Star Struck

Last week, President George W. Bush became the fourth consecutive president to promise the nation protection from a ballistic missile attack. In a speech given at the National Defense University, he proposed to “leave behind the constraints of the ABM Treaty” and to deploy missile defenses to protect the United States and its allies. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, he said, had “identified near-term options for an initial capability against a limited threat.” He did not, however, specify what these options were, nor did he say when he expected the deployment to take place. This was surely the better part of wisdom.

Since Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) with the announced goal of making ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete,” the U.S. has spent nearly two decades and about $70 billion on the task of developing ICBM defenses. During the late 1980s, the idea of building a perfect astrodome defense was very popular with the American people, who, as polls showed, believed that American science could work miracles. At the same time, the antimissile program became a cause with Republican conservatives, who did not like arms treaties and had always believed the U.S. should be building defenses as well as offenses.

In the mid-1980s, there was no ICBM defense on the horizon. Since then, some technical progress has been made, but a true space-based defense--or “Star Wars”--remains well out of reach. Even the task of intercepting a single ICBM warhead with a ground-based rocket, or “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” has proven extremely difficult. At present, there is still no system that can reliably shoot down ICBM warheads, and according to the most optimistic Pentagon estimates, there will not be one for years. Still, technical difficulties have never stopped presidents and other senior officials from promising the deployment of effective defenses.

On Oct. 15, 1986, a year and a half after the formal launch of his SDI program, President Reagan in a midterm election campaign speech said that an antimissile system was practical and could be deployed “several years down the road.” The press paid little attention to this remark, but the following January Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar W. Weinberger, announced that “a firm commitment” could be made to deploy the first phase of a defensive system in just two years. “We have,” he said, “an unprecedented degree of confidence in the feasibility of a defense against Soviet missiles.... We are now seeing opportunities for earlier deployment of the first phase of strategic defenses than we previously thought.”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, saw no such opportunities. Testifying before Congress in early 1987, their chairman, Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., reported, “SDI is a research program....We still have to determine whether it is technically feasible and then whether it is financially possible.” He added, “A lot of what I read makes it sound as if SDI is just out sitting in the parking lot. That’s not true.... It will be some time before the decision is made to begin deployment.”

What Crowe was referring to was a spate of articles published by Republican conservatives in previous months proposing a variety of missile-defense systems. Conservatives had also written Reagan urging him to make a deployment before he left office, lest SDI lose political support--the support his promise of a perfect shield had created for it--and fade away.

The chiefs did not think that any effective system could be deployed in the near term, but they worried that the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, a quasi-independent entity that reported only to the secretary of defense, might deploy something--anything--that would break the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, commit the United States to an expensive, open-ended effort to develop defenses and create an all-out arms race with the Soviet Union. To prevent this from happening, the chiefs maneuvered the SDIO into putting any deployment plan into the regular Pentagon acquisitions process. They further required that, prior to deployment, a system would have to meet a certain standard of effectiveness: It should be able to stop 30% of a Soviet first strike.

In June 1987, Air Force Lt. Gen. James A. Abrahamson, chief of the SDIO, announced a “phase-one” plan to deploy a system composed of some hundreds of space-based battle stations and some hundreds of ground-based interceptors, all at an estimated cost of $40 billion to $60 billion. “With adequate funding for the SDI program, we could confidently anticipate that phased deployment could begin as early as 1994 or 1995,” Weinberger wrote in an Op-Ed piece for the New York Times. “In my view, no technical roadblocks stand in the way.” The Defense Acquisition Board, however, found the plan little more than a sketch on the back of a napkin. Fairly quickly, the estimated costs rose to hundreds of billions of dollars. Apparently the Chiefs had been right.

After President George Bush took office in 1989, senior officials declared that a perfect umbrella defense of the country was unattainable. Vice President Dan Quayle went so far as to call Reagan’s promise “political jargon,” and said, “Now we’re back to a practical point of view.” But it was a strange sort of practicality, for the administration still proposed to meet both the chiefs’ standard for effectiveness and the 1994 deployment date--this time with a completely new system.

By the start of 1989 even SDIO head Abrahamson had conceded that his “phase-one” plan would be far too expensive, but in an end-of-tour report he described a new concept born at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Instead of the heavy battle stations in space, there would be a swarm of tiny interceptors stuffed with miniaturized computers and sensors that would float around the Earth in low orbits waiting for the signal to attack enemy missiles rising out of the atmosphere. Known as Brilliant Pebbles, this system, Abrahamson wrote, offered an opportunity for “improved performance and dramatic cost reductions” and could be ready for an initial deployment in five years. The new secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, decided to accept the recommendation, and in March Vice President Quayle praised the affordability of the system and “its use of available, largely demonstrated technologies.” Brilliant Pebbles, he said, “could revolutionize much of our thinking about strategic defense.”

Brilliant Pebbles did not stand up well to the scrutiny of Pentagon review boards, but when the SDIO put forth a new “phase-one” plan for a system made up of 4,600 pebbles plus one to two thousand ground-based interceptors, senior administration officials waxed enthusiastic. In August, Cheney, then Bush’s secretary of defense, declared, “It is no longer visionary to think that a successful strategic defense could render our fears about a preemptive [Soviet] first strike obsolete.”

The waning of the Cold War put an end to plans for a defensive system that would stop an attack by hundreds of Soviet missiles--but hardly an end to plans for the deployment of missile defenses. In February 1990, when he visited the Livermore Lab and was briefed on Brilliant Pebbles, President Bush reported that SDI might protect the U.S. from renegade nations or terrorists with ballistic missiles and concluded that in the 1990s “strategic defenses make much more sense than ever.”

On Jan. 3, 1991, Bush and his advisors approved a new SDIO plan for the deployment of about a thousand Brilliant Pebbles and between 500 and 1,000 ground-based interceptors to protect the U.S. from attack by Third World countries or accidental Soviet launches of under 100 missiles. A year later, however, the plan was dead. According to General Accounting Office investigators, Brilliant Pebbles was still unproven and “tremendous technical challenges” lay ahead. Further, the ground-based interceptor had, it now appeared, failed its flight tests and, according to senior Pentagon officials, could not get off the ground until 2002 at the earliest.

On taking office in 1993, the Clinton administration halted plans for antimissile deployments and redirected research funding from national missile defenses to shorter-range systems aimed at protecting troops in the field and other relatively small targets abroad. Conservative Republicans in Congress, however, continued to press for a system that would defend the United States, and during his reelection campaign President Bill Clinton agreed to a compromise whereby the administration would spend three years designing and testing a system that could be fielded in another three years if the go-ahead was given. In January 1999, three months after a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld reported that nations such as Iraq and North Korea could obtain ICBMs within five years if they wanted to, and just as the House presented its impeachment case against Clinton to the Senate, the Clinton administration went further, proposing to deploy a system involving between 20 and 200 ground-based interceptors by 2005 to protect the country against attack by a “rogue state” with a handful of missiles. Last year, the interceptor failed two of its three flight tests, and Clinton put off the decision to begin a deployment.

During the election campaign of 2000, George W. Bush repeatedly criticized the Clinton plan as inadequate and called for a multilayered system composed of land-, sea-and space-based elements. Voters presumably believed that he and his expert advisors had something concrete in mind. But now he is talking vaguely about “options for an initial capability”--in other words a “phase one” of his promised system. However, according to the Pentagon, even Clinton’s national missile defense system cannot be ready until 2006--or after Bush’s first term in office. So what is the president going to do? Keep making vague promises? Or deploy something, anything, to break the ABM Treaty and pretend that it works?