24 April 2000
Source: Hardcopy of Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the
End of the Cold War, Frances Fitzgerald, Simon and Shuster, New York,
2000. ISBN 0-684-84416-8. Pages 479-99 (text); 562-65 (notes). Thanks to
the author and publisher.
"Most Americans are shocked to discover that our country is unshielded from the accidental or ruthless launch of even a single missile over our skies."-- REPRESENTATIVE STEVE LARGENT (Republican of Oklahoma), January 19, 19991
IN 1988 MANY IN WASHINGTON and Moscow predicted that the Strategic Defense Initiative would not survive the Reagan administration: that the effort to deploy anti-missile defenses would soon end and that the research programs in defensive technologies would return to the relatively obscure place in the military budget from which they had come. But the initiative defied these expectations. Throughout the decade after Reagan left office, spending on anti-missile defenses remained at the level it had attained in the second Reagan administration, that is, at three to four billion dollars a year. Then, except in the first three years of the Clinton administration, the U.S. government was never without a plan to deploy a missile defense for the United States. Over the years program managers beat a gradual retreat from the technical goals of the Reagan administration, and by the late 1990s the anti-missile system envisioned for deployment was a pale shadow of its former self: a network of ground-based interceptors with the capability to stop a few ICBMs. Whether even this goal could be achieved by the target date of 2005 remained uncertain. Nonetheless, in the spring of 1999 the Clinton administration and both houses of Congress committed themselves to deploying a national missile-defense system as soon as technically feasible, and the administration began negotiations with the Russians to revise the ABM Treaty For the first time many expert observers felt that at least some elements of the system would be deployed in the next few years.
Much, of course, happened within the decade to alter the purpose and military
requirements of an anti-missile system. Still, the persistence of the push
for deployment was in many ways phenomenal. It survived declining defense
budgets. It survived a fall-off of public interest so complete that many
consistent newspaper readers thought the program had died. It survived the
collapse of the Soviet Union. It survived despite the fact that there was
no technological breakthrough, and that by 1999 the prospects for deploying
an effective interceptor remained not very much brighter than they had been
in 1983. In a sense the history of the initiative in the 1990s is even more
remarkable than that of its origins. Every time the program seemed ready
to expire, or collapse of its own weight, something would happen to bring
it to life again.
At the beginning of 1989 there was some reason to suppose that the Bush administration would quietly let the Strategic Defense Initiative fade away. During the 1988 campaign Bush had blown hot and cold on the issue of deployment, but he was not thought to have much enthusiasm for his predecessor's project, and his closest defense adviser, Brent Scowcroft, was a major critic of SDI. In 1988 Scowcroft and three colleagues from the Aspen Strategy Group had criticized the structure of the program, rejected the idea of near-term deployment and endorsed the traditional interpretation of the ABM Treaty.2 Then, a few days after the inauguration, former Senator John Tower, Bush's first choice tor secretary of defense, said in a Senate hearing that the Bush administration was going to take a more modest view of SDI than its predecessor. "To begin with," he said, "I don't believe that we can devise an umbrella that can protect the entire American population from nuclear incineration."3
The remark made headlines across the country. Tower was merely acknowledging the obvious, but as a spokesman for the Bush administration he was violating the taboo on official speech that had held for the past four years. Tower did not become secretary of defense, but Richard Cheney, the Wyoming congressman who did, took the same line, and so did all senior Bush-administration officials.4 Apparently the President and his aides had deliberately decided to burst the bubble their predecessors had spent so much breath inflating.
Then, too, the auspices in Washington were favorable to a restructuring of the SDI program. The Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress, and by this time the heads of the Armed Services Committees and the Joint Chiefs were thoroughly tied up with Star Wars. The Pentagon's acquisition process had shown that Abrahamson's "Phase One" architecture was nothing but a concept, and yet, because of the Reagan administration's deadline for a deployment decision in 1993, the SDI budgets continued to climb off the charts. Carlucci had cut Weinberger's proposed budgets way back, and the Congress appropriated less than he asked; still, the last Reagan-administration budget showed the Pentagon spending over forty billion dollars on SDI from fiscal 1990 through fiscal 1994.5 In a time of declining military budgets the sum appeared chimerical.
During the strategic review that began shortly after Bush's inauguration, the Joint Chiefs took a hard look at SDI and made three recommendations: first, the administration should continue the research and testing of SDI technologies but make no commitment to deployment; second, it should refrain from violating the ABM Treaty; third, it should take a meat ax to the proposed SDI budgets. In May, Admiral Crowe added a fourth recommendation: that the administration change the U.S. position at the Geneva talks and no longer insist upon the U.S. right to deploy anti-missile defenses.6 The Chiefs were, in other words, proposing that SDI be returned to the status quo ante and to its mission as a research program on the weapons of the future, so that they could go about their business of strategic-force planning and the START talks could proceed.
The Chiefs' recommendations added up to a coherent change of policy. They also added up to a repudiation of Reagan-administration policies on strategic defenses -- and a potential confrontation with the Republican right.
Presented with this clear alternative, the Bush administration rejected it. In the course of the strategic review, the President decided to maintain the Reagan administration's negotiating position on strategic defenses: the "broad" interpretation of the ABM Treaty, and the call for an agreement on deploying defenses after a period of years. Bush also decided to proceed with work on "Phase One" for a deployment decision in 1993. At the same time, recognizing that the Reagan budgets could not be sustained, Secretary Cheney cut seven billion dollars out of the forty Carlucci had proposed for the next five years.7
Bush had made some decisions, but they did not add up to a plausible policy for the SDI program. Thirty-three billion dollars was an enormous sum -- doubtless too big for the Congress -- yet it would not begin to pay for Abrahamson's "Phase One," with its hundreds of ground-based interceptors and hundreds of space-based "garages" full of kinetic kill vehicles, supposing these weapons could be built. But just at the moment, there appeared a new concept in space weaponry, one that promised an affordable defense: a swarm of tiny kinetic-energy weapons stuffed with miniaturized computers and high-technology sensors known as Brilliant Pebbles.
In February 1989 General Abrahamson, who had decided to retire as director of the SDIO, wrote an end-of-tour report for the incoming secretary of defense recommending a radical change in the "Phase One" system. The system, he noted, had passed the Defense Acquisitions Board, but now there was a new opportunity for "improved performance and dramatic cost reductions" in Brilliant Pebbles. In an effusive five-page memorandum, which soon became public, he described an architecture made up of several thousand tiny interceptors floating around the earth in low orbits waiting for the signal to attack enemy rockets rising out of the atmosphere. Each interceptor would have its own optics and sufficient computer capability to make its own targeting decisions; once cleared for release, it would select the nearest target, fly towards it on an intercepting orbit, then ram into it at high speed. These tiny interceptors, Abrahamson wrote, could be proven in two years and deployed three years later; with them, he wrote, an entire SDI "Phase One" system that met the JCS requirements would cost not more than about twenty-five billion dollars.8
This concept, it transpired, was the brainchild of Edward Teller and his protégé Lowell Wood.
