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http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/000703/aegis.htm U.S. News 7/3/00 Shooting From the Ship: The Navy may have the best angle on a national missile defense system By Richard J. Newman The missile gap is growing-at least between the left and the right. As the fall elections approach, Republicans have been hammering the Clinton administration for a "flawed" national missile defense plan, as George W. Bush called it last month. Bush and others say the Clinton plan would not go far enough to protect America and its allies from Third World missiles. Liberal groups, meanwhile, have been urging the president to bag his planned missile shield to preserve arms-control deals with Moscow and save the money for other projects. They have also piled up a lot of technical evidence suggesting that even today's best missile-killing interceptors could be foiled by warheads with modest countermeasures. Despite the harangues from right and left, a quiet consensus is forming on one front. Republicans and Democrats have recently called for using Navy ships, deployed near unfriendly nations such as North Korea or Iran, to shoot down long-range missiles in the "boost phase," shortly after launch. Bush has said that policy- makers should consider "all options" as part of a missile defense shield, meaning ground-based systems like those Clinton and Al Gore advocate, as well as shipboard defenses. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and 24 GOP colleagues have also endorsed a sea-based system. And former top Democratic officials John Deutch, Harold Brown, and John White argue in the summer issue of Foreign Policy that it would be cheaper and more effective to shoot down ballistic missiles aimed at the United States using interceptors close to the launch sites. Those would be based on ships and, if possible, on allied territory. "Everybody who looks at the problem knows that the boost phase is where the leverage is," says Owen Cote, a national security specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There are major advantages to fielding missile interceptors in areas close to the threat. Close-in interceptors are the only way to shoot down ballistic missiles while they're still rising and moving relatively slowly, and while their rocket motors are still attached, making them glaring targets. Relying on interceptors based in Alaska, and possibly in North Dakota, as the Clinton plan envisions, would be far more difficult, say missile defense experts. Those would be aiming for warheads tumbling through space at more than 12,000 miles per hour. Once in space, a single missile could unleash several nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads, each of which would then have to be targeted on its own. And American missile interceptors still have a way to go to be able to distinguish warheads from decoys meant to look like the real bombs. Last week, a review panel appointed by the Pentagon issued a report saying that the current plan to intercept missiles in space "requires critical attention to potential countermeasure challenges." Rigged? There may already be cracks in the planned missile shield. MIT nuclear physicist Ted Postol, in a May letter to the White House, charged the Pentagon with covering up "program-stopping" flight data. He says his analysis of data published in Pentagon documents indicates the current system "will not be able to reliably deal with even the most simple first-generation countermeasures," such as decoys, warheads that tumble end over end, and unconventional-looking warheads. Beyond that, Postol says that three of four flight tests were rigged to increase the likelihood that the test "kill vehicle" would find the target. The Navy is now developing systems to shoot down short-range ballistic missiles, and that might solve the problem. A classified Pentagon study, due to Congress this summer, has found that those defenses could be upgraded to shoot down long-range missiles aimed at the United States. Until now, scientists developing "theater" missile defenses-designed to protect troops from the sorts of missiles Iraq fired at allied bases in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf War-have limited the speed, range, and other capabilities of the anti-missile missiles. The restrictions have been necessary to conform to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union. But if Russia agrees to ABM modifications, missile upgrades and sophisticated new radars could give Navy cruisers and destroyers the ability to shoot down the longer-range projectiles. But the conversion wouldn't be simple. The Navy's theater systems are designed to shoot down missiles in space, not in the boost phase. Simply modifying the missiles to go after intercontinental ballistic missiles in both the boost phase and in space would provoke outrage in China and Russia, both of which fear a U.S. national missile defense system could neuter their own nuclear arsenals. And an interceptor fast enough to knock down missiles in the boost phase would probably be so big it wouldn't fit into the vertical launch tubes on surface ships, which fire smaller weapons such as Tomahawk missiles. "You cannot build a big enough boost-phase interceptor to catch all missiles, and put it on surface ships," says MIT's Cote. The only vessel with adequate launch tubes for that, he says, is the Trident-class submarine, which is still fully employed cruising the deeps with America's own nuclear missiles. Vulnerable spots. But even with limitations, a boost-phase missile killer could smooth some diplomatic wrinkles, since it would be ineffective against Russian and Chinese missiles. And Pentagon officials think a modified theater system would still be able to protect against missiles fired from many locations. Two Navy cruisers or destroyers flanking North Korea, for instance-which could field an intercontinental nuclear missile by 2005-would be enough to shoot down most missiles fired across the Pacific at the United States. But a shot over the North Pole could escape the Navy's reach. Ships in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean would be able to parry missiles fired from Iran, Iraq, or Libya, although some corridors would still be safe from Navy interceptors. The Navy is also hesitant about the burden of taking on a new mission. "If you grow me missions, I need more ships," says a senior Navy official. At a minimum, the Navy thinks a sea-based national missile defense network would require four to seven additional ships-more if round-the-clock coverage were necessary or if complementary land-based batteries became unfeasible. Whatever the case, a sea-based national missile shield could add more than $10 billion to the defense budget and be subject to the same delays as the current program, which Clinton will either approve or defer by this fall. And it would still require some of the advanced new ground- or space-based sensors needed for the Clinton system. The Navy's "theater-wide" system for use against short-range missiles isn't even due to be fully deployed until 2010, which is five years later than the current program. Technical delays revealed earlier this month could stall that further. Whether by land or by sea, missile defense is still a long way off. U.S.News & World Report Inc. Bruce K. Gagnon Coordinator Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 90083 Gainesville, FL. 32607 (352) 337-9274 http://www.globenet.free-online.co.uk [EMAIL PROTECTED]
