The Atlantic | April 1988 | The Rush to Deploy SDI

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How SDS Works

hat does the new system look like? By July, SDI officials had settled on its architecture, although it was not final (and many aspects are classified). The figures cited below for each system are taken from published reports and a plan proposed by the Sparta Corporation, one of the companies contracted to design SDS. This "first generation" defense includes

3,000-5,000 space-based interceptors (SBIs), carried in hundreds of "garages" placed in orbit, for boost-phase intercept

30 boost-phase surveillance and tracking satellites

20-80 space-based surveillance and tracking satellites to track warheads during their midcourse flight

2,000 ground-based rockets called ERIS (for exoatmospheric re-entry vehicle interception system) for late-midcourse intercept

100 ground-based "pop-up" surveillance systems on missiles

a network of battle-management and command, control, and communications satellites to serve as the "brains" of the system

The SDI Organization intends during fiscal years 1988 and 1989 to spend 50 percent of its budget—or almost $2 billion in fiscal year 1988—demonstrating the technological validity of these Phase I weapons. Before leaving the Pentagon, Weinberger gave this system another push forward with two orders promulgated in November of last year. The first helped establish the system as a group of weapons heading for production: "Now that ... Phase I has entered the acquisition process," Weinberger said, "operational test and evaluation activities must begin immediately.... " To make sure that unfavorable test results, concerns of his successor, or congressional actions did not slow down the frantic deployment schedule of SDS, Weinberger fired off a second order exempting SDI from "all DOD routine bureaucratic procedures."

This Phase I system would not be a population defense. Its primary mission would be to protect U.S. strategic nuclear forces and other military assets. General Abrahamson assured the House Armed Services Committee that this type of system would still provide population defense, because "we are trying to find an effective way, first, to prevent war by complicating the Soviet attack plans, complicating them to such an extent that the uncertainty level will be high enough that they will not strike. So that is the most important thing. And by the way, then it is perfect, clearly perfect, if we can do that."

But, of course, even SDI officials admit that SDS would not be perfect. After spending at least $100 billion and launching hundreds of satellites into orbit, we would still be only at the beginning. The SDI Organization envisions "generations" of weapons deployed in waves stretching well into the twenty-first century. The contractor study noted above, for example, anticipates that the first lasers or other directed-energy weapons would be deployed no earlier than 2010.

A Senate study estimated that if this system were rushed to deployment by the mid-1990s, it "would have an effectiveness against Soviet ballistic missile warheads of no more than 16%." That is, 84 percent of the Soviet warheads would come through unscathed. The American Physical Society council warned, last April, that "even a very small percentage of nuclear weapons penetrating a defensive system would cause human suffering and death far beyond that ever before seen on this planet."

The Senate investigators found agreement among SDI scientists that substantial increases in funding would be needed to overcome the tremendous technical obstacles and that fairly soon after deployment the Soviets could develop countermeasures to overcome the system. This was confirmed by the Defense Acquisition Board. If the next phase of SDI were not then ready to go up into space, one SDI scientist said, "you may well end up with a more destabilizing situation than before."

Disinformation

hroughout the rapid growth of SDI very little candid information has been forthcoming from the SDI leadership to Congress, to responsible Department of Defense officials, and perhaps even to the President himself.

Last October documents became public charging that the physicist Edward Teller, one of the first to convince the President of the feasibility of SDI, and the SDI scientist Dr. Lowell Wood gave "overly optimistic" and "technically inaccurate" information regarding the x-ray laser to the nation's highest policy-makers. The author of the charge is Roy Woodruff, a highly respected scientist who resigned in protest from his post as head of the weapons programs at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoly, in California.

Woodruff strongly supports SDI research but says that "it has to be responsibly portrayed to the nation's senior policy-makers." He adds that the "vision of a leakproof shield that makes nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete is not a practical reality." Briefings from Teller and Wood may have led President Reagan and other high officials to believe that a wonder weapon—the x-ray laser—capable of obliterating hundreds of missiles in a single burst was close to becoming a reality. This misinformation may have greatly influenced Reagan's negotiating position at the U.S.-Soviet summit in Iceland, as well as his position on redefining the ABM treaty, and it may be coloring current negotiations with the Soviets. But Woodruff and other scientists agree: the x-ray laser does not work now, and it will be five to ten years before we can even know if such a weapon is feasible.

