If We Could Stop ICBMs, Would We Want To?

 

Along with invading Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has put his country's nuclear arsenal on high alert.  He hopes by this measure to prevent the U. S. or its allies from interfering militarily with his exploits, but by doing so he has provided an unpleasant reminder that Russia has more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world.   

 

According to Wikipedia, the Russians, with about 5900 nuclear warheads, have a slight edge over the U. S. with about 5400.  But considering that just one nuclear weapon can spoil your whole day, this is a distinction without a difference.

 

What if we could erect something like Israel's Iron Dome system used against Palestinian rockets, a system that shoots down the vast majority, or even all, of a rival state's intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)?  Besides being able to cross that off our worry list, we could then unilaterally disarm ourselves from nuclear weapons, at least in principle. 

 

There are several problems with that idea.  One of the biggest, according to a recent article at Salon.com, is that we've tried building an ICBM defense system, and it probably doesn't work.

 

I say "probably" because, thank God, it's never been subjected to a real-life test.  Termed the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system (GMD), it was designed primarily to guard against potential nuclear launches from North Korea.  GMD consists of some 44 interceptor rockets stationed in Alaska and California.  It's been tested with dummy targets dozens of times since it was first deployed around 1999, and while its record would look pretty good as a baseball batting average, even one strike with a nuclear missile is too many. 

 

Scientists consulted by Salon say there is no fundamental theoretical barrier that prevents us from developing a 100% effective anti-ICBM defense.  But it's a very hard technical problem.

 

An ICBM undergoes powered flight (the "booster phase") for only its first three or four minutes.  After that it goes ballistic, literally—meaning that it's moving like a thrown rock in space, subject only to Newton's laws and without any steering.  This is the phase in which it is easiest to get a radar handle on where it is and where it's going, and steer any prospective anti-missile weapons toward it.  Once it gets close to its target and slows down in the atmosphere, it's too late to do much about it, because blowing it up a few thousand feet above a populated area and scattering the radioactive residue all over would not be much better than just letting it do its job.

 

Also, modern ICBMs launch multiple warheads at the same time, some of which are decoys.  This makes hitting all the real ones much harder, especially considering that each one is only about a meter long, according to one source.  Against a single ICBM consisting of a single nuclear warhead, our GMD stands a good chance of whacking it out of the air.  But a massive full-scale ICBM attack such as Russia would be able to do is far beyond GMD's capabilities, and probably beyond the capability of any conceivable system we could put in place at a reasonable cost.

 

Suppose, however, the political will was there to mount an Apollo-space-program-style effort to design the ultimate ICBM-deflector, a U. S. version of Israel's Iron Dome that would really make us free from any concern about nuclear attacks by ICBMs.  Would we want to deploy it? 

 

For those of us with long enough memories, this was the ultimate goal of Ronald Reagan's so-called Star Wars program, which never got very far.  But if scaring the old USSR to pieces was the goal, Star Wars achieved its aims without even being built.  Historians will argue till doomsday about the true causes of the USSR's collapse, but Star Wars was certainly a factor.

 

The political prospects of the present U. S. administration announcing something like Star Wars for the twenty-first century are about the same as the prospects of a snowball in a volcano.  But if we built such a thing, would it be wise to scrap our nuclear arsenal and say that now we don't have to worry about nuclear attack, we don't need to threaten anyone else with it either? 

 

That would certainly be an option, and if we did so it would be a sign that we really trusted our ICBM defenses.  But I note that even with the Iron Dome, Israel has not divested itself of conventional rockets, and they hammer back at their enemies who throw rockets at them whether or not they land on Israeli territory.

 

Realistically, there are always going to be some regimes that won't feel safe until they have nuclear weapons.  North Korea is one such place, and currently Russia is another one.  A major nuclear war anywhere in the world would probably be a global disaster, with dangerous levels of radiation rising into the stratosphere and coming down gradually everywhere. 

 

While it would be nice to think that the world would follow our example and get rid of its nuclear weapons after the U. S. did, all it would take is one holdout to spoil the game.  And so it looks like the path to nuclear disarmament doesn't lie along the lines of developing a really good ICBM defense system first and then getting rid of our own nuclear weapons.

 

As in other aspects of war, you never know for sure whether you've prepared adequately for the next war until you lose it.  If you win, you might have gotten by with considerably less preparation than you did.  So war is always a wasteful proposition, among its many other disadvantages.

 

The current war in Ukraine is tragic enough without pulling us closer to the brink of what has become for many the secular Armageddon, the nuclear end of the world.  Let's hope that the prospect of mutually assured destruction, which has kept us free from nuclear war for seven decades or so, will continue to convince Putin and others that the nuclear option is really no option at all.

 

Sources:  The Salon article " Why scientists still can't figure out how to intercept nuclear missiles" by Nicole Karlis appeared on Mar. 3 at https://www.salon.com/2022/03/03/why-scientists-still-cant-figure-out-how-to-intercept-icbms/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Ground-based Midcourse Defense and obtained the statistics on nuclear weapons from the Wikipedia article "Russia and weapons of mass destruction."

Does the U. S. Need a New Star Wars Program?

