[Peace-discuss] National Missile "Defense"
ppatton at uiuc.edu
ppatton at uiuc.edu
Thu May 20 23:15:02 CDT 2004
National Missile Defense: The Secrets the Pentagon Doesn't
Want You to Know
by Robert Freeman
There is a dirty little secret about national missile defense
the Pentagon doesn't want you to know. It is this: missile
defense is fundamentally flawed--not just in technology but
in rationale and in concept. It should not be built. It
should never have even been started. And like the war in
Iraq, if deployed, missile defense will leave the U.S. more
vulnerable and less secure than if it had never been built at
all.
Let's do a little thought experiment. How would we know if a
weapon system such as missile defense was a good idea or not?
Well, like any complex system looking for a justification,
missile defense must pass four simple tests: Is it necessary?
Can it work? Are there better alternatives? And, does it do
more good than harm? These are very simple, very sensible
considerations. The problem with missile defense is that it
fails not just one, but all four of these tests. And badly.
Consider:
First: Is it necessary? Missile defense's purported rationale
is to defend against so-called "rogue states" launching a
nuclear attack on the U.S. This has been almost laughable
from the beginning. It is hard to imagine people can even
talk about it with a straight face.
The purportedly suspect countries (North Korea, Libya, Iran,
and Iraq) do not possess ballistic missiles. The 2005 target
readiness date was based on a worst case scenario developed
in 1997 of North Korea possibly being able to launch such a
missile within eight years. But North Korea had suspended its
missile development program almost two years before that
scenario was even created. And until President Bush promised
to invade it, North Korea was steadily working toward
rapprochement with South Korea. Somehow, however, the magical
2005 date was never changed.
And what of the other so-called "rogue states"? Iraq is in
rubble, militarily occupied, and posing no threat to anybody
but the hapless US soldier on the ground. Iran does not
possess either nuclear weapons or ballistic missile delivery
systems. Libya never showed the capacity to develop anything
even as technically sophisticated as a watch much less an
ICBM capable of accurately delivering a nuclear warhead
thousands of miles away on the first try. And it has recently
come over to the side of goodness and light. Strike One.
Second: Can it work? The tests to date have been more comical
than credible. Most of them ended in failure. The one that
didn't was so phony it prompted charges of fraud by
contractor employees who said they were pressured to fake
their data. And on the most recent test, the target contained
a homing beacon advertising its trajectory so that only a
blind mule couldn't find it.
The problems with workability are four-fold. First is the
very real difficulty of "hitting a bullet with a bullet".
Actually, this metaphor understates the problem as incoming
ballistic missiles travel at 10 times the speed of a bullet.
The second problem with workability is testing. A truly
operational missile defense system would be the biggest
machine ever conceived-hundreds of millions of lines of
computer code, tens of millions of parts, strewn across
millions of miles of earth and space. And it has to work
perfectly. The first time. Without ever having been tested in
its real-world environment.
Think about that. Would you operate your company's accounting
department with such a system? Would you agree to blindly pay
whatever phone bill was sent to you by such a system? Would
you trust your personal checking account to a system that had
never been realistically tested? And yet missile defense
proponents want you to bet yours and the nation's security on
such a system. It is beyond arrogance. It is lunacy.
The third problem with workability is that it is impossible
to distinguish "dummy" warheads from the real thing. But it
is much cheaper and easier to proliferate dummies than it is
to hit all of them. This asymmetry of offense and defense
makes it impossible for the defense to win. And needless to
say, it only takes one real one to slip through and the
system has catastrophically failed.
The last and most damning problem with workability is that a
bomb placed in the cargo hold of a ship or the bed of a truck
bypasses the entire system. This, of course, is how a real
aggressor would deliver a warhead (if he had one). Think
9/11. It is vastly easier, quicker, less costly, more certain
of success, and more discreet than an ICBM with a return
address emblazoned in its exhaust plume. Missile defense is
completely useless against such a simple recourse. No
engineering workarounds, no amount of expanded funding, and
no amount of Buck Rogers "spin" can fix it. Strike Two.
Third: Are there better alternatives? The most conservative
estimates of the system's cost place it in the low hundreds
of billions of dollars. (Some $90 billion have already been
spent and we've hardly even started.) Critics put the final
cost at closer to a trillion dollars. Given the Pentagon's
history of cost overruns (remember $700 hammers?), there's
good reason to believe the latter estimates will prove closer
to the mark.
A trillion dollars could pay off a significant portion of our
$7 trillion (and growing) national debt. With regard
to "rogue states" we could: offer incentives to stop any
missile development programs; permanently position warships
off of their coasts to shoot down any missile launched from
their soil; give them economic development assistance; give
them access to U.S. markets; dramatically step up inspections
at U.S. ports; or any of a number of other types of
constructive engagement.
All of these combined would not begin to approach the cost of
a missile defense system. Any one of them would likely be
more effective. In particular, a simple commitment to North
Korea to not invade it would, according to North Korea
itself, invite the suspension-and verification-of its nuclear
weapons programs. It seems a simple, astoundingly cost
effective proposition. Yet it is routinely rebuffed by the
U.S. Strike Three.
And finally, fourth: Does such a system do more good than
harm? This is perhaps the most damning indictment of missile
defense. Missile defense destroys the entire framework of
international arms control and non-proliferation that was
built up over the past fifty years. And it is the U.S. that
is the aggressor, the destroyer.
Both China and Russia have said they would respond to such a
system by dramatically increasing their offensive
capabilities so as to be able to overwhelm any system the
U.S. deployed. It would spark a new global arms race,
especially in south Asia, increasing tensions in one of the
world's already most unstable areas.
