Commentary : Real Phantom Menace Is ‘Star Wars’ : Military:Why do we throw good billions after bad at an unproven antimissile system?

Ever since Nazi V-2 rockets smashed into World War II London causing death and destruction, military planners have obsessed on the chimera of creating a national antimissile defense. That this quest has proved to be the most enduring and profitable boondoggle for defense contractors is easily understandable. That the pursuit of a system that can never provide true security is now used by Senate Republicans, led by North Carolina’s Jesse Helms, to make a hash of arms control efforts is morally indefensible.

There is something unquestionably terrifying about an unimpeded enemy being able to deliver death and destruction unannounced. Add the possibility that the rocket might be bearing a nuclear warhead, and one has just the elements of fear required to inspire the most astronomical of military budgets.

That’s why this nation has spent more than $120 billion attempting to develop a defense against ballistic missiles. And while the program has not achieved a scintilla of meaningful success, it continues to this day in the form of the Army’s sponsorship of Lockheed Martin’s attempt to build the Theater High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD as it is known in the trade.

THAAD is the last pathetic residue of Ronald Reagan’s grandiose “Star Wars” system, a fantasy of the “father of the H-bomb,” Edward Teller, that was a stunning failure. If it had been possible to build the space-based X-ray laser that Teller envisioned, which transformed the power of nuclear explosions into huge numbers of calibrated lasers to shoot down incoming enemy missiles and all of their easily deployed decoys, one could at least envision a scenario of defense. But the report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of the success in creating such a laser was false, and the idea was dropped with embarrassment even by its most die-hard fans.

What we have now in the way of antimissile defense is a paltry echo of past antiballistic efforts. THAAD may carry a heavy price tag of $15.4 billion, but its proponents don’t even pretend it would be effective against ICBMs if the Russians or Chinese ever sought to launch them. It’s a theater weapon aimed at shooting down Scud-type missiles of short and intermediate range just above the atmosphere. Its purpose is to thwart rogue nations, but if such an enemy sought to deliver a nuclear attack on the U.S. or its deployed forces, surely a suitcase bomb or one dropped from a propeller plane would do better than a missile. For one thing, the nation initiating a missile launch would be easily spotted and obliterated by the awesome U.S. retaliatory force that is on constant alert.

Even rogue nations that have the ability to launch missiles certainly can master the much easier task of deploying many cheap decoys to confuse the THAAD defense, which requires our bullet precisely hitting theirs. Lockheed failed six times to pull off such a hit under the most carefully rigged circumstance until this month when, faced with $15-million fines per failure and loss of the program, Lockheed managed to arrange a couple of bull’s-eyes. They bore no real connection to national missile defense, in which the enemy does not provide a skeet range target and its precise travel itinerary for the missile defender’s convenience. This test was “highly scripted,” in the words of Philip E. Coyle III, director of operational test and evaluation for the Pentagon.

Yet these dismal results after a half-century of such efforts have once again emboldened Senate Republicans to jettison arms control efforts in favor of an antiballistic missile shield. The danger is not in the mere continued waste of tens of billions of dollars that could be used elsewhere to make this world more secure. The true risk is in tearing up the ABM treaty, which severely restricts antiballistic missile efforts while hobbling efforts to reduce the still-huge size of the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and to ratify the test ban treaty. Missile defense perpetuates the dangerous illusion that nuclear weapons are usable, which only encourages other nations, including longtime allies like Pakistan and India, into mad arms races to obtain them.

The secret to security in the modern world lies in the creation of an internationally accepted legal culture in which only criminals build weapons of mass destruction and which activity elicits swift punishment from the world’s more responsible nations. Rogue nations that develop such weapons can easily have their manufacturing and test sites observed and eliminated. But the moral certainty to act decisively must stem from the fact that the major powers also have disavowed such weapons as instruments of national policy.