National Missile Defense aka Star Wars

National Missile Defense aka Star Wars by Matt Giwer, June 29 2001
The national missile defense scenario is a recipe for the return to the Cold War battle of competing economies. The Issue An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) can be viewed quite simply as a satellite (nuclear warhead) which did not reach orbit without doing too much damage to the physics. Any nation with the technology to put a satellite in orbit has ICBM capability. There are a handful of non-nuclear nations which can do that today and others developing the capability. If the future is space we expect a future in which dozens of nations have the ability to launch satellites. The future will have dozens of nations with ICBM capability. The present approaches to an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system are kinetic and directed energy, simply either hit the incoming warhead with a rock or a laser beam. At present the rock approach is being actively developed and field tested while the laser approach remains in the laboratory. As satellite and ICBM technology are the same so also is ABM technology as it is only improvement in payload guidance technology. For nearly two decades we have heard the self-styled experts inform us it is possible or impossible depending upon their political position and employer. Lets put it in practical terms. Most everyone will agree the current approaches are impossible in the next year. Most everyone will agree it will be possible in one hundred years. There can be no rational debate over possible or impossible without the number of years in the future being specified. While an ICBM is clearly a missile tossing a warhead an ABM system can be a missile, a laser, a particle beam, or just a ton of sand to ruin the heat shield of the warhead so it burns up. Forty years ago a researcher could get his picture on the cover of Time being the first to do what we now call a laser pointer for under ten dollars and buy at any office supply store. In roughly those same forty years, missile technology has gone from Sputnik to the International Space Station. It has gone from reaching earth orbit to close ups of the moons of Jupiter. More relevantly to this issue from a handful of liquid fueled monstrosity ICBMs to thousands of launch-in-five-minutes solid fueled missiles and warhead weighing a thousand pounds to the proverbial briefcase nuke. In those same years we have gone from room-sized computers to desktop computers with more computing power than all the computers in the world forty years ago. We can confidently expect similar improvements in missiles, nuclear weapons and computers in the next forty years. In 1945 producing an atom bomb was a major economic and scientific achievement by the United States. Thirty years later countries the size of South Africa and Israel had them in their arsenals. Today, any nation above poverty status can make them if they want them. The technology for an ABM system will be common and cheap at some point in the future. The further in the future the cheaper and more common. As with the Atomic Bomb, developing an ABM system is a matter of economics to pay for the development of the technology to permit it to exist a decade or so before it becomes something every nation can do. The total technical discussion is only a question of how much sooner not whether or not it is possible. The primary consideration of defense against ballistic missiles is their speed. Intercontinental ballitic missiles are not the only ones. Ballistic missiles are loosely described by their effective range, the farther they travel their greater their speed. Success has been achieved against ballistic missiles with 200 to 500 mile range, SCUD-type missiles. Work is in progress to deal with missiles of greater range and thus greater speed. It can only be a matter of time before the range of missiles we are able to counter becomes the same as dealing with a missile with intercontinental range. It is inevitable for progress to develop the capability to deal with intercontinental missiles. DECOYS The issue of decoys is two edged. Radar and computers can distinguish between simple decoys and real warheads. The undetectable decoy is one with the same size, shape and mass of a real warhead. At that point it is reasonable substitute another warhead for a decoy. We already face that problem with multiple warhead missiles. That is why the proposed ABM concept is addressing only single warhead missiles. An arbitrary Challenge The present technical challenge is self created. We have had the ability to build an ABM system for over thirty years and one got close to testing as Nike Zeus. It was simply an intercepting missile with a nuclear warhead. That could be done today with DOD petty cash. The problem with using nuclear warheads to destroy nuclear warheads is the explosion would create an electromagnetic pulse which would likely damage or destroy satellites in orbit. That would take out the early warning system for additional missile launches and a large fraction of the commercial satellites. The latter consideration is significant to the