Accessory to War
Page 28
For twenty years the Soviet Union has been accumulating enormous military might. They didn’t stop when their forces exceeded all requirements of a legitimate defensive capability. And they haven’t stopped now. During the past decade and a half, the Soviets have built up a massive arsenal of new strategic nuclear weapons—weapons that can strike directly at the United States.
With US military spending overdue for a major boost, the president was publicly announcing a new initiative “to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive.” He first posed a rhetorical question: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge . . . that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” He then called for “the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”29
In its report on the speech, the New York Times relayed statements from White House officials who said that “the new program might involve lasers, microwave devices, particle beams and projectile beams”—all of which, though still “in a very early stage of development,” would be capable “in theory” of being “directed from satellites, airplanes or land-based installations to shoot down missiles in the air.”30
The administration’s vision of missile defense was formally called the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, but given the release of the third film in the Star Wars trilogy two months after Reagan’s speech, a colloquial rename was irresistible, and SDI was dubbed Star Wars. Its primary goal was to destroy a nuclear-tipped ICBM in the course of its swift journey in our direction, preferably soon after launch. It was to be a matter of interception: knocking out the other side’s missile well before it reached our side and knocked us out.
That’s quite a technical challenge, often and accurately described as a bullet hitting a bullet. Richard L. Garwin, a renowned physicist whose military work has ranged from the hydrogen bomb to spy satellites, warned that if the missile carried a hundred targeted bomblets rather than just one big bomb, an interception during the terminal phase (the release of all the bomblets) would fail. A successful interception could be done earlier, he added—up to about four minutes into the boost phase—if and only if the interceptor issued from somewhere nearby.31 Burton Richter, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physics, declared, “The intercept-in-space, hit-to-kill system now under development is the most technically challenging of the possible alternatives. . . . The proposed system is not ready to graduate from development to deployment, and probably never will be.”32 Journalists echoed the skepticism. In a piece about one SDI concept, Brilliant Pebbles—tens of thousands of small, smart orbiting rockets that would hurl ten-pound projectiles at incoming enemy ICBMs, fatally puncturing them—John M. Broder, then at the Los Angeles Times, wrote, “Any space-based anti-missile system confronts a difficult technological task—to identify ballistic missiles in the very early stages of flight, to pick out the rocket body from its large plume of fire, to track and then home in on the target before the weapons-carrying ‘bus’ separates and releases the nuclear warheads.”33
Nevertheless, beginning in the 1950s, while Ronald Reagan was still a Hollywood actor, both the USA and the USSR conducted considerable R & D on missile defense, pausing briefly in acquiescence to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty but picking up again within a few years. During the decade that followed Reagan’s announcement, Congress put $30 billion into the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. In 1993, describing how well that money was spent, the organization’s director, General James A. Abrahamson, said it had yielded “major hardware assembly and field experiments necessary to prove available technologies can be integrated together to operate as an effective defensive system in a hostile and reactive environment” and had caused “a sea change in our negotiations with the former Soviet Union and, by informed and authoritative accounts, the end of the Cold War.” Indeed, claimed he, the evaporation of the need for Cold War spending had “more than repaid the $30-billion investment of the past decade in just a couple of years.”34
Meanwhile, large quantities of sober analysis, concerned commentary, damning survey results, and carefully worded petitions—much of it issuing from Nobel laureates and other unassailable experts such as Richard Garwin and Carl Sagan, who felt obliged to demolish Star Wars’ precepts, politics, and prospects—were rapidly accumulating. Possibly swayed by the scale of the opposition, Congress periodically reduced SDI funding and attached strings to it. The Pentagon responded by classifying information on the costs of SDI.35
Problem is, when more than 90 percent of the 450 physicists, engineers, and mathematicians in the National Academy of Sciences who answer a 1986 Cornell University questionnaire on SDI say that the technology would be unable to effectively defend the US population against a Soviet missile strike; and when 1,400 “scientists and engineers currently or formerly at government and industrial laboratories” send a letter to Congress declaring their “serious concerns” about SDI and their belief that its stated goal “is not feasible in the foreseeable future” and “represents a significant escalation of the arms race”; and when more than 3,800 senior faculty members of physics, computer science, and other “hard science” departments at “leading” US universities, including almost 60 percent of all faculty in America’s “top twenty” physics departments, sign a pledge to reject funding from the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization—that’s when it becomes hard to tout the achievements of SDI unless you’re the guy in charge. Even some scientists who were doing the actual research told Senate staffers in 1986 that “there had been no major breakthroughs” that would make comprehensive deployment possible by the late 1990s.36
In November 1987, three weeks before a Reagan–Gorbachev summit, a group called Spacewatch organized a debate titled “Is the Strategic Defense Initiative in the National Interest,” in which Sagan and Garwin spoke against the emergent, non-Reaganesque version of SDI, while General Abrahamson and Richard Perle, then an assistant secretary of defense, spoke in its favor. The former pair offered physics and logic; the latter offered primarily politics and fear plus a couple of superficially reasonable statements, such as the validity of attempting a partial defense if a comprehensive defense proved unachievable.
