Expenditures for Antimissile Systems

* Gregg Easterbrook (“An Antimissile Defense? You See It Only in Movies,” Opinion, Sept. 15) writes, “Tens of billions spent during the 1980s by the Reagan administration on SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative] resulted in no practical anti-ICBM--not even the notorious X-ray laser, which itself required detonating nuclear explosions to oppose nuclear warheads.” Readers may be interested to know that the actual amount spent on the SDI and Theater Missile Defense programs since 1983 is $51 billion, including nearly $3 billion for the X-ray laser and other so-called nuclear-directed energy weapons, and for space-based reactors and nuclear propulsion systems (these and other figures are in constant 1996 dollars).

In all, since the mid-1950s we have expended nearly $100 billion in the quest to provide a defense against nuclear missile attack (far more--some $350 billion--was spent on defenses against nuclear- armed bombers). We even deployed an antiballistic missile system in North Dakota in the mid-1970s, albeit one that protected 150 Minuteman ICBMs rather than people. That system--known as Safeguard--cost some $22 billion. It was shut down in 1975, only months after becoming operational, because the Air Force belatedly determined that Safeguard’s high annual operating costs far exceeded its limited defensive benefits. Proponents of the latest incarnation of ballistic missile defenses would do well to learn the costly and checkered history of these efforts before calling on taxpayers to finance yet another missile defense program.

STEPHEN I. SCHWARTZ

Director, U.S. Nuclear Weapons

Cost Study Project

Brookings Institution, Washington

* Easterbrook says the problem with a “Star Wars” defense program is that we lack the technology to make it work. For him this is no reason to resist SDI, but rather a reason to resist imposing a deadline on its implementation. I think there are other, and worse, problems with Ronald Reagan’s dream baby.

Here’s one. Some of SDI’s backers would like us to believe that the system will be purely defensive. That’s a myth; there is no such thing as a purely defensive weapon. The same technology that could allow a defensive missile to track down an incoming warhead could be used to enable that warhead to evade the defense. If a laser could knock missiles out of the sky, think what it could do to a city that’s standing still. Surely our potential enemies will. They’ll be spurred to create new and better ways to try and kill us, and we’ll have to create new countermeasures. It’ll be just another silly arms race, and a virtually bottomless pork barrel for the aerospace industry. A safer world? I wouldn’t bet on it.

JEREMY ANDERSON

Costa Mesa