The New York Review of Books
February 14, 2002
1.
On December 13, 2001, President Bush announced that in six months the United
States would withdraw from the 1972 ABM treaty, a treaty that limits the
testing and prohibits the deployment of any national missile defense system by
Russia or the US. The stated reason for this decision was that the United
States needs to develop a system that would protect us from attack by
intercontinental ballistic missiles launched by terrorists or by a so-called
rogue state. The US has not yet withdrawn from the treaty; this is the formal
six months' advance notice that is required by the treaty, and the President
could still decide not to withdraw, but it is hard to imagine that anything
could happen before June 2002 that would change his mind.
The arguments by scientists and members of Congress that the US could
continue an active program of developing and testing missile defense systems
without abrogating the ABM treaty now seem moot. But the issue of whether to
actually develop and deploy a national missile defense system is not moot, and
will not be settled even after the treaty is abrogated. Requests for missile
defense funding will come up again in Congress in mid-2002, and in subsequent
years. We can anticipate a continuing national debate about whether the US
should seek to develop and deploy a national system of defense against
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Few of the arguments in this debate will be new. Indeed, it is
hard to remember a time when the US has not been arguing about a national
missile defense program.[1]
Almost half a century ago, in the Eisenhower administration, the Army proposed
to convert the old Nike antiaircraft system to an antimissile system called
Nike Zeus, which would send radar-guided nuclear- armed rockets to intercept
Soviet warheads as they plunged through the atmosphere toward US cities. It had
obvious failings: the nuclear blasts from successful interceptions could put
our radars out of action, and the stock of interceptor missiles could be
exhausted if the enemy missiles carried several light decoys along with each
warhead.
In the Kennedy administration the Nike Zeus plan was upgraded to a two-tier
project called Nike X. Long-range nuclear-armed missiles called Spartans would
attempt to intercept Soviet missiles while they were still coasting above the
earth's atmosphere; short-range Sprint missiles would then deal in the atmosphere
with those warheads that had survived the Spartan attack. As a member of the
JASON group of defense consultants, I worked in the 1960s on the problem of
discriminating decoys from warheads, and learned how difficult it is. Like
others before me, I gradually also became influenced by a powerful argument
against deploying any missile defense system: that in the conditions of the
times it would simply induce the Soviets to increase their offensive
intercontinental missile forces, leaving us worse off than before.
Despite such arguments, the Johnson administration came under powerful
political pressure to go ahead with some sort of missile defense. In 1967
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara gave a remarkable speech in which he
explained all the reasons against deploying a national missile defense, and
then concluded that the Johnson administration would go ahead anyway with a
limited antimissile system, now to be called Sentinel, which would protect our
cities only from attack either by accident or by what was then considered to be
a rogue state, China.
To everyone's surprise, the most effective opposition to the Sentinel system
did not come from experts who criticized its effectiveness or worried about
arms control, but rather from citizens who simply did not want nuclear-armed
defensive missiles in their neighborhoods. In response to this opposition, the
Nixon administration moved the proposed Sprint missile sites away from cities
and renamed the system Safeguard. Its declared purpose was now to defend our
offensive missile silos instead of our cities against a missile attack. This
was intended to defuse worries about strategic stability—protecting our missile
silos would not make it necessary for the Soviets to increase their forces in
order to maintain their ability to retaliate for a US first strike. And by
protecting our own offensive missiles Safeguard would reduce any incentive that
we might have to launch missiles in a crisis. As explained by Defense Secretary
Melvin Laird, "The original Sentinel plan could be misinterpreted as...and
in fact could have been...a first step for the protection of our cities."[2] But in fact there was
little technical difference between the Sentinel and Safeguard systems, except
that Safeguard would have less effect on suburban real estate values.[3]
The Safeguard system was scotched by doubts about its
effectiveness (especially concerning the vulnerability of its radars) and fears
about its cost. In 1972 the Nixon administration and the Soviet Union signed
the antiballistic missile (ABM) arms control treaty. It limited defenses
against ballistic missiles to one hundred interceptors at each of two sites, later
reduced by mutual agreement to one hundred interceptors at one site. The site
could be located to protect either the national capital or a field of offensive
missiles. This would allow the Soviets to maintain their rather primitive
Galosh missile defense system around Moscow, while the US could proceed with
the declared aim of the Safeguard system and defend the intercontinental
ballistic missile field in North Dakota.
