Hit to Kill: The New Battle over Shielding America from Missile Attack by Bradley Graham

From the Publisher

The definitive account of the biggest national security issue of our time: the precipitous and politically charged revival of national missile defense. The new Bush administration has wasted no time in making national missile defense the centerpiece of its national security policy and is expected to move forward with testing and eventual deployment of a system to destroy incoming missiles in flight-even though the Russians, the Chinese, and our own European allies have expressed alarm at such action. The system's defenders say that we must press forward if America is to be secure against nuclear, biological, and chemical threats in the decades to come. There's only one problem: No one has ever shown that such a system would actually work. In Hit to Kill, Bradley Graham, a longtime military and foreign affairs correspondent for The Washington Post, tells the behind-the-scenes story of how national missile defense-once considered a discredited relic of the Cold War-was revived during the 1990s to address an emerging Third World missile threat. Graham recounts the political battles surrounding national missile defense during the Clinton administration and the technological trials and tribulations of the major defense firms involved in the project. He reports on the experts who have mobilized in the last year to question the system's unworkability and examines the scientific evidence for and against it. Over the past half century, no proposed weapons system has drawn more argument or more dollars than national missile defense, and Graham explores the reasons for the enduring debate and the costs to the nation of having failed to resolve it.

Author Biography:Bradley Graham has spent more than twenty years working for The Washington Post in various reporting and editing assignments focused on foreign and military affairs. Most recently, he completed a six-year stint covering the Pentagon. He lives near Washington, D.C.

Los Angeles Times

Bradley Graham's timely Hit to Kill is likely to help refuel and intensify the debate [about missile defense]

Washington Post Book World

Bradley Graham has written a clear and thorough overview [of the missile-defense issue]

Publishers Weekly

The U.S., writes veteran Washington Post military affairs reporter Graham, has no way of preventing a nuclear missile attack upon its territory; thus, this is the story of the "frustratingly elusive dream" of creating a nationwide antimissile system that all presidents since Johnson have pursued. Graham focuses on the Clinton administration, but in doing so, he uncovers the broader complexities and pitfalls of creating an antimissile system. Uninterested at first, Clinton was pushed to pursue such a plan by a bellicose Republican Congress as well as the successful launch of a sophisticated missile by North Korea. Problems were everywhere: intelligence sources could never accurately say how real the nuclear threat was from "rogue nations" like North Korea; the military, quite presciently, worried that other threats such as a terrorist "bomb in a skyscraper" might be the more clear and present danger. The cost was enormous and it was never clear that the technology for such a system could soon or ever be developed. Political challenges were enormous as well. Deployment of the system would directly violate the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty with Russia, which prohibited such systems. China was threatened by the U.S. moves and Europe disliked unilateral action by the Americans. After a few inconclusive tests, Clinton abandoned the plan, leaving its fate to his successor. Bush at least up to September 11, which the book predates had made an anti-missile system the centerpiece of his defense policy. Graham weaves all these threads into a compelling narrative of America's quest for invulnerability, a quest we now know all too well to be indeed an elusive dream. (Nov.) Copyright 2001Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

After crude experiments in the Sixties and early Seventies, President Reagan relaunched the national missile defense effort in the 1980s with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as Star Wars. The bulk of this work deals with the 1990s, the political infighting and technical problems, and how the Clinton administration, focused on domestic affairs, was more interested in a cheaper theater defense system. The new Bush administration's announcement that it is making missile defense a top priority has led to much international and domestic controversy. The author does not favor either side of the argument, but he does say that the President must offer some reasonable alternatives to the present security structure to help make things as stable as possible internationally. While the cost of any such system is beyond calculation, the real question remains whether or not it would work. Graham spent many years covering foreign and military affairs for the Washington Post and conducted over 300 interviews for this fair-minded survey, which belongs on the shelf beside Defending America: The Case for Limited National Missile Defense (LJ 9/1/01). Suitable for the circulating collections of all public libraries. (Index not seen.) Daniel K. Blewett, Coll. of DuPage Lib., Glen Ellyn, IL Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Now that many feel less sanguine about what may come dropping out of the clear blue sky, Graham, an old hand at reporting military affairs for the Washington Post, provides a balanced and disturbing overview of America's capacity to protect itself against incoming missiles. Simply put, a hostile missile shot at the US has good odds of hitting home, or certainly better odds of hitting home than of being intercepted and destroyed. The why of this is also simple: Nobody has the technological know-how to build a functional missile-defense system. Neither an alarmist nor a proponent of either side in the debate, Graham is able to deliver a concise historical survey of the national missile defense program, from its Cold War days right up through the administration of Bush II. Best known of such programs was Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, a.k.a. "Star Wars," which even had hawks shaking their heads at the utter ridiculousness of its fantasies of space-based interceptors and laser-equipped satellites. As Graham points out, during the Cold War the problems were technological and financial. With the end of the Cold War came new questions about how real the threat was and how pursuing such a missile program would disrupt our international relations. But when North Korea launched a long-distance missile in 1998, potential threats became clear and interest in missile defense was rekindled. Clinton encouraged the defense industries to get cracking, but, Graham is glad to note, he didn't have to worry about abridging the ABM Treaty or "decoupling" from NATO because the issue was at that stage largely theoretical. Vast and varied opinions on the matter notwithstanding, technical feasibilityand cost "continue to make the whole endeavor exceedingly challenging if not entirely dubious." Ought to ratchet the national anxiety meter up a notch, and deflate a few Sunday morning gasbags in the defense industry and on Capitol Hill.

