Abstract
Those nuclear-tipped defensive “interceptors” would make dandy tools for taking out the other guy's satellites.
After decades of fits and starts, U.S. plans to develop and deploy anti-ballistic missile defenses seem to be taking yet another turn. In April, William Schneider, Jr., chairman of the Defense Science Board, told the Washington Post that the Bush administration was looking into the possibility of putting nuclear warheads on interceptors intended to protect against incoming ballistic missiles. These nuclear-armed interceptors would replace the kinetic-energy, hit-to-kill weapons currently planned.
The hit-to-kill idea has always seemed pretty silly, requiring as it does the most astounding accuracy. And it's expensive nonsense, too, particularly when you consider that those hit-to-kill interceptors would be hopelessly confused by any “countermea-sures” (dummies or decoys, among others) that a potential attacker could disperse along with actual warheads in what the experts like to call “threat clouds.”
But putting nukes on interceptors just might work—even if it is an old idea that dates back to the late 1950s. Although the missile-defense crowd began to cool on using nukes after exploding a massive (1.4-megaton) warhead 250 miles above Johnston Island in a July 1962 test, they didn't entirely give up on the idea until the early 1970s.
The problem was that radiation from the 1962 explosion fried the electronic circuitry of nearby satellites, which was not good. American spy satellites were becoming increasingly important as the United States tried to ferret out hard data from a closed Soviet Union.
But things change. Schneider may be thinking of arming tomorrow's interceptors with “micro-nukes” rather than the monster warheads of the 1960s and 1970s. The current administration, after all, seems to have an overweening passion for developing a new generation of mini- and micro-nukes with all manner of wonderfully creative uses. Meanwhile, its enthusiasm for missile defense remains as unbounded as it is unfathomable.
Combine these two enthusiasms and—voilá— you might produce a workable system, particularly if you throw tens of billions of dollars at it.
After all, even true-blue believers in arms control like me have to admit that over time the ClintonBush missile defense people have demonstrated that they can get interceptors pretty close to incoming warheads, at least part of the time. And they will undoubtedly get better. The problem is that with a hit-to-kill system, close is not good enough. Miss by an inch, miss by a mile; it makes no difference.
With a micro-nuke, though, a near miss could do the job. A micro-nuke ought to be able to vaporize an entire threat cloud. And because it would produce much less radiation than larger warheads, it might not indiscriminately disable satellites in orbit.
If this sounds like an idea whose time has come, just wait. As they say on late-night TV, “There's more!”
National missile defense still makes little sense, mainly because there is no threat. What nation is going to attack the United States, the sole remaining superpower as the cliché has it, with a missile that bears a return address?
Sure, there are non-state actors out there who wish the United States ill, Osama bin Laden being the latest exemplar. Those terrorists may be capable of bloody brutalities, but they cannot send intercontinental ballistic missiles to Chicago or Washington or Los Angeles.
Further, as all sorts of sensible science-minded people have pointed out over the years, if a wily adversary did attack the United States with ballistic missiles, it might be inclined to load them up with biological rather than nuclear weapons.
And if each enemy missile threw off dozens of bioweapon “bomblets,” they could be so widely dispersed that no micro-nuke could take them all out. In that case, the United States would be back to Square One. It would face a threat against which there is no reasonable defense.
The Bush-ites are inclined to ignore the possibility of bioweapon bomblets, however. That may be because such a scenario is inconveniently problematic. Or it could be because they have other fish to fry.
So why does the anti-missile defense juggernaut hurtle onward? It's not hard to understand its appeal to defense contractors. Hawkish politicians and pundits, who seldom see a weapon system they do not admire, generally like it too. But otherwise, national missile defense seems to be a horrendous-ly expensive exercise against an imaginary threat.
Unless …
For a moment, suppose you are the commanderin-chief of the United States, the world's “hyperpower,” according to some of your envious friends. Although your country leaves an awfully big footprint on a smallish globe, you also have the nagging feeling that a target is pinned to your back.
You can control the skies anywhere on the planet, zapping targets as small as houses from 35,000 feet up. You can, at will, command the seas far beyond the dreams of those grand old doyens of American imperialism, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt. And you have legions of highly trained commando-style forces equipped with state-of-the-art weapons, who are capable of small-scale but lethal operations in less organized parts of the world.
But what if America's most awesome tools—its intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, communication, and navigation satellites—were in danger? These are the crown jewels that make possible the “full-spectrum dominance” of the “battlespace,” to quote the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are the eyes and ears of the U.S. military.
Your secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, says yes, they are in danger from the predations of rogue states. Such states, he says, could develop the capability to mount a crippling sneak attack against U.S. space assets. The Space Commission, which Rumsfeld chaired just before taking office, warned that black-hat states might surprise the United States with a “Space Pearl Harbor,” taking out the couple of dozen U.S. reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, and meteorological birds in low orbit—or even the Global Positioning Satellites, 10,900 miles up.