civilian planners. So in creating a technological challenge we are both requiring a non-nuclear method but also one a few decades before it is easy. The ABM Treaty In strictly legal terms the treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union is legally dead due to the disappearance of the Soviet Union. As with contracts when one of the parties dies the contract is resolved by the estate. With nations and treaties when there is a major political change treaty obligations are in abeyance absent a renegotiation. There has been none between the US and the separate nations of the ex-Soviet Union, primarily Russia. In practical terms Russia still has ICBMs so the legal point is a quibble. It is only the absence of threatened hostilities between the US and Russia into the foreseeable future which permits bringing up its legally dead status. The issue is not the treaty. The treaty was conceived as a grand gesture of Cold War diplomacy which was no more than an effort to limit the economic burden of the Cold War by both sides. It is the same method by which Ronald Reagan's Star War demonstrated (about half faked) would financially ruin the Soviet Union. The US could not have created such a system at the time the treaty was created. Rogue nation The most common public view of the rogue nation issue is some nation nuking an American city. The result would be the rogue nation being flattened by the US nuclear response. That is not a legitimate concern. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) worked for decades. North Korea is no more interested in being flattened than was the Soviet Union. No nation is interested in it. A more realistic scenario is as outlined in a Tom Clancy novel a few years ago, the bluff, in the standoff with Japan. A nation has ICBMs and threatens to use them instead of actually using them. As was the crux of that scenario the issue is the nation being able to keep their location secret. During the Gulf war Iraq was able to keep most of its mobile Scud missiles undetected so this is a reasonable scenario. A nation which invests decades of effort and billions of dollars into development to exclusion of a larger conventional force will certainly not aim it at New York City and demand "Give me California." The utilization has to be of a transient nature as it is a matter of time before the missiles are located and taken out with a first strike. Or, "We call your bluff and raise you Bahgdad." In recent terms Iraq demanding to keep Kuwait or else lasts only as long as it takes to identify the missiles. But Yugoslavia demanding the bombing be called off would last long enough to eliminate the KLA and those demanding separation. In real life terms the actual threat would never be made. It would be one factor known by all sides and considered in forming diplomatic and military options as it is with Israel's nuclear arsenal being used nuke the Mideast oil fields if not supported by the US. Small nations having ICBMs results in a decrease in the military options of the US and gives small nations a greater say in changing the status quo in their favor. Limited Shield ICBMs are not like bullets in a handgun kept in a nightstand for years just in case. They require constant maintenance and training just as with any other weapon system. They have to be taken off line for that maintenance and are unavailable during training. And even those which are online would have failures if launched just as satellite launches fail. And launch locations can be discovered and destroyed with preemptive attacks. All of which means any nation having them will have many of them. The same considerations for ICBMs above apply to the ABM system. There must be more ABMs than there are threat ICBMs. What is being simplistically presented as a rogue nation having one or two missiles will not be the case. Nor will the image of three or four ABMs in the wilds of Alaska be the case. The reality of the scenario is that said rogue nation will slowly but steadily increase its number of ICBMs and the US will increase its number of ABMs. On the chance that two such nations would join forces against the US the number of ABMs will increase further. It will be only a matter of time before the US system is capable of providing a defense against the remaining arsenal of Russia which is exactly the objection of Russia. Once an ABM system is started that is its only logical conclusion. As there is no essential difference between satellite launch systems and ICBMs there is no way for the US to do preemptive strikes on nations possessing or developing satellite launch systems. The only value of an ICBM at present is with a nuclear warhead and as Pakistan and India have demonstrated the "penalty" for developing nuclear weapons is two years of half-hearted sanctions there is no practical means to prevent any nation from developing ICBM capability. Rogue today, rogue tomorrow What does rogue mean? The Star Wars advocates only answer by example and the example is a current "bad guy" such as North Korea. The is not what the term means. It means little nations with big nation weapons and who refuse to do what one or more