Chapter Five
What about Star Wars?

Every new weapon will eventually bring some counter defense to it.
—Harry Truman, addressing the U.S. Congress, October 1945

After five centuries of the use of hand arms with fire-propelled missiles, the large number of men killed by comparable arms in the recent war indicates that no adequate answer has yet [been] found for the bullet.
—Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon, 1946

Nuclear Science Fiction

In a fund-raising letter for Americans for Democratic Action, Isaac Asimov writes that the Star Wars plan for defending the United States by shooting down Soviet nuclear missiles is nothing but "Hollywood science fiction." He warns, nevertheless, that Star Wars is "dangerous" and "destabilizing," and even "a threat to world peace" and "to our national security." But how can a fictional weapon endanger the survival of the real world? Similarly, Harrison Brown, then editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, reveals that on learning of Star Wars he "laughed" and is "quite certain that [his] laughter blended with that of thousands of other scientists and engineers," because the design of an impenetrable nuclear shield is "virtually impossible." But if, as Brown believes, the Star Wars concept is "reminiscent of the concept of perpetual motion," how can it also carry "unprecedented dangers," and why does he say that "those of us who laughed when the Star Wars concept was first suggested should be crying"?^[1]

This strange contradiction is at the heart of the debate about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), otherwise known as Star Wars. Almost everyone now accepts that SDI cannot defend America from nuclear war. The world's premier scientific journal, Nature, stated flatly that

"the scientific community knows that [Star Wars] will not work." The Pentagon nevertheless insists that SDI is essential for U.S. security. Moscow incorporated opposition to Star Wars into the new Communist party program, thereby making it "one of the most basic precepts of the party." And the American peace community, having worked diligently to prove Star Wars impractical, continues denouncing it as an unprecedented threat to peace and committing many precious resources to stopping it.^[2]

The preoccupation with Star Wars is perhaps the classic case of weaponitis. Star Wars cannot shift the nuclear equation, for better or for worse, any more than a perpetual-motion weapon could if President Reagan had gone on national television to announce that the United States was determined to build it.

Let us examine three of the central claims made about Star Wars: (1) it will protect people from nuclear war, (2) it will make nuclear war either more likely or less likely, and (3) it will radically transform the nuclear arms race.

A Nuclear Umbrella?

President Reagan's original vision, presented in his startling speech to the nation of March 23, 1983, was apparently of an impenetrable shield that could repel any offensive nuclear barrage, protect the U.S. population, and even "give us the means of rendering … nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." A 1985 fund-raising letter of the Citizens for a High Frontier was in full agreement: "This plan … [will] make all of us safe from nuclear missile attack … [because] it will actually render harmless virtually all nuclear missiles anyone might fire at us."^[3]

No one doubted that it was possible to shoot down ballistic missiles—and had been since the original ground-based antiballistic missile (ABM) weapons of the 1960s. But soon after the first ABMs were deployed, most authorities agreed that actually protecting populations and industry was well beyond their means. Indeed, the ABM treaty of 1972 was essentially a formal recognition by both sides that a practical and economic missile defense of society was unreachable in the 1970s.

The prognosis is unlikely to change in the 1990s or even in the twenty-first century. Former secretary of defense James Schlesinger writes that "there is no realistic hope that we shall ever again be able to protect American cities" because a single hydrogen warhead can destroy one. As McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, Robert McNamara,

and Gerard Smith point out, "even a 95-percent kill rate would be insufficient to save either society from disintegration in the event of general nuclear war." To work effectively, the shield cannot leak, but as the entire history of military technology shows, "there is no leak-proof defense."^[4]

