Some Say Bomber Portends More Headaches for U.S. Than for Enemy : If Stealth Is Nightmare, Critics Wonder Whose

It could be a Soviet war planner’s nightmare: Waves of American bombers, laden with nuclear weapons and invisible to probing Soviet air defense radars, slip silently into the motherland to destroy the most sensitive military targets, including railroad-mounted command centers and ultra-secret mobile missiles.

And that is exactly what the Reagan Administration expects of the stealth bomber, a sleek, boomerang-shaped craft that is designed to stymie Soviet radar systems and hold even the most elusive Soviet targets at risk in the event of nuclear war.

To the Defense Department, the stealth bomber, which is to be formally rolled out Tuesday at the Palmdale plant of the Northrop Corp., is the prime example of President-elect George Bush’s fundamental arms-buying principle. Called “competitive strategies,” it emphasizes weapons that exploit Soviet weaknesses and would be less costly to build than for the Soviets to counter.

Incapable of Mission?

But to some American experts the stealth bomber, whose cost is now estimated by the Air Force at $500 million or more for each of the 132 copies, may be incapable of its mission. Even if it is, they add that it would bring the superpowers closer to the nuclear brink. Finally, some fear it could be a monumental disaster--an inflexible aeronautical experiment whose compressed schedule of development, testing and production could result in technical snafus reminiscent of those that have plagued the B-1B bomber.

The stealth program, launched in secrecy during the Jimmy Carter Administration and brought to the threshold of flight under Ronald Reagan, was hailed last week by Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci for “path-breaking innovations in that aircraft’s design and in the use of radar-absorbing materials (that) will make the B-2 . . . far more difficult to detect.”

The stealth is to work in conjunction with a secret Air Force program, launched in 1986, to develop ways to locate hidden, fast-moving and disguised mobile targets in the Soviet Union.

The program’s insignia shows a mobile missile with a line slashed through it. Its motto was taken from a favorite war cry of Ronald Reagan: “You can run, but you can’t hide.”

By one Pentagon estimate, the plane could render obsolete billions of dollars worth of Soviet investments in air defenses and force the Soviet Union to spend 10 times more than the $6 billion it spends annually to defend itself against manned bombers. That will be money that cannot be spent on offensive weaponry.

“It will undoubtedly cause the Soviets to reassess the effectiveness of their extensive air defense system,” Carlucci said.

Some Analysts Dubious

Yet some analysts are not sure the stealth will work.

Experts in Congress and at the Santa Monica-based RAND Corp. worry that the Air Force may have locked itself into a B-2 design--and begun production--before flight tests can prove it sound. The plane’s overlapping schedule of development, testing and production could lock the Air Force into a less-than-perfect design and result in procurement disaster, these critics have warned.

In most programs in the past, a long initial development phase has yielded a handful of custom-built test models that were then tested in lengthy flight programs. As shortcomings were found, changes could be made to the design before production began.

But in an effort to cut the B-2’s costs, the Air Force departed from the “fly before you buy” approach. The bomber that emerges from Northrop’s hangar on Tuesday will be the first production version of the craft--built on what the defense industry calls “hard tooling.”

If the aircraft’s test performance exposes the need for further fixes, says House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.), the Air Force will be forced to make them within the considerable constraints of its production tooling.

That is a good risk, said Gen. Larry D. Welch, the Air Force chief of staff. He notes that extensive computer testing and wind tunnel tests on bomber models have provided proof enough that it will work.

“The test program is not going to expose any problems in the major aerodynamics of the airplane,” said Welch. He expressed “high confidence we won’t find any basic problems” in the forthcoming tests.

Marginal Mission

Even if the stealth works as promised, many critics argue that the $69-billion program will produce a plane designed to perform a mission so marginal that much of Soviet society--and the Soviet air defense weapons the bomber is designed to foil--will have been largely vaporized by the time it comes into play.

“You’re paying a lot of money there to make the rubble bounce twice,” said Jeffrey Record, a military analyst with the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute.

And others are more worried that the B-2 will succeed than that it will fail. Citing the arcane logic of nuclear deterrence, they believe that the bomber’s mission is downright dangerous to the survival of the planet.

Stealth bombers, these experts point out, are designed to threaten exactly those Soviet military assets--mobile missiles and command posts--whose relative safety keeps the superpowers away from the nuclear brink.

The mobility of such missiles as the SS-24 and SS-25 makes them better able to survive an enemy attack than missiles at fixed sites, so they can be available for retaliation; that means they deter a first strike by the other side.

Retaliation, Intimidation

This, according to today’s war planners, means that mobile missiles make nuclear war less likely rather than more likely. They are maintained more for retaliation than for intimidation.

