Missile Defense Distortions

Commentary -- January 1997

Note: Bracketed text was deleted from the published version of this letter

To the Editor:

Angelo Codevilla's numerous distortions and omissions of fact to support his contention that the United States should quickly deploy a national ballistic missile defense system reveals the hollowness of both his arguments and the threat which they purport to answer ("Defenseless America," September 1996).

Mr. Codevilla attempts to frame the current threat by asserting that in March 1996 China, "in one of the most ominous and underreported developments in the post-Soviet atomic age, openly threatened to hit Los Angeles with a nuclear-tipped missile..." In fact, this incident occurred in December 1995. As reported in The New York Times on January 24, 1996, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas. W. Freeman, Jr., traveled to China for meetings with senior Chinese officials. During a January debriefing with President Clinton's national security adviser, Freeman quoted an unnamed Chinese official "as asserting that China could act militarily against Taiwan without fear of intervention by the United States because American leaders 'care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan.'" Freeman characterized this statement as an indirect threat by China to use nuclear weapons against the United States.

Clearly this was not an open threat. That it was underreported only suggests that journalists (and national security officials) understood China was engaging in atomic saber rattling. [It is hardly equivalent to President Eisenhower's actual threats to use nuclear weapons during the Korean War or President Nixon's order in October 1973 to place U.S. military forces worldwide on DEFCON 3 as a signal to the Soviet Union not to intervene in the Yom Kippur War (DEFCON 5 is normal peacetime readiness and DEFCON 1 is maximum readiness for war).] More important than one Chinese official's blustering is the U.S. response: two naval groups, including the aircraft carriers U.S.S. Independence and U.S.S. Nimitz, were dispatched to patrol off Taiwan during and after China's live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait (March 12-20) to demonstrate U.S. intentions to help defend Taiwan.

Mr. Codevilla argues that, "the threat posed by ballistic missiles has, in fact, never been more urgent." In fact, most scholars maintain that the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 is the closest we have come to nuclear war (U.S. forces were placed on DEFCON 2). Furthermore, it should be obvious that the threat posed for more than three decades by placing tens of thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert in two countries openly antagonistic to each other was far "more urgent" than that presented by either China's relatively small nuclear arsenal or any of the so-called "rogue" states (none of whom actually has deployed nuclear weapons). [Many "threats" offered to a credulous public during the Cold War?the "bomber gap" of the mid-1950s, the "missile gap" of the early 1960s, the "window of vulnerability" in the early 1980s, to name but a few?were, upon closer inspection, deemed either erroneous or overblown.]

Returning to China, Mr. Codevilla warns that it, "...already has intercontinental missiles that are exact copies of our old but excellent Titan II." Yet the Dong Feng-5A, China's only ICBM capable of reaching the United States, is merely generically similar to the Titan II, not an "exact" copy. Furthermore, only seven are deployed. That's hardly a cause for major concern, except perhaps for the Chinese technicians who maintain them. Our Titan IIs were first deployed in 1963. They used volatile liquid fuel, proved difficult to maintain, and were highly susceptible to accidents. [In 1965, a fire in a Titan II silo in Searcy, Arkansas, killed 53 people. Between 1975 and 1979, the Air Force reported 125 accidents with Titan IIs. In September 1980, a Titan II in Damascus, Arkansas, exploded, blowing off its 740 ton silo door and hurling the missile's nine megaton warhead 600 feet away.] The last of the 54 Titan IIs were retired in 1987.

[Despite numerous contemporaneous official pronouncements to the contrary,] Mr. Codevilla adopts a strangely revisionist view of the Cold War, claiming that the Soviet Union was "a relatively benign regime, which would in any case be restrained (so the reasoning went) by the very awesomeness of nuclear weapons and by what was then known as the balance of terror." (Has Mr. Codevilla forgotten that Josef Stalin?hardly the paradigm of a predictable and controllable national leader?had his finger on the proverbial button from 1949 until his death in March 1953?). He asserts all this has changed, that ballistic missiles are now "in the hands of people who run the gamut of human qualities from the responsible to the nasty, the unpredictable, and the uncontrollable." Thus, "whoever wants missiles is likely to get them, and whoever wants to use them probably will." The spread of technology and the end of the Cold War have certainly made ballistic missiles more widely available, but it does not follow that national missile defenses are the best and only solution.

Logically, opponents who are equally matched and generally restrained and reasonable will refrain from conflict knowing the disadvantages of war outweigh the advantages. A hopelessly outmatched opponent should likewise abstain from launching an attack, realizing his one weapon is no match for his opponent's thousands. (Madmen?by definition?will not invoke reason and are thus undeterrable). Yet Mr. Codevilla asserts that, "...missile-wielding governments could blackmail us into acquiescing in their power grabs." By this reasoning, the United States?the sole remaining superpower and possessor of the most formidable conventional and nuclear forces on earth?is helpless in the face of any nation with even one nuclear weapon (or the potential to build or acquire it). That this ruse failed in the recent case of China goes unexamined.

Betraying his ignorance, Mr. Codevilla states, "Technically, defending against ballistic missiles presents a challenge not much greater than building them." If this were true, we would have built defenses long ago; after all, our first Atlas ICBMs were deployed in 1959 and we have built more than 6,100 ballistic missiles since then. [In Mr. Codevilla's estimation, erecting missile defenses is roughly equivalent to protecting oneself from bullets by donning a bulletproof vest. The more accurate analogy would be to defend oneself from bullets by shooting them out of the air.]