In the fall of 1986 Teller and Wood breakfasted with Gregory Canavan the Los Alamos physicist, who had defended the concept of Star Wars in the "science wars" of 1984. In the course of a discussion, Canavan offered an idea: why not make a miniature smart rock that would be so intelligent that it could operate on its own, and so small it would be easy to launch into space and difficult for the Soviets to go after? The idea, as Canavan later acknowledged, was not a fundamentally new one. It had been conceived in the late 1950s, and in the early 1980s, with the revolution in microchip technology, Richard Garwin -- one of Canavan's opponents in the "science wars" -- had brought the idea up again, only to dismiss it as unworkable. Teller and Wood had long argued that space-based defenses could not be made survivable, but since the demise of the X-ray laser they had been looking for new ideas, and this one, they decided, was worth exploring
Wood put the Livermore Lab to work on Canavan's concept, and by the fall of 1987 he had a model of the interceptor, blueprints, computer simulations and a name: Brilliant Pebbles. He and Teller then began to sell the project in much the same way they had sold the X-ray laser.9
In 1987 the SDIO had decided to put a little money into the concept but by the fall of 1988 Brilliant Pebbles was still a low-level project and something of a curiosity in the organization. Still, after taking office in March 1989, Defense Secretary Cheney decided to accept Abrahamson's glowing end-of-tour recommendation and to give emphasis to the Livermore program. In April the SDIO unveiled the project with some fanfare.10 Just as with concepts past, schematic drawings of Brilliant Pebbles appeared in the press, and journalists quoted officials on the devastation the system might wreak on Soviet ICBMs. The unveiling was heralded by Vice-President Quayle, who, in a speech on the sixth anniversary of Reagan's Star Wars address, praised the affordability of the system, its survivability and "its use of available, largely demonstrated technologies." Brilliant Pebbles, Quayle said, "could revolutionize much of our thinking about strategic defense."11
The interceptor, as it was now described, was not quite the weapon Wood had touted the year before. From a five-pound "pebble" it had become a hundred-pound, three-foot-long boulder with a "protective cocoon." Wood now had to use a cart to take its mock-up around Washington. Also, it was not quite so autonomous as it had been. Apparently the Pentagon was uneasy about the idea of unleashing thousands of robots into space without any human controls. Then, too, the estimate for each copy had gone up from one hundred thousand dollars to somewhere between a half and one and a half million, exclusive of launching costs.12 Still, even by the new estimates, the interceptor promised to be cheap compared with its predecessor, and in an effort to match the stated goal of a deployment decision in 1993 with some politically plausible expenditure of funds, the administration made what one Senate staffer described as "the technological equivalent of a Hail Mary pass." In 1989 the SDIO asked for a sevenfold increase in funding for the Livermore program; in 1990 it abandoned the old concept for a space-based interceptor and substituted Brilliant Pebbles. The new "Phase One" architecture showed a system made up of forty-six hundred pebbles plus one to two thousand ground-based interceptors. The funding request for the pebbles rose to $392 million for fiscal 1991.13
Brilliant Pebbles did not, however, fare well with the Pentagon review boards, and by the summer of 1990, when the Congress came to consider the defense budget for the following year, the purpose of the deployment scheme had become even more mysterious than the virtue of the technology under consideration.14 The Cold War in Europe was over. Bush and Gorbachev were working together on regional issues, including Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. They were still wrangling over the side issues of the START treaty, but they were looking forward to making deeper reductions in START II. The Soviets had already agreed to dismantle many more of their ICBMs than the "Phase One" scheme was designed to stop, and on the defensive side their only condition was that the U.S. abide by the ABM Treaty: the administration could have arms reductions or "Phase One" but not both.15
Bush-administration officials acknowledged that warmer U.S.-Soviet relations and the imminent prospect of a START treaty diminished concerns about a Soviet nuclear attack. But, they did not therefore question their goal of an SDI deployment. Rather, they and other Republicans came up with new rationales. In February 1990, during a trip to California in which he visited the Livermore Lab and was briefed on Brilliant Pebbles, President Bush had suggested that the U.S. faced threats beyond the traditional one from the Soviet Union. SDI, he said, might protect the U.S. from ballistic missiles in the hands of renegade nations, terrorists or "narco gangsters," who he maintained were taking on "the pretensions of a geopolitical force."16 Around the same time, Richard Perle testified to the Senate that the U.S. could "safely reduce the investment we make in protecting against a massive surprise Soviet nuclear attack" and "reorient the program towards missiles launched by accident or by rogue states in the Third World."17 With the outbreak of ethnic violence in the Soviet Union that spring, some Republicans raised the prospect that terrorists or madmen might gain control of a few Soviet long-range missiles. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait that summer, a number of Republicans called for an SDI deployment to defend the United States against attack by a "rogue state."
Pentagon and CIA analysts did not think much of these new rationales. General Colin Powell, who had succeeded Admiral Crowe as chairman of the JCS the previous year, came down hard on the idea of accidental launches or terrorists' gaining control of Soviet ICBMs. "Based on my knowledge of how the Soviets manage their nuclear systems and the safeguards they have," he said, "I'm fairly comfortable that those weapons will not get into improper hands"; if they did, "the systems they have to protect those weapons would make them pretty much unusable."18 As for the "rogue state" threat, it was not yet on the horizon of U.S. military planning. True, Iraq and a number of other Third World countries, including India and Pakistan, were developing ballistic missiles as well as nuclear weapons, but all of them seemed to be developing relatively short-range missiles to threaten their regional rivals, not intercontinental missiles for suicidal attacks on superpowers. Besides, if any rogue state or terrorist group wanted to attack the U.S., it could accomplish the task far more easily -- and with far less risk of retaliation -- by delivering a bomb in a suitcase or from an offshore vessel. As Harold Brown suggested, the U.S. would gain more protection from Third World threats by beefing up the U.S. customs service than by deploying SDI.19
In early August the Senate, by a vote of fifty-four to forty-four, passed an amendment to the defense bill that for the first time imposed some congressional control over how SDI funds were expended. The amendment, proposed by two Democrats and backed by Nunn, cut the administration's request for Brilliant Pebbles by almost two-thirds and refocused the program on ground-based interceptors and long-range research on exotic technologies. In October the Democrats cut back SDI funding by almost a billion dollars from the previous year, a reduction that clearly doomed "Phase One."20
January 3, 1991, Bush and his advisers approved a new deployment plan presented by Dr. Henry E. Cooper, the new head of the SDIO. Cooper, who had been chief negotiator at the moribund defense and space talks, was the choice of the conservatives to succeed the Bush administration's first director, Lieutenant General George L. Monahan. The plan Cooper presented was as great a step down from "Phase One" as that limited system had been from Reagan's promise of a perfect defense. Known by its acronym, GPALS, for Global Protection Against Limited Strikes, the proposed deployment was designed to protect the United States from an attack by Third World countries or accidental Soviet launches of under a hundred ballistic missiles. Approximately a thousand Brilliant Pebbles and between five hundred and a thousand ground-based interceptors were to be involved in this enterprise, and the cost was estimated at forty billion dollars.21
On January 5 the chances that the Congress would fund GPALS seemed extremely low. However, on January 16 the UN deadline for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait ran out, and the Gulf War began. For five weeks U.S. aircraft and naval vessels pounded Iraq, before the ground troops moved into Iraq and Kuwait. During this period the American public watched U.S. military videos of cruise missiles and smart bombs acquiring their targets and homing in on them unerringly. The public also watched televised pictures of U.S. Patriot-missile batteries firing at Iraqi Scud missiles aimed at cities in Israel and Saudi Arabia and creating spectacular fireworks in the sky. The Patriots, it appeared, had achieved the first destruction of enemy ballistic missiles in a combat situation, and, according to exultant Army briefers, they had intercepted almost all the Scuds they had attempted to hit.22 Along with General Norman Schwarzkopf and the American troops, the Patriot missile became a hero of the Gulf War, and with it the fortunes of SDI soared.
