----- Original Message ----- From: Dick Withecombe To: STOP NATO Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2000 11:26 PM Subject: [STOPNATO] Economist June 3rd 2000 - Son of Star Wars STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.COM The Economist June 3rd 2000 MISSILE DEFENCES A shield in space America wants to build a new system of missile defences. This is not popular with others, whether allies or potential foes "LATE next spring, when the ice melts and L the wind subsides to a moderate gale, barges based in Seattle may well be making the 3,000-mile voyage to deliver building materials to an Alaskan island called Shemya. The erection of an ultra-sensitive radar installation on this unforgiving terrain, where building is possible only for a few weeks every summer, would mark the first step in a crash programme to provide the United States with a shield against certain limited types of rocket attack. Although the Pentagon has already embarked on half-a-dozen other programmes designed to stop missiles in mid-flight, this will be the first time a nuclear power has openly set out to defend its entire territory from such attacks. But before the barges can start plying the north Pacific, a big change will have occurred, for better or worse, in international diplomacy. From the moment the first concrete is poured into Shemya's soil, the United States will be in breach of the current terms of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, under which America and the Soviet Union agreed that neither would build a comprehensive defence against the other's long-range nuclear arsenal. That accord, designed as a guarantee against a "first strike" by either side, has been widely criticised, especially on America's political right, as a hangover from the cold war that is no longer useful in a world where any rogue state can acquire deadly missiles. Russia and China, on the other hand, have expressed horror at the idea of abrogating the treaty. They fear (plausibly in China's case, less so in Russia's) that their own nuclear arsenals could be rendered useless by an American shield-while America could still use its rockets with impunity. Among the main provisions of the treaty are strict curbs on the construction of radars powerful enough to track incoming missiles in space. So, before starting to build the $5oom radar in Alaska, the American government must do one of two things. It could exercise its option to withdraw from the ABM treaty on six months' notice-which would delight Republicans in Congress, but could plunge relations with Russia and China into crisis and strain the Atlantic alliance. The alternative course, which President Bill Clinton hopes to follow during his final months in office, is to negotiate with Russia the changes to the treaty that would be needed to make a limited national missile defence (NMD) system possible. In order to do this, America must convince Russia that its proposed anti-missile shield is designed to ward off a handful of rockets from a North Korea or an Iran-not a massed attack from the still-formidable Russian arsenal. The treaty changes America is now proposing are only the bare minimum required to allow work in Alaska to begin. Broader changes would be needed before implementing in full the Pentagon's current plan for an anti-missile system with a second interceptor site, in North Dakota, and superhigh-frequency radar stations in Greenland, Britain and possibly South Korea as well as other parts of the United States. The immediate plan is to deploy 20 interceptors, able to stop a few crude missiles, in Alaska by 2005; but by the end of the decade there could be as many as 250 interceptors, capable of knocking out a "few dozen" missiles. Reassuring Russia American diplomats are working hard to convince the Russians that, even at its maximum stretch, such a shield would not render Russia's nuclear deterrent ineffective. This would still be true, they say, even if, as Russia has proposed, a new agreement were to cut the number of warheads deployed by America and Russia to 1,500 each. Under the Start-2 accord, each side's total will come down to 3,500 by 2007. Follow-on Start-3 talks aim to Cut to 2,000-2,500 warheads. The Pentagon said last week it would be "uncomfortable" about going lower than that. Even if it successfully deploys a limited shield, and both sides' arsenals are slashed, the United States would still not be able to strike Russia with impunity, American officials have assured their Russian counterparts. The Pentagon would have to assume that Russia still had a huge number of warheads, based on land and sea, primed for "launch on warning" of an American attack. By sending this message of reassurance, the Clinton administration has exposed itself to the charge that it is positively encouraging its cold-war foe to maintain a large, sophisticated arsenal on hair-trigger alert. In any case, Russia's new president, Vladimir Putin, whom Mr Clinton will be meeting on June 4th, seems so far to be unimpressed. Senior American officials admit that Russia is not yet convinced of the need to amend the ABM treaty, so the presidents will also focus on other arms-control measures, such as a deal to destroy large amounts of plutonium. If the two presidents find they disagree sharply over ABM issues, the stage could be set for a hot diplomatic summer. America's European allies have concerns of their own about the proposed missile shield. Their biggest worry is that the ABM issue will cause a general downturn in relations with Russia and China, whose consequences would be felt in Europe. "Quitting the ABM treaty would send an unfortunate signal about America's readiness to play by agreed rules rather than unilaterally," says Francois Heisbourg, a French security analyst. Mr Clinton's room for manoeuvre in this political and diplomatic game is small. The Pentagon says a decision to start the NMD programme must be made by this autumn; otherwise