AnalysisMissile defense system that might just work
The Obama administration’s decision to scrap the Bush administration’s plan to place ballistic missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, and replace it with short-range defensive systems closer to Iran, makes sense; instead of making a political point to Russia, the U.S. might now have in place a defensive system that works
President Obama’s decision to scrap the Bush administration’s plan to place ballistic missile systems in Poland and the Czech Republic and instead deploy sorter range systems in places closer to Iran, should occasion an exploration of where, exactly, do we stand with regard to ballistic missile defenses.
Debora Mackenzie writes that the U.S. Star Wars project, launched by President Ronald Regan in 1983, is not dead, although the ambitious goals Reagan announced for the project (to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”) proved unrealistic. Instead, Obama has a new plan that may finally make it realistic.
The Bush administration’s idea — installing ten missile launchers in Poland by 2015 to shoot down intermediate and long-range nuclear missiles (ICBMs), and deploying high-definition radar in the Czech Republic to guide the defensive systems — was already several orders of magnitude more modest than Reagan’s 1983 concept. Bush’s more modest plan was based on interceptors tested in Alaska and California, but those had a success rate of only 50 percent, under what many considered unrealistically favorable conditions.
The problem that the Bush plan faced were similar to the problem the Reagan plan faced: McKenzie notes that ICBMs fly six times as fast as a rifle bullet, so it takes a powerful rocket to catch one mid-flight. What will make the task more difficult is that the war-head-carrying ICBMs will likely be accompanied by flak or by dummy missiles. The United States planned five interceptors for each ICBM, but they are expensive, which limited numbers.
Whether or not the systems would even work was one thing — but if even if they did, they would not have provided defense against the countries that the United States currently considers most threatening. Iran and North Korea have no ICBMs, but they do have hundreds of medium and short-range missiles, said James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a press conference last week.
The ten interceptors planned for Poland were supposed to take out two ICBMs heading for the United States or western Europe from Iran. They were not placed to hit missiles targeted at Iran’s neighbors, or even at Poland, and certainly could not handle hundreds of missiles. MacKenzie notes that Iran is thought unlikely to even have ICBMs until 2018 — if ever, given probable US retaliation to the launch of such a missile.
Meanwhile, the United States has been developing an alternative system to shoot down short and medium-range missiles. This has passed eight anti-missile tests since 2007 — and the SM-3 missiles it uses cost a seventh as much as the Polish interceptors. These are already being deployed as part of the ship-borne Aegis system, whose mobile sensors are less vulnerable targets than the big, fixed Czech radar would have been. Three of these ships will be in place by 2011, Cartwright says.
The United States thus plans to upgrade Aegis, moving it ashore and improving sensors to treble the area they cover by 2015. By 2018, says Cartwright, airborne sensors and bigger interceptors will defend all of Europe from missiles up to intermediate range. The system should handle ICBMs by 2020 — with Russian collaboration, he hopes.
Commenting on the Obama decision, Jeffrey Lewis of Washington, D.C.-based think tank the New America Foundation, says that instead of a plan mainly meant to “make a political point to Russia,” the United States has “a defense that works, against a threat that exists.”