In his opening remarks, Sagan points out that there are almost 60,000 nuclear weapons in the world, more than a third of them “designed to go from the homeland of one nation to the homeland of another.” Since the world has only 2,300 cities of a hundred thousand people or more, there is obviously a “grotesque disproportionality between the power of the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union and any conceivable use.” Having established the degree of nuclear peril, Sagan goes on to say that because Reagan’s promise of population defense would be so hard to achieve, SDI’s champions have given in to the “temptation to shift the ground, to invent more modest objectives.” So,
SDI is fine if it is perfect—that is, if no significant number of Soviet warheads leaks through the shield. The most optimistic numbers you can hear from technically competent advocates of Star Wars is 70, 80, or maybe even 90 percent of incoming Soviet warheads destroyed. Well, take the more optimistic number: If 90 percent are destroyed, 10 percent get through. Ten percent of, say, ten thousand warheads is one thousand warheads. One thousand warheads is much more than is needed to obliterate the United States. The shield is leaky.37
Well, Star Wars has survived the decades, even though major components have been abandoned, postponed, reframed, or scaled back. Both Brilliant Pebbles and a space-based, nuclear-pumped X-ray laser called Project Excalibur were canceled in the early 1990s. By then, some commentators maintain, SDI had effectively served a central Cold War purpose: the further weakening of the Soviet economy. That space-based missile defense was largely unachievable was beside the point; if the
Soviets could be convinced it was achievable, they would pour money they barely had into trying to make it happen. As Gorbachev’s military advisor told Soviet studies specialist Dimitri Simes in 1990, “while SDI was unlikely to achieve its stated goal of serving as an impenetrable barrier against nuclear attack, it was nevertheless a full-scale military-technical offensive planned simultaneously to overcome Moscow militarily and ruin the USSR financially.”38
Within a few months after 9/11, the Strategic Defense Initiative became the Missile Defense Agency and was exempted from the Pentagon’s standard procurement and oversight procedures. February 2010 marked a modest milestone: the first lethal boost-phase intercept, with both weapon and target in motion (a megawatt-level laser, mounted on a plane, destroyed a ballistic missile at close range within two minutes after the missile’s launch). By 2017, Star Wars had barely made it past the concept stage. As the world witnessed a flurry of North Korean missile successes, accompanied by a volley of insults exchanged between the US and North Korean heads of state, a land-based US missile-defense installation broke ground in South Korea.39
So, for the time being, the armed forces will have to do without orbiting laser weapons.
Asteroids—large rocks and even larger rock piles held together by gravity—may present other military possibilities. Some are the size of cars, others the size of houses, still others the size of stadiums. The largest are the size of mountains. From time to time, these cosmic missiles have hit and obliterated entire regions of Earth. Many more have come close but not hit us.40
A good solution to the danger would be to identify the trajectories of such objects and destroy or deflect any that threaten to hit us. The first step is to find them and their cometary brethren, together classified as near-Earth objects, or NEOs. For good reason, space organizations around the world have prioritized finding and tracking NEOs. Celestial mechanics decrees that any NEO whose path crosses Earth’s orbit will strike Earth sometime within the next hundred million years or so. Size matters. By now, the NEO catalogue lists more than sixteen thousand, about a thousand of which are larger than a kilometer across—large enough to disrupt civilization. Yet size isn’t the whole story. What about NEOs that might strike in the next thousand years, the next century, or the next decade? A threatening subset of NEOs known as PHAs, short for potentially hazardous asteroids, harbor a high probability of swooping within about twenty times the Earth–Moon distance during the next century.41
But maybe there’s an asteroid with Earth’s name on it that isn’t yet known. If found and tracked, it must then either be destroyed or forced into another path—and that part of the challenge persists.
In the 1990s, when NASA was about to begin surveying the skies for near-Earth asteroids that measured more than a kilometer across and that might be heading our way, the most efficient available technology for deflection would have been a series of multi-megaton nuclear explosions. At that time, Carl Sagan and his colleague Steven Ostro of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory saw grave dangers inherent in both the survey, known as Spaceguard, and the deflection technology:
If we can perturb an asteroid out of impact trajectory, it follows that we can also transform one on a benign trajectory into an Earth-impactor. . . . With a Spaceguard-like inventory of such asteroids and launch-ready deflection system of nuclear-armed missiles, it might take only a few years to identify a suitably large asteroid, alter its orbit with a series of nuclear explosions . . . and send it crashing into Earth. [Thus] a few nuclear weapons could by themselves threaten the global civilization.