No complex technology works perfectly, and Star Wars would be by far the most complex ever attempted. But it "must work perfectly the very first time [it is used], since it can never be tested in advance as a full system." A true operational test would require an actual Soviet attack. As prominent software engineers have pointed out, even if the gamut of exotic Star Wars hardware by some miracle performed flawlessly in its first full-scale use, the unprecedentedly large software programs that control it would not, since it is impossible to build large "bugless" programs. David Parnas, a computer scientist on the president's Strategic Defense Initiative advisory panel, resigned with the following explanation: "Because of the extreme demands on the system and our inability to test it, we will never be able to believe, with any confidence, that we have succeeded."^[5]

In fact, a leak-proof shield against current Soviet nuclear forces would be only the beginning, and possibly the easiest part, of strategic defense. For "any prospect of a significantly improved American defense is absolutely certain to stimulate the most energetic Soviet efforts to ensure the continued ability of Soviet warheads to get through." This is the answer to those who compare the prevailing skepticism about Star Wars' feasibility to that about putting a man on the moon in the 1960s: "The effort to get to the moon was not complicated by the presence of an adversary. A platoon of hostile moon-men with axes could have made it a disaster."^[6]

One way to foil Star Wars is simply to attack it. Schlesinger predicts that "an effective opponent will develop defense suppression techniques and will punch a hole through any space-based defense that is deployed." And "no one has been able to offer any hope that it will ever be easier and cheaper to deploy and defend large systems in space than for someone else to destroy them. The balance of technical judgment is that the advantage in any unconstrained contest in space will be with the side that aims to attack the other side's satellites."^[7]

The Soviets could also expand and improve their offensive nuclear strike forces until they could overwhelm, elude, and spoof the defensive screen. A study for the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) by Ashton Carter, a Pentagon systems analyst in the first two years of the

Reagan administration, concludes that "for every defense concept proposed or imagined, including all of the so-called 'Star Wars' concepts, a countermeasure has already been identified"; that these "could be implemented with today's technology, whereas the defense could not"; that "in general, the costs of the countermeasures can be estimated and shown to be relatively low, whereas the costs of the defense are unknown but seem likely to be high"; and that "in general, the future technologies presupposed as part of the defense concept would also be potent weapons for attacking the defense." To take just one example, leaks of a classified Defense Intelligence Agency study revealed Pentagon evidence that by 1993 the Soviets could build "fast-burn" rocket boosters able to evade the critical "boost-phase" intercept by U.S. space-based weaponry. That phase is the only chance to attack Soviet missiles before they decompose into numerous warheads and decoys. The new Soviet rockets would "burn out" so fast after leaving the earth's protective atmosphere that space-based weapons would not have enough time (less than one minute) to destroy many of them before the hot exhaust used to track them was gone.^[8]

Even with a near-perfect antimissile defense—a technical absurdity—America would remain absolutely vulnerable to nuclear devastation; ballistic missiles are only one of many ways to deliver nuclear warheads. Others include air-breathing delivery vehicles (manned bombers and cruise missiles) and covert delivery by commandos, infiltrators, and saboteurs. Former secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger suggested that Star Wars would defend against these threats as well, but that hardly seems credible. Schlesinger points out that "the United States Air Force has long argued that air defense systems [against manned bombers] are penetrable and will always be penetrable…. The United States has long seacoasts. In contrast to the Soviet Union, the bulk of our population lies along the coast." (Indeed, the United States long ago dismantled the bulk of its air-defense system because of its impracticality in the nuclear age.) Furthermore, "there is no foreseeable way that we can preclude [cruise] missiles' impacting on our cities—even if we had a perfect ballistic missile defense." The Carter OTA background paper adds that "a desperate Soviet Union could introduce nuclear weapons into the United States on commercial airliners, ships, packing crates, diplomatic pouch, etc." And it notes that even if all these methods somehow failed, "other methods of mass destruction or terrorism would be feasible for the U.S.S.R., including sabotage of dams or nuclear power plants, bacteriological attack, contaminating water, producing tidal waves with near-coastal underwater detonations, and so on."^[9]

