagon research chief, Richard DeLauer, warning darkly about the "staggering" costs we must be prepared to accept...
...MX will simply replace Minutema[ in the same silos, rather than in the sort of mobile basing mode advocated~ by the Carter Administration...
...But no one, I think, would argue that we are more secure today as a result of SALT I and the ABM treaties...
...Star Wars...
...And by the same token, it would be as well for us to share a BMD with them as it would be to gain what could only be a shortlived advantage in having it first--at the risk of precipitating a Soviet preemptive strike...
...DeLauer was himself a member of the Fletcher Commission, these pangs of fiscal conscience on his part are not easily explained...
...the present generation of SLBMs lacks the necessary accuracy for counterforce use...
...And now today the USSR enjoys so great a preponderance in offensive strategic nuclear weapons that it stands on the threshold of being able to launch and win a nuclear war against the U.S...
...But it is difficult to see how the President could have done otherwise, given the appallingly dangerous situation we now find ourselves in vis-a-vis the Soviets...
...Or to put it more directly, we have to proceed on the assumption that Soviet leaders, if faced by a likely prospect of our achieving nuclear invulnerability before they do, would do whatever they could to prevent it...
...Nor will the addition of the MX missile to our strategic arsenal add much, if at all, to deterrence against a surprise attack...
...Reagan the Space Cowboy...
...The quest for nuclear invulnerability might appear to be the likeliest path--at any rate the Reagan Administration has now taken the first tentative steps in that direction...
...In Gen...
...Though a number of difficult technological problems remain to be solved, both High Frontier and the Fletcher Commission see this third layer of BMD as deployable within 15 or 16 years...
...Reagan's inability to comprehend that any move toward strategic defense is bound to be "destabilizing...
...In those far-off innocent days, movies had no moral pretensions...
...They knew that their audiences wanted to be titillated with a little sex and violence and that the whole point of the exercise, the trick of the thing, was for the viewer to experience sin and end up feeling virtuous...
...Like it or not, the Soviets no less than we are committed to never allowing the other side to gain a truly decisive strategic advantage...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 call upon all their witting and unwitting allies in the West to forestall commitment to the program (while they of course plunge full speed ahead with their own...
...Their similarity is doctrinal: Both involve-the fundamental switch from MAD to MAS, or mutual assured survival...
...The first is that, whatever their ultimate aims for world hegemony, they have an overriding interest in avoiding nuclear war...
...he always insisted that a BMD was not worth having unless it could be designed to be 100 percent effective) is that a nuclear surprise attack would be risky even in the best of circumstances, and so the existence of even a modestly effective BMD would provide all the deterrence we could ever hope for in an imperfect world...
...Granted, $90 to $100 billion spread over 15 years is a lot of money even by federal government standards...
...MX is destabilizing, but not the gigantic SS-18 to which it is a belated response...
...It is this: In view of the utterly decisive advantage we would gain from being the first to acquire nuclear invulnerability, the Soviets acts...
...The Bicycle Thief, alas, changed all that...
...But it is important that we do not ignore the reality while dismissing the rhetoric...
...Happily, until recently the most important American directors felt under no compulsion to take themselves so seriously...
...In that way, nuclear war would become not only "unthinkable" but unwageable...
...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 The problem of devising a feasible mobile basing mode for our ICBMs has so far proved insoluble...
...One or more of these, in conjunction with improved sensors that can pick up a missile's heat after THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 13 its engines have stopped and the missile itself has cooled, would greatly increase the range within which we could be confident of destroying enemy missiles...
...Profit with an f, principal with an a, they told their directors and writers...
...Most importantly, this sort of point defense system is comprised almost entirely of off-theshelf technology and could be deployed within a matter of two years...
...This is not a negligible consideration for any of us, but especially not for the men in the Kremlin with their obsessive fear of the Chinese behemoth...
...30, 1984...
...Graham's perhaps overoptimistic view, this first generation of a spacebased BMD could be deployed before the end of the decade...
...Put another way, Soviet war planners would risk launching a counterforce first strike only if they could see a high probability of wiping out almost all our retaliatory power...
...Each rocket would be capable of achieving a velocity of 3,000 feet per second relative to the truck, aggregating to a vdocity of almost 22,000 miles per hour--a speed at which, as Gen...
...the Fletcher Commission approach leaves open the window of vulnerability for the rest of the decade, until we can close it with deployment of the new generation of Trident submarines...
...The second reason for thinking the Kremlin may well accept our offer to share an antinuclear technology flows from the first...
...For the past two decades the weight of doctrine has rested on the side of the former and we even entered into a treaty explicitly rejecting the latter...
...The other, longer range approach envisions a space-based defense employing one or more exotic technologies, with enemy missiles being intercepted and destroyed from space by, say, high energy Iaser beams fired from orbiting satellites...
...And now an American BMD would be destabilizing, but not a Russian...
...It was' clever, skillfully directed, cinematic...
...High Frontier envisions 432 such trucks, each carrying up to 50 selfpropelled rockets, plus the computer, ~Daniel O. Graham and Gregory A. Fossedal, A Defense that Defends...
...Surely sufficient to deter the Kremlin from any such surprise attack...
...But barring a Democratic landslide in the '84 elections, neither strategy seems likely to succeed...
...That announcement was greeted with howls of anger and derision by all the advanced thinkers of Liberaldom...
...Still, even if we lowered it to a very conservative 40 percent estimate, and with two Soviet warheads targeted on each Minuteman silo, some 270 of our ICBMs could be expected to survive--in itself a formidable counterforce deterrent to a Soviet surprise attack...
...But a BMD would make that an unattainable goal...
...The Scowcroft Commission then came up with the plan, now adopted, to deploy MX in existing Minuteman silos...
...They know that in a race to the High Frontier, we would get there first...
...missiles than Soviet planners would risk coping with in the aftermath of a surprise first strike...
...The first significant down payment--S1.8 billion--on that investment has now appeared in Mr...
...The fact--not only large but decisive--is that the Russians are hard at work on developing their own BMD...
...Absent either of these conditions, the Soviets will not risk nuclear war...
...predictably, they did...
...It was in this context that President Reagan in March 1983 announced the beginning of a "long-term research and development program" to develop a BMD...
...When the arms control community and its human megaphones in the news media figure out the implications of the new Reagan policy, the ensuing uproar will make the eruption of Mt...
...The second BMD layer would be based in near-space, some 250 to 350 nautical miles above the earth, consisting of orbiting platforms, or "trucks," moving in circular orbits inclined at 65 degrees to the equator...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