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Chapter One

BACK TO THE FUTURE

In the autumn of 1944, the terror and destruction of German V-2 rockets, traveling faster than the speed of sound and slamming one-ton-explosive loads into British neighborhoods, marked the dawn of the missile age. At the end of the war, the Allies learned of Nazi plans to build a larger, two-stage rocket that might have been able to span the Atlantic Ocean, enabling Germany to make good on its intention of striking the United States. This revelation prompted Americans to question whether they could ever feel secure from missile attack.

    Several U.S. military studies recommended the immediate development of an antimissile system, but a General Electric report in 1945 concluded that such a defense was beyond the scope of contemporary technology. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, an early missile defense skeptic, scoffed at the idea of shooting down missiles, comparing the challenge to "hitting a bullet with a bullet." Then, in 1957, the United States observed the test of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. Two months later, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite. Together, these events showed that the Soviets could build missiles with enough range to cripple U.S. bomber fleets in a surprise attack. Intelligence estimates at the time predicted that the Soviets would deploy more than five hundred such missiles by the end of 1962.

    Antimissile programs then took on a new urgency. The Army seized the lead, developing the Nike-Zeus project as an expansion of its Nike surface-to-airmissiles—an anti-aircraft system initiated in 1945. Entirely ground-based, the plan involved dish-type radars for detecting enemy warheads and guiding interceptor missiles to them. The interceptors, armed with atomic devices, were to get close enough to the targets to destroy them in space with nuclear explosions.

    No sooner had the Army introduced its concept than others started picking the plan apart, finding technical and operational faults. Some of the concerns were unique to the proposed use of nuclear missiles to shoot at other nuclear missiles. For instance, government review groups argued that nuclear blasts from interceptors could destroy the system's own radars and warned that the Soviets might even choose to explode nuclear weapons high in the atmosphere to blind the radars. Other concerns included doubts about the system's ability to guide the interceptors close enough to destroy their targets and worries that the Soviets could easily overwhelm the system by firing many missiles or confuse it by employing decoys along with active warheads.

    Service rivalries came into play as well. While the Army had based its concept on shooting down missiles in their last minutes of flight, providing a point defense of military facilities, the Air Force favored an alternative concept centered on intercepting enemy missiles shortly after launch in their boost phase. The Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was exploring futuristic technologies for just such an approach under a program called BAMBI (Ballistic Missile Boost Intercept). It came up with a number of concepts for defenses in space, one of which involved housing interceptor missiles in large vehicles that would be stationed in orbit over ICBM sites. Critical of the Army's approach, the Air Force urged the Joint Chiefs not to deploy Nike-Zeus because it could be easily deceived, would cost too much, and might create a false sense of security. Besides, the Air Force argued, offensive retaliation—an Air Force mission—was a better defense.

    The Army stood alone in its insistence that Nike-Zeus was effective and had growth potential; the reservations and doubts of higher authorities prevented the Army from proceeding with production. Even though funding for research and development continued to flow into work on antimissile systems, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations withheld any decision on deployment.

    Subsequent designs modified Nike-Zeus in important ways to correct some of its shortcomings. The follow-on Nike-X system, initiated in 1963, used a layered defense of two missiles to address the risk of being overwhelmed. Under the revised plan, Spartan, an extended-range Zeus missile for interceptions in space, would take the first shots, and Sprint, a short-range missile for low-altitude intercepts, would attack any warheads that had penetrated the first layer.

    This system also introduced phased array radar, a new kind of radar that was meant to reduce the vulnerability of earlier radars to direct attack. In contrast to previous mechanically steered, fragile, dish-type radars, the new versions used electronically steered radars housed in structures designed to withstand nuclear blasts. In addition, these radars could scan a much wider area of the sky and handle a larger number of targets than the Nike-Zeus models.

