Systemic Failure

News flash: the missile defense shield still doesn’t work.

By Keith White, University of Virginia

Imagine this terrible futuristic account:

The president of the United States is rushed into the White House Situation Room, which is filled with red-eyed generals and other security officials.

The Joint Chiefs inform the president of the dreadful news: North Korean President Kim Jong Il has ordered the launch of a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from his Musudan-ri missile facility.

An hour latter, at speeds faster than bullets, Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) kill vehicles locate, lock onto, and destroy the dangerous weapon. All this occurs within the safe confines of outer space.

Minutes later, speaking from the White House, the president goes on national television and informs the nation of the successful interception.

A collective sigh of relief is heard from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles and Anchorage.

It sounds like a piece of cheesy science fiction, but the Bush administration recently heralded a step towards such a missile shield, briefing the press on a successful missile shield test.

Unfortunately this test is neither a success nor a step towards a more secure nation. Instead it shows an administration substituting mirages for substance when it comes to national security.

The Test

The Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) is the re-branded "Strategic Defense Initiative" (SDI) initiated by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. Reagan hoped such a system would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The Bush administration now considers the BMDS a vital defense against the actions of rogue states and terrorists.

The first sketch of missile defense envisioned satellite-based lasers zapping nuclear missiles out of the sky—earning the program the derisive nickname "Star Wars." As shown in this Bush administration report, BMDS has matured greatly over the last two decades: five detection systems and nine types of interceptors now constitute BMDS.

The current missile shield’s "success" centered on the ability of kill vehicles to intercept a missile during flight. Launching these reactive missiles is no easy task. Think of two people, one in Florida and one in Maine, trying to have bullets they shoot meet one another in space.

Did we accomplish this feat of technological wizardry? Not really.

The test was a "qualified" success, with even Donald Rumsfeld tempering expectations for a usable missile shield anytime soon.

But what’s the big deal? While BMDS may only offer artificial "success" today, what’s wrong with funding a program that potentially offers such huge security dividends?

Well, that would depend how much is being spent on this 20-year venture. In 2003, the Center for Defense Information counted BMDS costs from 2002 to 2009 to be over $63 billion. Recently, the Congressional Budget Office refined this estimate, putting the price tag at $234 billion over the next 18 years.

What’s two decades of failure and $200 billion? If BMDS could succeed doesn’t it deserve as much funding as necessary?

Technological Limitations

But then there are the BMDS’s technological limitations. These limitations, according to MIT Professor Ted Postol, will not be overcome by any cash infusion or time investment into the current BMDS system.

In an interview with the Boston Review, Postol elucidates the cruel realities of missile defense. He points to a key problem: While technology now allows us to track incoming missiles and launch kill vehicles, there is virtually no way BMDS can tell the difference between decoys and the real, nuclear deal. And guess what? Decoy inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are pretty easy to make.

Some rocket science might prove handy at this point. By looking at an ICBM flight plan, one sees the many phases of an ICBM launch. Boiled down, a full missile is launched, and then lifts into space. The missile then separates, with the no longer needed delivery system dropping off and the nuclear warhead hurtling downward to Earth. It is during this separation phase that kill vehicles work their magic. But if one adds little round decoys to be released with the warhead, suddenly a kill vehicle is not tracking one warhead but dozens of potential warheads.

But wait, shouldn’t it be easy for a computer to detect false warheads from actual ones? Not really: While the decoys are not identical, they will mask the true warhead from the decoys. And the data that our systems work so hard to detect—vibration, size, and speed—won’t help differentiate the balloon bomb from the pool of balloon decoys.

In a real enemy missile attack, not only could there be decoys. The enemy would likely fire multiple nuclear-armed missiles, instead of just one. We wouldn’t have advance warning and time to prepare, as in a test. It would be a crisis fraught with tension and misinformation. The other side would try to blind and confuse our intelligence capabilities.

How does one know that technological changes won’t eventually square the circle of missile defense?

Critics, like Postol, do not claim a new technological age will never occur. Instead they make two claims, both difficult to refute. First, they point to the obvious: a new technological age has yet to come. And even if a modern day Wright brother reevaluates our horizon of possibility, the BMDS system would most likely need to be scrapped and rebuilt from the bottom up.

International Blow-Back

The system not only wastes money, but also harms U.S. security by encouraging the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their component parts by other nations. Why would a defensive system provoke such a response? Simple: BMDS always has offensive capabilities.

Developments in our missile system have led Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press, in a recent Foreign Affairs article, to claim "it will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike."

Such a possibility encourages Russia and China to update their nuclear capabilities. This promises only a world with more WMD ingredients floating around. More WMD supplies bring more risk of nuclear theft or misuse. As Pakistani scientist AQ Khan notoriously demonstrated, one man in the right place can disseminate nuclear know-how around the globe.

Conclusion

The Bush administration’s misguided BMDS focus diverts funds and attention from the real weapons threat of our age: low-tech WMD threats. What good is a missile shield if an easier pathway to strike exists in the form of a dirty bomb explosion? A dirty bomb is a conventional bomb packed with radioactive material. Given that it doesn’t require full-scale nuclear technology, it is much easier for a terrorist to obtain than a nuclear weapon. Although it is not nearly as deadly as an actual nuclear explosion, a dirty bomb detonation in a major American city would have very serious consequences.

Progressives with serious national security and non-proliferation experience, including Al Gore, John Kerry, and Joseph Biden, do not call for stopping research into BMDS. They seek only to place this technology in its proper place within our nation’s overall security policy. This position permits space for any technological breakthroughs without provoking an arms race that imperils global security.

Aggressive diplomacy and other efforts to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of rogue nations and terrorists is a far smarter use of resources today.

By failing to face the realities of BMDS—the fact that it doesn’t work and its dangerous ramifications—the Bush administration has endangered our nation. Without giving America real missile defense, BMDS boils down to mere BS.

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