To guard against surprises, the treaty also contained a clause that banned
developing, testing, or deploying "ABM systems or components which are
sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile land-based,"[4] a clause that later
came under special attack by proponents of missile defense. Despite the
proclaimed need for defense of our offensive missiles, neither the Nixon
administration nor any following administration maintained the ABM defense of
the North Dakota missile field that was allowed under the treaty.
There matters remained until the Reagan administration. It is said that
President Reagan was converted to missile defense on a visit to the continental
defense headquarters at Cheyenne Mountain, when he was surprised to learn that
the US had no ability to shoot down enemy missiles attacking our country. Be
that as it may, in 1983 he announced plans for a Strategic Defense Initiative,
intended to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete."[5] No longer would the
system be limited to ground-based interceptor missiles; there were plans for
more adventurous technologies, including satellites carrying X-ray lasers that
could burn through the skin of an offensive missile booster in the first few
minutes after it was launched. The imagined system soon came to be called Star
Wars.
Eventually it became clear even to the enthusiasts of the Reagan
administration that the X-ray lasers and other features of the Strategic
Defense Initiative were beyond current technological capacities. The
administration of George Bush Sr. replaced the Strategic Defense Initiative
with a system of Global Protection Against Limited Strikes, including about one
thousand "brilliant pebbles," small space-based interceptor missiles,
along with more conventional land- or sea-based missiles. This strategy also
led nowhere, and was allowed to lapse in the Clinton administration.
Research and development continued at a more leisurely pace. In 1996 the
Department of Defense announced a plan to continue further development of a
scaled-down missile defense system for three years, after which a decision
would be made whether or not to deploy the system within the following three
years. The National Missile Defense System under study was now limited to a
single kind of interceptor missile. Instead of a nuclear weapon it would carry
an "exo-atmospheric kill vehicle" weighing about 120 pounds, which
would destroy the enemy warhead above the earth's atmosphere by a direct hit
rather than a nuclear blast. If it worked, it would truly be a bullet hitting a
bullet.
Then, on August 31, 1998, North Korea surprised the world by
launching a three-stage rocket that carried its third stage over one thousand
miles before it broke up into pieces and fell into the Pacific Ocean. The missile
did not fly far enough to reach any part of the US, and it could not have
carried a nuclear warhead, but its launch put tremendous political pressure on
the Clinton administration to do something soon about missile defense.
In July 1999 President Clinton signed a National Missile Defense Act that
had been passed by Congress a few months earlier. Like the Johnson
administration's Sentinel initiative, this was more of a defense against
Republicans than against external threats. The act committed the US to deploy a
national missile defense "as soon as technologically possible." Later
that summer the administration settled on the defense system's initial
("C-1") configuration, which remains as a central element of the
missile defense system under study by the Bush administration. Twenty (later
increased to one hundred) interceptor missiles carrying exo-atmospheric kill
vehicles would be based at Fort Greely, Alaska, to be guided to their targets
initially by five early-warning radars in Alaska, California, Massachusetts,
Greenland, and England. Then, later in their flight, they would be guided by a
high-frequency battle management radar on Shemya Island in the Aleutians and
finally, in the last six hundred miles of flight, by infrared telescopes
carried by the kill vehicles.
This geographical deployment was clearly aimed at defense from North Korean
missiles. To better protect the east coast of the US from missiles launched
from the Middle East, it would be necessary later to add interceptor missiles
at a second site, perhaps in North Dakota or Maine, and also to add additional
battle-management radars. The decision to deploy the C-1 system was to have
been delayed until 2000, after some of the components of the system had been
tested.