big nations tells them what to do, nothing more. Friendly or unfriendly to the US (or in US self-aggrandizement, the West) is a status which can change overnight as Iraq did from surrogate warfare against Iran for the US to invader of Kuwait. Unlike the general public which believes all kinds of impossible things about international relations, little nations think three times before upsetting the big nations. Iraq double checked US approval before invading Kuwait. As Iraq learned the big countries have other agendas and cannot be trusted such as setting up Iraq as a test of US vs SU military capability. A nation today satisfied with its piece of the pie in the world can become dissatisfied tomorrow. Dissatisfied and able to do more than complain at summit meetings designed to prevent change turns a friendly nation rogue overnight. For a different political audience, a rogue nation is one which sponsors international terrorism. Terrorism is violating the rules of combat which would permit the superior military power to win, very like the colonial militia sniping at British columns rather than playing by rules which assure British victory. The label of terrorist is a measure of the frustration of the superior military force. A dozen ICBMs owned by an impudent nation cannot work in the "nuked you for supporting Israel" manner. It can only work in the "if you continue to support Israel" sense. Individual acts of terrorism work precisely because they are not national actions. A national act would get nukes in return, Osama Bin Laden gets an FBI investigation. The scale of the "if you continue" threat would be tailored to the objective so rather than general support of Israel it would be "supporting settlement expansion" and diplomatically phrased as arguing for unqualified support of the Mitchell Report without reservation so the US can publically be "morally convinced" rather than militarily threatened. We see that sort of thing every day if we read between the lines. Russia played the nuke card over Kosovo and more recently over NATO interference in Chechnya. You had to listen carefully but it was there and rather explicit over the latter. Back in 1990 Israel boasted it could handle Iraq all by itself. That was a threat to use its nuclear weapons as there is no other way it would be possible. That is exactly the way it worked during the Cold War. First use would lead to mutual destruction, threat of use was drawing a line in the sand with calling to see if it was a bluff much too high a risk. Internationally and to the future, rogue today/rogue tomorrow begs the question of what the US will be like tomorrow. It assumes the US with a long history of gunboat diplomacy and hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and a 20^th century history of extending that to the rest of the world can forever be bought off from military adventurism with good business deals. No rational person much less country would assume the US will remain open to a deal into the far future. Countries must act in their own rational self interest in light of all possible futures. A US with ICBMs and an ABM system is dangerous to any and every country without the economic resources to build enough ICBMs to overwhelm the US ABM system. To the world a future US is as much a potential threat to the world status quo as any nation ever was. Cuban Missile Crisis Had it been Castro's home grown missiles the solution would have been simple, disassemble them or be nuked. It was Russia which prevented that option. Without a Russia the method of dealing with a rogue nation is the same as it would have been with Cuba without Russia. The US could today (Russia willing) end all developing ICBM capability by simply explaining to nations like India the consequences of not doing so. As evidenced by Iraq, conventional warfare and inspections cannot work. That would require them to end all ambitions in space exploration on their own. Rather than a threat perhaps the US could offer satellite launches far below cost. The US does that and in the process makes the investment in private launch capability uneconomical. Always read between the lines. But the situation could have been different had Cuba developed its own missiles (albeit not in the timeframe) and was able to get Russia to support their deployment against the US. A future Iraq, Pakistan or country we only know from a map these days. That future nation would leave the US with the implicit nuclear card having been played and with Russia giving it an implicit Kosovo/Chechnya style protection. It that case the only effective US ABM system would again be one suitable to shield against Russia. Again that has to be the ultimate capability of any missile shield and the one to which Russia objects. The ultimate Result In any scenario we are faced with a new Cold War of military escalation. But at the same time the world would only be drawn into a massive expenditure because the capability is being created ahead of its time. There will eventually be a world where any nation can easily have such a system. In all of this we have the Cold War mentality over the peace mentality. Page reads: 1191