As Bundy and his colleagues observe, "the overwhelming consensus of the nation's technical community is that in fact there is no prospect whatever that science and technology can, at any time in the next several decades, make nuclear weapons 'impotent and obsolete.'" Ashton Carter's OTA background paper, based on "full access to classified information and studies performed for the executive Branch," concludes as follows: "The prospect that emerging 'Star Wars' technologies, when further developed, will provide a perfect or near-perfect defense system … is so remote that it should not serve as the basis of public expectation or national policy." Even Lieutenant General James Abrahamson, former commander of the Star Wars program, has flatly stated that "a perfect defense is not a realistic thing." Under Secretary of Defense Richard DeLauer, the department's senior technical official, admitted in congressional hearings that "there's no way an enemy can't overwhelm your defenses if he wants to badly enough." The Reagan administration suppressed one of its own high-level technical reports that came to the same conclusion about SDI: "The report doesn't boldly state that the plan is idiotic. But after reading the list of disadvantages, only a fool could come to the wrong conclusion."^[10]

Reactions such as this prompted several new twists in the president's argument to shore it up politically and lend it at least minimal scientific credibility. It was necessary to show how an imperfect defense might still protect Americans in a nuclear attack—a very small one, that is, launched by terrorists, a minor nuclear power, or even by the Soviet Union if it heavily cut back its offensive nuclear forces or made a small accidental launch. This justification is reminiscent of one rationale for the original American ABM of the 196Os: the need to defend against the nascent Chinese nuclear threat.

An imperfect defense against a small-scale attack is a far less demanding goal than foiling a large-scale attack and could possibly be achieved to an extent. But the importance of such a defense should not be exaggerated. A "mad captain" on either side might be able to launch an unauthorized attack—but an attack by even a single modern nuclear submarine would not in fact be very small and probably would not be calmly regarded as accidental by the nation at the receiving end. And as Ashton Carter argues, "Emerging nuclear powers or terrorists would be unlikely to use ICBMs [what Star Wars defends against] to deliver their small nuclear arsenals to the United States."^[11]

A committed nuclear attacker or terrorist will probably always be able to detonate one or more warheads on American soil no matter what defenses are built. And Rathjens and Ruina note that "a reasonably

thin area defense intended to protect against some unauthorized, accidental, or third-country attacks can be developed with existing technology. With time, such systems can surely be improved, but we need not await breakthroughs in technology resulting from the SDI program to address realistically the question of the net benefits of such a defense and to decide whether it should be deployed." Noted weapons scientist Richard Garwin asks, "If protecting the United States against accidental launches of Russian ICBMs is truly important, why wait for an elaborate defense? The United States and the Soviet Union could more easily and cheaply protect themselves against accidental launches by installing the command-destruct radio receivers commonly used in test firings of their operational missiles." Physicist Sherman Frankel points out that Star Wars only "detracts from getting on with deploying" such devices "on our huge arsenal of missiles."^[12]

Fred Hoffman told a Senate armed services subcommittee in March 1985 that the inability of Star Wars to defend U.S. cities is irrelevant since the Soviets, for fear of retaliation in kind, probably would not attack cities. A Soviet attack on U.S. military targets, Hoffman contends, may "leave the bulk of Western civil society undamaged." Hence even an imperfect defense could increase the number of survivors. But as Sidney Drell and Wolfgang Panofsky point out, "While neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has made the destruction of enemy populations in response to enemy attack an explicit policy objective, both recognize that should a large fraction of the superpowers' arsenals be used—under any doctrine, any choice of pattern of attack, or for any purpose—then the threat to the survival of the two societies is very grave indeed."^[13] In fact, Star Wars could easily increase the number of Soviet missiles hitting the United States if, as is likely, the Soviets acted on worst-case assumptions about the defense, building and firing more missiles than they otherwise would have, and if, as is also likely, the defense did not in fact work.

