More than five years after George W. Bush committed himself to an initial deployment by election day 2004, elaborate plans had been laid and huge amounts of money spent but nothing had been completed that actually worked. Shortly after June 13, 2002, when President Bush’s withdrawal of the United States from the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty became final, Arizona senator Jon Kyl declared that the United States was now dedicated to “peace through strength, not peace through paper.”34 In fact, the ABM Treaty had restrained the only country truly capable of launching an attack on the United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles, namely, Russia, and replaced it with—paper.
Unsurprisingly, the Clinton-era Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, or GMD, as it is known within the Pentagon and the missile industry, remains by far the most advanced and important part of the whole multi-tiered system, as revealed in budget priorities. In the fiscal year 2002 budget, for example, $3,762.3 million was devoted to GMD whereas boost-segment research got $599.8 million and terminal-segment research $200.1 million.35 (Actually, that terminal-phase figure should be increased by $898.7 million, that year’s funding for the Patriot PAC-3 missile, reported separately in the defense budget and the current favorite when it comes to trying to hit a warhead just before impact.)
Meanwhile, the GMD system as it is being conceived and built will, at best, be capable of hitting a single long- range missile or a very few of them launched by a technologically unsophisticated Third World nation like North Korea. Russia has already deployed ICBMs that can defeat any antiballistic-missile system we could conceivably produce, and China will no doubt do so soon. On March 7, 2006, the commander of American forces in South Korea, General Burwell B. Bell, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “In the years since the late nineties, the last six years, seven years, we have seen very little activity by the North Koreans to actively continue to develop and test long-range missile systems.”36 Nonetheless, three months later, the U.S. military announced that North Korea had a Taepodong-2, its longest-range rocket, sitting on a launching pad fueled and ready for flight. It consists of a set of old Russian Scuds bolted together. The U.S. military claimed that it had a range of up to 9,300 miles, more than enough to reach the U.S. mainland, and that the United States had only a limited ability to shoot down such a missile should North Korea launch it.37 On July 4, 2006, North Korea test-fired this and other shorter-range missiles. The Taepodong-2 crashed after forty-two seconds of flight.
The Ground-based Midcourse Defense system that we have been building against North Korea consists of three separate elements: an array of interceptor missiles housed in silos in the ground that are at least theoretically linked to spy satellites in orbit as well as enormous, terrestrially based X-band radars meant to detect and track missile launches (“X-band” is merely a reference to its wavelength, 2.5-4 cm, which is small and therefore more sensitive; most airliners, for example, are equipped with X-band radars to detect turbulence). All of this equipment is then connected to a battle-management command-and-control center with massive computers for superspeed- processing of data, final determination that a launched missile is hostile, and the ability to transmit commands to launch the interceptors. There are problems with every phase of this, so many in fact that charges of faked tests of parts of it have been commonplace. Some people, myself included, suspect that the GMD is simply a cover for long- term research and development plans aimed not at defense on Earth but at the domination of space.38
It is important to remember that the three approaches to interception—boost phase, midcourse, and terminal —are utterly different and each has its own constraints. Any boost-phase interception, no matter how technologically sophisticated, has to originate fairly close to the launch site of the enemy missile to have any chance of success. Our current missile defense sites, for example, are nowhere near close enough to have a hope of intercepting a Chinese launch from its Central Asian province of Xinjiang. Such a Chinese attack could be intercepted only in the midcourse or terminal phases.39 The terminal phase usually lasts only a minute or two and is currently beyond the data-processing capabilities of our computers. That is why the GMD remains the most important option since it offers the greatest chance of success, problematic as even that may be.
Boeing is the GMD’s prime contractor. As of December 17, 2005, the company had built eight interceptors that were placed in silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, and two more at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. These make up the entirety of the known missile defense system deployed by the United States to date. The Missile Defense Agency has announced that it will not release any further information about future emplacements, even though Fort Greely is scheduled ultimately to house forty interceptors. Victoria Samson of the Center for Defense Information believes that this “unwillingness to give specifics about the program is a sure indicator that things are going poorly.”40 She may well be right.
The problems of the GMD itself are legion. The interceptor—technically known as an “exoatmospheric kill vehicle” (EKV)—consists of a two-stage booster, followed by a liquid-fuel rocket that steers it on the last leg of its journey. Its speed should be about 13,400 miles per hour at impact. The interceptors are supposed to carry infrared sensors that will help them determine whether a target is a warhead or a decoy, although so far there is no evidence that these work. Other on-board sensors take over from ground guidance at close range, making the rocket, which does not carry a heavy explosive warhead, somewhat maneuverable. It is designed to destroy the target simply by colliding with it.41
Test failures have revealed numerous problems with the interceptor. On December 15, 2004, a simulated warhead was fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska, south over the Pacific, but its intended interceptor, launched from the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands, never left its silo. On February 14, 2005, the Missile Defense Agency tried again. This time the interceptor shut down due to a “software error.” These are peculiar failures since the United States has had decades of experience in missile launches.42 Keep in mind that the interceptor has yet to be tested with the much more powerful booster rocket designed for it and intended to give it the necessary speed to intercept a real missile. The surrogate rocket used in the Pacific tests does not produce the vibration and stress that will accompany real-world conditions, which threaten to damage the on-board computer, thrusters, antennas for receiving data, optics for navigating, sensors, and a refrigeration unit for cooling the sensors, which are extremely sensitive to heat.43
The most notorious problem with the tests is that, when the interceptors have actually lifted off, they have been artificially guided to their targets by Global Positioning System homing devices and electronic beacons because our new spy satellite and radar systems for detecting and tracking missiles have not yet been built. We do not yet have the means to detect a hostile ballistic missile coming at us, which means that the interceptors sitting in the ground in Alaska are functionally blind. Defense Department veteran Philip Coyle says that for the GMD system to work in its present condition, North Korea would have to give us advance notice of its intention to launch an ICBM and supply the relevant target information. “To be credible,” Coyle writes, “the GBI [ground-based interceptor] must eventually show that it can hit a target with no targeting aids on-board the target re-entry vehicle.”44 It has yet to do so.
There are major delays and cost overruns in other vital parts of the GMD system, particularly the not-yet-built new-and-improved surveillance satellites and a huge X-band radar mounted on a seagoing, oil-drilling rig, which is supposed to be moored at Adak, Alaska.45 The probably insurmountable problem that faces the whole GMD system, however, is its inability to distinguish between warheads and decoys in flight. Increasingly, it seems that, in the foreseeable future, no amount of science will be able to overcome this difficulty. Any nation or terrorist group capable of building an intercontinental ballistic missile would have no difficulty in adding a few appropriately painted balloon decoys to its payload. If our interceptor missiles cannot tell one from another, the entire effort is a waste of time and money, a point that serious strategists have long understood. In 1986, the renowned Russian physicist and winner of the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, Andrei Sakharov, advised the Soviet government that Reagan’s strategic defense initiative could easily be fooled and/or overwhelmed simply by firing