National Missile Defense aka Star Wars
by
Matt Giwer, June 29 2001

The national missile defense scenario is a recipe for the return to the Cold War battle of competing economies.

The Issue
An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) can be viewed quite simply as a satellite (nuclear warhead) which did not reach orbit without doing too much damage to the physics. Any nation with the technology to put a satellite in orbit has ICBM capability.

There are a handful of non-nuclear nations which can do that today and others developing the capability. If the future is space we expect a future in which dozens of nations have the ability to launch satellites. The future will have dozens of nations with ICBM capability.

The present approaches to an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system are kinetic and directed energy, simply either hit the incoming warhead with a rock or a laser beam. At present the rock approach is being actively developed and field tested while the laser approach remains in the laboratory.

As satellite and ICBM technology are the same so also is ABM technology as it is only improvement in payload guidance technology. For nearly two decades we have heard the self-styled experts inform us it is possible or impossible depending upon their political position and employer. Lets put it in practical terms.

Most everyone will agree the current approaches are impossible in the next year. Most everyone will agree it will be possible in one hundred years. There can be no rational debate over possible or impossible without the number of years in the future being specified.

While an ICBM is clearly a missile tossing a warhead an ABM system can be a missile, a laser, a particle beam, or just a ton of sand to ruin the heat shield of the warhead so it burns up. Forty years ago a researcher could get his picture on the cover of Time being the first to do what we now call a laser pointer for under ten dollars and buy at any office supply store.

In roughly those same forty years, missile technology has gone from Sputnik to the International Space Station. It has gone from reaching earth orbit to close ups of the moons of Jupiter. More relevantly to this issue from a handful of liquid fueled monstrosity ICBMs to thousands of launch-in-five-minutes solid fueled missiles and warhead weighing a thousand pounds to the proverbial briefcase nuke.

In those same years we have gone from room-sized computers to desktop computers with more computing power than all the computers in the world forty years ago.

We can confidently expect similar improvements in missiles, nuclear weapons and computers in the next forty years.

In 1945 producing an atom bomb was a major economic and scientific achievement by the United States. Thirty years later countries the size of South Africa and Israel had them in their arsenals. Today, any nation above poverty status can make them if they want them.

The technology for an ABM system will be common and cheap at some point in the future. The further in the future the cheaper and more common. As with the Atomic Bomb, developing an ABM system is a matter of economics to pay for the development of the technology to permit it to exist a decade or so before it becomes something every nation can do. The total technical discussion is only a question of how much sooner not whether or not it is possible.

The primary consideration of defense against ballistic missiles is their speed. Intercontinental ballitic missiles are not the only ones. Ballistic missiles are loosely described by their effective range, the farther they travel their greater their speed. Success has been achieved against ballistic missiles with 200 to 500 mile range, SCUD-type missiles. Work is in progress to deal with missiles of greater range and thus greater speed.

It can only be a matter of time before the range of missiles we are able to counter becomes the same as dealing with a missile with intercontinental range. It is inevitable for progress to develop the capability to deal with intercontinental missiles.

DECOYS
The issue of decoys is two edged. Radar and computers can distinguish between simple decoys and real warheads. The undetectable decoy is one with the same size, shape and mass of a real warhead. At that point it is reasonable substitute another warhead for a decoy.

We already face that problem with multiple warhead missiles. That is why the proposed ABM concept is addressing only single warhead missiles.

An arbitrary Challenge
The present technical challenge is self created. We have had the ability to build an ABM system for over thirty years and one got close to testing as Nike Zeus. It was simply an intercepting missile with a nuclear warhead. That could be done today with DOD petty cash.

The problem with using nuclear warheads to destroy nuclear warheads is the explosion would create an electromagnetic pulse which would likely damage or destroy satellites in orbit. That would take out the early warning system for additional missile launches and a large fraction of the commercial satellites. The latter consideration is significant to the civilian planners.

So in creating a technological challenge we are both requiring a non-nuclear method but also one a few decades before it is easy.