Our European allies are opposed to missile defense precisely
because of this certainty-that it makes the world not more
but less secure. The president of France, publicly mocking
the idea on Bush's first visit to Europe, said
accurately, "It is a fantastic invitation to proliferation."
North Korea's response to the invasion of Iraq is
instructive: it now views nuclear weapons as its only
insurance against a similar such invasion. And this is
entirely logical.
This same logic applies equally well to missile defense. If
the U.S. is going to build it and others perceive that it
threatens their security, they will not sit idly by. They
will proliferate their nuclear warheads and their delivery
systems so as to overwhelm or underfly any US attempt at
effective defense. And more nuclear weapons in the hands of
more states would leave the U.S. and the rest of the world
less stable and more insecure than if such a system were
never built in the first place. Strike Four.
Note that to be justified, a weapon system must pass not just
one but all four of these tests. For example, even if it
could work, such a system must first be necessary. And even
if it was necessary and worked, it must still produce more
good than bad. And so on. The overwhelming indictment of
missile defense is not that it does not pass all four of
these tests. It's that it doesn't pass any! A more dangerous,
ill-conceived system could scarcely be imagined.
So, why, then, if there exist all these problems, the
desperate, headlong rush to deploy? First, missile "defense"
has never really been about defense at all. Its proponents
know the above flaws much better than the public does.
Missile "defense" is now and always has been about missile
offense. It is about control of space as the next battle
frontier. And it is about projecting instantaneous,
indefensible US destructive capacity over the heads of every
country on earth.
>From its very inception-in the days of the Reagan
administration when it was routinely derided as Star Wars-the
heart of missile "defense" has been the nuclear pumped X-ray
laser. This system generates an intense laser beam by
detonating and channeling the force of a nuclear weapon from
space. According to Roy Woodruff, the physicist who headed
the X-ray laser program at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, "If
the lasers can be made powerful enough to destroy enemy
missiles, they also would be able to destroy targets on Earth
surgically and instantaneously."
To reinforce this point, consider the following from Space
and Security News: "Studies done for the Department of
Defense have concluded that before a system of laser battle
stations gets good enough to be really useful against
ballistic missiles, they would be powerful enough to
incinerate cities in minutes."
Consonant with Bush's radical doctrine of pre-emptive war,
national missile "defense" offers the U.S. the exquisite pre-
emptive capability: to be able to take out any weapons system
from any adversary before it could ever be used. It
represents the ultimate decapitation of any enemy's
conventional war fighting capability.
But remember the caution above. The simplest workaround to
missile "defense" is to simply bypass the system, to deliver
nuclear weapons through conventional means-boats, trucks,
airplanes, etc. Think of the French Maginot Line in World War
II. German Panzer divisions simply drove around this
supposedly impregnable line of fortresses, leaving to the
English language the standard epithet for an expensive,
ineffective illusion of defense.
Far from making the world safer from nuclear threats, then,
national missile offense actually increases such risks. For
alternatives are cheap, more discreet than missiles, and much
more certain of success. And by both provoking such recourse
while starving the nation of the means to defend against it,
missile "defense" leaves the US far less secure than if the
system had never been built in the first place.
The second real rationale for missile "defense" is that it
has always been a welfare program for large military
contractors whose gravy train dried up with the end of the
Cold War. Like it or not, we have a class of politically well-
connected dependents in this country who live at the trough
of military spending-they can't do anything else. They are
big. They are powerful. And they spend millions of dollars
buying politicians the way most people buy groceries.
>From their point of view, missile "defense" is the perfect
weapon system: it is unnecessary; it doesn't have to work as
defense; it generates hundreds of billions of dollars in
direct revenue; and the cherry on top of the sundae is that
since it invites retaliation by China and Russia, it delivers
a new, built-in global arms race, a vast new opportunity to
arm all sides of all new global conflicts for the next half
century. It is the Mother of All Self Licking Ice Cream Cones.
Either of these rationales-missile "defense" as missile
offense, or missile "defense" as corporate welfare-provide a
more credible explanation of known motives and technical
realities than do the childish fantasies of "defense" offered
by the military.
It is a particular perversity of our political process that
this dangerous, Rube Goldberg scheme has become the litmus
test of "strength" in military affairs. And the mainstream
media is not simply culpable but craven in the perpetration
of the fraud. It has not only shown itself timorous in taking
on the powerful weapons industry. It has, as with the
invasion of Iraq, happily put itself at the industry's
disposal to act as its Hallelujah Chorus in the selling of
the program to an ignorant, credulous public.
But the failed Iraq invasion notwithstanding, the U.S. is
still stronger today than it has ever been. We won the Cold
War, remember? There are no credible challengers to U.S.
military might anywhere in the world. If ever there was a
time to offer the world a true "Pax Americana" this is it.
This is the first opportunity in fifty years to be not just
strong but wise, to seize the peace we fought half a century
to win and turn it into a prosperity that buoys all the
world. We have a rare opportunity to make former enemies
reluctant to wage war against their greatest benefactor, to
make them, instead, co-creators in a more peaceful, more
prosperous world for all of humanity.
We seized a similar such opportunity at the end of World War
II. The Marshall Plan not only rebuilt Europe from the ashes
of the greatest devastation ever, it not only proved an
effective bulwark for shattered democratic states against the
predation of Soviet aggression, it also jump-started the
greatest engine of wealth creation the world has ever seen.
But missile "defense" renders such possibilities stillborn.
While it is an unequaled, unending bonanza for the U.S.
weapons industry, missile "defense" would be the death knell
of the just and peaceful and prosperous future the world's
people now deserve.
Robert Freeman writes about technology and economics. He can
be reached at robertfreeman10 at yahoo.com.
###
__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute Rm 3027 405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795 fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-328-4064
homepage: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ppatton/index.html
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
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