Just hours after the first Scud fell out of the Arabian sky on January 18, The Wall Street Journal called the event "a great advertisement for SDI." A few days later Patrick Buchanan wrote, "Using SDI technology, the United States has shown it can attack and kill ballistic missiles." President Bush, he said, "ought to insist on the restoration of full funding for SDI." Other conservative commentators followed suit.23 On January 29, with the air war still less than two weeks old, President Bush in his State of the Union address cited the "remarkable" success of the Patriot in defending Israeli and Saudi citizens and announced his decision to refocus the SDI program "on providing protection from limited ballistic missile strikes, whatever their source." The administration asked for a 77-percent increase in the SDI budget, and conservatives in Congress roared approval. "While the images [of the Patriot streaking skyward] are fresh in our mind," wrote Representative John Kyle, an Arizona Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, "we should focus on what these events teach us: Americans and our allies should never again be defenseless against a ballistic missile attack; and we need not be.24
In the midst of this excitement Senator John Warner, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee, proposed a resolution directing the secretary of defense to begin the development of space-based defenses immediately, regardless of the ABM Treaty. After some discussion with administration officials, he modified the resolution so that it called for a prompt renegotiation of the ABM Treaty and directed the secretary of defense to prepare to develop and test space-based systems while the negotiations continued. In floor speeches and a letter to colleagues, Warner invoked the Patriot missile and said his amendment would free American genius to devise new, more advanced systems to defend U.S. territory and fighting forces from a "world-wide proliferation of ballistic missiles."25
Senators Nunn and Cohen and others on the Armed Services Committee persuaded Warner to withdraw the proposal and began discussions to work out a compromise. In July, Nunn and Warner offered a bill, known as the Missile Defense Act of 1991, which called for the deployment of one hundred ground-based ABM interceptors at a single site in five years' time. 'l'he deployment was to be a first step towards an anti-missile system with multiple sites to defend the entire United States against a limited nuclear attack. The bill called upon the administration to begin negotiations to modify the ABM Treaty so as to permit the deployment, and it authorized $4.6 billion for the SDI program -- or just seven hundred million less than the administration had asked. The bill mandated only ground-based deployments but it included $625 million for the accelerated development of Brilliant Pebbles.26
In retrospect, these events would seem to suggest that a major misunderstanding had taken place. The Patriot and SDI interceptors were both intended to shoot down missiles, but the similarity ended there. The Patriot was an Army program begun during the Ford administration with technology conceived in the 1960s; originally designed as an air-defense system, it was upgraded in the 1980s to defend troop concentrations or military bases against primitive, short-range missiles, such as the Iraqi Scuds, by exploding in their path. The SDIO had displayed no interest in the Patriot since it was technically irrelevant to the mission of defending the United States. The task of blowing aside a Scud in its short trajectory through the atmosphere and that of hitting a warhead traveling through space and descending into the atmosphere were two different things. To say that, because the Patriot worked, an ABM defense of the U.S. should be deployed, was the equivalent of saying that anyone who could build a barn could build a skyscraper.27
In fact, there was very little misunderstanding about this issue in Washington. Not long after the first announcement of a Scud shoot-down, Army spokesmen crowed that the Patriot was an Army program and "not even a spinoff of SDI," and Dr. Henry Cooper acknowledged forthrightly that the Patriots were "not some product of 'Star Wars' technology or 'Star Wars' funding." Subsequently numerous journalists and experts explained the differences between the two programs.28 With a few exceptions, conservative commentators did not assert that there was any real technological connection between the two programs but merely argued by analogy.29
What had happened was that the conservatives had seized upon the apparent success of the Patriots to push for space-based defenses at a time when the Democrats were in disarray. In January the Congress had debated the wisdom of an immediate attack on Iraq, and on January 12, just a few days before the expiration of the UN deadline, both houses voted on whether or not to give Bush the authorization he needed for the use of force. The Pentagon had estimated that the war might produce thousands of American casualties, and Nunn, who had previously insisted that the President needed the consent of Congress to go to war, argued that the Bush administration should allow some time for the sanctions to take effect before committing U.S. troops to battle. Nunn voted against the authorization, and so did a majority of the Senate Democrats.30 When the worst-case Pentagon estimates proved spectacularly wrong, and NATO forces quickly routed the Iraqi troops, taking very few casualties, Nunn and the rest of the Democratic nay-sayers were roundly denounced. In Nunn's home state of Georgia, the reaction was harsh. A billboard went up proclaiming Nunn "Saddam Hussein's Best Friend." In February many commentators pronounced him politically dead.31
The Nunn-Warner bill passed the Armed Services Committee on July 17 with only Senators Glenn, Gore, Kennedy and Levin opposed. The same day, Bush and Gorbachev wrapped up the START treaty, and attached to it was a unilateral Soviet declaration that the U.S.S.R. might withdraw from START if the U.S. abrogated or substantially violated the ABM Treaty.32 The Senate nonetheless passed the Missile Defense Act without debate, and when Les Aspin came out for the deployment plan, the House passed a similar bill. SDI funding for fiscal 1992 went to $4.15 billion-a 43-percent increase over the previous year and a record high for the program.33
Senate Democrats assumed that this deployment plan superseded not only Warner's
first proposal but GPALS, the administration's plan that included a space-based
deployment. Henry Cooper, however, did not interpret the Nunn-Warner bill
in quite the same way. He agreed that the bill gave priority to a ground-based
system, but, he pointed out, it did not order him to abandon GPALS, and the
Congress had always asked for a balanced defense, so he saw no reason to
shelve his earlier approach. Nunn argued with him, but to little effect:
the Republicans wanted a space-based defense. Thus, in December 1991, when
the Soviet Union broke up, the SDIO was working not on one deployment plan
but on two.34
A year later both deployment plans had been abandoned and an air of scandal surrounded the SDI program.
The SDIO had planned for a GPALS deployment in the mid-1990s, and for over a year SDI enthusiasts spoke as if the project were well under way. But in March 1992 GAO investigators reported that GPALS still had no stable architecture, and that Brilliant Pebbles was still unproven and "tremendous technical challenges" lay ahead. Interpreting this language for a reporter, Representative John Conyers (Democrat of Michigan), the chairman of the House Government Operations Committee, said, "The Star Wars program is floundering. They haven't a clue where they are going or how to get there."35
By contrast to GPALS, the congressional plan to deploy ground-based interceptors had seemed eminently feasible. Certainly it was described in that way. When the Nunn-Warner bill was proposed, Defense Department officials told Congress that they were ready to forge ahead with an ABM Treaty-compliant defense located at a single site. They assured Nunn's committee they could field one hundred interceptors by the target date of 1996 without much technical risk. The evidence they presented to that effect included the spectacular success of a January 1991 test, in which a prototype ERIS missile had hit a mock warhead in space. According to SDIO estimates, the first site could be built for ten billion dollars, and the network of sites needed to cover the United States could be completed for twenty-five billion.36
However, when the Senate Armed Services Committee took up the matter in the spring of 1992, the cost estimate for the first site had mysteriously doubled; a second ERIS test, conducted in March, failed because of technical errors; and in the testimony of Henry Cooper, small warning signals began to appear.37
On June 2 the New York Times revealed that the Pentagon's top program analyst had conducted an internal Pentagon review of the deployment plan and found it a disaster in the making. In the leaked report, dated May 15, Dr. David S. C. Chu, the assistant secretary of defense for program analysis and evaluation, wrote that, in order to meet the target date, the interceptor system would have be exempted from more than a dozen laws and regulations governing weapons procurements; it would have to skip important performance tests, with the result that it could end up with crippling defects. Dr. Chu, an economist who had directed program analysis in the Pentagon since 1981, recommended that the system not be built until it could be thoroughly tested and that the deployment target be moved to 2002 or 2003.38
On June 4, two days after the Times article came out, Donald J. Atwood, the deputy secretary of defense, appeared before a subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Nunn was angry. "We've been substantially misled," he told Atwood. "There was considerable evidence, in fact overwhelming evidence, that the '96 goal was achievable, based on all the testimony we had." The SDI program, he said, "is already in enough trouble without these kind of background exaggerated claims that are now proven to be totally erroneous and false."
Atwood did not deny Nunn's accusation. He replied that those responsible for the program had assumed that critical parts of the testing program could be skipped. This, he added, was "a terrible mistake," and on reflection the original schedule "didn't appear to be realistic at all."
Duly warned, the Armed Services Committees set the deployment date back to 2002.39
How Sam Nunn could have been so misled about the feasibility of missile defenses became rather clearer in September, when the GAO released another report on SDI. After studying the seven major flight tests of SDI interceptors conducted between January 1990 and March 1992, GAO investigators found that SDIO officials had at least exaggerated the success of four of them. The other three tests were correctly depicted by the SDIO as either complete failures or only partly successful. According to the GAO, no Brilliant Pebbles test had succeeded, in spite of SDIO claims that one had accomplished all of the main objectives." Also, according to the GAO, the Army had misrepresented the ERIS test of January 1991, claiming that the missile had met its key goal of discriminating between a warhead and decoys, when it had not.40
The four SDI tests studied by the GAO were, it later appeared, not the only ones that had been misrepresented. In August 1993 four former Reagan-administration officials, including two military officers and a scientist, told the New York Times that the HOE test of 1984 had been rigged. This was big news, since that test, fourth in a series known as the Homing Overlay Experiment, was the first -- and for many years the only -- example of a missile hitting a missile in space. Coming just a year after Reagan's Star Wars speech, it was cited as proof that "the President's dream" could come true.
