National Missile Defense

...Interceptor rockets, equipped with infrared guidance and microprocessors, were now accurate enough to preclude nuclear explosives from the defense rockets...

...There was, however, never any trillion-dollar estimate-internal or external-touted by the SDIO...

...Even in the 196o's and early 7o's, American know-how could have deployed a missile defense system...

...VVtfile a nuclear explosion high in the stratosphere was far better then one at, say, Empire State Building level, the advantages of exploding nuclear weapons an)where above our cities was an understandably hard sell in a democracy...

...Though nothing was ever deployed, SDI proved something new: Even the looming prospect of new technologies can prevent aggression...

...By the 198o's , the most threatening category of Soviet warheads had grown twenty-fold, and &nerican interest in missile defense was revived...

...Though most of the arguments against missile defense are disappearing, the same cannot be said of its critics...

...Furthermore, the commander-in-chief made a point of reducing funds for national missile defense by 80 percent, cutting an additional 3 ~ percent from programs targeted at knocking down short- and regional-range missiles--the sort North Korea has deployed and Iran is fielding...

...If, year after year, the U.S...

...The consequent fiveyear "peace dividend" announced by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in January 199o was $167 billion, over five times the $30 billion already spent on SDI...

...could safely pretend that nuclear weapons did not exist...

...Yet even in this interim, defense technology advanced: The quality of satellite information about incoming warheads had become so precise as to obviate (in many cases) the need for ground-based radars...

...The Soviets also kept building their offensive forces...

...But then Saddam Hussein and Kim I1 Sung brought the reality of missile and nuclear proliferation into sharp focus...

...As Hans Bethe admitted to the Wail Street Journal in 1984 , the "dispute isn't primarily scientific" but turns on political and strategic matters...

...Somehow one of them always gets through...

...Told that Garwin stands by all his calculations, Bethe said "I firmly believe also" that the figures were correct...

...John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), for example, remains adamant that SDI is impracticable...

...President Bill Clinton, since taking office in 1993 , has made it an overriding national security goal to preserve the ABM treaty...

...government has decided not to deploy a missile defense, it is not for lack of means or technical competence...

...This view was shared by, among others, former British Prime Minister Thatcher...

...The popular trillion-dollar figure had always been anti-SDI nonsense...

...Asked whose "plausible estimates" they were, Pike claimed the one trillion dol]ar figure came from "internal Strategic Defense Initiative Organization [SDIO] estimates...

...N I t seems the anti-anti-missile-defense crowd has become as permanent a part of our political landscape as the anti-antiCommunists - a n d just as impervious to facts...

...In July, the Federation of American Scientists released a letter drafted by Hans Bethe and signed by 50 Nobel Laureates (one in economics incidentally, the rest hard science) opposing a National Missile Defense system: "The system would offer little protection and would do grave harm to this nation's core security interests...

...In letters to President Clinton, congressional testimony, and in "scientific" reports about missile defense, they offer much the same pseudo-scientific arguments as they did against Star Wars...

...The failure of the test was insignificant because the "kill vehicle" that was supposed to destroy the enemy warhead failed to separate from the booster which launched it into space...

...Since separating one stage of a rocket from another was perfected decades ago, the test failure was not an indication of technological imperfections...

...This failure was a little like driving home a brand new ear only to find the door won't open," said Angelo M. Codevilla, a former aide to the U.S...

...Following the collapse of the USSR in the early 9o's, it seemed--briefly--to some optimistic observers that the world might be entering a period when the U.S...

...Malcolm O'Neill, who worked with the SDIO in the 198o's , says their actual estimate for the total cost of implementation was around $too billion...

...When asked if technological developments have led him to even slightly rethink his critique of SDI, Pike responded with a simple "no...

...Defending against the threat of nuclear missiles is, now, mostly a matter of manufacture, not of design...

...The American Spectator _9 November 2000 33...

...Other longtime critics are even less nuanced in their estimations...

...Despite six successful hit-to-kill interceptor tests in 1999 alone, President Clinton decided-on the heels of a technologically insignificant test failure--to defer a decision on missile defense deployment until the next administration is in office...

...Senate Intelligence Committee...

...scrapped missile defenses altogether...

...By the mid-9o's , the demise of SDI had left only a few development projects standing, but these were relatively far advanced toward constructing actual prototypes of anti-missile devices...

...Though Bethe could not recall the specific numbers that UCS touted about SDI, he did suggest that most were formulated by Dick Garwin...

...Pike even stands by his estimate in 1985 that SDI's cost would be equivalent to paying for a "new Navy...

...At the time," he explains, "there were plausible estimates for [a] total system cost [of] about a trillion dollars...

...But that hasn't stopped the enemies of missile defense from launching more objections than a Soviet first strike...

...Moreover, Gen...

...Clinton also decided to totally eliminate, and shut down development of, all space-based defense systems...

...The errors of the UCS are long forgotten, but they shouldn't be...

...Ronald Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization teams, indicating that we could not develop an effective [national missile defense] system...

...While ballistic missile defense tests the frontiers of technological innovation, the real threat to American security, it is now clear, is the anti-anti-missile-defense crowd, more interested in techless ideology and partisan squabbles than in facing the facts...

...Which begs the question: If these scientists can't even get their science right, why should we take them seriously on matters vital to our nation's defense...

...They remain a lesson to all those Americans concerned about ehe dangers of rogue missiles or terrorist attacks--in part, because the enemies of an American missile shield continue to invoke the names of these critics...

...As Air Force Lt...

...Given the technology of the time, however, the only way to knock down incoming warheads was to send a nuclear-tipped missile up and explode it in the general vicinity of the enemy warhead...

...Satellites with infrared detectors could track and discriminate among missiles and their warheads sooner and better than the groundbased radars...

...Clearly science isn't the main issue here...

...By then, new technologies were available...

...sensor and guidance systems for interceptors had become even more reliable...

...It was, rather, an indication only of government's ever-present quality control problems...

...So while the Soviets quickly built up to and beyond the limits allowed for in the ABM treaty, the U.S...

...In fact, the Nlti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed in 197 z, specifically allowed for the limited construction of such systems...

...Unlike the mid-8o's, the feasibility and cost of each device were no longer in question...

...Ronald Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (formerly known as the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, or SDIO), recently announced, "There is no technical reason at this point, validated by independent review Air Force Lt...

...The stage was thus well set for Ronald Reagan's announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in March 1983...

...and the beam directors for space lasers had become instantly retargetable...

...In 1993 Reagan's national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, wrote that V]adimir Lukin--former chairman of the Supreme Soviet Foreign Relations Committee and Russian ambassador to the U.S.--told him that SDI accelerated the end of the Cold War by five years...

...Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe, who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, concedes that some advancement has been made since the z98o's-"We have shown in the Gulf War it is possible to hit designated targets from far away'--but still insists an overall missile defense is not feasible...

...Moreover, no longer did we have to wait for the warheads to detach themselves from their missiles but could more efficiently attack the missiles themselves by means of laser weapons in orbit...

...The administration quickly cut planned expenditures on missile defense by more than 50 percent for the last half of the 9o's...

...Though only an expanded research and development program, 32 No v e m b e r ~ o o o _9 The American Spectator SDI stimulated a huge and, at times, dramatic debate about the performance of hypothetical defense weapons...

...Every hurdle to ballistic missile defense has been overcome with the result that no one can credibly cite technological limitations to the system...