The first test of the exo-atmospheric kill vehicle (EKV) was made on October
2, 1999. A dummy warhead that had been sent into space by a Minuteman
intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in
California was hit over the Pacific by an EKV from an interceptor missile fired
from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. But there was less to this
success than met the eye. The EKV was at first off course, so that its
telescopes did not pick up the Minuteman warhead. When the EKV widened its
field of view, at first it saw a large bright balloon decoy, and corrected its
course, after which it saw the warhead and managed to hit it. If the warhead
had not been accompanied by a decoy it might have escaped detection, and if the
decoy had looked more like a warhead the EKV would have hit the decoy instead
of the warhead. Even so, it seemed that under the right conditions a bullet
could hit a bullet.
Then in January 2000 the EKV failed a second test. The krypton gas needed to
cool the EKV's infrared telescopes had been blocked by ice in the plumbing, so
that the EKV never saw the warhead, and missed it by over two hundred feet. A
third test in July also failed, when the EKV failed to separate from its
booster. Further, even if all these tests had been successful, three tests were
not nearly adequate to test the system.[6] In August 2000
President Clinton finally decided that the Department of Defense should not
start preparing the Alaska site for the battle management radar, and he
announced that he would leave the decision whether to deploy the missile
defense system to the next administration.
President Bush has taken the movement toward national missile defense in a
new direction. Where the Clinton plan called for spending $5.75 billion in 2002
for all forms of ballistic missile defense, the Bush plan calls for spending
$8.3 billion on the same tasks. The Bush administration assumed that an
antimissile system much like the Clinton administration's National Missile
Defense C-1 system would be tested not only by engagements between rockets
fired from Vandenberg and Kwajelein, but also by interceptors fired from Alaska
sites, which could later be converted to operational missile defense sites.
Also, the Bush administration proposed to supplement this land-based midcourse
interception system with an ill-defined mixture of other systems, including
possible airborne or spaceborne lasers that would attack enemy missiles during
the initial boost phase of their flight.
The Alaska interceptor test site might violate the 1972 ABM treaty; the
development and testing of airborne or space-based missile defense systems
surely would, long before any actual deployment. But where President Clinton
had ruled out a unilateral abrogation of the treaty, President Bush has from
the first been eager to free the US from its restrictions. In August 2001 he
said that the US will withdraw from the treaty at a "time convenient to
America."[7]
Since then the disaster of September 11 has brought Presidents Bush and Putin
into closer collaboration, but the Russians have refused to agree to major
changes in the ABM treaty, and now the President has given notice of his
intention to withdraw from it.
So here we are again, arguing the pros and cons of missile defense. The
debate raises three main issues:
Would a missile defense system actually protect the US against even the sort
of attack that might be launched by rogue states like North Korea or Iraq?
It seems to me likely that the problems that bedeviled the early tests of
the exo-atmospheric kill vehicle can all be solved. The fourth and fifth tests
in July and December 2001 were successful, though the kill vehicle booster failed
in a test later in December. The big problem, as it has been since the days of
Nike X, is that any number of interceptor missiles could be used up in
attacking decoys that had been sent by the attacker along with its warheads.
This is a particularly acute problem for such missile defense systems as
that planned as the first phase of the Clinton-Bush National Missile Defense,
which rely on intercepting warheads in midcourse, above the earth's atmosphere.
Balloons that are deployed in space at the same time as warheads will follow
the same trajectory as the warheads until they reenter the earth's atmosphere.
They can easily be shaped to look much like warheads to ordinary telescopes,
and heated to look like warheads to infrared sensors. It is also possible and
probably even easier to make the warhead look like a decoy by putting it in a
decoy balloon, or make it invisible by hiding it in a cooled shroud. There has
been no realistic test of the ability of an exo-atmospheric kill vehicle to hit
a warhead that is accompanied by such penetration aids.