The Pentagon, and later the GAO, investigated the charge, only to discover that, though the four former officials did not have all of the facts right, there had been not one but many attempts to rig the test results. In the first three of the HOE tests, Pentagon officials had installed a small bomb on the target missile, which they planned to explode if the interceptor flew past it, simulating the effect of a direct hit. The idea, it appeared, was to deceive the Soviets about U.S. capabilities. But the plan was not carried out, because the interceptors flew so wide of their mark that the Soviets would not have been fooled by an explosion. The fourth test was not rigged in this way. Instead, officials, afraid that another failure would doom the entire program, had "enhanced" the target by heating it and turning it sideways in flight, so that it appeared twice its normal size to the interceptor sensors, thereby doubling the likelihood of a hit. SDIO officials thought these "enhancements" reason- able, but they had failed to inform the Armed Services Committees.41
In addition to these discoveries, it was found that the Patriot missiles had not done nearly as well as was claimed. In the midst of the war, President Bush said that the Patriots had intercepted forty-one out of the forty-two Scuds they engaged, and at the end of it the Army claimed a 96-percent success rate. But when independent American experts and Israeli Defense Force officials took a look at the evidence for this claim, they concluded that there was no clear evidence of even a single successful Scud interception. Looking again at the data, the Army twice revised its estimates downwards. By April 1992 Army officials said that the Patriots had intercepted 70 percent of the Scuds fired at Saudi Arabia and 40 percent of those fired at Israel.42 But even these figures were, it turned out, not based on hard evidence. Prodded by a congressional investigation, the Army found that it had "high confidence" in warhead kills in only 25 percent of the Patriot engagements. The GAO, however, reported that, except in 9 percent of the cases, the Army could prove only that the Patriots had come close to the Scuds, not that they had destroyed them.43
The news that anti-missile weapons were not as successful as previously thought had a depressing effect on some SDI promoters but a positively liberating effect on others. From the beginning it had been clear to many experts that Star Wars technologies were much better suited to the offense than to the defense, and among SDI enthusiasts there were a number who had always thought that the goal of the program should be to establish U S. control over space. The subject was taboo while the nuclear-arms race with the Soviet Union continued, and while the idea of Star Wars defenses had popular support in the U.S. But the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union permitted space-weaponry advocates to come out of the closet -- even as it encouraged those who had been working on missile-defense technologies to design new uses for their products.
In 1991-92 one center of this new thinking was the Heritage Foundation. Another was the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where Edward Teller and Lowell Wood were gearing up for another campaign. In their view the SDI surveillance satellites known as "Brilliant Eyes" could be equipped with radars, lasers and telescopes, antennae and sensors to allow military commanders to peer through clouds and darkness to see troop movements and bombing targets. As for Brilliant Pebbles, the system could be reconfigured to attack targets on the ground or in space. One proposal Wood was shopping to the Pentagon involved ordering the pebbles, which for these purposes he called "Endo-Pebbles," to leave their orbits and hit targets on the surface of the planet: enemy tanks, artillery emplacements, airplanes, command bunkers and so forth. Another proposal involved using Brilliant Pebbles as anti-satellite weapons and as "battleships" to enforce a space blockade, standing ready to destroy any rocket launched to put a satellite into orbit.44
Yet another center of this thinking was the National Space Council, a White House panel created by Bush to oversee the space program and directed by Vice-President Dan Quayle. In 1992 Quayle proposed to break down the traditional barriers between the military and civilian space programs. In January 1993 he issued a final report calling upon the nation to develop space weapons to exploit the high ground of space for future wars. His report said nothing at all about missile defenses. Rather, he raised the specter of America's foes using spacecraft "to overfly and threaten U.S forces with impunity" and called for a comprehensive "space control" capability, including space-based surveillance systems and anti-satellite weapons that could destroy enemy communications, navigation and weather satellites.45
These ideas were shelved. By the time of Bill Clinton's inauguration in January 1993, the fortunes of SDI were at an all-time low. The Cold War was over; the Gulf War had receded into the past; the economy had been in recession for over a year; some in Congress were pressing for major cutbacks in defense spending; the public had turned its attention to domestic issues, and SDI did not figure in the election campaign. In January, just before he left office, Bush signed an agreement with Russian president Boris Yeltsin to eliminate two-thirds of the strategic nuclear warheads on both sides by 2003. The START II treaty required the elimination of MIRVed land-based missiles and tacitly affirmed the traditional interpretation of the ABM Treaty.46
On taking office, the Clinton administration conducted a bottom-up review of the defense budget. In May 1993 Les Aspin, the new secretary of defense, declared that the era of Star Wars was over and that the Strategic Defense Initiative was dead. The SDIO would, he said, become the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and would report to the assistant secretary of defense for acquisitions and technology instead of to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. These changes, Aspin said, represented a shift away from a crash program to deploy space-based weapons. His plan, he said, was to develop and acquire systems for defending U.S. forces against shorter-range battlefield missiles while continuing research on national missile defenses. He asked $3.8 billion for the program -- or the sum the Congress had appropriated for it the previous year -- but suggested that, with diminishing defense budgets, there might be leaner years ahead.
Aspin's announcement went down rather better with SDI supporters than with SDI critics, both of whom had been expecting more radical surgery and now judged that the program would go on much as before. Frank Gaffney, who had been Perle's assistant in the Weinberger Defense Department and had become a one-man SDI lobby, said with unconscious irony that Aspin was "rearranging the deck chairs." Senator Jim Sasser, a Democrat, charged that SDI was being put through the equivalent of a "witness protection program.47
Aspin, however, made substantial changes. He halted plans for the deployment of a national missile defense and drastically reordered the priorities for the program as a whole. After the Gulf War the Bush administration had put 20 percent of the SDIO's budget into theater missile defenses; Aspin reversed the proportions, putting only 20 percent into R&D on national missile defense and 80 percent into an aggressive program to develop theater missile defenses to protect American allies and U.S. troops in the field.48
At the time, the changes seemed to please almost everyone in Washington. The Democratic-led Congress gave the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization a billion dollars less than Aspin requested; nonetheless, there was substantial bipartisan support for the development of theater missile defenses. The Republican right was quiescent, and for two years the only audible complaint about the program came from the arms-control community.
Long before the Gulf War, the Army, the Navy and the Air Force had begun to develop their own theater missile defenses. The Army and the Navy were both working on two types of systems: a point, or "lower-tier," defense to intercept short-range missiles in the lower regions of the atmosphere, and an "upper-tier" defense to intercept missiles of greater ranges high in the atmosphere. The Air Force was working on an array of programs, including a boost-phase laser intercept to be carried on a piloted aircraft. From the plethora of competing programs the BMDO chose to push three towards deployment: two "lower-tier" systems, the Army's upgraded Patriot (known as PAC-3), the Navy's Aegis program and one "upper-tier" system the Army's Theater High Altitude Area Defense, known as THAAD.
Unlike most of the shorter-range systems, THAAD was a new program; it drew
on concepts developed in the 1980s for the SDI's High Endoatmospheric Defense
Interceptor (HEDI) and was designed to intercept missiles at altitudes in
excess of forty kilometers and to protect an area a few hundred kilometers
in diameter.49 Since its planned capabilities
would cross the agreed demarcation line between "theater" and "strategic"
defenses, the Clinton administration, which had repudiated the "broad"
interpretation of the ABM Treaty, decided to ask the Russians for a
"clarification" of the treaty that would establish the demarcation line high
enough so that THAAD and all the other upper-tier systems could be tested
and deployed.50 The Arms Control Association
criticized both the building of an interceptor that could be used as a part
of a national missile-defense system and the administration's attempt to
pressure the Russians into accepting a substantial modification of the ABM
Treaty, particularly when, in a period of nationalist reaction, the Russian
parliament was refusing to ratify SALT II.51
In the 1994 congressional elections the Republicans, led by the right made a surprise sweep through both houses of Congress, winning the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. The comfortable majorities the Democrats had held in both houses since 1986 now belonged to the Republicans. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina became the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina the chair of the Armed Services Committee. In the House, Speaker Newt Gingrich presided over a large freshman class whose members were far to the right of most Republicans elected in previous years. Flushed with success, Gingrich made his pre-election manifesto, the Contract with America a platform for Republicans. Among the provisions of the contract was a directive to the administration to deploy "a highly effective defense" of the United States at the earliest practical date." Frank Gaffney had persuaded Gingrich to include the directive on the grounds that there was latent political support for it.52 The result was another fierce partisan battle over the deployment of national missile defenses.