The two scientists were also concerned that “in the real world and in light of well-established human frailty and fallibility,” knowledge could too easily be turned from a tool of protection into a tool of destruction:
Given twentieth-century history and present global politics, it is hard to imagine guarantees against eventual misuse of an asteroid deflection system commensurate with the dangers such a system poses. Those who argue that it would be prudent to prevent catastrophic impacts with annual probabilities of 10–5 will surely recognize the prudence of preventing more probable catastrophes of comparable magnitude from misuse of a potentially apocalyptic technology.42
A decade later, focusing not on the prevention but rather on the creation of catastrophe, RAND researchers studied the feasibility, relative costs, and psychology of turning asteroids into weapons. They concluded that since “much cheaper, more responsive weapons of mass destruction are readily available, this one is likely to remain safely in the realm of science fiction.”43
If deploying an actual asteroid against an enemy is infeasible, we still face the problem of rendering an incoming one harmless to ourselves. Two 1998 blockbuster movies, Deep Impact and Armageddon, solved that problem by nuking their NEOs.44 In the domain of nonfiction, too, a few investigators have been assessing the possibility of having a spacecraft set off a nuclear explosion deep within the unwelcome space rock (thereby yielding scads of unwelcome orbital debris).45 But nukes could be used for deflection, not merely destruction. For instance, you could deploy one to create a proximal explosion near one side of an asteroid, causing a recoil by the asteroid and thus forcing a change in its orbit.
Misuse of a potentially apocalyptic technology was the specter raised by Sagan and Ostro—a perspective that matters to us all, whether or not asteroids are the subject. But even a technological glitch or a minor accident could lead to an apocalyptic event. Safety mechanisms have prevented most such outcomes, but no real-life mechanisms are foolproof, infallible, or always applicable. The Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima nuclear disasters made that clear.
In July 1961, the nuclear reactor on a Soviet submarine stationed not far from a NATO base in the North Atlantic developed a disastrous leak in its cooling system. The engineering crew managed to rig a substitute coolant arrangement and prevent a nuclear explosion, but within three weeks those engineers had all died of ionizing radiation. Today Pravda is on record saying that if the reactor had in fact exploded, it could have triggered World War III.46
In September 1980, during routine maintenance on a nuclear-tipped Titan II missile far underground in rural Arkansas, a socket that was inadvertently dropped from a wrench punctured the missile. This damage caused a fuel leak, leading to the collapse and explosion of the entire apparatus. It could also have led to the inadvertent detonation of the nine-megaton nuclear warhead perched atop the missile, resulting in the destruction of practically everything and everyone from Little Rock to New York City. But by pure dumb luck, the nose cone that housed the warhead blew apart during the explosion, separating the warhead from its source of electricity. Without electricity, its detonators wouldn’t work. That was just one US accident, and there have been thousands.47
Besides glitches and accidents involving deadly technology, there’s the fact that benign technology can be adapted to serve apocalyptic ends. Dual-use space hardware, which dominates the world of space assets, can serve either military or civilian purposes—and dual use can slip into misuse. Even a kindly little weather satellite can be reprogrammed, repurposed, and deployed as a platform to support weapons of mass destruction.
On the other hand, a solar sail cannot redirect a threatening asteroid on short notice, nor can an app for identifying new asteroids solve the problem of deflection. Mapping the paths of space rocks is not the same as moving them. You’d still need a way to eliminate the danger, whether by destruction or deflection, plus sufficient lead time to make it happen. Are there any non-scary proposals for planetary defense? Yes. Current consensus favors the gravitational tractor. Park a massive space probe beside the offending NEO. Although their mutual gravity gently urges them toward each other, station-keeping retro-rockets on the probe preserve the gap. The space probe slowly draws the asteroid out of its deadly path, yielding no debris at all.48
Enough hypotheticals. What’s in the real-life, readily available space arsenal? Surely there are X-ray lasers, high-powe
r microwave beams, hypervelocity metal rods, miniature autonomous attack spaceplanes with self-adapting warheads, space-based smart munitions, nuclear electromagnetic pulse warheads designed to be detonated at high altitudes, co-orbital ASATs, weaponized microsatellites, orbiting battle stations? Nope.
Definitions of space weapons vary. Here are two: (1) “terrestrially-based devices specifically designed and flight-tested to physically attack, impair or destroy objects in space, or space-based devices designed and flight-tested to attack, impair or destroy objects in space or on earth”;49 and (2) “attack munitions that are themselves orbital objects or that are intended to destroy space objects.”50 What’s actually available? Kinetic or explosive interceptor missiles and tactical, modest-kilowatt lasers. That’s it. They can each target satellites, terrestrial installations, and long-range missiles, though that last one is still a challenge. When their task is to kill or otherwise neutralize a satellite, they’re called ASATs—“A” for “anti-”; “SAT” for “satellite.”
Satellites would seem to be prime targets. They’re central to modern life, especially the GPS constellation, and they’re not easy to camouflage, so their orbits are obvious to all who look. Furthermore, geostationary satellites, such as those used for nearly all space-based communications, are always present at the same altitude above the same places on our planet, hence “geo-” + “stationary.” At 36,000 kilometers up, they’re the highest-orbiting class of satellites but present an especially easy target for evildoers. For societies and militaries that depend heavily on global positioning, communications, surveillance, navigation, early warning, and weather satellites—and no society or military is more dependent on them than America’s—an attack on our space assets would be terrifying. Precisely because of the world’s growing dependence on satellites, ASATs work best as a threat. To visit intentional doom upon someone else’s satellite spells retaliatory doom for one’s own, although in fact the United States would suffer more from a successful hit than would its adversaries.