Much of the technical argument over several decades about the effectiveness
of antimissile systems has focused on the question of whether the US can solve
this problem.[8]
It may be that at great cost we could develop a midcourse interception system
that could defeat any particular group of penetration aids and warheads, but of
course we are not likely to know what aids are chosen by the attacker, and I
don't see how we could ever have confidence in our ability to deal with an
unknown threat. The attacker always has the last move.
Another way of defeating a US midcourse interception system was mentioned in
the report of a "blue ribbon" panel on missile defense convened by
Congress in 1998, which was headed by Donald Rumsfeld, and has been emphasized
several times since then by Richard Garwin, one of the panel members.[9] Instead of using a
rocket that would launch at most a few nuclear warheads, an attacker could use
the same sort of rocket to launch hundreds of "bomblets," containing
biological warfare agents, such as anthrax spores. Once deployed, the bomblets
would be immune to any sort of missile defense now contemplated. This sort of
missile could kill even more people than one carrying a nuclear weapon.
None of these objections applies to a missile defense that can damage an
attacker's missile while it is still in "boost phase," i.e., during
the brief period when it is being accelerated upward, before it has time to
deploy warheads, decoys, or bomblets.[10] But the boost phase
lasts only a few minutes. A missile attempting to intercept another missile
during the boost phase would have to be launched within about six hundred miles
of the intercontinental ballistic missile launch site; so this sort of missile
defense system would have to be targeted only at one or at most a few
particular potential attackers. For example, a sea-based system that would
target missiles in North Korea would not protect against missiles launched from
China or Russia. Likewise, an airborne laser would not be effective against
missiles that at the end of boost phase are still beyond the horizon, which for
a missile at an altitude of 120 miles is about one thousand miles away. (The
actual range of the laser would be substantially less than this.) An air- or
sea-based boost phase intercept system could be vulnerable to preemptive attack
(as also would the radars of the Clinton-Bush National Missile Defense system),
but unless this attack were very carefully timed, it would trigger a
counterattack that would destroy the enemy's offensive missiles while they were
on the ground. If it could be made to work, a system of space-based lasers (or
"brilliant pebbles") might be able to provide protection from threats
coming from a much larger area, but this technology does not yet exist, and in
any case no specific space-based laser system has been proposed by any
administration.[11]
Is it plausible that the US would be attacked by intercontinental ballistic
missiles launched by terrorists or a rogue state, or by accident?
The attack of September 11 made it clear (though it was pretty clear before)
that there are people in the world who want to damage us. This seems to have
shifted public opinion in favor of missile defense, and it stopped moves in the
Senate to deny funding for missile defense tests that would violate the ABM
treaty. Hearings on this issue before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at
which I had been asked by the staff to testify were canceled soon after September
11. But the attack also demonstrated that there are ways to hurt the US that do
not involve the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Even nuclear
weapons could be delivered in many ways, for instance by using trucks or
freighters or (as suggested by the Rumsfeld panel) ship-launched short-range
missiles. But the intercontinental ballistic missile is not just one among the
many vehicles that might be used by terrorists or a rogue state to attack us
with nuclear weapons—it is the least likely vehicle. Though some
terrorists are willing to commit suicide in their attacks, the heads of the
nations that harbor them never have been. The leaders of the Taliban did not
publicly acknowledge that the September 11 attacks were organized in
Afghanistan, and Qaddafi has never admitted that the explosion of a Pan
American airliner over Lockerbie was planned in Libya.
But unlike such terrorist attacks, an attack by intercontinental ballistic
missiles carries an indelible return address. Every launch of such missiles is
inevitably detected and its source identified by the fleet of American Defense
Support Program satellites. Even granting that a state like North Korea or Iraq
might eventually be able to deploy nuclear-armed intercontinental missiles, why
would any head of government, however much he may hate us, attack us with
intercontinental ballistic missiles, or allow terrorists on his soil to launch
such an attack, when he and they could use many other means to deliver nuclear
weapons anonymously?
On the other hand, there are circumstances in which the very visibility of
intercontinental ballistic missiles might be an advantage. For instance, the US
might not be deterred from its recent actions in Afghanistan or from trying to
overthrow Saddam Hussein by a mere threat of nuclear terrorism; but would it
risk trying to overthrow a state that had nuclear-armed intercontinental
ballistic missiles?
