Happy Birthday, Star Wars

In 1983, Ronald Reagan launched a 40-year, $380 Billion Boondoggle

On March 23, 1983, the day President Ronald Reagan would shock the nation with an ambitious vision to use lasers in space to intercept long-range ballistic missiles, Air Force officials were on Capitol Hill testifying about their laser programs. Apparently, they were unaware of the President’s plans.

That day, General Donald L. Lamberson told the Senate that he could not recommend an acceleration of the space-based laser program on technical grounds "at this point in time." General Bernard Randolph told the House of Representatives that a laser weapon system would require many megawatts of power, would need a precision mirror much larger than any yet manufactured, would weigh 150,000 pounds, and would cost "many, many billions of dollars." He explained that "to point the system at a target would be like pointing from the Washington Monument to a baseball on the top of the Empire State Building and hold it there while both of you are moving.... I view the whole thing with a fair amount of trepidation.”

That night, as a student getting my masters degree at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, I watched President Reagan’s sweeping speech:

"What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”

It was an enticing vision, presented with all the sincerity and skill that made Reagan one of the most persuasive presidents of all time. He called on the scientific community "to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." The President announced that he was directing "a long term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles." He said, "It will take years, probably decades, of effort on many fronts.”

That turned out to be a gross understatement. Forty years and about $380 billion later we are no closer to the dream of an effective national defense against ballistic missiles than we were on the night of Reagan’s speech. Vision and will could not overcome hard scientific realities.

The major technical problems that remain unresolved and eventually forced the cancellation of these ambitious plans are the same obstacles that have ruled out an effective ballistic missile defense for sixty years. Today’s more limited system of missile interceptors deployed on land and sea face the same basic problems:

• the ability of the enemy to overwhelm a system with offensive missiles;

• the questionable survivability of space-based weapons;

• the inability to discriminate among real warheads and hundreds of thousands of decoys;

• the problem of designing battle management, command, control and communications that could function in a nuclear war; and,

• low confidence in the ability of the system to work perfectly the first and, perhaps, only time it is ever used.

These problems have been detailed at length in many independent expert studies, including two that played a major role in the Star Wars debates—the 1987 American Physical Society Directed Energy Weapon study and the 1988 Office of Technology Assessment Ballistic Missile Defense study.

But there are literally scores of other technical problems that would have to be resolved before an effective defense can be deployed. In the long term, new technologies, particularly directed energy weapons, hold some promise. In the short term, however, there is little reason for technological optimism.

While intercepts against short-range missile and drones can be effective, a report from the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation summarizes the independent expert assessment that the current system of 44 deployed interceptors does not and cannot work.

“At a total cost of nearly $70 billion (a figure likely to increase), the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program has a failing test record. In a real-world scenario, the system cannot be relied upon to protect the United States from even an extremely limited attack. In this case — a nuclear attack against the homeland — deploying a failing system to attempt to thwart the attack makes little, if any, difference to not having any system at all.”

Even if, some distant day, an effective system could be built, it would be dangerous to do so. Rather than providing security, it would increase the risks of nuclear annihilation. The reason is simple: any defense encourages an opponent to defeat it with greater offense. This was the proven logic that lead President Richard Nixon to negotiate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972.

In order to limit and then reduce offensive nuclear weapons, we had to limit defensive systems. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger understood that an arms race in strategic defense systems fosters the proliferation of offensive missiles and the development of countermeasures to defeat the defense. Unfortunately, President George W. Bush used the fear after the September 11 attacks to abandon the ABM treaty in 2002. It did not unleash a rush of tests and technologies that the administration claimed would allow us to deploy a nation-wide “shield.” More contracts and more programs just produced more failures.

Politicians have not learned from this history. This year’s Pentagon budget includes about $10 billion for “missile defense and defeat” programs, as it did last year and the year before. There has not been a test of the national system in several years and there is unlikely to be one for several more. There is no effective Congressional oversight of the programs.

As I told the PBS show, Frontline, years ago, “The myth endures. The belief that we can do this is not fazed by the technological failings. It's not fazed by the cost of the research. There is an almost religious belief that we can do this, and if we can, we must do this. That's what propels the proponents, and that's what's kept this illusion alive for decades.”

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For more history, please see my 2000 Carnegie Endowment Report, “A Brief History of Missile Defense.”