Most of the technical debate about Star Wars is simply beside the point. There is no way to defend populations against hydrogen weapons, period. It does not matter whether nuclear-pumped lasers, orbital battle stations, and the like can be made to work. The issue of the "popup" defense—Star Wars satellites that would be launched into orbit just before use to replace those destroyed by Soviet antisatellite weapons—illustrates how absurdly technical the debate has become. During 1984 Senate hearings, Harvard's Albert Carnesale conjectured that "if we could deploy a popup system, they could probably deploy a popup system

to destroy ours." Senator Paul Tsongas asked the next logical question: "But you could not assure us that we could not develop an antipopup popup system?"—that is, a way to pop up American satellites to destroy the satellites the Soviets popped up to destroy the satellites the United States popped up to destroy the missiles the Soviets popped up to pop the United States!^[14]

A Shield for Using the Sword

As Schlesinger writes, the debate about Star Wars has undergone a "remarkable transformation": "The argument is no longer that somehow we can protect American cities perfectly. Instead the argument has become that maybe, not definitely but maybe, strategic defense would permit us to improve deterrence—and that the mix of offense and defense would lead to a more stable world."^[15] The rationale is no longer that Star Wars can reduce the consequences of a nuclear war, but rather that it may reduce the risk by decreasing the incentives for a Soviet first strike.

In July 1985, for example, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski called in the New Republic for "reformulating [SDI] politically and strategically." He argued that "the U.S. should drop or at least de-emphasize President Reagan's idealistic hope for total nuclear defense for all our population." The goals, rather, should be to "reinforce deterrence and promote nuclear stability." On the anniversary of Hiroshima, the Economist wrote that "the case for Star Wars" rested not on a "wildly implausible" defensive screen for American society but on "the possibility of a defensive screen capable of stopping quite a lot of the Soviet warheads aimed at America's nuclear forces and command centres," which "would make it almost impossible for the Russians to risk a disarming first strike against America."^[16]

The new goal of SDI, according to Gerold Yona, the Pentagon's chief Star Wars scientist, is to make "leakage of such low military value as to discourage a first strike." The Defense Department general counsel, William H. Taft IV, wrote that "the purpose of the President's initiative is to strengthen our ability to deter … to reduce the likelihood of war" and not to "save lives in time of war." Physicist Robert Jastrow ("the single most influential proponent of SDI outside the government") contends that Soviet first-strike weapons have "knocked the stuffing out of deterrence" and that only Star Wars can restore stability. Jastrow actually denies that President Reagan ever claimed that Star Wars was intended

to defend American cities. The purpose of Star Wars, for now at least, is to "strengthen and preserve the American deterrent to a Soviet attack."^[17]

Star Wars advocates claim, then, that the system will stabilize deterrence by discouraging a first strike. But critics counter that Star Wars will destabilize deterrence by encouraging a first strike. Schlesinger, for example, worries that Star Wars would "create instabilities during the entire period of deployment…. The advantage of striking first, for either side, would be greater than is the case for terrestrial capabilities." The late Herbert Scoville, president of the Arms Control Association and former high-level official of both the CIA and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, agreed that "developing defenses encourages a first strike." Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann, writing in the New York Review of Books, called Star Wars "a major threat to stable deterrence."^[18]

The anti-SDI pledge, signed by most of the faculty of the nation's topranked physics departments as well as by many in other science and engineering departments, says: "The program is a step toward the type of weapons and strategy likely to trigger a nuclear holocaust." Hundreds of prominent scientists, including dozens of Nobel laureates and a majority of members of the National Academy of Sciences, signed a Union of Concerned Scientists appeal stating that space-based missile defenses and related antisatellite weapons "would increase the risk of nuclear war." The Mobilization for Survival's anti—Star Wars literature quotes the extraordinary claim of Robert Bowman, head of the Air Force advanced space programs between 1976 and 1978, that all Star Wars proposals "would be extremely destabilizing, probably triggering the nuclear war which both sides are trying to prevent." Writing on behalf of the same organization, Benjamin Spock warns that "our very survival depends on" stopping Star Wars."^[19]

So we are told on the one hand that Star Wars is required to prevent, and on the other that it would trigger, nuclear war. Both claims, fortunately, are wildly overblown. Star Wars probably cannot affect the risk of nuclear war one way or the other. Because Star Wars cannot change the probable outcome of a nuclear war, it should not change the incentives on either side to start one.