The ABM Treaty
In strictly legal terms the treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union is legally dead due to the disappearance of the Soviet Union. As with contracts when one of the parties dies the contract is resolved by the estate. With nations and treaties when there is a major political change treaty obligations are in abeyance absent a renegotiation. There has been none between the US and the separate nations of the ex-Soviet Union, primarily Russia.

In practical terms Russia still has ICBMs so the legal point is a quibble. It is only the absence of threatened hostilities between the US and Russia into the foreseeable future which permits bringing up its legally dead status.

The issue is not the treaty. The treaty was conceived as a grand gesture of Cold War diplomacy which was no more than an effort to limit the economic burden of the Cold War by both sides. It is the same method by which Ronald Reagan's Star War demonstrated (about half faked) would financially ruin the Soviet Union. The US could not have created such a system at the time the treaty was created.

Rogue nation
The most common public view of the rogue nation issue is some nation nuking an American city. The result would be the rogue nation being flattened by the US nuclear response. That is not a legitimate concern. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) worked for decades. North Korea is no more interested in being flattened than was the Soviet Union. No nation is interested in it.

A more realistic scenario is as outlined in a Tom Clancy novel a few years ago, the bluff, in the standoff with Japan. A nation has ICBMs and threatens to use them instead of actually using them. As was the crux of that scenario the issue is the nation being able to keep their location secret. During the Gulf war Iraq was able to keep most of its mobile Scud missiles undetected so this is a reasonable scenario.

A nation which invests decades of effort and billions of dollars into development to exclusion of a larger conventional force will certainly not aim it at New York City and demand "Give me California." The utilization has to be of a transient nature as it is a matter of time before the missiles are located and taken out with a first strike. Or, "We call your bluff and raise you Bahgdad."

In recent terms Iraq demanding to keep Kuwait or else lasts only as long as it takes to identify the missiles. But Yugoslavia demanding the bombing be called off would last long enough to eliminate the KLA and those demanding separation.

In real life terms the actual threat would never be made. It would be one factor known by all sides and considered in forming diplomatic and military options as it is with Israel's nuclear arsenal being used nuke the Mideast oil fields if not supported by the US.

Small nations having ICBMs results in a decrease in the military options of the US and gives small nations a greater say in changing the status quo in their favor.

Limited Shield
ICBMs are not like bullets in a handgun kept in a nightstand for years just in case. They require constant maintenance and training just as with any other weapon system. They have to be taken off line for that maintenance and are unavailable during training. And even those which are online would have failures if launched just as satellite launches fail. And launch locations can be discovered and destroyed with preemptive attacks. All of which means any nation having them will have many of them.

The same considerations for ICBMs above apply to the ABM system. There must be more ABMs than there are threat ICBMs. What is being simplistically presented as a rogue nation having one or two missiles will not be the case. Nor will the image of three or four ABMs in the wilds of Alaska be the case.

The reality of the scenario is that said rogue nation will slowly but steadily increase its number of ICBMs and the US will increase its number of ABMs. On the chance that two such nations would join forces against the US the number of ABMs will increase further. It will be only a matter of time before the US system is capable of providing a defense against the remaining arsenal of Russia which is exactly the objection of Russia. Once an ABM system is started that is its only logical conclusion.

As there is no essential difference between satellite launch systems and ICBMs there is no way for the US to do preemptive strikes on nations possessing or developing satellite launch systems. The only value of an ICBM at present is with a nuclear warhead and as Pakistan and India have demonstrated the "penalty" for developing nuclear weapons is two years of half-hearted sanctions there is no practical means to prevent any nation from developing ICBM capability.

Rogue today, rogue tomorrow
What does rogue mean? The Star Wars advocates only answer by example and the example is a current "bad guy" such as North Korea. The is not what the term means. It means little nations with big nation weapons and who refuse to do what one or more big nations tells them what to do, nothing more. Friendly or unfriendly to the US (or in US self-aggrandizement, the West) is a status which can change overnight as Iraq did from surrogate warfare against Iran for the US to invader of Kuwait.

