His hosts listened warily. “We have to be very careful that any such project does not retrigger… a renewed arms race,” warned German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder. The reception in Moscow over the weekend was expected to be even chillier. The Russians are fearful that Washington will junk the 28-year-old antiballistic-missile treaty that bans America and Russia from erecting national missile defenses. The Russians can’t afford to rebuild their aging ICBM arsenal to be able to overcome a missile shield in the West. Clinton will try to convince Russia’s new president, Vladimir Putin, that the Kremlin should join Washington in creating a new, safer logic of nuclear deterrence, one based on strong defenses rather than the promise of MAD–mutual-assured destruction.
Most Americans thought that arms-control talks ended with the cold war and that Star Wars, a missileproof umbrella over the United States, was a fantasy of Ronald Reagan’s. But the worldwide debate over NMD raises a host of difficult questions about nuclear security in a volatile world in which terrorists can obtain weapons of mass destruction. In the presidential race, Al Gore and George W. Bush will battle over who has the better plan. The first question, somewhat overlooked last week in the diplomatic sparring, is pretty basic: will the NMD currently planned by the United States actually work?
At least one knowledgeable expert has some serious doubts. From his cluttered office overlooking the MIT campus, Prof. Ted Postol watched Clinton’s pitch for NMD with disbelief. “I don’t know what the president thinks–or if he thinks–about missile defenses. My guess is that he’s just repeating what he’s told by his staff. And they don’t want to acknowledge that the whole thing is a fraud.” Strong words, but Postol’s credentials give him credibility. As scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the early ’80s, he helped develop the Trident-2 missile. After the gulf war, he singlehandedly demolished the Pentagon’s exaggerated claims for the success rate of the Patriot antimissile system against Iraqi Scuds. Now the MIT physicist has closely studied the military’s own tests of NMD. His conclusion: “This system has no chance of working.”
Pentagon spokesmen rejected Postol’s critique, insisting that NMD’s capabilities will steadily grow after deployment–initially, 25 missile interceptors, based in Alaska, at a cost of $30 billion–begins in five years or so. (Clinton still has to give the go-ahead, probably this fall.) But the story of how Postol arrived at his gloomy assessment is troubling. Charges of government lying and cover-up are beginning to surface. At the very least, it appears that the hopes for an NMD are somewhat unrealistic and that the rush to build one has been driven more by politics than technology.
The dream of a Star Wars dome collapsed with the Soviet Union, but the idea of missile defense never went away. The military services all continued to work on programs to protect against missile attacks on the battlefield. By the mid-’90s, Republicans were agitating for a missile defense that would guard American cities against accidental launches or attacks by rogue nations. In the 1996 election, Bill Clinton cleverly trumped GOP candidate Bob Dole by promising a limited, ground-based missile defense. The pressure was on the Pentagon to come up with a system that could be deployed reasonably quickly.
Missile defense–hitting a bullet with a bullet–is hard enough. It is made much more difficult by the use of decoys, which are relatively cheap and easy to disperse from an ICBM. In 1995, the defense contractor TRW was one of the competitors to design a sensor that would enable a missile interceptor to distinguish decoys from the actual warhead. A year later, in 1996, a TRW scientist, Nira Schwartz, argued that her company’s system was hopelessly flawed. Fired by TRW for insubordination, she has sued under a law that protects government “whistle-blowers.” (TRW denies all allegations by Schwartz.) The litigation revealed information on missile-defense testing that would normally be kept secret. At MIT, Postol decided to take a look.
What he saw stunned him. Crucial to NMD’s success is the theory that the sensor on a missile interceptor can pick out a warhead because it gives off infrared radiation differently than a decoy does as it tumbles through space. In practice, Postol found from TRW’s own flight-test data that decoys and warheads were indistinguishable. What’s more, he says, he discovered fakery by the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Office–BMDO–the successor to the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative. BMDO, charges Postol, is rigging its tests. In the first real trial of the defense system, in June 1997, the interceptor had to pick out a warhead from eight decoys. BMDO hailed the test as a success, but TRW’s data showed that in fact the sensor utterly failed. So in subsequent tests, BMDO abandoned plans to use multiple decoys and instead used only one and that–a shiny silver balloon–was so easily recognizable that the sensor couldn’t miss. BMDO, Postol says, has been “testing for success.”
Postol wrote directly to the White House last month to warn the president’s advisers of his findings. Rather than call a halt to the program or even start an investigation, Clinton’s aides turned over Postol’s letter to the BMDO. The BMDO promptly classified Postol’s detailed findings as secret, while publicly dismissing his naysaying. Postol has counterattacked by taking his case to the media, including NEWSWEEK. Government watchdogs can’t be trusted, he insists, at least when it comes to missile defense. “Nobody gives a damn about the truth,” he asserts. “There is no oversight of any kind.” White House officials traveling last week with the president rejected Postol’s allegations. Clinton, they say, won’t decide to go ahead with the system unless he is satisfied that it can be made workable. One top official argued that Postol had failed to take into account new developments in high-precision radar that will ease the task of picking out warheads from decoys. This official predicted that within a decade the scientists will have worked out the bugs.
Postol himself, unlike some critics of NMD, is not ideologically against building a missile-defense system. He worries about the “asymmetric” threats posed by small and unruly nations with a few big weapons. His concerns are widely shared. True, terrorists may be more likely to try to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States in a suitcase than launch one by missile. But the mere capability to fire a nuclear-tipped ICBM at America could give a rogue regime a powerful blackmail tool.
The real question is how to counter that threat. Could any technology give a solid shield? Postol and many other experts suggest that it is easier to shoot down a missile in what is known as boost phase–as it lifts off, while its white-hot plume makes an easy target and before it has a chance to throw out decoys. The catch is time and distance: to intercept a missile in boost phase, the interceptor must be within a few hundred miles and ready to fire in less than two minutes.
This is where politics comes back into the picture. To hit the continental United States, a missile launched from the Middle East or North Korea must fly over Russia. Thus, a land-based system to shoot down missiles in boost phase would have to be based in Russia. Last week Putin tried out a bit of one-upmanship and suggested that the Kremlin might be willing to build such a system–with American help.
If Putin is sincere, his offer would really put America to the test. Some Democrats and veteran arms controllers are uneasy about tinkering with the balance of terror. While in theory it makes sense to move from MAD to defensive standoff, getting there could be exceedingly tricky. George W. Bush is willing to take a more radical approach than the Clinton administration, calling for deeper cuts in ICBMs and more ambitious (and expensive) antimissile defenses. China is already worried about Clinton’s proposal. And if China entered the race, would India and Pakistan be far behind? A truly global system of defense might seem to be a giant step toward reducing the risk of nuclear war. But would a Republican-controlled Congress vote to provide old foes like the Russians with a missile shield? Some suspect that the hidden agenda of conservative hard-liners is to give the United States true strategic superiority over Russia and China. Some backers of NMD have suggested putting a boost phase antimissile system onto submarines or even up in space. Satellites zapping missiles with laser beams–shades of Star Wars. The technical problems of a space-based system are horrendous. Still, for the true believers, the dream of a magic bullet never dies. It just gets renamed.