By the end of 1995 the Republicans had succeeded in passing legislation mandating the development of a multi-site ground-based national missile-defense system to be deployed by 2003. President Clinton vetoed the legislation, but he signed an appropriations bill that gave him $745 million for national missile defenses -- or more than double what the Pentagon had asked for.53
The next year was a presidential election year, and the Gingrich Republicans were in a triumphal mode. Senator Dole, the leading Republican candidate, entered into the spirit of the moment to the extent of cosponsoring a Gingrich bill entitled the Defend America Act. The bill called for the deployment of a "highly effective" national defense against limited attacks by the end of the year 2003; further, it specified a mix of ground- and space-based systems and directed that this system be "augmented over time to provide a layered defense against larger and more sophisticated ballistic missile threats as they emerge." l he layers were to be composed of ground-based missile interceptors, sea-based interceptors, space-based kinetic-energy weapons and space-based directed-energy systems: the whole Star Wars extravaganza. The House Republicans had somehow lost track of the expense of such undertakings, and when the Congressional Budget Office estimated the deployment would cost either thirty-one or sixty billion dollars, the Defend America Act was withdrawn.54
In the meantime Senator Dole ran on the issue of deploying national missile defenses. He had never displayed much enthusiasm for deployment in the past, but, according to pundits, the issue would clearly differentiate him from Clinton without being one of those Gingrich issues, such as outlawing abortion or repealing the gun-control laws, that would alienate two-thirds of the voters. More important, perhaps, the Gingrichites had made it a loyalty test for Republicans in Congress. As Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador, put it, "It's not so much a matter of [Dole's] choosing the issue. He's really reflecting a widespread, deeply felt concern in the Republican community. It's the defense issue on which there is the greatest conviction among those Republicans who think about national security matters."55
In practice, the deeply felt concern seemed to be confined to Washington, for with the Cold War over and no international crisis at hand the public did not fear a ballistic missile attack enough to pay attention to the issue. In numerous polls and focus groups, including a half-dozen conducted by Frank Gaffney and his Coalition to Defend America, voters expressed puzzlement that anyone would bring up such a matter. When informed that the U.S. had no defense against ballistic missiles, they manifested disbelief. In one Gaffney-sponsored focus group, two women protested they had seen Patriot missiles shooting down Iraqi Scuds on TV, and one man, an auto engineer, said, "You couldn't pay me enough to believe you. After all, you see it in the movies."56 Other participants responded much as they, or their parents, had in the days before SDI: they assumed "defense," as in "the Defense Department," meant defense. When persuaded that there was no national ABM system and told that a Chinese rocket could land on an American city, they tended to react positively to the idea of a defense -- at least until told how much it would cost.57
Dole soldiered on with the issue. "The United States has no defense -- and I repeat -- no defense against ballistic missiles," he kept repeating. But in vain. "National security issues are not on people's screens at all," one foreign-policy polling expert said. "When you do finally scratch around for a threat, people see terrorism, not ballistic missiles as the problem."58
Clinton and the congressional Democrats, however, took the Republican challenge on missile defenses seriously enough to adopt a compromise plan for deployment known as "three-plus-three." The administration agreed to spend three years designing and testing a system that could be fielded in another three years if the go-ahead was given. The system, which in theory could be deployed by 2003, would initially consist of twenty ground-based interceptors capable of blocking the few missiles that might be launched intentionally by "rogue states," or accidentally by Russia or China. Officials pointed out that no Third World country yet had a missile capable of hitting the United States, and, according to U.S. intelligence analysts, none was likely to get one for a decade or more. In any case, they argued, the U.S. would have at least three years' warning of any deployment so the U.S. could afford to hold off on building a system while it improved the design. According to Senator Levin, who helped forge the compromise the deployment decision would depend not only on the threat but on the effectiveness of the system, its cost and its compliance with the ABM Treaty.59
In the meantime the Clinton administration continued to press for a "clarification" of the ABM Treaty to accommodate THAAD and other planned "upper-tier" theater missile-defense systems. The Russians resisted, but in 1997, with their economy in need of a bail-out, they agreed to something much less than the U.S. had asked. In effect the agreement, signed in September, exempted THAAD but not the other, faster, upper-tier systems from the treaty. The agreement infuriated the Helms-Gingrich Republicans, who complained that it prohibited the Navy and Air Force systems and did not permit an effective ground-based national missile-defense system or defenses in space. Calling for an abrogation of the ABM Treaty, they mustered enough votes to block the administration from submitting the agreement to the Senate for approval.60
All this diplomatic and political pulling and hauling had, however, remarkably little to do with the anti-missile defense program. For one thing the Clinton administration had for years been operating as if its THAAD testing was compliant with the ABM Treaty. For another, the THAAD interceptor had failed to hit its target in all four of its tests. "This is really rocket science," Lieutenant General Lester Lyles, the director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said apologetically in a congressional hearing that spring.61
In July 1998 a bipartisan commission established by the Congress to assess the ballistic-missile threat to the United States reported that "rogue states," such as Iran and North Korea, had the capacity to develop and deploy long-range ballistic missiles "with little or no warning" in about five years' time. The report contradicted the official CIA assessment that no small, hostile country, with the possible exception of North Korea, could field an ICBM before 2010. The commission, headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, secretary of defense in the Ford administration, had reviewed U.S. intelligence and concluded that nations such as Iran and Iraq had obtained sensitive missile technologies with the help of loosened export controls among industrialized nations and the assistance of other rogue states. In addition, the panel reported, the suspect countries had become so adept at concealing their missile programs that it was difficult for Western analysts to gauge the extent of their progress.62
The CIA reaffirmed its previous assessment, but its position was undermined when, in August, North Korea surprised U.S. analysts by test-firing a three-stage ballistic missile out over the Pacific. The rocket, whose purpose was ostensibly to launch satellites, fizzled in space, but it indicated that North Korea might develop a weapon capable of reaching Alaska and parts of Hawaii in the next few years.63 In September all fifty-five Senate Republicans voted for a bill introduced by Senator Thad Cochran (Republican of Mississippi) calling for the deployment of a national missile-defense system as soon as technologically possible. "There could very well be a missile heading in our direction as we speak," Senator James M. Inhofe (Republican of Oklahoma) said during the debate. Only the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats stopped the passage of the bill.64
By that time THAAD -- the only long-range anti-missile system being tested -- had failed to hit its target for the fifth time and was four years behind schedule. In February an outside panel of experts headed by Larry D. Welch, a former Air Force chief of staff, had issued a blistering report on the program, finding failures rooted in poor design and fabrication, lax management and lack of rigorous government oversight. The main point the report made was that the test schedules had been so compressed that the program became "a rush to failure."65
However, the Democrats were once again on the defensive. In December, House Republicans voted to impeach President Clinton on various charges associated with his attempt to cover up an affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. In January 1999 Republicans from the House Judiciary Committee took their impeachment case to the Senate for a trial of the President.
On January 20 the Clinton administration pledged an additional $6.6 billion over five years for the deployment of a national missile-defense system. William Cohen, the former senator, who had become secretary of defense in 1996, cited the threat of a ballistic-missile attack from rogue nations and pointed in particular to the North Korean missile test. "We affirm that there is a threat and the threat is growing," he said. According to Pentagon officials, the system of ground-based interceptors probably could not be fielded until 2005, two years later than originally predicted, but a deployment review would be made in June 2000. The system, which would initially consist of twenty interceptors, might be sited in Alaska or North Dakota. According to Cohen, it had not yet been determined whether the whole U.S could be defended from a single site, but if not, two or more sites would be built and more interceptors added. Cohen said that the administration would talk to the Russians about amending the ABM Treaty, but that if Russia refused the U.S. would abandon the treaty and build the anti-missile system anyway.66
Senator Thad Cochran expressed satisfaction with Secretary Cohen's statements but reintroduced his bill requiring the Pentagon to deploy a national anti-missile system "as soon as it is technologically possible."67 Republicans in the House introduced a bill that did not fuss around with technical feasibility but simply stated, "It is the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense."68
In mid-March, after the Senate Democrats had blocked the Republican efforts to remove President Clinton from office, the Senate took up the Cochran bill with amendments added by the Democrats stating that money for the system had to go through the regular appropriations process and that the system had to be consistent with policies to reduce Russia's arsenal. The Democratic leaders told Clinton's aides that this was the best they could do and that they probably could not muster the votes necessary to sustain a veto. I'he administration then dropped its objections, and the bill was passed by a vote of ninety-seven to three. According to White House officials, the administration's support for the bill would help to defuse a potent political issue for the Republicans in the campaign of 2000.69 The prospect of an American ABM deployment immediately raised a number of diplomatic and arms-control issues.