This is a real problem for America, but it is not clear that anything but a
perfect antimissile defense would make much difference. If the US had an
antimissile system that had never been used in action, would this give us
sufficient confidence to attack a regime that possessed intercontinental
ballistic weapons, especially when we did not know what sorts of decoys their
missiles carried?
But it need not come to this. There is another way that the US can avoid
being subject to nuclear blackmail by states like Iraq or North Korea. It is
occasionally mentioned in discussions of missile defense, though briefly and
perhaps with some embarrassment. It is preemption. (Or, as it is sometimes
called, pre–boost phase interception.) If a country like Iraq or North Korea
were suspected of having nuclear weapons, and we saw that it had tested a
ballistic missile of intercontinental range, would we really watch them begin
to erect these missiles without taking steps to destroy them on the ground?
These steps need not involve our use of nuclear weapons; cruise missiles are
now sufficiently accurate to do the job with conventional explosives. I very
much doubt if intercontinental ballistic missiles could be put in place by any
state without the US knowing it, and indeed they would be of no use for nuclear
blackmail unless they were known to us.
This leaves a mistaken launch by Russia or China as the only plausible way
that intercontinental ballistic missiles might threaten the US. Here
"mistake" might mean anything from a purely mechanical malfunction in
a single rocket, to an unauthorized launch by a few madmen of all of the missiles
in a submarine or a land-based missile field, all the way up to the launch of a
whole arsenal of missiles ordered by a national leader who is under the
mistaken impression that his country is under attack.
Launch by mistake is a serious danger, and although it was not mentioned by
President Bush at the time he announced his intention to withdraw from the ABM
treaty, it had frequently been cited as one reason for building a national
missile defense system. Indeed, a large-scale mistaken attack by Russia is the only
plausible threat that could not only damage our country but destroy it beyond
our ability to recover. Such an attack would be far more devastating than
anything terrorists could manage. Russia has some 3,900 strategic nuclear
warheads, of which over one thousand are on land- or submarine-based
intercontinental ballistic missiles that are ready to be launched at a moment's
notice.[12]
These missiles are increasingly vulnerable to an American first strike, as the
Russian early-warning capabilities get progressively weaker. At least twice the
Russians have mistakenly thought that they were under missile attack: once in
March 1983 because a Soviet satellite mistook bright reflections for the launch
of five missiles, and again in January 1995 because a Norwegian research rocket
that had been detected by a Russian radar was interpreted as an incoming
American missile. In both cases the Russian launch process came within minutes
of the point where they would make a decision whether or not to launch a
nuclear retaliation.
The danger of a launch during a crisis is made worse by the fact that most
Russian and American warheads are MIRVs—multiple independently targeted reentry
vehicles. For example, each Russian SS-18 missile carries ten warheads, each of
which can be directed to a separate target. Without MIRVs, and with equal
numbers of missiles on each side, there would be a disadvantage in striking
first. Even if every missile had a 90 percent chance of destroying its target,
the side that struck first even with all its missile forces targeted at its
adversary's missiles would leave its own arsenal empty while its adversary
would still have 10 percent of its forces left. But with, say, ten warheads on
each missile, the side that struck first with just 10 percent of its forces
could destroy 90 percent of the adversary's forces and still have 90 percent of
its own forces left.[13]
Of course, this reasoning is insane. No one today thinks that either Russia or
the US would plan such an attack. But in some future crisis, with different
Russian leaders and with misleading data coming in from early-warning
radars—who knows?
The sort of missile defense planned by the Bush administration would not
protect us against a massive attack by mistake. Indeed, it has been
specifically advertised not to be able to defend us from a large-scale Russian
attack. (It might not even protect us against a mistaken launch of a few
missiles, since Russian missiles are presumably accompanied by sophisticated
decoys or other penetration aids; they surely would be if we were to deploy a
missile defense system.) With or without the Bush missile defense plan, we have
to face the danger of annihilation by Russian nuclear-armed missiles. With the
degradation of Russian early-warning capacities and the general loosening of
Russian society, this danger may be even greater than it was during the cold
war. Which brings me to the third and most important issue.