Unlike the general public which believes all kinds of impossible things about international relations, little nations think three times before upsetting the big nations. Iraq double checked US approval before invading Kuwait. As Iraq learned the big countries have other agendas and cannot be trusted such as setting up Iraq as a test of US vs SU military capability.

A nation today satisfied with its piece of the pie in the world can become dissatisfied tomorrow. Dissatisfied and able to do more than complain at summit meetings designed to prevent change turns a friendly nation rogue overnight.

For a different political audience, a rogue nation is one which sponsors international terrorism. Terrorism is violating the rules of combat which would permit the superior military power to win, very like the colonial militia sniping at British columns rather than playing by rules which assure British victory. The label of terrorist is a measure of the frustration of the superior military force.

A dozen ICBMs owned by an impudent nation cannot work in the "nuked you for supporting Israel" manner. It can only work in the "if you continue to support Israel" sense. Individual acts of terrorism work precisely because they are not national actions. A national act would get nukes in return, Osama Bin Laden gets an FBI investigation.

The scale of the "if you continue" threat would be tailored to the objective so rather than general support of Israel it would be "supporting settlement expansion" and diplomatically phrased as arguing for unqualified support of the Mitchell Report without reservation so the US can publically be "morally convinced" rather than militarily threatened.

We see that sort of thing every day if we read between the lines. Russia played the nuke card over Kosovo and more recently over NATO interference in Chechnya. You had to listen carefully but it was there and rather explicit over the latter. Back in 1990 Israel boasted it could handle Iraq all by itself. That was a threat to use its nuclear weapons as there is no other way it would be possible.

That is exactly the way it worked during the Cold War. First use would lead to mutual destruction, threat of use was drawing a line in the sand with calling to see if it was a bluff much too high a risk.

Internationally and to the future, rogue today/rogue tomorrow begs the question of what the US will be like tomorrow. It assumes the US with a long history of gunboat diplomacy and hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and a 20^th century history of extending that to the rest of the world can forever be bought off from military adventurism with good business deals.

No rational person much less country would assume the US will remain open to a deal into the far future. Countries must act in their own rational self interest in light of all possible futures. A US with ICBMs and an ABM system is dangerous to any and every country without the economic resources to build enough ICBMs to overwhelm the US ABM system.

To the world a future US is as much a potential threat to the world status quo as any nation ever was.

Cuban Missile Crisis
Had it been Castro's home grown missiles the solution would have been simple, disassemble them or be nuked. It was Russia which prevented that option. Without a Russia the method of dealing with a rogue nation is the same as it would have been with Cuba without Russia.

The US could today (Russia willing) end all developing ICBM capability by simply explaining to nations like India the consequences of not doing so. As evidenced by Iraq, conventional warfare and inspections cannot work. That would require them to end all ambitions in space exploration on their own. Rather than a threat perhaps the US could offer satellite launches far below cost. The US does that and in the process makes the investment in private launch capability uneconomical. Always read between the lines.

But the situation could have been different had Cuba developed its own missiles (albeit not in the timeframe) and was able to get Russia to support their deployment against the US. A future Iraq, Pakistan or country we only know from a map these days. That future nation would leave the US with the implicit nuclear card having been played and with Russia giving it an implicit Kosovo/Chechnya style protection.

It that case the only effective US ABM system would again be one suitable to shield against Russia. Again that has to be the ultimate capability of any missile shield and the one to which Russia objects.

The ultimate Result
In any scenario we are faced with a new Cold War of military escalation. But at the same time the world would only be drawn into a massive expenditure because the capability is being created ahead of its time. There will eventually be a world where any nation can easily have such a system.

In all of this we have the Cold War mentality over the peace mentality.

Page reads: 1191