Shortly after the funding decision was taken in January, the President and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright attempted to reassure Yeltsin and other Russian officials that the system slated for deployment was to deal merely with threats from rogue states; Albright proposed that the two sides begin talks on altering the ABM Treaty. The initial Russian reaction was not reassuring. A top Russian general accused the U.S. of exaggerating the threat from rogue states and of violating its treaty commitments, the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling the deployment plan "a serious threat to the whole process of nuclear arms control as well as strategic stability."70 In June, Clinton offered to resume the dialogue on a START III treaty to supersede the still-unratified START II in combination with talks on the ABM Treaty. Yeltsin, who wanted a new START treaty because his government could not afford to maintain the launchers for the three thousand single strategic warheads each side was allowed to keep under START II, agreed to listen to American proposals for amending the ABM Treaty, but by November Russia had not budged on the issue. "We aren't negotiating any kind of amendments to the ABM [Treaty]," a foreign ministry spokesman said. "There can be no compromise on this issue," the deputy chief of the Russian General Staff told reporters.71
Possibly the Russian leadership would eventually consent to amending the treaty, but the problem for Russia was how to retain its deterrent when its fleets of submarines, missiles and bombers were aging, and when it could not afford to modernize them. According to administration sources, Russia had developed only one new ICBM system and could afford to field forty or fifty copies of it per year. But if it relied merely on this new system, it would -- in theory -- fall behind the deployments of U.S. ABM systems and lose its deterrent. On the other hand, if it extended the life cycle of its older weapons, these weapons would become less and less safe. One possible solution under discussion within the Russian General Staff was for Russia to MIRV its launchers. The solution would contradict the logic of arms control since the late 1980s, doom Start II and, unless the U.S. went along, it would preclude a Start III accord.72
Not only Russia but China regarded the proposed deployments as a threat. After the March votes in the Congress, Chinese leaders expressed "grave concern" about upsetting the "global strategic balance." China also warned the U.S. against deploying a theater missile defense in Taiwan, saying that this would be a military provocation that would threaten security throughout the Asia-Pacific region.73 China had never built more than a couple of dozen ICBMs in the past, but, to retain its small strategic deterrent, it might begin an arms race with the American ABM systems. A Chinese test-launch of a new, mobile, ICBM that year showed that China was entirely capable of building more strategic missiles, and statements from Chinese spokesmen suggested that was what its government would do.74
America's NATO allies also opposed the American anti-missile deployment and any amendment of the ABM Treaty. What worried the Europeans, along with the Chinese, the Russians and others, was that in mounting missile defenses the United States would undermine the entire system of treaties designed to restrict and control nuclear weapons, among them the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the U.S. Senate had voted not to ratify in October, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the START accords. If Russia did not proceed with disarmament, European security would again be threatened. And if China deployed more ballistic missiles, how could India or Pakistan be persuaded to restrict their nuclear programs? The ABM Treaty, which many in Washington considered irrelevant after the end of the Cold War, appeared to many Europeans as a bulwark against a new nuclear arms race.75
Proponents of missile defenses in Congress clearly believed arms control to be less important than building defenses and countering the potential threat from small "rogue states." Why a country such as North Korea or Iran would attack the U.S. with an ICBM when the U.S. could retaliate by destroying the country, and whether there weren't ways to persuade such countries not to develop ICBMs and nuclear weapons, were questions the proponents never seemed to consider. Nor did they seem to consider the technical obstacles to building a national missile defense.
Between 1983 and the fall of 1999 the U.S. had spent sixty billion dollars on anti-missile research, and though technical progress had been made in a number of areas, there was still no capable interceptor on the horizon. In that period the U.S. had conducted nineteen intercept tests outside, or at the upper edges, of the atmosphere, and in fourteen of them the interceptor had missed its target. Of the five successful intercepts, three of them were in 1999: after five failures, the THAAD had hit its target in its sixth and seventh tests, and the kill vehicle for the national missile-defense system had made a hit on its first test.76 As these successes suggested, the BMDO and its contractors were learning how to hit a bullet with a bullet in space. Whether they could do it every time was another issue, for everything in the complex system of radars and battle-management software, as well as the rocket and the kill vehicle, had to work perfectly. But even if they could, hitting a target on a test range was only the first step on the way to the development of a capable ABM system. In the view of many expert observers, that next step was much longer than the first one.77 As Theodore Postol and others pointed out, the Patriot missile had a perfect test record before the Persian Gulf War, yet it failed in most, or all, of its attempts to destroy Iraqi Scud missiles.78 Then, unlike the Patriot, a national missile-defense system would have to cope with counter-measures that any country capable of building an ICBM could take to defeat it, and it would have to work the first time it was used.79
Common sense would, of course, suggest that if the national interceptor system could not reliably and consistently hit incoming warheads, it would not be deployed. Yet, as history has shown, big military programs are rarely canceled once Congress and the contractors are on board, and, in combination with the Clinton administration's pledge to fund the development of the system, the two congressional votes in the spring of 1999 for the first time convinced several long-term observers of the program that some form of national ABM system would be built in the coming years. "The political momentum is probably irresistible,"John Pike said. Joseph Cirincione, a senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, also felt that a deployment had become virtually inevitable. "This system is going to be built," he told one reporter. Politics and the politics of defense procurement will see to that."80
Indeed, by November Clinton-administration officials were talking about an initial deployment of two hundred interceptors in Alaska in 2005, a hundred more in a second site by the end of the decade.81 They were hoping to make a formal decision on the plan in June 2000 -- just a few weeks before the Democratic convention -- and begin work that summer, with the official ground-breaking, which would breach the ABM Treaty, in the spring of 2001. However, by June only three of the nineteen scheduled tests on the interceptor could be completed, and because some of the technology for the system had not been developed yet, the tests would have to be made with jury-rigged rockets. Back in January Secretary Cohen had offered no certainty of a full deployment by 2005, and in the fall the panel of defense experts which had called the THAAD "a rush to failure" said the same of the national missile-defense system.82 These were the usual warning signals. Yet all major candidates for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations were promising to build a national anti-missile system, and none were asking whether it was worthwhile to renegotiate or to break out of the ABM Treaty without the assurance that a capable interceptor could be built.
One of the curious things about the decisions on the national ABM system taken in 1999 was that there was no public pressure on the administration or Congress to make them. Indeed, there had been so little public discussion of the ABM program for the past several years that many consistent readers of the major newspapers did not know that the anti-missile program was still extant, much less that the U.S. was nearing a deployment decision. Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington seemed to assume that the public would favor such a system. Or, rather, they seemed to assume that, if asked whether America should be defended, the public would say yes. Possibly they were right. But in 1996 Bob Dole had failed to make missile defenses a campaign issue, and in 1999 Americans were no more fearful of a ballistic missile attack than they had been three years earlier. In September, Senator Mitch McConnell, the chairman of the Republican senatorial fund-raising committee, sent out a letter to thousands of potential donors asking for "a generous emergency gift of $25 or more" to help Senate Republicans "do what President Clinton will not" and defend the United States from the threat of a nuclear attack by North Korea. The response to this unprecedented appeal was apparently disappointing.83
What this suggested was that the pressures to deploy were far more ideological than political -- or, as ABM proponents might put it, deployment was a matter of principle. Why principle should dictate the deployment of a system that might not work would seem to be the question, but many proponents did not care if the initial deployment worked well or not. A Heritage Foundation "backgrounder" of March 23, 1998, for example, declared, "If the United States is to be defended against the growing missile threat," Congress must "mandate the deployment of a national missile defense by a certain date" -- making no mention of feasibility.84 But then for many Republicans in Washington the initial deployment was not an end in itself. In their view the "thin" defense would have to be thickened as time went on. "It's better than having nothing," Republican Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania said of the Clinton program, but "we're probably going to have to use space-based assets."85 As always for the Republican right, the goal was weapons in space -- that is, weapons which, if they materialized, could contribute to an offense, as well as provide a defense for the United States.
_______________________________
Notes
1. NYT, 1/21/99.
2. Bruce W. MacDonald, "SDI -- Lost in Space," Arms Control Today, September 1989 [hereafter MacDonald, 1989], p. 25, for Scowcroft; Fred Barnes, "Pebbles Go Bam-Bam," New Republic April 17, 1989, pp. 12-15; William J. Broad, Tellers War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 260.
In a debate with Jack Kemp in February 1988 Bush said, "Premature deployment of something that isn't totally effective would do nothing but cause the Soviets to break out of the ABM treaty and overwhelm what we've got." Yet in Chicago on August 22 he declared, "I am committed to the deployment of SDI as soon as feasible, and will determine the exact architecture of the system in my first term.... As president, I will not leave America defenseless against ballistic missiles." In an interview with a New York Times reporter three days later he pulled back from this statement somewhat, saying that full deployment would be very expensive and any decision would depend on further research. However, he said, "There are new technologies being looked at that would make it quite economical to deploy a major SDI." (Fred Barnes, "Pebbles Go Bam-Bam," p. 14.)