As we saw in Chapter 2, a successful first strike by either side is simply impossible. Star Wars cannot change that. The American deterrent force does not need to be protected more than it already is. Considering in particular the invulnerability of U.S. strategic submarines, further protection of U.S. land-based missiles is of little importance. And

Star Wars would be perhaps the least plausible and most expensive way to approach the job. The United States could protect its missiles by superhardening their silos, moving them around on railways or on roads (as with the Midgetman missile), or defending them with simple ground-based antiballistic missiles (ABMs).^[20] As for protecting command and control, as Charles Glaser points out, there are fewer than one hundred critical U.S. command and control points, and many of them are very fragile; hence "even very effective [ballistic missile defense] could not deny the Soviet Union the ability to destroy these targets with a first strike."^[21]

The fear of an American first-strike capability, backed by Star Wars, is as baseless as the fear of a Soviet one. Many argue that while a leaky space umbrella is indeed no good in a downpour (that is, a Soviet first strike), it can help a lot in a drizzle (that is, ragged Soviet retaliation following an American first strike). But against hydrogen warheads that can each level a city, a leaky umbrella is meaningless in either case. Even after absorbing an American first strike, the Soviet Union could send off enough ballistic missiles (to say nothing of bombers and cruise missiles) to utterly destroy the United States no matter what defenses we build.

As E. P. Thompson acknowledges, with or without Star Wars a successful American first strike is nothing more than an "ideological fiction."^[22] Both sides recognize this. True, the Soviets fear Star Wars. But what they really fear is losing a Star Wars technology race (which could give the United States a big advantage in spin-off technologies) and being forced to develop expensive countermeasures (a hedge against the small chance that Star Wars will actually work to a significant extent). The Soviet Union, we should recall, expressed urgent fear about many previous American nuclear systems, such as MIRVed missiles and the Pershing II and cruise Euromissiles. The United States has expressed similar fears about many Soviet systems, from sputnik to the "window of vulnerability." But these systems never tempted either side to preempt or even to take other steps—such as adopting a policy of launch on warning or putting bombers on airborne alert—that would indicate a genuine fear of first strike. Star Wars will not tempt them either.

As George Rathjens writes, the effects of Star Wars on crisis stability are "only of academic interest…. The prospects for a technically effective defense are so poor that I cannot imagine deployments in this century that would make a difference to the outcome of a nuclear exchange." Rathjens and Jack Ruina add that "there is no realistic prospect of defenses … even … being perceived as that effective."

None would be sufficient to affect "the behavior of nations in times of crisis." And even if we grant the improbable idea that Star Wars could slightly alter strategic stability or perceptions of it, we still cannot know the direction of the change. As Glaser observes, any U.S. nuclear defense program would probably be matched by the Soviets, and in that case "an attacker would face greater uncertainty about both the effectiveness of his attack and the effectiveness of the adversary's retaliation. The net effect of defenses is, therefore, indeterminate."^[23]

Star Wars could change the amount of warning time between the detection of a possible Soviet missile attack and the decision about whether to respond. The best way to shoot down Soviet missiles would be to attack them from space within minutes of launch—so-called boost-phase interception—before they decompose into numerous warhead-carrying reentry vehicles and decoys. With time so short, many fear that U.S. commanders may panic or take a fateful step based on incomplete information, or even that the United States might computerize the split-second decision and thereby invite an accidental war.

But the exotic technology required to attempt boost-phase interception does not exist and may never be perfected. And activation of a boost-phase interception system, whether by accident or following a false alarm of Soviet attack, would probably mean nothing more than laser beams or other weapons shooting harmlessly into empty space. That should in no way be confused with the firing of Minuteman missiles after a false alarm, which would of course be a catastrophe but has nothing to do with Star Wars.