On the Fourth of July last week, the world saw one rocket's red glare that wasn't fired in celebration:  North Korea launched the latest in a series of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests.  The timing was intentional, and the North Korean news agency quoted its leader Kim Jong-un as saying, "The American bastards must be quite unhappy after watching our strategic decision."  Not exactly diplomatic language.  Although the test missile went mostly straight up and down and landed harmlessly in the Sea of Japan, if directed toward the east, experts say it could have reached as far as parts of Alaska.  According to the New York Times report, it is unlikely that Pyongyang has a small enough nuclear weapon to fit on their ICBMs, but they seem to be devoting a great part of their pitifully small GNP to reach their ultimate goal of being able to threaten the continental U. S. with a nuclear warhead.

The North Korean government is one of the few remaining bastions of old-fashioned, dictatorial despotism, and rational behavior is not to be expected from them.  But missiles are. 

There are some parallels between this situation and the way the final years of the old Soviet Union played out.  When President Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") in 1983, it arguably contributed to the eventual downfall of the USSR as that nation's confidence waned that they could counter the U. S.'s initiative with anything as effective.  As it turned out, Star Wars as originally planned never reached the deployment stage, but by 1991 the USSR had cracked apart, and it wasn't needed.

North Korea is different, in that they will probably never have more than a few viable nuclear ICBMs.  But even one nuclear bomb can spoil your whole day, so since about 2000 the U. S. has been developing a kind of mini-Star Wars system called the Ground-based Missile Defense (GMD). 

Shooting down even one ICBM on the fly is a very delicate undertaking that has been likened to shooting a bullet with another bullet.  Nevertheless, in 18 tests the system has successfully destroyed 10 targets.  These are not encouraging odds, but it's not bad for a system whose funding and support has fluctuated wildly over the years with the political climate in Washington. 

Austin Bay is a retired colonel in the U. S. Army Reserve whose service record goes back to the 1970s, and for some years has written regular columns on national affairs from a military perspective.  I have always found his viewpoints to be solidly grounded in factual information, and before the latest North Korean missile launch, Bay noted in a May 31 column that the GMD program was doing as well as you could expect in view of  the "sparse and fitful" testing it has had. 

Compare the record of an average launch of one per year for the GMD to the series of manned as well as unmanned spaceflights that took place in the 1960s, leading up to the moon launch:  14 launches (3 of which failed) for Project Mercury, 14 launches (two partial failures) for Project Gemini, and 10 successful flights that led up to the triumphal landing on the moon in 1969.  All this happened in only ten years, 1959 to 1969, which saw an average of nearly four launches a year.

The world and the U. S. were very different then, and the 1960s space program ate up a much larger proportion of the federal budget than Washington is likely to tolerate today.  But in North Korea's missile launches, we face a threat that is much less predictable than the old Soviet Union was, and one that could quite possibly lead to hundreds or thousands of American deaths in a nuclear attack.  This is serious business.

In contrast to what worked with the USSR, merely announcing a greatly expanded GMD is not going to make much of an impression on Kim Jong-un.  As Bay points out, the alternative to missile defense is diplomacy, and when the Clinton Administration made an agreement with North Korea in 1994 to quit making plutonium, evidence shows that the regime ignored us and went right ahead with their nefarious plans. 

It looks like North Korea won't quit rattling their nuclear saber until we grab every one they flaunt and crack it over our GMD-equipped knees, to stretch a metaphor.  But we can't afford to attempt a shoot-down of one of their missiles and miss—that would be worse than sitting on our hands.  Bay thinks, and I agree, that the time has come to get serious about ICBM defense, and that means a focused, well-publicized, and well-funded effort, as independent as possible of politics, to come up with a system that can be relied on to shoot down North Korea-style missiles, say at least 90% of the time. 

In the current fractious political atmosphere in Washington, such a plan is way down toward the bottom of most politicians' priority lists.  It may take a genuinely frightening incident such as an apparent attack by North Korea to motivate enough voters to call for protection.  But nobody (on our side, anyway) wants to go that far.

There are other things we can do about North Korea, but unfortunately most of them are not unilateral:  asking China to squeeze them a little, solidifying alliances with Japan, South Korea, and other eastern nations against the crackpot North Korea regime, and so on.  While China doesn't want its little neighbor incinerating the planet by mistake, it is much more tolerant of North Korea's human-rights abuses and other misbehavior than we can accept in the U. S., and there is little hope that the North Korean regime will change in response to anything that China does.

In the meantime, the U. S. needs to defend itself against attacks by foreign powers.  Everybody—Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, you name it—agrees that defense is one of the bottom-line functions of the federal government.  However misdirected the defense budget has been in the past, the problem of North Korea won't go away.  We need to finish the job that the current GMD program has started, and develop and test it to the point that people in Alaska and the rest of the western United States can go to sleep without worrying that a rotund guy in Pyongyang is going to wake up one morning and decide to drop a nuclear bomb on their heads—and nobody can stop him.