3. NYT, 1/27/89.
4. Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), pp. 117-18, for Bush statement; MacDonald, 1989, for Cheney; LAT, 9/7/89.
Vice-President Quayle said that Reagan "talked about this impenetrable shield that was going to be completely leak-proof" but that was "political jargon" -- acceptable as such, but unrealistic in terms of the capability of a strategic-defense system.
5. MacDonald, 1989, pp. 25-26; NYT, 4/25/89.
6. NYT, 4/19/89, 6/1/89; WP, 9/7/89; MacDonald, 1989, p.23.
In February 1990 Crowe, then retired, recommended funding of three billion dollars for fiscal 1991.
7. NYT, 4/24/89; WP, 7/19/90.
8. Lieutenant General James A. Abrahamson, Memorandum for the Deputy Secretary of Defense, "End of Tour" Report, February 9, 1989.
Abrahamson's memo was declassified and distributed to the press by the Center for Peace and Freedom, a pro-SDI group associated with the Heritage Foundation (WP, 3/18/89).
9. Broad, Tellers War, pp.251-55.
10. Ibid., p. 266; WP, 4/26/89.
Brilliant Pebbles received eighteen million dollars in fiscal 1988; the funding was increased to forty-six million in fiscal 1989 -- but even that sum made it a relatively low-priority project.
11. Barnes, "Pebbles Go Bam-Bam," pp. 14-15.
12. WP, 4/26/89; Broad, Tellers War, p. 262; MacDonald 1989, pp. 24-25.
13. Bruce W. MacDonald, "Falling Star: SDI's Troubled Seventh Year," Arms Control Today, September 1990 [hereafter MacDonald, 1990], pp. 9-10; Broad, Tellers War, p. 266.
The funding request for Brilliant Pebbles went from $175 million in 1990 to $392 million in 1991.
14. R.Jeffrey Smith in WP, 2/18/90.
In 1989 the Defense Science Board and JASON, a group of independent scientists regularly consulted by the Pentagon, reviewed the Brilliant Pebbles design. The SDIO portrayed both studies as unqualified endorsements, when in fact the DSB had called the design incomplete and recommended against replacing the older interceptor concept, and JASON concluded that Brilliant Pebbles could not be assembled with off-the-shelf technology and expressed no confidence that the technical problems could be overcome.
15. In September 1989 Shevardnadze formally uncoupled START from any agreement on defense and space provided both sides continued to comply with the ABM Treaty. Shevardnadze wanted an explicit provision in START permitting either side to withdraw from it if the other side violated or withdrew from the ABM Treaty, but the Bush administration opposed the provision.
16. WP, 2/8/90.
17. R. Jeffrey Smith in WP, 2/18/90.
18. MacDonald, 1990, pp. 7-8.
19. Ibid.
Robert Gates, now CIA director, repeatedly told Congress that U.S. intelligence experts "do not believe there is a concern about any unauthorized launch of any of the Soviet strategic or tactical systems" and that no additional countries would be able to threaten the U.S. with ballistic missiles "for at least a decade." (Gerard C. Smith, "Two Decades Later: The ABM Treaty in a Changed World," Arms Control Today, May 1992, p. 4.)
20. WSJ, 8/6/90; NYT, 8/5/90; WP, 8/5/90, 8/6/90; NYT, 10/23/90.
The Democrats cut the funding back to $2.9 billion for fiscal 1991.
21. WP, 1/13/91.
In addition, Cooper budgeted some funds for work on defenses against short- and medium-range missiles.
22. WP, 1/31/91, 2/15/91; Seymour Hersh, "Missile Wars," New Yorker, September 26, 1994, p. 88.
23. Jeffrey Denny, "Star Struck," Common Cause Magazine, March-April 1991 for quotes; see also WSJ, 1/23/91, for editorial and piece by Oliver North; Newsweek, February 4, 1991, for piece by Kenneth Adelman.
24. WP, 1/31/91, for Bush quotes; Denny, "Star Struck"; USA Today, February 28, 1991, for last quote.
25. Helen Dewar in WP, 3/14/91, 3/15/91.
The amended resolution stated that, if the Soviets would not agree to space-based systems in two years, the President should immediately determine whether the United States should continue to adhere to the treaty.
On behalf of the President, Scowcroft wrote Warner, "I believe it [the resolution] will send an unmistakable signal of our determination to proceed with ballistic missile defenses that enhance our national security." (WP, 3/14/91.)
26. NYT, 7/18/91; Mary McGrory in WP, 7/23/91.
27. Harold Brown in WP, 3/27/91; Gelb in NYT, 1/27/91; Charles E. Bennett in WP, 2/3/91; see also WP, 2/21/91.
28. Leslie Gelb in NYT 1/27/91, for Army quote.
The day after Bush's State of the Union speech, the White House press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, said, "The Patriot is a piece of technology that emerged from the SDI program in the sense that -- well, some of the research that went into it was, and some of the concepts . . . emerged from that program." The difficulty Fitzwater had with this sentence said a great deal. (Smith in WP, 1/31/91.)
A few days after the speech, the New York Times ran an editorial headed, "Patriots Work, Star Wars Won't" (2/3/91).
29. The exceptions included George Will, who, contradicting Sam Donaldson, opined, "When you see a Patriot shooting down an incoming missile, you are seeing strategic defense, and you are seeing Star Wars technology" (Denny, "Star Struck"). Kenneth Adelman wrote in Newsweek, "The Patriot is a sort of SDI Jr, based on the principles of the larger model" (2/4/91).
30. Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 498; Fred Barnes, "Brilliant Pebble," New Republic, April 1, 1991; WP, 12/7/90, 12/16/90.
All but ten Democratic senators voted nay.
31. Mary McGrory in WP, 7/23/91; WP, 3/15/91.
Nunn's defeat of the Warner resolution was treated by journalists as a political comeback for the chair of the Armed Services Committee, and Nunn did not deny it.
32. START I was signed at the summit, July 30-31; it brought the warhead totals down to where they were when the START negotiations began in 1982. (Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations at the End of the Cold War [Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994], p. 466.)
The Soviets specified abrogation or a "material breach" of the treaty (Matthew Bunn, "The ABM Talks: The More Things Change. . . ," Arms Control Today, September 1992).
33. NYT, 8/4/91; Statesman Journal, January 19, 1992; NYT, 11/18/91.
34. NYT, 5/28/92.
35. WSJ editorial, 1/23/91; George Melleon in WSJ, 2/10/92; WP, 4/25/91; WP, 3/11/92.
36. NYT, 6/4/92, 6/6/92; NYT,1/30/91, for ERIS test description.
37. NYT, 6/2/92, for ERIS test; NYT, 6/4/92, 4/10/92, 6/6/92, 5/21/92, 6/2/92.
In April, Cooper said that deployment by 1996 would mean the engineers would have to manufacture several parts of the system before prototype models were fully tested. Still, he said, "Early deployment is not a big risk." On May 20 he acknowledged that there might be delays and cost overruns, but said the risk of fielding the system by 1997 was "acceptable" given "the urgency related to our uncertainty in predicting when we might actually be threatened with ballistic missile attack." The sentence required some parsing (NYT,4/10/92, 5/21/92).
38. NYT, 6/2/92.
39. NYT, 6/6/92, 11/26/92.
Atwood said that he and Cooper had discussed the matter and agreed that the development process had to square with the Pentagon's rules for acquisitions (NYT, 6/6/92).
40. R. Jeffrey Smith in WP, 9/16/92; William Broad in NYT, 5/24/99; Dr. George N. Lewis, "Chronology of Missile Defense Tests," unpublished paper for Security Studies Program, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
In the ERIS test two decoys were tethered to each side of the dummy warhead and the interceptor's computer had been programmed to pick out the target in the middle. About one second before impact the kill vehicle deployed an inflatable octagonal kill-enhancement device. The second ERIS test was aborted, and in the third one ERIS failed to hit its target.
41. NYT, 8/18/93, 7/23/94.
42. NYT, 4/10/92.
43. WP, 9/30/92; Seymour Hersh, "Missile Wars," New Yorker, September 26, 1994, pp. 86-99.
According to the GAO, the 158 Patriot missiles fired hit no more than four of the forty-five Scuds they were aimed at. There was therefore some evidence to support the position of the chief American critic of the program, Theodore Postol, that the Patriots had done more harm than good because they added to the number of missiles that fell on Israel.