    The technical superiority of the Nike-X system strengthened the Army's case for deployment. So did developments in the Soviet Union. In 1964 the United States detected initial construction of an antimissile system around Moscow. The same year the Soviets paraded what they claimed were antimissile interceptors through Red Square during the celebration of the October Revolution.

    The intensity of the Soviet antimissile effort helped the U.S. Army rally the other military services to support a U.S. deployment. In 1965 the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously recommended that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara request funds for some initial Nike-X components. But just as the military chiefs appeared to be moving toward embracing missile defense, McNamara and the Pentagon's civilian leadership found themselves moving away from the concept as part of a rethinking of U.S. nuclear strategy. The Pentagon's missile defense efforts thus became enmeshed in an emerging body of thought about strategic nuclear deterrence.

    McNamara had initially focused strategic planning on destroying Soviet nuclear forces in the event of war, but by the mid-1960s he had come around to the idea that no attainable level of force was sufficient to strike the Soviets and preclude a devastating retaliatory blow, particularly since the Soviets kept building more weapons. His central concern became finding a way to deter the Soviets from nuclear war. To figure out how much force was enough—and impose some fiscal constraint on service requirements—McNamara adopted a new standard for procurement, based on what he called the capability of "assured destruction." He defined this as the capability to destroy a certain percentage of the enemy's population and industrial capacity. This shift in strategic doctrine drew criticism from conservatives who viewed it as capitulation to the Soviets. But a growing and increasingly vocal group of private experts—mostly scientists and former government officials—also was contending that mutual deterrence could be maintained if each side developed a secure, second-strike force and simply left its population vulnerable to annihilation. Missile defense had no place in such a strategy because, so the reasoning went, it would spark a new arms race as each superpower sought to compensate for the other's defense.

    McNamara thus joined the argument against missile defense. But President Lyndon Johnson was being lobbied to support an antimissile system, not only by the Joint Chiefs but also by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees. Johnson was concerned as well that the Republicans would pound him about an "ABM gap" in the 1968 elections. In December 1966, McNamara offered Johnson a compromise: seek funds for long-lead items on missile defense but delay a deployment decision while querying the Soviets about negotiations to limit such systems.

    Johnson spent the first part of 1967 playing for time, hoping to work out a deal with Moscow that might make missile defense unnecessary. But the Soviets were not interested. When Johnson met Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey, in June, McNamara took the opportunity to argue that missile defense threatened strategic stability and must therefore be limited. Kosygin disagreed with the notion that missile defense was destabilizing and said to McNamara, "When I have trouble sleeping nights, it's because of your offensive missiles, not your defensive missiles." The Soviets would not agree to further discussions. With a three-to-one disadvantage in strategic offensive arms, the Soviets had little incentive to bargain over missile defense.

    At the same time, the Chinese were beginning to loom as a new threat, having fired their first nuclear-armed missile in 1966. A week before the Glassboro summit, they surprised both the United States and the Soviet Union by announcing the detonation of a hydrogen bomb. If the notion of defending against massive Soviet attack still seemed too much of a reach for U.S. technology, the prospect of a limited defense against the small number of Chinese missiles held some promise.

    This is the direction McNamara ultimately took. In September 1967, in a speech in San Francisco, the Defense secretary moved the United States for the first time toward deploying a national missile defense. But it was a heavily hedged and ambivalent step. In the speech, McNamara began by actually making an impassioned case against missile defense, emphasizing that attempts to defend against a large-scale Soviet strike would just fuel the arms race. At the end, however, he announced the decision to proceed with a "thin" system called Sentinel to protect U.S. cities not from Soviet attack but from a much smaller Chinese threat.

    Sentinel, an outgrowth of the Nike-X program, envisioned a layered defense using the Spartan and Sprint missiles, ground-based radars, and a multiple site command-and-control system. The plan called for deploying seven hundred interceptors to defend a handful of U.S. population centers around the country.

    The Sentinel decision represented a political compromise—an attempt to balance conflicting strategic, technical, and diplomatic considerations. With China beginning to test nuclear devices and missiles, the threat was real and clearly a major motivating factor to do something. Experts were convinced that an antimissile weapon could be built to defend against a limited and relatively unsophisticated attack. Congress went along initially with the Pentagon's technical judgments.

    But the anti-Chinese rationale was less a coherent strategic approach than an attempt to appease the pro-missile defense forces while minimizing any provocation to the Soviet Union. If McNamara could not prevent missile defense outright, he could at least keep it limited. Johnson too saw in the Sentinel plan a way of mollifying critics with something while still trying to entice the Soviets into an arms control deal.