Presidents since Eisenhower have been urged by hardline advisers to take unilateral control of space. Mr. Sociable himself, Bill Clinton, accepted that controlling space should be a part of U.S. national policy. But no president save Ronald Reagan ever went far down that particular Hegemonic Highway. But now the secretary of defense says it's time to actually achieve control of space instead of just talking about it.
Total control of space requires anti-satellite weapons, or ASATs, so that the United States can “deny access” to anyone else whose satellite photos or communications might get in its way. The Clinton guys, Milquetoasts all, were content with schemes designed to jam, degrade, or disable enemy hardware. Pish, says Rumsfeld, not good enough. The United States needs to be able to destroy everybody else's satellites.
Even if you take the secretary of Defense at his word, spending billions of dollars to develop the capability to destroy the satellites of other nations could be a tough sell in the post-Cold War era. And it might strike American taxpayers as needlessly aggressive, even-offensive. Many people still think, as Eisenhower did, that space ought to be reserved for peaceful purposes.
But building an anti-ballistic missile system is a different slice of pie. The American people want to sleep soundly at night, comforted by the knowledge that U.S. technical know-how is guarding the heavens. Missile defense has broad public appeal, particularly if its costs are understated. Developing the means to blow up enemy missiles is as prudent as locking your doors at night, isn't it?
Happily, developing a missile-defense system provides a dandy cover for developing an ASAT system. The same technologies needed for a “mid-course” anti-missile system are almost precisely the same as those for a “direct-ascent” ASAT system.
And putting micro-nukes on ballistic missile interceptors is the icing on the cake. No matter what Star Trek suggests, orbital mechanics is tricky. It would be darned difficult to make an ASAT interceptor actually collide with a target satellite with annihilating force. But nuclear-tipped interceptors wouldn't have to collide, just get “close enough” to their targets.
So if, in a gambit the arms control crowd would probably call “relabeling,” ballistic missile interceptors suddenly become ASATs a few years down the road, don't be too surprised.
Sun Tzu, the Chinese general who practiced his craft more than 2,000 years ago, would have understood. “All warfare,” he said, “is based on deception.” •
A sense of history
After the war in Vietnam ended in 1975, the Vietnamese eventually discarded their war mentality and moved on with developing their economy and their relations with the outside world. The Korean War ended in 1953, but North Korea lives as though the war were yesterday. Nowhere is this more evident than at the Great Fatherland Liberation War Victory Museum, and the Memorial to the Victors of the Fatherland Liberation War, just outside. In the museum's basement are “merited weapons” used to fight the imperialists. The most prominent is a MiG-15 fighter, numbered 009. So important is this aircraft that a replica appears in bronze among the memorial park statuary outside, yet it has no kills to its credit. The aircraft's only claim to fame is that Kim Il Sung crawled up the ladder, now preserved with the aircraft, peered into the cockpit, and gave “helpful advice” to the pilots.
The future
When Kim Il Sung died in 1994, many analysts and media commentators predicted that the country would soon collapse. South Korea began feverish preparations for a potentially disastrous and unplanned unification, with perhaps millions of economic refugees streaming across the Demilitarized Zone.
It didn't happen. In fact, totalitarian rule in Pyongyang is as strong as ever, and it has additionally weathered the “arduous march” of drought and famine.
The country will continue to take advantage of all foreign food and funding, no matter the source. Slowing deliveries would only bring with it the risk of increased weapons production and “saber-rattling.”
There is no threat to the regime other than the lack of food. Because the famine is largely contained in areas with completely marginalized populations, and because there is a very strong security presence at all levels, there is no danger that the hungry or disaffected will topple the government or the ruling Korean Workers Party.
The one thing that brings foreign diplomats and international organizations to North Korea is nuclear weapons, or at least the threat of nuclear weapons. Without a nuclear program North Korea would be seen as nothing more than a tiny, sparsely populated, hermit kingdom with a totalitarian regime. Although it is starving, there would be little outcry and little attention would be paid.
But with a nuclear program in place, North Korea can command the attention of the world, or at least those parts of it willing to trade aid for nonproliferation. Pyongyang's hotels, like the Koryo and the Yanggak-do, are regular haunts for diplomats in town discussing nuclear matters. The nuclear deal's problem is that oil deliveries are far behind, construction of the reactors is delayed, and the Bush administration is unwilling to work constructively with Pyongyang, so there is now a greater chance that Kim Jong Il will resurrect the nuclear program for political purposes.
Kim Jong Il is firmly in charge of the military through family connections, patronage, and the replacement of significant officials. His “army-centered” policy of governing ensures that the military will be no threat to him as long as the army gets first call, as it now does, on economic resources. There is a great deal of life left in this repressive regime, and it seems unlikely that any outside force can exert much influence on the form or nature of the government. •