Military Sees Win-Win in Alaska

The brushy headlands of Narrow Cape are spectacular.

They back up to the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge, home of the biggest bears in the world. Offshore, hundreds of gray whales a day make their way along an ancient ocean migration corridor. Down below, Fossil Beach offers--for those warmblooded enough to attempt it--the best surfing in Alaska.

And there is this odd fact: A rocket launched from Narrow Cape’s far northern latitude can enter a polar orbit with amazing ease--with the vast, empty expanse of the North Pacific available as a trajectory field for rocket debris.

To military minds, the implications are dramatic. No longer do you have to launch a test missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California out toward the Marshall Islands and pretend it’s an enemy missile. Fired from Kodiak down the West Coast, a missile looks just like a warhead dispatched from North Korea or China.

Almost by geographical default, Alaska is emerging as the first line of defense against the threat of an enemy nation--or a terrorist group with access to a missile launch facility--firing off a missile in northern Asia toward the U.S.

No other locale, defense officials say, can so realistically replicate an enemy attack, and none offers the hope of launching a defense interceptor missile capable of protecting not only the continental U.S., but Alaska and Hawaii as well.

With the Pentagon announcing this week that it would delay ship-based missile defense test launches to avoid conflicts with Russia over the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, administration officials said Friday that they are proceeding “on schedule” with plans to develop a mid-course missile defense test range in the North Pacific, centered in Alaska.

“The impact [of the delay] on Alaska will be none,” said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.

In Anchorage, state missile defense coordinator Chris Nelson said the state has been advised that Congress has authorized full funding to commence development of a missile test range in Alaska. “We haven’t gotten any red flags, so our assumption is we’re moving forward,” Nelson said.

The missile defense testing program represents a new military foray into a state that had all but lost its position as a strategic front in the Cold War. Over the last few months, such places as Kodiak and Delta Junction--a remote highway crossroads near the abandoned Army base of Ft. Greely--have become hubs of military activity.

Rocket scientists from NASA, the Air Force and the Army have become some of the most frequent passengers at the World War II-era landing strip on Kodiak. At Ft. Greely, bulldozers have moved in to clear trees for construction of five interceptor missile test silos.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Cosumano, commanding general of the U.S. Army’s space and missile defense command, recently toured the site and met with top Alaska state officials.

With Congress poised to approve about $8 billion for the development of missile defense technology, the Bush administration says Kodiak and Ft. Greely, together with an expanded radar tracking system in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, are ideal centers for a new mid-course test range in the North Pacific.

The prospect has environmental groups across the state worried about the potential of rocket fuel poisoning marine wildlife, on threats to migrating whales and the cumulative effects of decades of hazardous military waste in Alaska. But in a state whose budget has always been hostage to the ups and downs of oil, fishing and timber, the proposal has most Alaska officials dreaming of a place at the high-tech table.

“The Alaska economy is a resource extraction economy. We pump oil and we ship it outside, we catch fish and we cut trees, and we ship them outside,” said Nelson. “The high-tech economy that’s been developing in other parts of the U.S. has really passed Alaska by, and we’re hoping missile defense will bring some of these companies up.”

Delta Junction, a virtual ghost town since Ft. Greely began closing in 1995, is celebrating. There is less enthusiasm in Kodiak, which already has a robust fishing industry, a strong tourism economy--and a growing suspicion of the rocket scientists setting up shop on Narrow Cape at a 3-year-old, state-owned commercial rocket launch facility that the Pentagon hopes to use.

A coalition of environmental groups has filed suit demanding new environmental studies before work on the missile defense program gets underway in Alaska. The government initially found there would be “no significant impact” on the environment from occasional launches at the Kodiak facility. But that never presumed, opponents say, that Kodiak would become a missile test range. No one looked in detail at potential effects on marine wildlife such as migrating whales, they say, nor at safety threats posed by an earthquake fault that runs just off Narrow Cape.

“We’ve already nearly lost our fishing industry due to [endangered] sea lion issues, and now you’re going to send rockets and missiles over their habitat?” Vikki Jo Kennedy asked Pentagon officials at an anxious public meeting in August. “It just ain’t going to work, boys. You gotta take this somewhere else.”

In fact, work has quietly been underway for several years to capitalize on Kodiak’s strategic location for testing missile trajectories.

The Air Force has launched several suborbital missiles from Kodiak down the West Coast, designed to test radar by simulating incoming enemy ballistic missiles. The Army hopes soon to launch what is to be the first of many test target missiles from Kodiak.

Last month, the rocket facility launched its first non-military mission and its first fully orbital satellite, a NASA payload that included, in addition to defense satellites, an amateur radio communications vehicle and a mirror-shrouded satellite, constructed as an international science experiment with help from students around the world.

Missile opponents believe that Kodiak’s strategic location for military applications must have been clear from the beginning to Pat Ladner, former director of test operations in the Strategic Defense Initiative Office. Ladner was hired as executive director of Alaska Aerospace Development Corp. in 1992 to win funding and oversee construction of the Kodiak complex, which was to become the nation’s first commercial rocket launch facility not located on a military base.

The original idea, Ladner insists, was to capitalize on what was expected to be a burgeoning commercial satellite market by building a facility that would allow telecommunications companies to get their spacecraft quickly and cheaply into polar and elliptical orbits.

“With the commercial satellite market going down the tubes, what are we going to do, just sit here and do nothing?” Ladner asked. “The Air Force’s $20 looks just like Motorola’s $20.”

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon lent new urgency to the issue. Setting aside qualms that expanding missile defense would violate international disarmament treaties, administration officials say it is more important than ever to put into place such a defense system.

“As terrible as the damage was from an airliner that was hijacked and aimed at a building, magnify that a hundred times or more if it was a nuclear warhead that hit New York City,” said Lehner of the Pentagon.

Driving out to the 3,100-acre launch complex in Kodiak is a slow affair, 40 miles of washboard gravel road through emerald hills, up switchbacks that overlook pristine coves, finally emptying out on a bluff-top of rolling tundra and scattered spruce trees at a small complex of launch towers and tall assembly buildings.

Ed Allen, a former vice president at the commercial satellite business Orbital Sciences Co., was hired as Alaska Aerospace’s technical director. He presides over a sophisticated network of computer terminals, fiber-optic communication links and a launch control center that resembles the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

He gets impatient when Kodiak residents talk of potential hazards. Before launching, he said, engineers calculate the probability of anyone being hit by debris. In every case, he said, there is no launch unless that probability is less than 1 in 1 billion.

“These people say, ‘Oh, my God. They’re flying over our communities. . . . First of all, one of the reasons we picked Kodiak is there are 15,000 people on this whole island and half of them are in Kodiak city, 40 miles away,” Allen said. “I’ve been working in the rocket business since 1956. I can very truthfully say that in all these years, the people I’ve known that have been killed have died in two ways: bar fights and automobile accidents.”

The public meeting in Kodiak in August was an eye-opener for missile defense officials, who had expected some opposition but probably not the four hours of vehemence that greeted them.

Native Alaskans raised fears that poisonous exhausts could damage sea life and threaten two native communities that are downrange of rocket launches on some trajectories.

“The military has traditionally viewed Alaska as a remote, unpopulated, vast wasteland where they can test and experiment without environmental concerns or worrying about lots of populated areas,” said Stacey Fritz of No Nukes North, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Delta Junction, however, has been almost unanimous in its enthusiasm. A $9-million contract awarded for ground clearing at Ft. Greely in August renewed hopes that the town could eventually hire back teachers, build a new bowling alley and a pool.