By the time action had to be taken to implement the Sentinel deployment, public opposition to missile defense was becoming a factor for the first time. Critics were coalescing into an organized movement of academics, scientists, and former government officials, publishing articles in science and foreign policy journals and pressing their arguments at arms control conferences, in the corridors of power, and in the halls of universities and laboratories. Antimissile systems were portrayed as more complex, less reliable, and considerably more expensive than the missiles they were designed to defeat. Even a limited system, it was noted, would have to provide a nearly perfect defense, since penetration by just one warhead would be a disaster. Enhancing America's offensive capabilities, it was argued, would be cheaper than erecting a defense. In a 1962 article in Scientific American, Herbert York, a former Pentagon director of research and engineering, and Jerome Wiesner, President John Kennedy's science adviser, argued that developing defenses would merely spur the Soviets to a new cycle of weapons building and thus intensify the arms race.

    The role of scientists is particularly noteworthy. As early as 1964, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a nationwide organization of about twenty-five hundred scientists and engineers concerned about the impact of science on national and international affairs, opposed any missile defense deployment. A 1968 article in Scientific American by Hans Bethe, a Nobel laureate professor of physics at Cornell University and member of the President's Scientific Advisory Committee, and Richard Garwin, a research scientist at IBM, outlined in public for the first time the technical vulnerabilities of ballistic missile defenses. Their article cited concerns about high-altitude detonations blinding radars on the ground and the prospect of decoys or multiple warheads overwhelming the system.

    Members of Congress began to seek the advice of the scientific community, and by the spring of 1969 scientists opposed to missile defense were testifying before congressional committees. This was a new phenomenon; previously, only administration witnesses had testified on defense matters. It was during this period that the core arguments against missile defense solidified and began to take root throughout the military establishment and on Capitol Hill. But the scientific community was itself split. A number of respected experts also made the case for proceeding with a limited antimissile system—among them, Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study and Alvin Weinberg of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They argued that a strong defense could undercut the value of ICBMs and end the arms race. Even in the absence of a 100 percent effective defense, Dyson wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, some benefit would come from saving most of a population. Another prominent supporter was Albert Wohlstetter, a researcher at the RAND Corporation and the Stanford Research Institute, who insisted that defensive systems were necessary to ensure that enough offensive missiles would survive a Soviet first strike to retaliate. He accused opponents of distorting operations research and data; they responded with accusations of contradictory statements, changing rationales, and selective use of intelligence information by members of the administration.

    The technical debate left the impression that for every expert declaring that missile defense would not work, another was ready to argue that it would. What finally aroused the general public, though, was the Army's move in the final year of the Johnson administration to start buying land for the missile defense sites. Opponents warned that cities near defensive missile sites would become "megaton magnets" for the Soviet Union. They also fanned fears by saying that the nuclear warheads of the Spartan and Sprint interceptors might detonate at low altitude during an attack, or accidentally in peacetime, thereby destroying the very cities they were intended to protect. In the face of such heightened public concern, congressional backers began to rethink their commitment. Compounding matters, the Sentinel controversy was occurring against the backdrop of growing opposition to the Vietnam War, which cast clouds of general suspicion across all military programs.

    Soon after taking office in 1969, President Richard Nixon decided to deploy Sentinel equipment in a new configuration, relocating defensive sites out of metropolitan areas and basing them around offensive U.S. strategic missile silos. He called the reoriented system Safeguard. With this shift from population defense to silo defense, the Nixon administration hoped to dampen public opposition. At the time, U.S. officials were also increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of U.S. missiles to attack as a result of moves by the Soviet Union to put multiple, independently targetable warheads atop its huge SS-9 missiles.

    Still, the Safeguard system proved as controversial as its predecessor, and the debate churned on. In August 1969, Congress narrowly approved funding to begin production of Safeguard, with Vice President Spiro Agnew breaking a fifty-fifty tie vote in the Senate. Over the next two years, the program retained its precarious grip on survival on the strength of its perceived value as a bargaining chip in the talks with the Soviet Union on limiting offensive nuclear weapons that began in November 1969. Already by the early 1970s, contemporary chroniclers were referring to national missile defense as "the most costly, complex and controversial weapon system ever developed by the United States."

In 1972, through negotiations known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), the United States and Soviet Union agreed to a five-year freeze on strategic launchers and concluded the ABM Treaty restricting each superpower to two antimissile system complexes. In 1974 a protocol was added reducing the number of permitted sites to one each and a maximum of one hundred interceptors. Consistent with their respective antimissile programs at the time, the United States chose to protect a missile base near Grand Forks, North Dakota, while the Soviets retained the Galosh system they had built around Moscow in the 1960s.

