A Defense That Will Not Defend

Most Americans are unconcerned that anthrax or nuclear weapons might be delivered to the United States by long-range missiles from North Korea. If asked, they feel protected by some kind of defense; and they are--by the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Nevertheless, U.S. leaders in Congress are determined to defend against this threat by deploying a national missile defense (NMD). Unfortunately the program as planned will not defend against even the minimal threat of four or five North Korean missiles if they are suitably equipped to penetrate the defense, which can be achieved with a fraction of the effort and skill required to build the missiles themselves.

This summer, the Department of Defense is scheduled to conduct its Deployment Readiness Review of the National Missile Defense Program, and President Bill Clinton has committed himself shortly thereafter to decide whether the United States should deploy the proposed NMD. He will do so on the basis of four criteria: ¹ (1) whether the threat is materializing; (2) the status of the technology based on an initial series of rigorous flight tests, and the proposed system's operational effectiveness; (3) whether the system is affordable; and (4) the implications that going forward with NMD deployment would hold for the overall strategic environment and our arms control objectives, including efforts to achieve further reductions in strategic nuclear arms under START II and START III.

The Long-Range Missile Threat

Since 1949, when the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon, the United States has been vulnerable to strategic attack. The Soviet Union still has more than 6,000 strategic nuclear warheads to use against the United States (and vice versa). Their use not only would destroy the United States as a nation, killing more than 200 million people, but also could imperil civilization on earth by the worldwide effects of nuclear explosions--radioactive fallout and destruction of the ozone layer.

I served from 1958 to 1973 on the Strategic Military Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee. The Strategic Panel met for two days every month in Rooms 206-208 of the Old Executive Office Building to analyze and advise on U.S. strategic offensive and defensive missile systems. ² Every month or so, we heard from the Army (in charge of antimissile defense) on the status of its ongoing developments and tests of defenses against ballistic missiles. We were frequently briefed by the contractors that were building test hardware and that would build a deployed system. We also heard from the national laboratories and other facilities that were carrying out sophisticated tests of radar to detect warheads and to discriminate them from the fuel tanks of ballistic missiles or from decoys that might be sent along to divert interceptors from the actual warhead.

Because the nuclear warheads of the interceptors might have an effective kill range of 10 kilometers against an incoming nuclear warhead, decoys that were close to the offensive warhead would not help its survival. Therefore, they were deployed farther away, in a long "train" that would reenter the atmosphere as if they were to land on the same target. There was no good way to distinguish decoys from warheads after the missile got up to speed and arched through space in its fall toward its target. Multiple light decoys could be deployed to resemble the warhead. This was particularly feasible when one considered the use of "antisimulation," in which the warhead was dressed to resemble an easily fabricated decoy.

Without antisimulation, a decoy would need to resemble the conical warhead, which is carefully fashioned and has a surface coating to survive the fiery heat of reentry without damaging the warhead contained within. Certainly one could make a lightweight decoy of the same shape and hope to give it the same radar cross section, but it is far easier to use as a decoy a simple balloon to resemble an inflated one...