Equally serious, a key recommendation from the Defense Department's Defense Science Board was removed before the report was given to the Defense Acquisition Board as part of the basis for its deliberations on SDI last summer. Reportedly under pressure from senior Pentagon officials, the science-advisory-panel chairman removed sharp criticism of the SDI plan. The uncensored report noted that "there is presently no way of confidently assessing" the system's price or its effectiveness. The science panel recommended delaying approval for "the next year or two" while SDI officials filled in "gaps in system design and key technologies." The acquisition board never got this recommendation, and the plan was approved.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff also have serious doubts about SDI, but these are muted in the face of White House pressure. For example, the SDS deployment plan was unable to proceed unless, like all other weapons programs, it won agreement from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that it met a legitimate military requirement. Reportedly, SDI officials requested a statement of the military's need for SDS, but the Joint Chiefs said they required only a research program. Finally, a few days before the Defense Acquisition Board review began and despite military concern that SDI will absorb billions of dollars that should go to other, more pressing conventional-weapons programs, the Joint Chiefs returned a military requirement for the protection of our nation's strategic military assets.

That was enough—barely—to fulfill the procedural requirements of the acquisition process, and SDS was officially blessed.

Unanswered Questions

DI officials have given Congress a shifting story about SDI over the years, despite repeatedly imposed requirements for specific reports. Few members find the SDI reports useful, yet we are asked to authorize billions of dollars annually on the basis of them. Before rushing into deployment of SDS or any phase of SDI, we need to have the following questions answered:

How would a potential enemy respond if SDI were carried out to procurement and deployment? What increase may be anticipated in the number or quality of enemy offensive weapons, which would be intended to penetrate the defensive shield?

What can be expected from an enemy in the deployment of weapons not endangered by SDI, such as cruise missiles and low-trajectory submarine-launched missiles?

How vulnerable is SDI to a potential enemy's anti-satellite weapons?

What are the cost estimates for the research program for SDI?

A requirement that these questions be answered was enacted into law by Congress in 1985. The questions were addressed to the Department of Defense, which has yet to answer them substantially, although the statute required it to do so two years ago.

The answer to the first question is obvious: the enemy would increase the number of its warheads and missiles. Two decades ago then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued that the United States would counter any Soviet anti-ballistic-missile system by greatly expanding the number of U.S. warheads. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger has said, "Remember the 1960s, and Secretary McNamara's reaction to the Soviet ABM system. Are the Soviets likely to be any less 'offensive-conservative' than we were then? How likely is it that in the event of an American deployment of substantial strategic defense, the Soviets would agree to a constraint on offensive capabilities?" As for how large an increase the Soviets can make in their ICBM force, the Library of Congress estimates that staying within current or currently envisioned production rates, the Soviets could add between 5,000 and 22,000 warheads to their current ICBM force of 6,440 warheads by the year 2000.

Proponents of early deployment argue the contrary: that defenses will be inexpensive and effective enough that it will become easier to trade away existing offensive weapons and less attractive to build additional ones. If the cost of offensive weapons is greater than the cost of defenses, they say, then the U.S. deployment of defenses might force the Soviet Union to give up its offensive capability.

Unfortunately, most studies indicate just the opposite. The cost-exchange ratio of even highly effective defenses still favors the offense. As we shall discuss, the technologies planned for Phase I deployment can be overcome quite cheaply. Even if future technological breakthroughs favor the defense, a superpower believing that its fundamental security is threatened by the adversary's defense will likely be willing to pay any amount to defeat it.

Sayre Stevens, a former high official of the CIA, concludes, "The Soviets will do what they have done in the past: spend money and allocate scarce resources to the extent that they are required by the military demands they find facing them. Thus, a vision of the world of 2000-2010 emerges in which both the United States and the Soviet Union are actively engaged in the significant upgrading of both offensive and defensive weapons systems."