44. Oregonian, 8/4/92.
Daniel O. Graham thought Teller and Wood had an excellent idea. "What Brilliant Pebbles would give you," he said, "is control of access to space."
45. NYT, 1/15/93.
46. NYT, 12/30/92.
47. WP, 5/14/93.
"I don't see an awful lot of change," Daniel O. Graham said. "They hope to camouflage this mismanaged mishmash with a new name,"John Conyers charged (WP, 5/14/93).
Senator Malcolm Wallop said the reorganization seemed a good idea, and he hoped it meant a transition from research to acquisitions (NYT, 5/14/93, and see AP, 5/16/93).
48. WP, 9/5/95.
Fifteen Third World countries had ballistic missiles, but very few of them could be characterized as "rogue states."
49. John Pike, "Theatre Missile Defense Programs: Status and Prospects," Arms Control Today, May 1992, p. 13; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept.-Oct. 1995, p. 50.
50. Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr, "The Theater Missile Defense Threat to U.S. Security," Arms Control Today, September, 1994, pp. 5-6.
The agreement when the ABM Treaty was signed was that the treaty banned the testing of (fixed land-based) interceptors against reentry vehicles traveling more than two kilometers per second or at altitudes above forty kilometers.
In 1993 the U.S. proposed that interceptors be permitted provided that they did not have a "demonstrated" or tested capability against a reentry vehicle traveling at more than five kilometers a second.
The Clinton administration initially planned to submit the proposed modification to the Standing Consultative Commission, the body created to deal with ABM Treaty disputes, and treat it as a technical change. Clinton was later persuaded to treat it as a substantive change that would require the approval of the Senate.
Russian negotiators initially accepted a U.S. proposal to increase the acceptable target speed for testing anti-missile systems to five kilometers -- provided that the interceptor's velocity be limited to three kilometers a second. They did not accept the U.S. proposal to distinguish between theater and strategic ABMs on the basis of the "demonstrated" capability of a system because it would prevent them from challenging those systems that had an inherent capability to counter strategic missiles but had not been tested against them. (Ibid.)
51. Pike, "Missile Defense Programs"; Mandelsohn and Rhinelander, "Shooting Down."
The Communist deputies argued, among other things, that the U.S. would take advantage of further strategic nuclear cutbacks to end the ABM Treaty and build an effective ABM system.
52. WSJ, 4/4/96.
53. WP, 5/9/95, 9/5/95, 9/7/95; NYT, 8/4/95, 12/29/95.
54. Senator J. James Exon in Omaha World Herald, 8/6/96, for partial text of bill; Scripps-Howard News Service, 8/4/96; AP, 6/6/96; WP, 6/5/96.
55. WP, 5/3/96, 7/28/96.
56. WP, 7/28/96.
57. WP,9/5/95.
Clinton took the position that the Republican plan would waste billions and violate the ABM Treaty, but he did not have to spend much time on the issue.
58. WP, 7/28/96; Holgar Jensen in Rocky Mountain News, 12/3/96.
Dole's polls told him that three in ten Americans supported his Defend America Act. But doubtless the pollsters had to explain what this was.
59. Bradley Graham in WP, 4/27/98.
60. NYT, 9/27/97;Lisbeth Gronlund, "ABM: Just Kicking the Can," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 1988.
The accord permitted interceptors having a velocity of less than three kilometers per second as long as they were not tested against targets that had speeds of more than five kilometers. This was essentially the Russian going-in position.
The accord included a statement on higher-speed systems. It did not specify what systems are permitted or prohibited but merely noted that any permitted high-speed system must adhere to the same testing restriction as low-speed systems.
The accord also laid down three principles in regard to deployment: the interceptors may not be deployed for use against other treaty partners, they may not pose "a realistic threat to the strategic nuclear force" of a treaty partner, and the scale of the deployment must be consistent in number and geographic scope with the theater missile threat.
In addition the accord specified that Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan would succeed the Soviet Union as parties to the treaty.
61. Ibid.; NYT, 3/7/97; Tim Weiner in NYT, 5/18/97.
In May 1997 Paul Kaminski, the undersecretary of defense in charge of weapons procurements, told Congress the Pentagon's efforts to create a hit-to-kill system had failed in 70 percent of the tests.
62. NYT, 7/16/98; Seattle Times, 5/1/98.
The CIA had cast doubt on its own ability to forecast missile technologies.
63. WP,E 1/21/99; LAT, 1/21/99.
64. NYT, 9/10/98.
65. William Broad in NYT, 5/24/99.
66. LAT, 1/21/99, for quote; WP, 1/21/99; NYT, 1/21/99; Dow-Jones News Service, 1/20/99; WSJ, 1/21/99; Walter Pincus in WP, 1/22/99; U.S. Department of Defense, Annual Report by the Director: Operational Testing and Evaluation, FY 1998.
According to Cohen and the Director of OT&E, the schedule of deployment in 2005 was still so compressed that there was a risk of failure.
67. WSJ, 1/21 /99.
68. Robert L. Park, Op Ed, in NYT, 2/15/99.
69. NYT, 3/17/99, 3/18/99, 3/19/99, 5/21/99.
In May the House passed the same bill as the Senate, 345 to 71.
70. NYT, l /22/99, 1/25/99; editorial, in WSJ, 3/19/99.
71. WP, 6/22/99; NYT, 10/17/99, 10/21/99 for quotes.
Russian officials said they had begun to consult with China about possible political and military cooperation in the event the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty.
72. Walter Pincus in WP, l/22/99; NYT, 10/21/99.
Allowing the Soviets to MIRV their launchers was discussed in the Pentagon. (Walter Pincus in WP, /22/99 )
Many Republicans in Congress opposed a START III treaty.
73. Editorial, in WSJ, 3/19/99; NYT, 3/24/99.
74. NYT, 10/17/99, 11/25/99
75. NYT, 10/21/99, l l/20/99
In early November, Russia sponsored a UN resolution opposing any missile defense system that would undermine the ABM Treaty. The resolution passed by a committee vote of 54 to 7, with all of the members of the European Union either voting with Russia or abstaining (NYT, 11/6/99).
76. Lewis, "Chronology"; NYT, 10/4/99.
77. NYT, 5/18/97; George N. Lewis, Theodore A. Postol and John Pike, "Why National Missile Defense Won't Work," Scientific American, August 1999.
"We can make a bullet hit a bullet," Paul Kaminsky, the undersecretary of defense in charge of weapons procurements said in 1997. "We can demonstrate that under ideal conditions. The next step is to move from hitting, not occasionally, but to hit routinely under stressful operating conditions" (NYT, 5/18/97).
John Pike, director of the Space Policy Project of the Federation of American Scientists, said, "The odds are pretty slim that they're going to be able to consistently and reliably hit every missile, and that's what's required when you are defending against a nuclear-armed missile. There is no margin for error, so if even the smallest thing goes wrong, it fails" (NYT, 3/30/99).
78. Lewis et al., "Why National Missile Defense Won't Work," p. 39.
79. Ibid., p. 40.
ABM proponents often dismissed counter-measures on the grounds that states such as North Korea were not technically sophisticated enough to mount them. Critics, however, argued that there were numerous counter-measures, some of them quite simple, that would defeat the current interceptor. According to Richard Garwin and others, one of them was wrapping a warhead in a Mylar balloon and releasing a lot of similar balloons along with it (WSJ, 3/19/99).
80. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 3/28/99 (for Pike quote); WSJ, 3/19/99 (for Cirincione quote). See also NYT, 3/18/99.
81. WSJ, 11/2/99.
82. James Lindsay and Michael O'Hanlon in NYT, 11/26/99.
83. NYT, 9/4/99. By December the Clinton administration had persuaded North Korea not to carry out a second test of its long-range missile (NYT, 12/8/99).
84. Heritage Foundation "Backgrounder" No. 1166.
Similarly, the House vote in March 1999 had made no mention of technical feasibility.
85. WSJ, 3/19/99; Peter Maass, "Get Ready, Here Comes the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle," NYT Magazine, September 26, 1999, p. 81.
Later that year Representative Weldon said, "Space is going to become a more critical part [of the NMD program]. Space-based sensing, space-based queing and space-based assets. It is a fact that we are going to have to deal with. We might as well be honest about that. In the end, the most capable response will come from outer space." (Ibid.)
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