Would a national missile defense system of the sort proposed by the Bush
administration help or hurt our national security?
At first sight, this question seems to answer itself. Isn't any missile
defense, however ineffective, better than no missile defense at all?
One trouble with this reasoning is that we do not face a fixed threat, a
threat independent of what we do about missile defense. True, we are not now in
the position we were in during the 1960s and 1970s, when we could reasonably
expect that any US missile defense system would be countered by an increase in
Soviet offensive missile forces. The current Russian economy would not support
an increase in Russia's missile forces and, indeed, the Russians have been
eager to reduce their forces, reportedly down to some two thousand or so
strategic nuclear warheads. But this is still a force that could destroy the
US, and much else in the world besides. The large size of their arsenal also
increases the danger that Russian nuclear weapons or even long-range missiles
might be stolen or sold to terrorists or rogue states. I am told that Russia
now maintains tight control over its strategic nuclear weapons, but this wasn't
true in the early 1990s and it may not be true in future. There is nothing more
important to American security than to get nuclear forces on both sides down at
least to hundreds or even dozens rather than thousands of warheads, and
especially to get rid of MIRVs, but this is not going to happen if the US is
committed to a national missile defense.
The Russian nuclear force is the sole remnant of its status as a superpower.
Whatever good feelings may exist now between us and Russia, any US system that
might defend our country against even a few Russian intercontinental ballistic
missiles therefore sets a limit below which the Russians will not go in
reducing their strategic nuclear forces. Even if Russia is forced by economic
pressures to continue reducing its missile forces, it can cheaply maintain its
deterrent, although in ways that are dangerous. It could, for example, remove
whatever inhibitions it may now have from launching its missiles on a moment's
notice. Nor is Russia likely to eliminate its MIRVs if the US goes ahead with
missile defense. The START II treaty was to have eliminated all land-based
MIRVs on both sides, but the Russians have already indicated that they will not
go through with implementing this treaty if the US abrogates the ABM treaty.
As for China, it has right now about twenty nuclear-armed intercontinental
ballistic missiles, enough for a significant deterrent against any attack from
Russia or the US. A recent National Intelligence Estimate that was leaked to The
New York Times and The Washington Post predicted that if the US
develops a national missile defense, then the Chinese will increase their
forces from about twenty to about two hundred missiles.[14] And if China makes
this sort of increase in its missile force, then what will Japan and India do?
And then what will Pakistan do?
It may seem contradictory to argue that the proposed national
missile defense system would probably be ineffective against even a small
attack by a rogue state, while also arguing that it would prevent needed
reductions in Russian missile forces and promote increases in Chinese missile
forces. But each country "prudently" tends to overestimate the
effectiveness of any other country's defenses, especially as they may develop
in future. The Soviet deployment of a primitive antimissile defense of Moscow
was a major factor in America's decision to multiply its warheads by deploying
MIRVs, so that Moscow was in more danger after it was defended than before. I
remember how in the early 1970s US defense planners became terrified that
Soviet antiaircraft missiles might be given a role in defense against
intercontinental ballistic missiles, something that never happened. Imagine
then how Russians and the Chinese defense planners will take account of the
unilateral American withdrawal from the 1972 ABM treaty.
If it were possible tomorrow to switch on a missile defense system that
would make the US invulnerable to any missile attack, then I and most other
opponents of missile defense would be all for it. But that is not the choice we
face. What is at issue is a missile defense system that will take almost a
decade to deploy in its initial phase, and then many more years to upgrade to
the point where at best it would have some effectiveness against some plausible
threats. During all of this time, however, American security will be damaged by
measures taken by Russia or China to preserve or enlarge their strategic
capability in response to our missile defense.