But what if Star Wars is really an offense masquerading as a defense? Could it then contribute to an American first strike? One study by R & D Associates, a Marina Del Ray think tank, warns that "in a matter of hours, a laser defense system powerful enough to cope with the ballistic missile threat can also destroy the enemy's major cities by fire—each city perhaps requiring only several minutes for incineration." An Argonne National Laboratory physicist adds that the fires caused by such an attack might "generate smoke in amounts comparable to the amounts generated in some major nuclear exchange scenarios," possibly triggering "a climatic catastrophe similar to 'nuclear winter.'"^[24] These are appalling prospects, to be sure, but they have nothing to do with a first strike, and the superpowers can of course incinerate each other's cities and perhaps blacken the atmosphere in well under thirty minutes with technology already at hand.

Star Wars might also be used offensively, many critics contend, to attack

Soviet satellites—a logical first step in a U.S. first strike. But as Ashton Carter points out, the loss of photoreconnaissance, communications, and even early warning satellites may seem dramatic but still cannot make a successful first strike possible and hence would not increase the incentives to preempt.^[25]

In 1986 Robert English, a former Pentagon policy analyst, proposed the ultimate scenario for a U.S. first strike using Star Wars. It begins with a lightning "laser attack on the other side's communications networks and early-warning systems, including satellites." High-altitude nuclear explosions would "further paralyze command and control systems" through electromagnetic pulse. Then, "with the victim effectively blinded," the coup de grace: "the launch of space-based missiles against such targets as silos, command bunkers, airfields, and other military facilities…. Lasers might also be used to pin down missiles in their silos until the silos could be destroyed." Thus, "in a matter of minutes, the victim of such an attack might find the bulk of his ICBM and bomber force gone and his command systems in disarray—without having endured any significant damage to his cities and industries."^[26]

True, there would be little if any warning of a science fiction attack from space, but of course the victim could still destroy the attacker, if only from submarines that would remain invulnerable. Unsavory as offensive weapons in space may be, they seem unlikely to upset the nuclear stalemate any more than weapons on land have.

A Logical Circle

Though Star Wars cannot reduce the damage or change the likelihood of nuclear war, it may well transform the nuclear arms race. Advocates contend that the United States can ultimately bargain it away in return for dramatic Soviet concessions on offensive missiles, perhaps as part of grand strategic reductions along the lines of the START treaty. Critics predict the opposite: the demise of arms control, a runaway offensive arms race, and a new arms race in defenses and the militarization of space as the Soviets scramble to counter the American program. Four former high-level U.S. officials wrote in Foreign Affairs of "the president's choice: Star Wars or arms control."^[27]

Whoever is correct, nothing of importance to deterrence is likely to change. Many times in the past the experts on nuclear war have attributed to some new weapon a decisive importance, either positive or negative, and when that proved difficult to sustain they have back-tracked

to the argument that even inconsequential new systems will set off a cycle of responses and counterresponses that will make a difference. As Richard K. Betts points out, concerns about the arms race have mostly been "future-oriented." Thus, "during the 'missile gap' controversy, the issue was whether the Soviets might achieve superiority a few years later. In the late 1970's the raging controversy was whether the 'window of vulnerability' would open by the early 1980's." Yet "when the early 1980's arrived, and the actual operating balance of intercontinental launchers and warheads had moved further in Soviet favor, U.S. concern evaporated because [of] Reagan's plans for strategic modernization and buildup."^[28] Few notice that the feared or hoped-for developments never materialize because deterrence is in fact existential.

Perhaps someday the United States or the Soviet Union will build a weapon that actually changes the nuclear peril. But that is a remote prospect. In the meantime the superpowers are periodically endangering the planet, as they have over the past forty years, through different actions. To these we now turn.