Sources:  I referred to a report on the latest North Korean missile test in the New York Times carried on July 4 at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile-test-icbm.html.  Austin Bay's commentary on previous GMD tests appeared on May 31, 2017 at https://www.creators.com/read/austin-bay/05/17/successful-us-missile-defenders-need-to-keep-on-shooting.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the Strategic Defense Initiative and NASA's 1960s space program. 

"Alas, Babylon" Revisited

A family is torn apart by war.  The wife, son, and daughter take refuge with a brother-in-law in rural Florida.  The twelve-year-old daughter happens to be looking out a window when a thermonuclear bomb goes off only a few miles away.  As the flash fades, the daughter finds that she is literally blinded, and cries out for her mother.

Grim stuff.  Just as the image of the exploding hydrogen bomb was etched on the daughter’s retinas, the image of the flash that blinded her is etched on my memory. On April 3, 1960, I was watching the TV show Playhouse 90’s retelling of Pat Frank’s apocalyptic science-fiction novel Alas, Babylon.  Rather than just showing a white screen for a few seconds, the producers of this black-and-white drama represented the nuclear flash by switching the entire scene to look like a photographic negative in which black looked white and white looked black.  At the tender age of six, I had never seen such a creepy thing before, and it terrified me.  I had nightmares about atomic attacks off and on for years afterwards.

Alas, Babylon was the most well-known early literary version of a genre with which we have since become perhaps too familiar:  the post-nuclear-holocaust survival story.  Published in 1959 and still in print today, it follows the fates of two brothers, Randolph and Mark Bragg, as full-scale nuclear war comes to the U. S. when the Soviet Union retaliates for an accidental bombing of a Syrian seaport.  Mark, an Air Force colonel, receives early warning that war is coming and sends his wife and children from where he is stationed at a nuclear-missile site in Omaha, Nebraska, to stay with brother Randolph in Fort Repose, a fictional small town in central Florida.  Once hostilities begin, Mark, along with several dozen million other Americans in most large U. S. cities, is vaporized, and Randolph gradually assumes leadership of a small self-sustaining community that forms around an artesian well on his property.  There is the requisite love story, a violent battle with roving highwaymen, and after a year of total isolation from the outside world, the tale ends with a helicopter visit from what is left of the U. S. government.

Pat Frank was a military publicist before he moved to Florida and began writing novels. Alas, Babylon is his most well-known work, and probably one of the most realistic novelistic treatments of how things might actually go after a total nuclear war.  But even in 1959, it embodied some wishful thinking.  Given its almost flat topography, Florida probably has few if any self-pumping artesian wells.  In a real nuclear-war disaster, water would be even scarcer than the novel implies.  If I were to try to rewrite the book today, I would set it on a ranch in far West Texas, which is one of the least likely locations for an enemy with any prudence to toss a nuclear weapon.  And I would use windmill-driven water wells and perhaps a wind generator in the plot to give our survivors some chance at staying in the twentieth century.  It would be no stretch at all to assume they would have plenty of guns and ammunition, because these things are nearly universal in that part of the country.

While it is true that nobody much worries about nuclear war these days, the simple mechanical facts that both we and Russia have enough weapons to do tremendous damage to each other have remained unchanged since 1959, though lots of other things have changed since then.  And you could make the case that today, with Iran striving to make nuclear weapons and Israel moving its itchy finger toward its nuclear trigger in response, that the world (if not the U. S. and Russia) may be approaching a nuclear crisis as serious as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, in which the USSR tried to put nuclear weapons in Cuba and the U. S. blockaded their efforts.

Because nuclear war has fallen off the bottom of the lists of what most people worry about, our preparedness for such a disaster, which was never very good even at the height of the Cold War, is abysmal today.  The only way I can think of in which we are perhaps better off than Pat Frank’s fictional survivors of 1959 is in communications, and this advantage may be largely illusory.  One reason the Internet was designed with distributed resources that are robust against the failure of several nodes is that the military provided the original funding and wanted a system that could survive a nuclear war.  It is by no means clear that this robustness has been preserved to the present day, and I don’t know how many major cities you would have to vaporize before the U. S. Internet failed.  But it might not be that many.  Once the Internet and telecomm systems fail, all you have left is satellites (if the ground stations haven’t been vaporized) or ham radio.

In every other way, I think we are less prepared than in 1959—more vulnerable in terms of power networks, emergency food and water supplies, and an intangible but vital characteristic I would call community spirit:  a recognition that a lot of individual rights and freedoms would have to go out the window for even a small community to survive.  I’m sure there would be exceptions, but I’m afraid lots of people in this country would face such a national emergency with mindless, selfish panic that would both harm themselves and others, and reduce their chances of survival to zero.

I am not an off-the-grid survivalist living as though nuclear war was coming tomorrow.  But I do think it is wise every now and then to at least give a thought to what we might be called upon to do if the worst happened, and even one terrorist nuclear weapon detonated on U. S. soil.  All the same, let’s hope we never find out for real how we would react in such an emergency.

Sources:  Pat Frank’s novel Alas, Babylon was published in 1959 by J. B. Lippincott, and can be found today in paperback editions.  I consulted Wikipedia articles on Pat Frank and Playhouse 90 for this blog.