There is one sort of missile defense that would not raise these problems. As
already mentioned, a defense that targets intercontinental ballistic missiles
during the boost phase with either missiles or airborne laser beams could only
defend against missile launches within a limited geographical area; and it
would also be immune to decoys and other penetration aids. We could defend
against the launch of North Korean missiles by using short-range missiles based
on ships in the Sea of Japan, though to defend against a launch from Iraq or
Iran would require cooperation from Turkey or some republic of the former
Soviet Union, respectively. Such a defense would have no effectiveness against
missiles launched from sites in Russia or China, which during the boost phase
would be beyond the range of any missiles or airborne lasers we might deploy.
For this reason, although this sort of defense would violate the 1972 ABM
treaty, President Putin has already indicated that he would consider revising
the treaty to allow it. But a boost phase intercept system would have all the
destabilizing effects of other missile defense systems if it were based on
satellites, or if it were combined with exo-atmospheric midcourse interceptors
like those of the Clinton-Bush National Missile Defense proposal.
Developing a national missile defense system would also harm
our foreign relations. It would add to the general perception that the US is
unwilling to be bound by international agreements, such as comprehensive test
ban treaties or environmental agreements. It would weaken Putin's hand in
dealing with Russian ultranationalists. By trying to defend the US from missile
attacks while leaving our allies defenseless, missile defense would tend to
undermine alliances like NATO. A boost-phase intercept system would not really
be an exception; it is true that the interception of a long-range missile in
the boost phase does not depend much on the destination of the missile, but by
interrupting the boost it would probably only cause the warhead to fall short,
perhaps on an ally, such as Canada or Germany.
A missile defense system would hurt our security in another important way,
by taking money away from other forms of defense. We are simply unable to do
everything we can imagine that might defend us. We need to upgrade our hospitals
to deal with biological attack; improve security along our border with Canada
and in our ports; upgrade the FBI computer system; and so on. All of our
activities along these lines are constrained by a lack of funds. Legislation to
increase funding for homeland defense was blocked in the House of
Representatives because the amounts of money requested exceeded the
administration's guidelines.
If we are particularly worried (as we should be worried) about terrorist
nuclear attacks on the US, then we ought to give a very high priority to
working with Russia and other countries to get rid of the large stocks of
weapons-grade plutonium and uranium that are produced by their power reactors.
Russia now holds about 150 tons of plutonium and one thousand tons of highly
enriched uranium. This material could be used not only to make nuclear bombs,
which can be delivered to the US in all sorts of ways; even a technically
unsophisticated terrorist could instead use it to make so-called
"dirty" bombs, in which an ordinary high explosive is surrounded with
highly radioactive material that when dispersed in an explosion would make
large urban areas uninhabitable.
Unfortunately, this material is not under tight control.[15] Since 1991 there
has been a bipartisan Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program that
among other things aims at improving the security of Russian control over
fissionable materials and making Russian plutonium and uranium unusable as
nuclear explosives, but this too is not being adequately funded. A bipartisan
panel headed by Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler has called for spending at an
average level over the next decade of about $3 billion a year for securing,
monitoring, and reducing Russian nuclear weapons, materials, and expertise.[16] The amount in the
2002 budget for these activities is only about $750 million, even after
substantial increases by Congress. Comparison of these figures with the $60
billion quoted cost (certain to be greatly exceeded) of a minimum missile
defense system gives a powerful impression that the Bush administration and
some in Congress are not entirely serious about national security.
I was at a press conference in Washington in November 2001, when the
Federation of American Scientists released a letter signed by fifty-one Nobel
laureates that opposed spending on national missile defense programs that would
violate the 1972 ABM treaty. One of the reporters present asked me why, if the
arguments against national missile defense are so cogent, many people in and
out of government are for it? It was a good question, and one to which I am not
sure I know the answer. There are the usual pressures for large military
programs that come from defense contractors and from politicians trading on
patriotism. The arguments for national missile defense may seem simpler and
more straightforward than the arguments against it. But I think there is also a
peculiar fascination with anything that projects American power into space. How
else explain the idiocy of the International Space Station, or the card tables
that were set up at airports during the Reagan administration by people
advocating a "high frontier" missile defense program? I have to admit
that thoughtlessness is not a monopoly of missile defense advocates. Some
opponents of missile defense are automatically against any large military
program. In assessing missile defense, or anything else for that matter, there
is no substitute for actually thinking through the issues.