What else will the Soviets do? They will most likely take other actions designed to overcome any SDI system at all three phases: boost, midcourse, and terminal.

he fast-burn booster has broad utility for countering an interim SDI system. A fast-burn booster is an ICBM booster with an enlarged rocket nozzle and fuel modified to burn at an increased rate. The result is a reduced boost time of 100 to 150 seconds, or even less, as compared with the normal boost time of 180 to 300 seconds. Boost-phase interception by space-based interceptors then becomes virtually impossible, since most of the fast-burn boosters will release the payloads of decoys and warheads before SBIs can reach them. The fast-burn booster is old technology. Far more stringent requirements were met by the rocket motors in the U.S. Sprint ABM interceptors of the 1960s. The Soviets are already moving to faster-burning boosters in their newest ICBMs, the SS-24 and the SS-25. Stephen Rockwood, the former director of SDI research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, agrees that fast-burn boosters put "chemical rockets out of business fairly quickly." Louis Marquet, the former SDI deputy director for technology, has admitted that "fast-burn boosters ... could rise up and deploy their vehicles before the kinetic-energy interceptors could reach them." The former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown asserts unequivocally, "Fast-burning boosters would effectively negate such a defense system [space-based interceptors]."

The boost phases of the new Soviet SS-24 and SS-25 last about 180 seconds. A recent study by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory indicates that an SDI system composed of a few thousand interceptors would be no more than about 20 percent effective against the Soviet threat that is now projected for the mid-1990s. This pessimistic conclusion is achieved in spite of three optimistic assumptions: that the interceptors would be launched within twenty to thirty seconds of a Soviet attack, that each interceptor would have a 90 percent probability of destroying its target, and that the Soviets would not have modified their missiles or taken any countermeasures in response to the deployment of U.S. space weapons.

Boost-phase defense has a more serious flaw, one shared by all space-based systems. In the words of Edward Teller, "I believe we should not deploy weapons in space.... To put objects into space is expensive. To destroy space-objects is relatively easy."

Even if the technology of the SDI system is capable of overcoming the proliferation of warheads and fast-burn boosters, the satellites the system needs for target identification and battle management, and also the "garages," will be vulnerable to a variety of anti-satellite systems. The enemy would not have to attack all the satellites but only those, such as the battle-management stations, that were critical to the operation of the system. Spies might provide the information that would enable the enemy to pinpoint the system's weak points, or might sabotage the computer programs necessary for the system to function. Just last October federal agents uncovered a plot by three men in California to sell Moscow supercomputer technology applicable to Star Wars systems.

According to a Soviet general as he was quoted by Tass, the likely Soviet responses to SDI would include the "destruction of SDI components such as orbiting battle stations and space-based battle-management systems as the most effective way of weakening the entire missile defense dramatically. "

In the low earth orbits, 200 to 800 miles up, necessary to carry out boost-phase intercept (forgetting for the moment the problem of fast-burn boosters), the SDI system's components will be vulnerable to a wide variety of current and future anti-satellite weapons. Unless there is an arms-control treaty banning the development of anti-satellite weapons by either side, the Soviets "could have prototype space-based anti-satellite laser weapons by the early 1990s," according to Robert Gates, the deputy director of the CIA—the same time at which proponents of the SDI system predict initial deployment. Some officials, including General John Piotrowski, the commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, believe that the Soviets already have ground-based lasers powerful enough to destroy existing unhardened, low-orbiting U.S. satellites and to damage those higher up. Of course, SDI systems themselves have an inherent anti-satellite capability. "It continues to appear that everything that works well as a defense also works somewhat better as a defense suppressor," Harold Brown says.

Scientists at one of the nation's primary nuclear-weapons laboratories, Sandia National Laboratories, have been studying the question of satellites' vulnerability and have concluded that space-based defenses can never be made "survivable." Curtis Hines, a departmental manager for systems analysis at Sandia, has said, "I think boost-phase [defense] may be out of the question." Robert Cooper, the former head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Reagan Administration, told the House Armed Services Committee last spring that there are "substantial problems" with making space-based defenses survivable and that "one has great difficulty in convincing oneself" that it could be done. He didn't see survivability measures on the horizon, he testified, that could justify early deployment.

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