it will be impossible to start work in Alaska next year, and there will be no hope of meeting the goal of erecting a modest anti-missile shield by 2005. According to the white House, the timetable is based on estimates that North Korea could have developed a missile capable of hitting the United States in five years time, if not sooner. But Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former national s ecurity adviser, believes one aim of the timetable is to shield Vice-President AI Gore from charges that he would be less keen on "defending American families" than his Republican rival, George W. Bush. Mr Bush said last week that, as president, he would deploy anti-missile defences as soon as possible. But he questioned the need for an immediate decision. In political terms, the anti-missile network proposed by Mr Clinton, calling for the eventual deployment Of 250 interceptors, is nowhere near robust enough to satisfy the keenest supporters of anti-missile defence on the Republican side. They want to withdraw from the ABM treaty immediately and start constructing a multi-layered system of interceptors, based at sea and in space as well as on land. Meanwhile, American citizens-and the rest of the world-are left wondering whether they will be safer or in greater danger if work starts on anti-missile defences. They want to know whether the perceived threat from rogue missiles is real, whether the proposed shield would work and what the economic and diplomatic costs will be. The real threat The strongest arguments in favour of developing anti-missile defences have to do with the proliferation of ballistic missiles and of the know-how needed to tip them with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads, which are lumped together under the catch-all term of -weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). General Ronald Kadish, the head of the Pentagon's ballistic-missile-defence programme, has said that at least 20 countries possess either short- or medium range ballistic missiles, while "two dozen" either have developed or can develop a WMD capacity. Because countries like North Korea will sell rocket technology to anybody who has the money, the pace of proliferation has been accelerating. "Co-operation between rogues is getting deeper and wider all the time," according to Ranger Associates, a Washington missile consultancy. But how many of these regional pariahs could develop missiles of long enough range to threaten the United States with non-conventional weapons? Only a handful. The Central Intelligence Agency has projected that over the next 15 years, in addition to the existing arsenals of Russia and China, America is "likely" to face a missile threat from North Korea. Such a threat is "probable" from Iran and "possible" from Iraq. Regimes may change for the better, of course. Still, the pace at which anti-American regimes can develop ballistic-missile technology has often been underestimated by western experts. North Korea's launch in August 1998 of a three-stage rocket shocked the world; since last autumn it has been observing a freeze on new flight tests, although it is believed to be pursuing other research. But would such rockets ever be fired against the United States? it would seem suicidal. it is possible, nonetheless, to imagine a regional crisis in which America's freedom to support local allies would be hampered by the knowledge that its territory could, however hypothetically, be attacked with missiles. Yet for the Pentagon to feel that the homeland was immune, it would need to be sure that its shield would be able to stop allcorners; and that degree of certainty has still not been reached. There are also more immediate dangers: the use of crude short-range missiles in regional conflicts, against American bases or American allies; or a non-conventional attack on the United States by some means other than long-range ballistic missiles, such as truck bombs or even sea-launched rockets. This has prompted some defence specialists, not all of them doves, to suggest that the NMD programme involves spending far too much money, and incurring huge diplomatic costs, for a threat which is by no means the most acute. How it would work The cost of Mr Clinton's proposed system - estimated by the Pentagon at 27 billion US dollars over 20 years for a single interceptor site, plus radars - looks small compared with some other defence programmes. The Congressional Budget Office reckons the full system, without extra satellites, could cost 50 billion US dollars. Obviously the more complex the defences attempted, the higher the price tag. How would Mr Clinton's proposed NMD system deal with a rocket attack? The idea is that far above the atmosphere, near the top of its flight path, the rogue rocket would be stopped in its tracks. An American missile, guided by one of the most powerful radar systems ever built, and equipped with detectors of its own, would home in on the intruder-by this stage a cone-shaped object, five feet long-and smash it to pieces. The hostile launch would first have been detected by space-based sensors. Then a network of ground-based radars would erect "search fences- to detect the intruder and consider how to stop it. The powerful x-band radar, based initially at Shemya, would follow the attacker as it soared above the atmosphere, while a command centre deep in Colorado's Cheyenne mountains directed the launch of an interceptor. once the interceptor or "kill vehicle" got close enough to the target, it would start using its own sensors to tell the real rocket from any decoys. So far, the Pentagon has tried out the concept with two attempted intercepts, each costing about $loom. One, last October, was a success (although its terms of reference were restricted), while the second, in January, narrowly failed. As a result of this failure, a third test (of a total of 19) has been postponed from April to July. The Pentagon is then due to give the