But the U.S. stealth, some experts believe, could turn this logic on its head. If the Soviets believe that their mobile missiles will be vulnerable to the stealth, they might be tempted to use them early in a war. That could put the nuclear balance on a hair trigger.

“Why would we want to encourage Soviet commanders to fire these last-ditch weapons on a ‘use-them-or-lose-them’ basis?” asked John Pike, an analyst for the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists. “In an era of stable deterrence, the B-2 bombers have a mission we definitely do not want--that of precipitating . . . war under the guise of searching for missiles left over after a first strike.”

The Air Force vigorously disagrees with the critics. Air Force Capt. Jay DeFrank said that it made no more sense to rule any Soviet weapons--particularly mobile missiles--off limits.

“To arbitrarily concede sanctuary to Soviet nuclear missiles would be a mistake,” DeFrank said. “To say threatening Soviet mobile missiles is destabilizing is as illogical as saying the Soviets should dismantle their air defense system so as not to challenge the stability offered by our manned bombers.”

Whether the B-2 can effectively search out and destroy mobile Soviet missiles and command centers remains unclear. To do it, the warplane would need exceptional range, enormous weapons-carrying ability and a little help from its friends, including satellites and refueling aircraft.

While the Pentagon has revealed few such details to date, many experts believe that on each of these counts, the stealth is flawed.

For instance, the stealth’s range, still a secret, could be as little as 4,000 miles. In any event, it is unlikely to exceed 7,500 miles, say experts. As a result, the stealth will depend on aerial refueling if it is to penetrate deep into Soviet airspace, loiter over broad swaths of Soviet countryside and return home.

But refueling could prove dangerous. If the stealth made its rendezvous with a tanker aircraft within range of Soviet radar, the bomber’s secretive approach would be compromised. If the rendezvous took place outside that range, however, the bomber might have just enough fuel to reach its target and return to base, with little extra to search for its elusive quarry.

Reliance on Satellites

To find its mobile targets, the stealth will rely heavily on satellites. Its two-man crew would not want to use radar, which would give away the plane’s location.

But American satellites that could provide the B-2 with such information might be among the first victims in a war with the Soviets. Some experts fear that by using its anti-satellite weapons, described by the Pentagon as “fully capable,” the Soviets could shoot the eyes out of the stealth.

Air Force Chief of Staff Welch concedes that mobile missiles will be tough to find.

“I don’t want anyone to think we think we have that task in hand,” he said. “We do not.” But he added that the stealth is needed to threaten a large range of other important targets and that one of its chief achievements would be its effect in diverting Soviet military funds to air defense.

Welch added that the stealth will be a “very versatile” aircraft that will rate “great” in every quality desired in a bomber--from range to economy.

Others disagree. Hudson’s Jeffrey Record called it “an aeronautical prima donna” that is unfit for the range of unglamorous jobs for which past bombers have been built.

At 69 feet, the stealth is only slightly longer than the Air Force’s sleek F-15 fighter, with a wingspan of about 172 feet. It was built so small to minimize its visibility to radar. As a result, however, it also is expected to carry a far smaller load of weapons than have its predecessors, the B-1B and the Air Force’s venerable workhorse, the B-52.

‘Relatively Ineffective’

The stealth, said Record, “is a relatively ineffective and costly cruise missile carrier. It’s also an inappropriate candidate for the performance of long-range, high-payload conventional bombing missions. Its cost alone would serve to deter the Strategic Air Command from risking the (stealth) in other than strategic nuclear operations.”

The Air Force, recognizing some of the limits in the stealth’s initial design, moved quickly to correct problems. In a massive, billion-dollar effort, the Air Force and Northrop five years ago launched a secret effort to redesign the B-2’s wing. The change, which has delayed the program by more than a year, is expected to allow the bomber to penetrate Soviet air defenses at both high altitudes and low.

“The technical challenges made up a very difficult set of challenges,” said Welch. But he insisted that “we faced up to them very early” and predicted that there would be “no showstoppers” that would expose problems in the airplane’s ability to fly.

But even in the wake of all the fixes, Pentagon officials themselves are cautious about proclaiming early successes in the B-2’s flight test program, which will determine how well all of the bomber’s sophisticated electronics and weapons systems work together.

“We’re not building K-cars,” said one senior Air Force official, who readily acknowledged that the stealth bomber could have problems as serious as the B-1B bomber. “When you’re pressing the state of technology both in terms of production techniques and in the kind of performance that justifies such large expenditures, there are going to be technical problems. It’s inevitable. But none that we can’t resolve in time.”