U.S. Studying Nuclear-Power Space Defense

The Reagan Administration, while emphasizing that its proposed “Star Wars” shield against enemy missiles would depend on non-nuclear defensive weapons, is intensifying research on beam weapons powered by nuclear explosions in space, Defense Department officials told Congress in testimony released this week.

The new nuclear technology is most promising as a short-term solution to a space-based defense, according to Dr. Richard L. Wagner Jr., chairman of the military liaison committee between the Pentagon and the Energy Department, which is in charge of making nuclear weapons.

But Wagner said the goal, “in the very long run, eventually,” is a network of non-nuclear interceptors such as “smart” projectiles that home in on enemy missiles.

Three days after Wagner spoke enthusiastically on March 20 about the nuclear-powered beam weapons, a top-secret underground nuclear test was conducted in Nevada that took a crucial step toward proving that X-rays from a nuclear explosion can be focused into the kind of high-energy beam needed for a weapon, sources said.

A published report of the experiment in the New York Times drew an official “no comment” from the Pentagon earlier this week. But, privately, sources called it “painfully accurate.”

Weapon scientists such as Wagner consider nuclear-powered, directed-energy weapons to be qualitatively different from nuclear bombs. It is doubtful, however, that nuclear-powered beam weapons can be described as non-nuclear weapons.

Scientists have identified a “family” of at least four nuclear-driven beam weapons, said John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, with the X-ray laser at “the head of the family.”

All four weapons, he said Friday, depend on the fact that some of the energy produced by a nuclear explosion--the X-rays, for example--shoot out from the blast at the speed of light. They outrun the explosion’s blast wave and could be focused at targets before the blast vaporized the entire weapon.

Look Like a Porcupine

The X-ray weapon, studded with laser rods, would look like a huge porcupine in orbit. When the nuclear explosion occurred in its center, the X-rays would be channeled through the laser rods toward distant missiles before the blast destroyed the rods.

The other weapons would use lasers to direct other energy sources from nuclear explosions toward enemy targets. One would employ beams of charged particles, another would direct microwave energy and the third would use a pulse of combined X-rays and gamma rays.

A memorandum of understanding signed in February by the defense and energy secretaries laid out the policy guidelines for “vigorous” nuclear research related to President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the formal name for “Star Wars.” It stated that the nuclear explosions driving beam weapons would be “controlled so that there would be no harmful effects from the nuclear source.”

Such nuclear explosions, however, would clearly violate the international treaty banning nuclear tests in space as well as the Soviet-American Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibits testing space-based defenses against missiles.

The Energy Department is seeking $280 million for its “Star Wars”-related research in fiscal 1986, which begins Oct. 1, a 33% increase over this year’s $210 million.

$3.7-Billion Budget Request

That would come on top of the Defense Department’s $3.7-billion “Star Wars” budget request for next year. Wagner said that, while nuclear research represents about one-fifteenth of the total “Star Wars” budget request, it equals between one-fourth and one-third of the funds to be spent specifically on missile destruction by non-nuclear means. The rest of the money would go toward research useful for either nuclear or non-nuclear weapons.

The memo of understanding stated that nuclear “Star Wars”-related research, in addition to seeking nuclear-powered space defense weapons, is needed “to determine the feasibility and effectiveness of counterdefensive nuclear-driven systems that an adversary may develop against future U.S. surveillance and defensive systems.”

The Scientists’ Federation’s Pike, a critic of “Star Wars,” said that such work inevitably would seek ways to make a U.S. counterdefense system that could defeat a Soviet space-based missile defense system.

“Counterdefensive systems could be used in a first strike (surprise attack) to punch a hole in the other guy’s space defenses just before we launched our offensive missile strike,” Pike said. “You can call it counterdefense, but it can also be used offensively.”