In my own field of physics, we make a distinction between applied physics,
which is motivated by some social need, and pure physics, the search for
knowledge for its own sake. Both kinds of physics are valuable, but not
everything pure is desirable. In seeking to deploy a national missile defense
aimed at an implausible threat, a defense that would have dubious effectiveness
against even that threat, and that on balance would harm our security more than
it helps it, the Bush administration seems to be pursuing a pure rather than
applied missile defense—a missile defense that is undertaken for its own sake,
rather than for any application it may have in defending our country.
[1]An
excellent and evenhanded account of the Bush administration's missile defense
plan as well as earlier missile defense proposals is given by Bradley Graham in
Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack
(Public Affairs, 2001).
[2] Statement
before the Senate Armed Services Committee, March 19, 1969.
[3] For
contemporary arguments against deploying the Safeguard system (including an
article of mine), see ABM: An Evaluation of the Decision to Deploy an
Antiballistic Missile System, edited by Abram Chayes and Jerome B. Wiesner
(Harper and Row, 1969).
[4] The texts
of various arms control treaties can be found in Nuclear Arms Control:
Background and Issues, prepared by the Committee on International Security
and Arms Control of the National Academy of Sciences (National Academy Press,
1985).
[5] On the
Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative, see Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There
in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (Simon and
Schuster, 2000).
[6] A mordant
analysis of the limitations of these tests was presented in "Report in
Support of the National Missile Defense Deployment Readiness Review," by
Philip Coyle, then the director of Operational Test and Evaluation of the
Department of Defense (August 2000).
[7] See David
E. Sanger, "Bush Flatly States US Will Pull Out of Missile Treaty," The
New York Times, August 24, 2001, p. A6.
[8] This
question is discussed in detail in the Union of Concerned Science/MIT report
"Countermeasures: A Technical Evaluation of the Operational Effectiveness
of the the Planned US National Missile Defense System" (April 2000).
[9] For
instance, see Richard Garwin's Op-Ed article in The New York Times,
December 30, 2000.
[10] A
realistic boost phase intercept system is described by Richard Garwin in Arms
Control Today, September 2000.
[11] For a
detailed analysis of the prospects for using lasers or other directed energy
weapons for missile defense, see "Report to the American Physical
Society," by the study group on science and technology of directed energy
weapons, Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 59, No. 3, Part 2 (July 1987).
There have been no technological developments since 1987 that would make the
pessimistic conclusions of this report out of date.
[12] For a
description of Russian missile forces, see Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces,
edited by P. Podvig (MIT Press, 2001).
[13] To be
precise, this calculation only applies to immobile missiles, that can be
targeted in a missile attack. But Russian submarines spend almost all their
time tied up at docks, and Russian mobile land-based missiles are generally
kept in fixed garrisons, so for these purposes their missiles are immobile.
[14] Roberto
Suro, "Study Sees Possible China Nuclear Buildings," The
Washington Post, August 10, 2000, p. A2; Steven Lee Myers, "Study Said
to Find US Missile Shield Might Incite China," The New York Times,
August 10, 2000, p. A1.
[15] For
instance, see Steven Erlanger, "Lax Nuclear Security in Russia Is Cited as
Way for bin Laden to Get Arms," The New York Times, November 12,
2001, p. B1.
[16] "A
Report Card on the Department of Energy's Nonproliferation Programs with
Russia" (US Department of Energy, January 10, 2000), Appendix A. (The
chart from which this figure is taken warns that "it is not intended to be
of budget quality, nor to imply that the US should be the sole provider of
funds for such a program," but in fact contributions to these activities
from other countries have been relatively small.)