president an estimate of whether the system can be deployed in five years' time. General Kadish describes the 2005 timetable as "high risk", because five very sophisticated components have to be developed concurrently and then tied together, much faster than military planners would like. Decoys and alternatives One of the strongest arguments put forward by the sceptics (on both right and left) is that the system currently proposed would be too vulnerable to counter-measures. A report issued in April by the Union of Concerned Scientists argued that any country clever enough to design ballistic missiles would also be able to make decoys of sufficient sophistication to fool the interceptors. According to the ucs, decoys can be particularly effective outside the atmosphere, where there is no resistance from the air, and where objects of different weights and shapes behave in the same way. One technique would be to wrap the warhead in a material called aluminised mylar and simultaneously to release balloons coated with the same substance; another would be to cool the warhead with a shroud of liquid nitrogen, making it harder for the interceptor to home in. If a rogue wanted to tip his rockets with chemical or biological warheads, they would almost certainly be split up into "bomblets" or submunitions which, the ucs believes, would be too numerous for interceptors to stop. In short, it would be hard to stop missiles in space with land-based interceptors. So why not stop them earlier in their flight, from the sea? The main argument against sea-based defences is that these would require a much more radical rewriting of the ABM treaty. In other words, they would be harder to sell to the Russians. Already the Pentagon's effort to develop a sea-based shield against medium range missiles, known as Navy Theatre Wide, has been limited in scope-or as critics would say, "dumbed down" - in order to reassure Russia that it will not be used as a proxy for a system to defend America. The advantage of a system like Navy Theatre Wide, which should be operational by 2007, is that it aims, ideally, to stop missiles in their ascent phase-in other words, before they reach their highest point. This makes it harder for the enemy to use counter-measures, although the ships themselves would be vulnerable to attack. Better still, in theory, would be a system that knocked out enemy missiles in their boost phase, a few minutes after being launched. The only Pentagon effort that is explicitly designed to achieve that purpose is the air force's Airborne Laser programme, which is probably a decade away from deployment. Tantalising as it sounds, the success of this effort is far from assured-and it would be anathema to the Russians. The diplomatic costs The diplomatic, economic and military consequences of the American decision are already being felt in many different parts of the world. In Greenland, local politicians are worried that the upgrading of an American radar station, as part of the NMD network, will make the vast, icy landmass a target for enemy attack. In Canada, which might well have a role to play in tracking incoming missiles, officials are furious about a remark, by an American admiral, that a missile heading towards Ottawa might not be stopped unless Canada joins the shield. In NATO capitals, diplomats are fretting over the "decoupling- of the United States, protected by an anti-missile shield, from its European allies. in China, which has threatened to accelerate its own strategic arms build-up in response to the American shield, officials are convinced that the shield is directed against them; they speak ominously about a new cold war. Although the Chinese are not party to the ABM treaty, they are-like the other minor nuclear powers-a beneficiary of its curbs on anti-missile defences. They have suggested that playing about with the treaty could wreck the fabric of arms control. Such talk is a veiled threat that China would not only boost its own arsenal but withdraw promises to stop exporting dangerous defence technology. On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Republican hawks such as Senator Jesse Helms have given warning that any deal with Russia to keep the ABM treaty, and prevent America building a more ambitious anti-missile shield, will be "dead on arrival" in Congress. All this has prompted supporters of missile defences to suggest that more imaginative ways ought to be found of maintaining Russian confidence, while giving America a free hand to defend itself, Russia itself has put forward proposals for countering the threat of rogue missiles, and for reducing the risk of an accidental nuclear exchange. The Russian proposals include "broad international participation" in an arrangement to swap information about missile launches; and a set of incentives designed to encourage rogue missile-makers to abandon their efforts by offering them commercial space technology, and security guarantees. America rejects the idea of security guarantees and is wary of any formal system of incentives, available to any country that starts making rockets and then stops. Moreover, help for space programmes could be misused to develop longer-range missiles. But the Americans have not ruled out extending an information-sharing regime beyond Washington and Moscow. What about bolder initiatives from the American side, designed to reassure Russia while ensuring greater freedom of action for the Pentagon? Ever since the "star wars" programme of the Autos, advocates of anti-missile defence have insisted that it should be possible to break the -balance of terror- logic without alienating Russia. In practice, it is hard to think how this might safely be done. But unless it can, America could find itself in the worst of all worlds: incurring the huge diplomatic cost of withdrawal from the ABM treaty, without any real guarantee that rogue missiles could be stopped. 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