To date, we have spent nearly $100 billion (in constant 1996 dollars) on numerous ballistic missile defense programs since the mid-1950s, including $51 billion for the SDI and Theater Missile Defenses since 1983. Why then do we have so little to show for it? From the late 1950s through 1965, research and development on the Nike-Zeus system consumed more than $3 billion. The follow-on Nike-X (part of the nationwide Sentinel system to counter the then-developing Chinese missile threat) cost another $9 billion from 1964-1968 before it too was abandoned following concerns about high costs and the danger of surrounding American cities with hundreds of nuclear-tipped interceptors.

Next came Safeguard, a scaled-back effort to defend not cities and people but 150 Minuteman ICBMs. Safeguard?which ultimately cost $22 billion?was eventually deployed in North Dakota in the mid-1970s. But it operated for only a few months before the Army deactivated it in 1975, belatedly determining that high annual operating costs greatly exceeded the system's limited defensive benefits.

Mr. Codevilla makes no mention of Safeguard although he alludes to the Sentinel program. Instead he charges, "If, year after year, the U.S. government has decided not to deploy defenses, it is not for lack of technically competent means." He cites concerns about how many warheads might "leak" through a defensive shield but adds "such doubts were not the reason the defensive complex was never built." But it was built. It is clear why Mr. Codevilla fails to mention this fact because to do so would undermine his central argument that only a lack of national will prevents us from erecting missile defenses. It is less understandable why he lays full blame for our inability to deploy such defenses on the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972. This is akin to saying the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The national controversy ignited by Sentinel and Safeguard led (in no small part) to the ABM Treaty, not vice-versa.

Mr. Codevilla also misrepresents several current missile defense technologies. Describing the Space and Missile Tracking System (SMTS), he claims these satellites "would extend the range, accuracy, and effectiveness of every American interceptor against all kinds and speeds of warheads." This might well be true in theory, but as yet the SMTS does not exist; neither do the interceptors. Even if they did, they have not yet been field tested to verify that the sort of system integration of which he speaks is possible.

Similarly, the Army's Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) is touted as a system "that can intercept missiles more than 100 miles away from cities." Perhaps someday, but to date THAAD has failed all three of its flight tests. The Navy's Upper Tier system "can also rely on information from satellites to hit a warhead over 1,000 miles away." Flight tests may eventually verify this claim, but at this writing Upper Tier has only achieved 42 of 43 test objectives (as defined by its contractor), with number 43 being the critical one: the demonstrated ability to intercept a target (two flight tests have failed).

Mr. Codevilla argues, "Each of these weapons would be useful by itself, and all would be more useful together." Yet compiling and testing the computer code necessary to connect the various components has always been the most complex part of missile defense. Anyone who has ever tried to install and operate software and hardware on a home computer knows it is one thing to talk about system integration and quite another to make it an error-free reality. By glossing over this fundamental issue, Codevilla grossly distorts the magnitude of the problem facing missile defense scientists.

Mr. Codevilla's faith in missile defense technology colors his thinking in another troubling way; it leads him to avoid discussion of any non-technological means of defending against missile attack. For example, since 1987 the 31-member Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) has helped to control the spread of ballistic missiles. All six nations that currently possess ICBMs (including China) belong to the MTCR. The MTCR is not perfect, but when it works it does one thing no weapon system ever can?prevent the further spread of ballistic missile technologies.

Or consider the bi-partisan Cooperative Threat Reduction program, commonly known as Nunn-Lugar. Since its creation in 1991, Nunn-Lugar has assisted the states of the former Soviet Union with dismantling their nuclear weapons and safeguarding their nuclear materials, helping to pay for the deactivation and disabling of at least 40 SS-19 and 46 SS-24 ICBMs in Ukraine armed with approximately 700 warheads. By late 1996, Nunn-Lugar funding will have helped to eliminate 176 ICBMs in Ukraine carrying 1,240 warheads, at a cost of $185 million ($149,193.55 per warhead). Additional funding is assisting in the destruction of bombers and missile launchers in the former Soviet Union, including $70 million to help eliminate 104 SS-18 ICBMs in Kazakhstan carrying more than 1,000 half-megaton warheads ($70,000 per warhead, a real bargain).

Mr. Codevilla fails to explain why it is more sensible?on military, economic, or political grounds?to devote tens of billions of dollars to a potential remedy to the ballistic missile threat during a missile's 15-30 minutes of flight than to spend just a few billion dollars on programs such as Nunn-Lugar and agreements like START and the MTCR to ensure the certain destruction of that missile on the ground before it is even launched.

Even if the myriad technical challenges could be resolved and the money found to pay for the program, no ballistic missile defense system, even one incorporating space-based components, would completely protect the population of the United States from nuclear, chemical, or biological attack. Because the system could never be realistically tested, no one could be certain it would destroy every missile and/or warhead it encountered. Unlike our recent military encounter with Iraq in September?when two separate waves of cruise missiles were deemed necessary to fully destroy fixed air defense installations?there are no second chances in ballistic missile defense.

Most important, the approach advocated by Mr. Codevilla would have no effect on weapons delivered via cruise missiles, aircraft, ships, or trucks. Why would any terrorist group or nation resort to the most expensive, time consuming, highly visible and potentially defeatable mode of attack when simpler, cheaper and more expeditious means are readily available? Mr. Codevilla completely ignores this show-stopping issue, leaving readers mystified as to why he considers ballistic missile defenses essential to protecting America in the post-Cold War world.