    The provisions of the ABM Treaty were tailored to prevent either country from deploying a full territorial defense or laying the groundwork for such a defense. To that end, the treaty placed tight restrictions on the development of new types of antimissile weapons, forbidding the testing or deployment of antimissile systems—or even components—that were mobile and land-based, or based in space, at sea, or in the air. The treaty marked a conceptual turning point in the nuclear relationship between the two superpowers. It signified an acknowledgment of deterrence based on mutual vulnerability. By entering into the treaty, the Americans and Soviets seemed to agree that the best way to avoid a massive nuclear attack by the other side was to remain defenseless against one. Understandably, missile defense enthusiasts found such reasoning absurd. Donald Brennan, a Hudson Institute analyst who had been working on missile defense issues, bitterly attacked the notion. He took McNamara's term "assured destruction" and the phrase "mutual deterrence" and combined them into what he called "the concept of mutual assured destruction," thus coining the enduring acronym MAD, which he said appropriately described the official U.S. posture.

    It did not take long after the ABM Treaty process reduced the number of allowable sites down to one for even the single U.S. Safeguard facility in North Dakota to start looking expendable. From its inception, Safeguard had faced the same technical criticisms as Sentinel—chiefly that the system was extremely vulnerable to countermeasures and a determined Soviet first strike. Such limitations might have been acceptable in the short term while Safeguard served as a bargaining chip to persuade the Soviets to accept reductions in strategic forces. But after the ABM Treaty and the SALT I accord, there was less justification for keeping Safeguard at all.

    Shortly after Safeguard started operating in October 1975, Congress canceled funding for the system, citing its expense and likely ineffectiveness. Operations were halted in February 1976. From start to finish, the program absorbed $5.5 billion, excluding the cost of developing and building the nuclear warheads. By the end, nuclear-tipped interceptors had lost favor as the way to defend against missile attack because of their technical and political liabilities. For one thing, nuclear explosions interfered with the operation of the radar systems that were supposed to control the battle between defending missiles and incoming warheads. For another, the prospect of nuclear blasts even high overhead unnerved populations on the ground.

    So the Army shifted its research and development to an alternative approach that avoided explosive devices and relied instead on the kinetic energy of a direct collision to obliterate a target. Such an approach would require significant advances in two main areas. One was optical sensors to overcome the problems that radars had with distinguishing among decoys, boosters, warheads, and debris. The other area was parallel processing by computers at speeds fast enough to interpret the sensor data, incorporate it with radar tracking information, and compute targeting instructions for an interceptor.

    By combining the improved capabilities of infrared sensors with small, high-capacity computers, the Army produced interceptors that worked on the principle of kinetic kill. Dubbed "hit-to-kill" vehicles, they represented the first major revolution in ballistic missile defense since the United States began research in the 1940s. This technology was ready for demonstration in 1982, when the Army began what it called its Homing Overlay Experiment, or HOE. In these tests, an experimental vehicle was launched from the Kwajalein missile range in the Marshall Islands using a modified Minuteman rocket. Once in space, the vehicle separated from its booster and homed in on a target missile that had been fired from an Air Force base in California. HOE succeeded in scoring a hit after three failures, but the credibility of the test was called into question years later when investigators at the Congressional General Accounting Office reported that the chances of intercepting the target warhead had been increased by heating it before launch and instructing it to fly sideways, thereby exposing a greater surface area to the interceptor's sensors. In any case, HOE was far too heavy and expensive for operational purposes.

    Major advances in the development of lasers also occurred in the 1970s as the Pentagon explored ways of using this technology to shoot down aircraft or missiles. By the early 1980s, these efforts had focused on high-energy lasers based in space in order to overcome the scattering and spread of laser beams caused by the atmosphere. The construction of large mirrors posed a challenge for the evolution of laser systems, as did pointing and tracking with high precision. But of all the technical advances during this period, the promise of directed-energy weapons contributed most to generating renewed interest in deploying an antimissile system.

At the end of the 1970s, a precipitous change in U.S.-Soviet relations resulting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the failure of the United States to ratify a SALT II agreement set the conditions for reigniting the missile defense debate. The election of Ronald Reagan provided the spark. But it did not come immediately. While Reagan wasted little time launching the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, the strategic modernization program that he presented in October 1981 contained no provision for an antimissile system. A Defense Science Board panel had reviewed the status of various missile defense technologies earlier in the year and concluded that none was on the horizon.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from HIT TO KILL by Bradley Graham. Copyright © 2001 by Bradley Graham. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved.