RACE FOR THE HIGH GROUND

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302550008-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 22
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 21, 2012
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: November 4, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
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ARTICLE AP:DEARED
ON PAGE ck8
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
4 November 1985
Race for the
high ground
By Peter Grier and Scott Armstrong
Series design and graphics by Robin Jaren=
Boston
n the name of defending the nation, re-
searchers in New Mexico have destroyed
a missile carcass with a beam of light. In
New Jersey, they have built an electric
cannon that uses in a single burst as much
current as the city of Newark. At a New
York Air Force base, they are trying to
develop electronic eyes sensitive enough
to spot nicks on warheads in the vast dark
of space. It's all part of what one re-
searcher calls "splendid defense" ? President
Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), his vi-
sion of developing a screen to protect the United
States from nuclear missile attack. Critics say it is
a pipe dream, one that might precipitate, not pre-
vent, Armageddon.
This series will not try to decide between
the judgments of "splendid defense" and "pipe
dream." But it will explore the current state of
technology of SDI and the options this now gives
the US in designing its multibillion-dollar
program.
What began as a seemingly offhand remark
by Mr. Reagan in a 1983 speech is evolving into
one of the key global issues of our time. It pro-
poses nothing less than a complete change in the
way superpowers think about nuclear weapons. It
is a central force shaping relations between the
United States and the Soviet Union. It perplexes,
and at times peeves, America's European allies. It
baffles Congress, divides scientists, and stirs the
kind of passion in public more often associated
with theological disputes.
"I think this offers more ho
world than anything else," say
tary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger
Scoffs IBM 5(...ientisi, Richard Garwin:
It will require "a kind of magic spell that
will turn warheads to dust."
The SDI, popularly known as "star
wars," is not a search for a perfect de-
fense. Disinvention of nuclear weapons
is not possible. Neither can the United
States turn itself into a giant domed sta-
dium, the population safely inside.
SDI is instead a multibillion-dollar in-
quiry into the relative merits of imper-
fection. While a leakproof defense looks
improbable, even critics concede that a
screen could be built to stop some Soviet
missiles. Thus the key questions related
to technology and feasibility are: How
well would such a system work? Could
the US afford it? What are the specific
options?
A close look at the President's SDI
program reveals these points:
? The next 18 months will be pivotal
in determining SDI's future. Members
of Congress and lobbyists say they will
devote full attention to the system for
the first time. The Geneva arms talks
may determine whether SDI research
proceeds full-speed.
? Official SDI plans initially involve
rockets, high-speed guns, and other ki-
netic-energy weapons, which depend on
the energy of motion for their destruc-
tiveness. Lasers, particle beams, and
other exotic weapons aren't figured to be
available until the year 2005 or 2010.
? Weapons will not be the most diffi-
cult technical problem of star wars. That
distinction will go to the computers, to
the communications, and to other sup-
port tecimologies needed to knit Lhe
weapons into an effective system.
? If SDI's goal is 5orncthirig less than
perfection, it is also something more
than mere protection of individual US
missile fields, the goal of earlier ballistic-
missile defense programs.
? Technology alone can't make mis-
siles obsolete. An effective defense of the
US population would probably require
some cuts in Soviet offensive arms, say
a number of SDI officials. This brings
arms control into the picture.
? Cost is emerging as a major point
of contention in the SDI debate. Admin-
istration officials concede they must be
able to build a shield more cheaply than
the Soviets can add offensive weapons
i to overwhelm it. Critics and supporters
Mal
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2.
may travel too slowly for use in the all-
critical boost phase, when missiles are
easy to find and warheads and decoys
are wrapped in one neat package. Beam
weapons can suffer similar limitations.
For instance, some particle beams ?
which use streams of atoms or atomic
particles accelerated to near the speed of
light ? can't penetrate the atmosphere.
So they may not work for boost-phase
duty. Certain lasers could eat down into
the atmosphere, given much more
brightness than they have now.
Under current SDI thinking, an ini-
tial missile screen would consist of "ki-
netic kill" weapons, such as quick rock-
ets. If deployed at all, such a
space-based defense would likely not
come about before the mid-1990s. Exotic
beam weapons would not be ready until
the turn of the century
Of course, it is not a fore,gone conclu-
sion that these weapons will work. Most
are now only lab experiments.
And any weapon, however powerful,
is useless if it cannot be plugged into a
working system. More than anything
else, this is the requirement that makes
star wars perhaps the most complex
military undertaking ever.
The star-wars system first must find
its targets. This would be particularly
hard in the midcourse phase, when war-
heads and decoys may number a quarter
of a million objects.
Picking out warheads from the radar-
spoofing chaff, Mylar balloons, and
other decoys will require new ways of
getting different types sensors to work
together. "I think boost-phase intercept
and midcourse discrimination are the
key issues for a cost-effective defense,"
says Cornelius (Cory) Coll III, head of
an SDI study group at Lawrence Liver-
more National Laboratory in Livermore,
Calif.
Once targets are identified, weapons
must be aimed and fired, and kills as-
sessed. This requires ultra-fast commu-
nications and perhaps the most "intelli-
gent" computers ever made. Computer
hardware can probably be made to
crunch numbers fast enough, though
this will take plenty of work.
"It'll be like putting a Cray
supercomputer on a sugar cube," says
John Bosma, editor of the newsletter
Military Space. The computer he refers
to can perform up to 1.2 billion calcula-
tions a second.
But writing the software ? the
instructions behind the number-crunch-
ing ? may be the single most difficult
task of the program. SDI officials say
aLke agree that this will be one of the
program's toughest challenges.
Mr. Reagan's vision of a world bris-
tling with defenses against nuclear
weapons is not a novel idea. It is the lat-
est event in an on-again, off-again effort
by the US to build barricades against
nuclear weapons ? a process stretching
back to the dawn of the Atomic Age.
"There's such a sense of d? vu to all
this," says Gregg Herken, author of
"Counsels of War," a history of the nu-
clear age.
Early defense
concepts
As early as the 1940s, atomic bomb
pioneer J. Robert Oppenheimer urged
the world to work on defense against his
own creation, arguing it was a moral as
well as strategic imperative. In 1958,
startled by the Soviet launch of Sputnik,
Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy or-
dered development of systems for shoot-
ing down incoming missiles. This led to
Project Defender, a wide-ranging pro-
gram that some analysts think was more
ambitious for its time than SDI is today.
Many of Defender's ideas never went
much beyond the chalkboard. One,
Project HELMET, proposed planting gi-
ant howitzers near US cities to shoot
clouds of debris at incoming warheads.
Another, SAMBO, called for orbiting a
ring of pellets ? in effect, an artificial
asteroid belt ? over known Soviet mis-
sile fields.
Other Defender work proved more en-
during. Some of the earliest research on
beam weapons occurred under the pro-
gram, as did development of nuclear-
tipped interceptor missiles. The inter-
ceptors became part of the only US
defense against nuclear weapons ever
deployed. It was installed in the 1970s to
protect missile silos in North Dakota,
but later it was scrapped as too costly
and ineffective.
In the end the US decided that no de-
fense against nuclear missiles was possi-
ble with the technology of the 1960s and
'70s. The destructive force of nuclear
weapons was so great that only some-
thing approaching a 100 percent defense
? a historically unprecedented achieve-
ment ? would have any meaning. Even
a few nuclear warheads that got through
a screen would spell disaster. Offensive
weapons had unchallenged technological
primacy.
In 1972, the US and the Soviet Union
codified this mutual vulnerability in the
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty,
which prohibited development and de-
ployment of nationwide ballistic-missile
defenses. The US, however, continued
low-level research into missile-defense
technologies. This work went almost
unnoticed for years until March 23,
1983, when Reagan's star-wars speech
pulled it back into prominence.
On the surface, Reagan's speech
seemed impulsive. In fact, it caught
many of his closest aides by surprise.
Underneath, however, it appears to have
reflected a variety of forces: technologi-
cal advances that suggested an effective
shield might for the first time be possi-
ble; Reagan's dissatisfaction, like presi-
dents before him, with today's uneasy
balance of terror based on offensive ar-
senals; and personal appeals from advis-
ers such as physicist Edward Teller, the
father of the US hydrogen bomb.
"The Soviets have a monopoly on de-
fense," claims Dr. Teller, rocking back
in a chair in his office at Stanford Uni-
versity's Hoover Institute, stabbing the
air with a finger for emphasis. He is re-
ferring to the antiballistic-missile system
the Soviets have around Moscow.
The layers of
defense
What sets the President's initiative
apart from earlier thrusts is its stress on
space components and a "layered" de-
fense system. Previous efforts were
mainly concerned with attacking war-
heads during their terminal phase, when
the warheads reenter the atmosphere
and dive toward targets.
Star-wars weapons would attack nu-
clear warheads at four phases of their
30-minute trip from silos to US territory
First is the so-called boost phase, when a
rocket rises through the atmosphere tor
,three to- five minutes. Next is post-boost.
the 3- to 5-minute period when the war-
head bus, which carries the guidance
system, warheads, and decoys, sepa-
rates from the booster and begins to cast
off its warheads and decoys. Then
comes midcourse, when warheads and
thousands of decoys float through space
for 15 to 20 minutes, before reentering
the atmosphere en route to their destruc-
tive destinations ? the terminal phase.
In theory, each defensive layer could
be somewhat leaky and still contribute
to an effective shield. If each layer de-
stroyed 75 percent of the warheads leak-
ing though the preceeding layer, 4 out of
every 1,000 Soviet warheads launched
would actually detonate on US territory.
To accomplish this task, a varied ar-
senal would probably be used because
not all weapons may be good for all uses.
For example, kinetic-energy weapons
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yet-unknown technological edvances
will help write the 10 million to 100 mil-
lion lines of software needed.
Critics contend that software bugs
could never be worked out of the sys-
tem.
"You'd have to have a real nuclear
war to have operational testing," says
David Redell, a Digital Equipment
Corporation engineer.
Some critics also complain that so
many lightning-quick decisions would
have to be made that humans could not
run the system. SDI officials say a top
military officer would watch over the
shield. But they concede star wars will
impose new challenges on how to bring
political and military leaders into the
decisionmaking process.
?
Countering a
missile defense
An even bigger concern: While the
US is developing defensive weapons,
the Soviets will undoubtedly try to de-
vise ways to counter them.
"Technology today is capable of
shooting down offensive missiles. The
question is: Can you do it in face of
what the Soviets do in reaction?" says
former Defense Secretary Robert S.
McNamara.
Tlie Ki'Orllin might build more of-
fensive missiles and warheat-is try to
saturate a defense. They might try dis-
guises ? balloons imitating warheads
or warheads hiding in balloons.
They might try to skirt a defense al-
together by aiming submarine-
launched ballistic missiles so they
leave the atmosphere only briefly, if at
all, or by developing legions of ground-
hugging cruise missiles and strategic
bombers. These would be difficult to
zap from space.
But SDI advocates argue that some
star-wars weapons may work against
this threat, and that, in any case, it is
important to blunt the accurate land-
based ballistic missiles, the heart of the
Soviet strategic arsenal.
Moscow could also design ways to
foil specific defensive weapons. They
could spin boosters like drill bits so
that lasers can't dwell on one spot, or
devise thick-skinned missiles to resist
attack. Perhaps most worrisome, they
could build fast-burn boosters that
would complete their work while still in
the atmosphere, hampering the ability
of some weapons to reach them.
Fast-burn boosters would be costly,
both in reducing the performance of a
missile and on the Soviet economy ?
prohibitively so, SDI advocates say
This type of measure-countermeas-
ure gamesmanship will be expensive
for both sides. "You want to make the
Soviets spend a lot of money" says
one SDI scientist.
Finally, the Soviets could simply
punch a hole in a defense system. They
might orbit "space mines" that would
blow up on command and shower satel-
lites with shrapnel. One SDI scientist
worries about three other antidefense
weapons: ground-based lasers; nuclear-
tipped interceptor rockets; and X-ray
lasers, beam weapons powered by
small nuclear bombs. The US is devel-
oping the X-ray laser as a possible de-
fensive weapon, and the Soviets are
known to be working on it as well.
"Many of these defensive technol-
ogies are the key to the destruction of
the defense itself," Dr. Garwin says.
? But battle stations may be able to
defend themselves or have special
"guard" satellites to do the job. They
may be armored, or able to bob and
weave when attackers approach.
"I worry about survivability. Along
with cost, I see it as a major constraint
to SDI," says Stephen Rockwood,
head of SDI research at the Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico.
Weapons in space might be used of-
fensively to destroy an adversary's sat-
ellites. In theory they might also be
able to destroy aircraft or hit "soft" So-
viet targets, such as factories. But SDI
officials counter that star wars is only a
defensive program and that soft targets
can be more easily destroyed by exist-
ing weapons, such as bombers.
Whatever its final capabilities, any
defensive shield would be expensive ?
equal to adding another Navy to the
budget, according to critic John Pike of
the Federation of American Scientists.
Estimates of a star-wars system's cost
run to $800 billion or more, but until
the system takes shape such figures
are guesswork at best.
What is known is that expenses
would not stop with deployment.
"Even in the absence of hostile action,
there will h?-lw to be constant activity
in space. . . to maintain a working sys-
tem," notes a report by Congress's Of-
fice of Technology Assessment.
Star wars, after all, would be un-
precedented in scope. It requires ad-
vances in basic science and engineer-
ing, and must take into account a
cunning adversary who can shoot
back. Work on the program may span
20 to 30 years. By comparison, during
World War II the Manhattan Project to
develop the atomic bomb took four
years; landing on the moon took eight.
Even if it turns out that a defensive
shield can be built, and for something
less than a year's gross national prod-
uct, there's the more fundamental
question of whether it should be built.
According to President Reagan, star
wars is a way out of today's nuclear
balance of terror, in which the super-
powers refrain from war because each
is able to retaliate against the other.
The balance of terror resulting from the
primacy of offensive nuclear weapons
has dominated the four decades of the
nuclear era; and the specific American
doctrine of mutual assured destruction
(MAD) has dominated US military
strategy for more than two decades.
SDI enthusiasts envision a world of
"assured survival," in which the US
would once again control its own des-
tiny. Under the most prevalent sce-
nario, initial deployment of a defensive
screen would deter the Soviets from
launching a first strike, because they
would have doubts about how many of
their missiles might get through. In ef-
fect, this would strengthen MAD,
though not replace it.
Over time, the Soviets would come
to see the futility of investing in offen-
sive forces and would begin to reduce
their arsenals, relying more on defense.
The world would never become free of
nuclear weapons. But their role would
be greatly reduced. They would be
unusable and hence obsolete, in the
words of one Reagan official. "Obso-
lete and unusable, what's the differ-
ence?" asks George A. Keyworth II,
Reagan's science adviser. "This idea of
needing an umbrella of perfection is
misleading, because your real objective
is to make nuclear weapons unusable."
Critics see more dangerous endings
to this script. They are concerned that
development of a US shield will violate
the 1972 ABM Treaty, unraveling the
fragile fabric of arms control pacts.
The response to US defenses will be a
Soviet arms buildup, they claim.
arm
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Even if the Soviets decide to set up
their own version of SDI, the transition
to a defense-oriented world would be
tricky. If one side developed a superior
defense, it might be able to strike first
with its nuclear missiles, knowing that
its shield was good enough to handle
any retaliation. Thus defenses might
heighten, rather than lessen, the
chances of nuclear holocaust.
Another conundrum .is what a de-
fense-dominated world would mean for
America's European allies.
At present, Europe remains safe
from the Soviet Union's massive con-
ventional forces because of US nuclear
might. If a Soviet defense shield neu-
tralized this strength, Europe might
once again be exposed to conventional
war.
To the Reagan administration, SDI
is an example of technology leading di-
plomacy toward a safer world. To crit-
ics, this vision could do more harm
than good.
"It deludes the public into thinking
that the solution to the dual problem of
nuclear weapons and a troublesome ad-
versary can be resolved by new weap-
ons systems, rather than by political
means," write MIT professors George
Rathjens and Jack Ruina.
First of six articles.
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Baristic-missile path and hypothetic-a! detentes I
BOOST PHASE:
3 to 5 minutes.
Lasts from launch to
burnout of ICBM
booster's final stage.
The missile ? most
vulnerable during this
phase. Its exhaust
makes it easy to spot
and track, the warheads
and decoys are still in
one package, and it is
experiencing the
greatest structural
stress.
Potential defenses:
Space-based chemical
lasers, land-based free-
electron and excimer
lasers, pop-up
X-ray lasers, and
space-based neutral
particle beams.
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b.
The BUS holds warheads,
decoys, the missile's
guidance system, and
warhead arming devices.
At end of boost phase, a
signal from the guidanct
system TI warheads
and the bus separates
from the missile.
The bus uses small jets
to change its position
as it releases its
independent
warheads. Bus
Warhead
POST-BOOST PHASE:
3 to 5 minutPc
Warhead bus (see inset)
separates from booster.
The nose cone is
jettisoned and the bus
begins dispensing its
warheads, decoys, and
other penetration aids.
This phase presents the
last opportunity to knock
out more than one
warhead with one shot.
Potential defenses:
Space-based electro-
magnetic railguns,
satellites armed with high-
speed missiles, space-
based chemical lasers,
land-based free-electron
and excimer lasers,
pop-up X-ray lasers, and
space-based neutral
particle beams.
Pop-up
X-ray laser
Ground-based
tree-electron
or excimer laser
semi
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7.
TERMINAL PHASE:
2 minutes or less
Final part of trajectory. At
75 miles up, lighter
decoys begin to burn. At
20 miles, reentry
destroys the heavier
decoys. At this point,
warheads are less than a
minute from exploding.
Potential defenses:
Rai[guns, high-speed
missiles, electron
beams.
MIDCOURSE PHASE:
20 minutes
Warheads continue their
trajectory through space.
A defense now must cope
with thousands df objects
and be able to tell the
warheads from decoys,
spent warhead buses,
and other debris.
Potential defenses:
Space-based electro-
magnetic railguns,
satellites armed with
high-speed missiles,
space-based chemical
lasers, land-based free-
electron and excimer
lasers, pop-up X-ray
lasers, and space-based
neutral particle beams.
Ground-
launched
rocket
interceptor
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ARTICLE AP?EARED
ON PAGE ?
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR FILE ONLY
5 November 1985
STAR WARS
WILL IT WORK?
2
Cannons in space
By Peter Grier and Scott Armstrong
Series design and graphics by Robin Jareaux
Dow, N.J.
t is the most powerful railgun in the world, and it
now lies in pieces in a New Jersey Army lab. Using
bursts of electricity instead of gunpowder, it shoots
plastic cubes so fast that they carry the wallop of a
Mack truck traveling 60 miles an hour. Someday, its
descendants might blast missiles and warheads from
the sky as if they were shooting skeet.
"We're talking about something that's really quite
revolutionary" says Dr. Ted Gora, chief of railgun
research at the Army's weapon design facility here.
Of the weapons the Pentagon is studying for use in ballistic-
missile defense, lasers and other exotica have received the
most public attention. But a "star wars" system, at least at
first, would likely rely on railgun projectiles and warheads
on fast rockets. They get their destructiveness from kinetic -
energy, the energy of motion.
This kinetic-energy firepower is in es-
sence high-technology artillery. It could
lie hosed (in Earth or on platforms in
space. In theory it, could attack enemy
iiii'ilus:it every stage from the boost
phase. w ben a missile is cosiest to spot
and all its warheads and decoys are in
one III it package. to the terminal phase,
\\hen \\Ai-heads :ire reentering the atmo-
sphere. In practice. it might be difficult
tor projectiles to reach missiles (luring
the all-(?rucial first Iew minutes of flight.
Some kinetic-energy weapons are
technologically well developed. I ligh-ac-
cetera( ion rockets. fired from the ground
and intended to protect missile silos, are
perhaps ready for deployment today.
)t hers are still experimental.
Railguns and other electromagnetic
. .
launchers excite many weapons design-
ers. but power supplies kir these devices
pose problems. and the projectiles they
shoot move so fast they tend to rip up
the inside of the barrel.
All of our experiments have not
been raging successes," concedes the
Army's Ted ( ;Ora.
In 'Washington the Strategic Defense
Initiative (S1 )11 is an abstraction. budget
figures on a page. The program's nick-
name - - star wars ? emphasizes its fu-
turistic aura. Rut to 1)r. (;ora and others
working on its technology it, is as real as
the metal and wire in their labs.
Dr. (ora has been working on
railguns for seven years in a shed-like
building of the Army's Armament Re-
search and Development Center. The
Army has not always been wild about
the project. finding it hard to believe in
something that had no trigger, didn?t go
boom. and shot plastic shells.
liut ;ora and cohorts among them
physicist I larry Fair. and William
Weldon. now at the Iniversity of Texas
perservere(1. Now with the coining of
l'resident Reagan's 51)1 program.
A bullet for an M-16 rifle travels just
over 3,000 feet per second. In tests. the
Army's New Jersey railgun has sent an
11-ounce plastic cubes winging along at
2.6 miles per second. Other labs have
shot small, thimble-sized objects at
greater velocities (more than 6 miles per
second). But the Army's railgun has
hurled the largest projectile at high ve-
locities. SDI officials envision a railgun
that would shoot yet larger objects to up
to 12 miles per second.
The Army railgun, never before seen
by reporters, does not look like some-
thing that might spawn a powerful space
rifle. It looks instead like 12 feet of large
drainpipe with a cement mixer on one
end. Inside the gun's barrel stretch two
parallel copper rails.
When the gun is fired, a powerful
electric current surges up one rail, hits
the projectile, leaps across it to the other
rail, and surges back toward the gun's
breech. Contained by its own magnetic
field, the electric force explodes forward.
pushing the projectile as it goes.
Such brute force may have applica-
tions more terrestrial than shooting
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down missiles. The Army is interested
in high-speed railgun artillery, which
might be able to blast apart tanks as if
they were made of balsa wood.
Harnessing the power
te fire a railgun
Electromagnetic launchers are not a
new idea. At the turn of the century elec-
trical engineers theorized that such guns
were possible. During World War II,
German scientists toyed with the tech-
nology ? including using them to hurl
cargo-laden gliders across battlefields.
The Japanese tried to build an electric
machine gun.
These efforts, say researchers, all
foundered on the same problem: power.
You could briefly light Buffalo, N.Y.,
with the pulse of electricity today's
railgun experiments require. "Power
supplies right now are larger and heavier
than we would like them to be," says
Mr. Weldon, director of the University
of Texas (UT) Center for
Electromechanics.
But new advances hold hope that the
problem of producing space-transport-
able, powerful generators can be solved,
SDI officials say. For example, they
point to a machine that Weldon per-
fected over the last decade. Called a
compulsator, the device is capable of
loosing huge surges of current in quick
succession. This winter, UT researchers
hope to fire a 10-shot burst with a
compulsator-driven railgun. Last year,
they successfully fired four projectiles in
a row
Such machine-gun capability is
crucial if railguns are to become viable
missile-defense weapons.
Projectiles are another railgun prob-
lem. Electromagnetic launchers would
be firing at targets hundreds of miles
away At such distances, shells must
have some sort of ability to guide them-
selves to be accurate. They must be, in
an oft-quoted phrase, smart rocks.
But current guidance technology ?
such as the heat-seeking sensors in air-
to-air missiles ? would be turned into
silicon junk by the acceleration forces
that railgun shells experience.
Tough new metal alloys and other
materials would be needed for missile-
defense railguns as well. Currently,
railguns can be so scarred after one shot
that their interiors must be rebuilt.
If railguns are to be put in space, they
must also be made a fraction of their cur-
rent size. The Army's New Jersey
railgun experiment, with its support
equipment, takes up one-quarter of a
room the size of a hangar SDI officials
ultimately envision a space-based
weapon being something over 30 feet
long and weighing around 40 tons.
"We need a jet aircraft to do the SDI
job. We're at the propeller-plane stage
now," says Gene McCall, a physicist at
the Los Alamos National Laboratory in
New Mexico.
While railguns and other electromag-
netic launchers are still experiments, an-
other type of kinetic-energy weapon is
much more technologically mature: ga-
zelle-quick rocket interceptors. The
United States military now has a wide
range of such rockets in its arsenal, from
shoulder-fired, antiaircraft Stingers, to
the Sidewinder, favored weapon of
fighter pilots and the recently tested Air
Force antisatellite missile.
This technology could be taken off
the shelf, modified for higher perfor-
mance, and used to attack ballistic mis-
siles and warheads in space, according
to one vision now gaining favor among
SDI officials.
In this scenario, bundles of small
rockets with explosive warheads would
be mounted on satellites and sent into
orbit. In times of political tension the
satellite would be turned on alert and or-
dered to fire on ballistic missiles rising
from the Soviet Union.
"The weapons could not kill people,
because they would burn up before they
got to the ground," claims Col. Malcolm
O'Neill, head of SDI kinetic-energy
weapon programs. "But they could kill
anything flying in space, including mis-
siles, reentry vehicles, or satellites."
This proposal for "porcupine" satel-
lites mirrors a little-remembered 1960
Pentagon study named Project SPAD
(Space Patrol Active Defense). SPAD
recommended orbiting hundreds of
small satellites, each studded with six
small missiles, for defense against the
burgeoning Soviet intercontinental bal-
listic missile (ICBM) force, according to
John Bosma, editor of the newsletter
Military Space. The technology of the
times was not up to the task, however.
and Pentagon interest passed to other
forms of antimissile systems.
Small space rockets must be cheap to
build and orbit, SDI officials say, since
they are in essence ammunition that will
be fired in quantity at Soviet missiles.
They must also be able to reach their
targets. This will be particularly hard in
the all-critical boost phase ? the 3- to 5-
minute period between launch and the
time when an ICBM's final booster
stage burns out. Missiles are the most
; vulnerable during this phase: The engine
exhaust is easy to spot and all the war-
heads are in one package.
If the Soviets adopted fast-burn
boosters, which could take about 100
seconds to complete their work, the en-
gines would burn out within the atmo-
sphere. In either case, projectiles enter-
ing the atmosphere from the vacuum of
space might break apart or generate
enough heat to destroy their guidance
systems.
Thus kinetic-energy weapons might
not be quick enough to reach Soviet mis-
sile boosters before they burn out and re-
lease their warheads, a recent Congres-
sional Office of Technology Assessment
report points out.
Outside the atmosphere, rocket inter-
ceptors or railguns would have a rela-
tively long time, 10 to 20 minutes, to
reach targets. But these objects ? small,
dark warheads coasting through cold,
dark space ? would be extraordinarily
difficult to find and track. SDI officials
and critics alike rate this "midcourse
discrimination" as one of the toughest
technical problems the program faces.
The final option for kinetic-energy
weapons would be to hit a warhead when
it plunges back into the atmosphere and
heads for its target. In this terminal
phase, which lasts about a minute, ki-
netic weapons ? probably rockets ?
would be based on the ground, and
launched up to intercept intruders.
The US fielded such a defense in the
1970s. This system, which protected
missile silos in North Dakota, was even-
tually scrapped as too costly and ineffec-
tive. The Soviet Union has a similar de-
fensive screen in place around Moscow.
These early defense systems, how-
ever, used nuclear-tipped interceptors.
What the Pentagon wants to do this time
is use nonnuclear interceptor warheads.
"What makes the terminal engage-
ment so difficult is that we are going to
do it without a nuclear weapon," says
Colonel O'Neill. "My marching orders
are that I have nothing nuclear."
Without the brute force of a nuclear
explosion, rocket interceptors will have
to be incredibly accurate. They will ei-
ther have to collide with a warhead or
get close enough to take it out with an
explosion of shrapnel.
Such accuracy has been demon-
strated on a small scale. In a much-pub-
licized experiment in June 1984, the
Army used a rocket interceptor to catch
a dummy warhead over the Pacific.
Ground-based radar and the interawd
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z
tor s sensors were used to zero in on the
device. Then the interceptor unfurled a
metal umbrella and destroyed the war-
head in a grand collision.
In a nuclear war, however, there
would likely be hundreds of warheads
falling on the US that would have to be
found and foiled. Exquisite radar and
sensing systems will be needed ? sys-
tems that would also have to be resistant
to blinding by nuclear explosions. Such
blasts would result if an attacker sets
warheads to explode when an intercep-
tor comes too close.
Interceptor rockets, too, would have
to be fast enough to stop warheads high
in the atmosphere, so that if the war-
heads went off they wouldn't harm peo-
ple on the ground. Colonel O'Neill says
this will take "incredibly hot rockets,"
perhaps capable of reaching their targets
within 10 seconds.
It is clear that in the not-too-distant
future kinetic-energy weapons will be ca-
pable of knocking down some targets
during a nuclear attack. The question is:
How expensive and effective would such
a defense be?
A first-step missile defense deployed
in this century, say SDI officials, would
likely rely heavily on kinetic-energy
weapons, with more exotic stuff such as
lasers used for target tracking and com-
munication. But to build a final shield
highly effective against attack and all
countermeasures, directed-energy weap-
ons ? an even more difficult frontier
are necessary.
Second of six articles.
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010
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
6 November 1985
STAR WARS
WILL irr WORK ?
11
Battling with
beams
By Scott Armstrong
Series design and graphics by Robin Jamas
Valle Sods PAWN Rens, NAL
About a dozen people, mainly
military brass, were crowded
into a control bunker three
stories beneath the New
Mexico desert here. Peering
anxiously at a bank of
monitors and computer
screens, they watched as a
laser beam the diameter of a
Hula-Hoop flashed a half-
mile across the desert floor,
glanced off a focusing mirror,
and lit on a section of a Titan missile. Seconds
later the rocket stage suddenly blew up,
scattering shards of metal hundreds of feet amid
the mesquite and pinon.
"I've been in this business for 12 years,"
says Capt. Arthur Schroeder, head of the Navy's
work here, who watched the demonstration in
September. "It was the most dramatic damage
and vulnerability test I've ever seen."
Impressive as it was, it does not prove that
lasers can be used to defend the United States
against nuclear annihilation The test was simply
one more small step in a long and arduous quest to
see if directed-energy or beam, weapons ever may
be suitable for knocking down Soviet missiles.
Above: AP photo of laser destroying Titan missile section
Beam weapons are gaining promi-
nence. Once confined to Buck Rogers
fantasy, these "death rays" consist
mainly of particle beams, which hurl
streams of atoms or atomic particles,
and lasers. These technologies have
been elevated to new visibility under
President Reagan's Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI), popularly known as the
"star wars" Drozram.
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Indeed, they are one ot the reasons
that the United States has revived the
idea of building defenses against inter-
continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)
after scotching it in 1970s.
Earlier it was thought that there was
no way to deal with tens of thousands of
warheads and decoys that might be
launched against the US in a full-scale
nuclear assault. There still may not be.
But a defender's job would be easier
if a system could knock out as many
missiles as possible within the first few
minutes of launching, before they had a
chance to release their many decoys and
warheads. Beam weapons flashing
through space at or near the speed of
light are prime candidates for the job.
Conceptually, they make captivating
weapons: beams of pinpoint precision
able to zap mankind's most destructive
armament. But translating that vision
into reality will be difficult.
Physicists have been toiling for more
than a quarter of a century to fashion di-
rected-energy weapons, as they are
called. The Pentagon launched its first
particle-beam research program, the
Seasaw project, in 1958 at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory The
aim: to build a particle-beam accelerator
and study its potential for thwarting
missiles.
Interest in laser weapons surfaced
shortly after that. In the years since, en-
thusiasm for these exotic weapons has
vacillated. Hopes raised by advances in
technology were often dashed when peo-
ple began to look at the cost and other
problems tied to building a practical
weapons system.
The military is still keen on beam
weapons for everything from air-defense
to zapping enemy satellites. The SDI
program, however, focuses attention on
the far more difficult task of destroying
enemy missiles and warheads, for which
$1 billion is being sought next year alone
(about one-fourth the SDI budget).
Given the hurdles that remain, par-
ticularly the defensive tricks the Soviets
may try (such as spinning a booster so a
laser cannot dwell on one spot), even
SDI officials do not see a practical and
affordable beam-weapon system this
century Divining what the Soviets
might do is like a chess game, says
Louis Marquet, head of SDI's directed-
energy programs. "Unfortunately, th
Soviets are very good at chess."
Cotinutd
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Infrared
chemical lasers
Light from a normal lamp is a disor-
derly jumble of frequencies. Lasers gen-
erate concentrated beams of light that
are almost perfectly parallel, identical in
frequency, and the light waves move in
phase with each other. This gives lasers
their punch. In theory they could be fo-
cused over thousands of miles of space
to burn a hole in the skin of a missile or,
in the case of lasers that emit pulses,
thump the target like a sledgehammer.
The most powerful lasers now in exis-
tence are chemical. They draw their en-
ergy from the combustion of gases. Be-
cause they do not require huge power
plants, chemical lasers are mainly being
considered for parking in space, where
they would be free from the distorting ef-
fects of the earth's atmosphere.
These lasers pack a punch. Ones fal:
less powerful than that tested here at
White Sands ? a 2.2-megawatt device
that is the "brightest" in the West ?
have already knocked down planes. But
space-weapons lasers will have to be
brighter (probably 10 times or more).
Such infrared chemical lasers also
have a long wavelength. Because their
beams spread out over great distances,
they would need to linger on the same
spot on a fast-moving missile for several
seconds. They also would require exqui-
sitely fabricated mirrors of up to 50 feet
in diameter to keep them focused. This
has caused them to fall from grace with
some in the SDI community.
Any orbiting constellation of chemi-
cal-laser battle stations will have to meet
several criteria: be reliable, be cheap
enough to hoist into orbit and maintain,
and be able to survive a direct attack ?
for instance, from exploding satellites
(space mines) the Soviets may park next
to the weapons platforms.
"The difference between putting
something up in space that can fire once
or twice and something that will keep
missiles from landing on top of you is a
big one," says Jeff Hecht, author of the
widely respected book "Beam
Weapons."
Free-electron
and excimer lasers
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The alternative is to use shorter-
wavelength lasers, such as the free-elec-
tron and excimer lasers. These are now
the fair-haired beams among SDI re-
searchers. A free-electron laser uses a
huge particle accelerator to generate the
electrons that, when passed through a
series of wiggling magnets, are the
source of the device's ultraviolet light.
These lasers have been developing
the quickest. "They've come along in
not many years from a scientific curios-
ity to reality" says Gerald Yonas, SDI's
chief scientist.
In theory, a free-electron laser can be
tuned to different wavelengths to allow
its beam to slip through Earth's atmo-
sphere. They also can be scaled to large
powers and operated at high efficiencies.
But for now, they exist only in early-
stage laboratory models. Because the
free-electron laser's accelerator requires
a jumbo power source, it is a better bet
for basing on the ground.
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Prodigious electrical requirements
are likely to keep the excimer earth-
bound as well. The excimer does not re-
quire a particle accelerator, but it does
use a lot of power in producing an
ultraviolet beam from rare gases.
Ground-basing is not necessarily a
woe. It makes the complex devices
simpler to tinker with, easier to defend,
and, as Dr. Marquet likes to point out,
"You could plug them into Hoover Dam,
turn off the lights when the war starts,
and deliver all the electricity into the de-
vices." Which you may have to do: By
one estimate, powering enough of these
lasers to hit 2,000 targets may gobble up
as much energy in a few minutes as New
York City uses in several hours.
One scheme calls for placing the la-
sers on mountaintops and firing them
high into space, where their beams
bounce off huge relay mirrors and then
off smaller aiming mirrors in lower
orbits. Or the beams might simply be
bounced off of "catch and transmit"
mirrors in low-earth orbit. Either way,
these devices will need mirrors of gem-
like quality larger than any built to date.
To meet this requirement, scientists
are considering using mirrors made up
of many small segments, like a mosaic,
all computer controlled. The same gen-
eral principle (adaptive optics) is aiding
scientists in overcoming another prob-
lem with ground-based lasers: atmo-
spheric distortion. So fat however, ex-
periments have only been carried out
with low-power beams.
The other snag with short-wavelength
lasers is that they can be self-destruc-
tive. An excimer laser may be able to
disable a booster in two seconds, which
would negate the effect of spinning it to
counteract the beam. But the excimer
could also buckle its own mirrors.
New mirror coatings are being devel-
oped, but this is considered one of the
more intractable SDI technologies. At a
conference this spring, James Stanford
of the Naval Weapons Center in Califon
rtia noted that only 2 percent of the
coatings now available meet even cur-
rently known requirements.
Pop-up
X-ray lasers
Of course, defenders could alleviate
many of the problems with ground- or
space-based systems by simply popping
lasers into orbit at the first hint of a So-
viet strike. This is where the nuclear-
pumped X-ray laser comes in. This
weapon appears to be advancing techni-
cally but losing ground politically.
The idea sounds simple: Explode a
nuclear bomb in a small chamber ringed
with rods and pointed at a target. When
the explosion's radiant energy hits the
rods, it produces a pulse ot highly lanai
X-rays, spraying them out in the instant
before the device vaporizes.
Snags exist, however. Even though
work on the secret devices at Lawrence
Livemore has been moving quickly, sci-
entists still have to invent more efficient
"third generation" nuclear devices that
will convert more of their energy into X-
rays instead of explosions. Researchers
will also have to control and aim the
pulses to hit quick-moving targets.
X-ray lasers, too, have put the
Reagan administration in the uncomfort-
able position of pursuing a weapon
driven by a nuclear bomb (albeit theo-
retically a small one) to help make nu-
clear weapons "obsolete." In theory,
hundreds of such lasers could be
orbited. But SDI officials now go to
great pains to say that will not be done.
The pop-up scheme involves putting
X-ray lasers atop missiles safely stored
beneath the sea on submarines or on
land-based launchers and lofting them
into space at the first sign of a Soviet
strike ? the pet idea of Dr. Edward
Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb
and an inveterate SDI booster.
To get the weapons into space quickly
enough, however, they would require ex-
tremely fast launchers and perhaps the
submarines would have to be parked
vulnerably close to Soviet shores.
"The practicality of a global scheme
involving pop-up X-ray lasers of this
type is doubtful," said a recent Congres-
sional Office of Technology Assessment
study.
X-rays also do not penetrate Earth's
atmosphere well. Thus if the Soviets
were to use "fast-burn" boosters ?
which would complete their flight within
100 seconds, while still in the atmo-
sphere ? the weapon may not be effec-
tive for knocking out ICBMs in the all-
critical boost phase, when warheads and
decoys are in one package and the mis-
sile is easy to detect. Currently, the
boost phase lasts from 3 to 5 minutes.
Livermore scientists are not ready to
concede lasers cannot be made bright
enough to eat part way into the atmo-
sphere. "It doesn't violate any laws of
physics to do so," says George Miller,
Livermore's deputy associate director
for nuclear design.
But X-ray lasers are considered more
likely for post-boost duty, when the mis-
sile is just beginning to cast off its war-
heads and is still somewhat easy to find.
In addition, the X-ray lasers could be
used during the midcourse phase, when
the warheads and swarms of decoys are
floating through space. However, be-
cause the X-ray laser is basically a one-
shot device, some critics think it will be
able to wipe out only a limited number of
decoys and warheads.
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The chief concern, however, seems to
be that detonating a series of nuclear
bombs in space might damage Ameri-
ca's own battle stations and satellites.
This point bothers even many in the SDI
community.
"I don't find it to be a credible weap-
ons system, even if it does work," says
Stephen Rockwood, head of SDI work at
the Los Alamos National Laboratory in
New Mexico.
X-ray-laser proponents say they be-
lieve battle stations could be hardened
against the effects of nuclear explosions.
They also say the device holds such po-
tential, either as a defensive weapon or
one to take out Soviet satellites, that the
US can't afford to give up studying it.
Neutral and charged
particle beams
The particle beam ? a stream of
atomic particles or atoms ? is the Ar-
nold Schwarzenegger of directed-energy
weapons: It comes in a large package
and packs a potent punch. The beam
penetrates a missile's skin and sizzle the
insides, unlike most lasers, which de-
posit their energy on the surface.
This means particle beams could dis-
able a target quickly. It also means they
would be tough for Soviet scientists to
foil, either by shielding the missile or
spinning it. The particle beam's pene-
trating character, however, has its
drawbacks: Because the beam immobi-
lizes the internal electronics, it might
take some time to verify that a target
had been destroyed or disabled. Thus a
particle-beam weapon may continue to
fire at a target long after it had actually
been "killed." In the meantime, other
warheads zip past.
The most likely candidate for a mis-
sile-zapper would be a neutral-particle
beam, which, because it can't penetrate
the atmosphere, would have to be
parked in space. The particle beam's
bulk is not endearing. Scientists figure a
neutral-beam battle station might be 80
feet long and weigh 50 to 100 tons (the
shuttle carries 33 tons). Up to 100 may
be required. "The problem for particle
beams is one of packaging and engineer-
ing," says Dr. Rockwood. "They will
have to be compact, lightweight, and
fully remote controlled."
Blunted by Earth's atmosphere, neu-
tral particle beams would be of little use
for boost-phase kills. But they look more
suitable for post-boost and midcourse
phases.
One type of charged-particle beam ?
the electron beam ? can operate in the
atmosphere. Indeed, it has to: Its inter-
action with the surrounding atmosphere
helps hold it together. If shot in space,
the beam would almost immediately dis-
perse as its electrons repelled each other.
- - ..-
ven if the electrons remained in a nar-
row stream, it would be bent uncontrol-
lably by Earth's magnetic field (neutral
beams are immune to such mischief).
Thus, the electron beam is being looked
at for use on the ground to zap warheads
dropping from space. The idea would be
to use them to defend ships or US mis-
sile silos and command posts.
The perfect weapon? Not quite. As
yet, researchers have only been able to
control the beams over very short dis-
tances in the atmosphere. One possible
solution: Use a laser to "tunnel" a path
for the particle beam through the air.
Scientists at Sandia National Labora-
tory have tested this technique in a spe-
cial gas-filled chamber. For now, how-
ever, the trick looks more like a coup for
science than anything to make the Sovi-
ets nervous: The gas used in the tests
doesn't exist in Earth's atmosphere.
At Livermore, meanwhile, research-
ers are enthusiastic about work they are
doing with the Advanced Test Accelera-
tor, a device nearly the length of a foot-
ball field bunkered in the flaxen hills
east of San Francisco. With something
greater than the sound of cracking hel-
mets, it propels pulses of electrons up to
50 million electron-volts of energy ? in
effect creating synthetic lightning.
When technicians fire the beam into
the air for the first time within the next
several months, they're hoping to keep it
controlled for some 75 feet ? something
that would be a leap forward but would
still fall shy of the several miles that will
be needed for a weapon. "You're talking
about a long row to hoe," says physicist
William Barletta, head of the beam re-
search program at Livermore. "We're
still working on the basic physics."
If and when scientists work out the
physics, they'll also have to be mindful
of the cost. "For terminal defense, if we
can't keep the costs down to $100 [mil-
lion] to $200 million a copy, it won't be
worth looking at," says Dr. Barletta.
Beyond this, star-wars officials are
exploring even more exotic concepts to
thwart missiles, though most of these
ideas are not much more than theories
now. Two examples: gamma-ray lasers
and "plasmoids."
Like the X-ray laser, gamma-ray la-
sers would be pumped by a nuclear
bomb. Because gamma rays are more le-
thal than X-rays, one SDI booster says
such a device would be the "ultimate di-
rected-energy weapon." Plasmoids are
clouds of energized atomic nuclei and
electrons that scientists would like to
hurl at warheadis. But first they will
have to find a way to make the cloud
stick together in space.
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Given the work to be done, it's per-
haps not surprising that beam weapons
in general are not envisioned as part of a
first-generation defense. Their first role
would probably be a supporting one ?
doing such things as helping discrimi-
nate decoys from warheads.
Even if beam weapons can be made
to shoot down missiles, they, along with
kinetic-energy weapons, will have to be
knit together in a reliable system, which
means some way to point and aim them
and manage the battle itself. Most ex-
perts agree that developing technologies
to run the battle will be far harder than
developing the weapons.
Third of six articles.
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tilt C;ti.1
Prrrr
CN ;N". =
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
7 November 1985
STAR WARS
WILL IT WORK?
The challenge of
mission control
13y Peter Grier
Ser,eliVS11,71 iMi 4,TaphwsIcc Hobin ,larraux
Griffis' 04 Faroe filass. PLY.
f a "star wars- control room is ever built, it
may resemble this secure Air Force lab. The
lights are soft, the walls sound-absorbing, and
the computers look like a new generation of
video game.
In a nuclear attack, such a center would
have to watch thousands of objects: missile
boosters. warheads in space. strips of foil
chaff, decoy balloons. Still-unknown electron-
ics would handle the task; today's technology
fast as it is. would simply crash.
)esig-ning this battle-management equipment
viii be "horrendous... ,ays one ,:cientist here. And it is
such mundane-sounding problems that may determine
the viability of ballistic missile defenses.
Lasers of gigawatt power and railguns are im-
pressive technology But if no control system tells them
what to do. space-based weapons are nothing but man-
made asteroids wearing American flags.
Strategic Defense Initiative ISM officials say the
highest technical obstacles to missile defense include:
? Computers. Computing hardware powerful
enough to run a space defense now seems feasible, but
scientists aren't sure if they can write the programs ?
or software ? needed to make the hardware run.
? Command and control. The various parts of a
missile defense must be able to talk back and forth and
work together, even in the face of massive attack.
? Target spotting. A missile roaring out of a silo
is as easy to see as a 10-story burning building, but cold
warheads coasting through space are extremely difficult
for sensors to "discriminate.-
? Power. A space-based weapon platform might
require the energy of "10 Hoover Dams in 1 second...
says John Bosma, editor of the newsletter Military
Space.
? Transportation. The cost of putting things in
orbit must, be reduced 90 percent if space-based defense
is to be affordable.
The men and women working on SDI
say their job is to stand up sometime
near the turn of the decade and say of
these problems: "Yes, we think they can
be solved," or "No, it's beyond us.
Sorry" To make that decision, they
must have some idea of what the entire
missile defense might look like ? a task
taking much of their attention right now.
In essence, SDI's system is being
shaped by a brainstorming competition.
Last year, 10 teams of companies won
contracts to draw up an SDI "architec-
ture," or overall plan. This summer,
companies such as as Martin Marietta,
TRW, and Boeing were picked to polish
their plans further, in the competition's
second phase.
Those who've seen the closely held
studies say three schemes for an initial
missile defense system are emerging.
The first is multilayered, using weap-
ons such as homing rockets on platforms
in space and on the ground.
The second is less ambitious, featur-
ing ground-based rockets and surveil-
lance sensors that would be popped into
space on notice of attack.
The third is a completely ground-
based defense intended to protect Eu-
rope against intermediate-range nuclear
missiles such as the Soviet SS-20.
None of these initial plans involve la-
sers or particle beams to shoot things
down. Research in these exotic technol-
ogies has given the SDI program an oth-
erworldly sheen and helped earn it the
nickname star wars, but directed-energy
weapons are still more prospect than
fact.
Lasers and particle beams might be
added to a defensive system after initial
deployment, say SDI officials, particu-
larly if the Soviets keep building new
missiles. Eventually, the US might field
a complex screen with directed-energy
beams, kinetic-kill weapons, and as
many as seven layers, according to SDI
plans.
"It may be necessary to have di-
rected-energy technology available in
2005, or 2010," says Navy Comdr.
James Offut, with the SDI systems
office.
The design of the SDI system is still
evolving ? the company studies are
more plans to make plans than plans in
themselves. It's clear, however, that SDI
is considering defenses molt limited
than a complex umbrella intended to be
90 percent effective.
"You can contribute to deterrence, to
stability in the strategic sense, by con-
structing defenses less than thoroughly
reliable," says Commander Offut.
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The need for
stalwart computers
For any US missile shield to be at all
reliable it must have stalwart comput-
ers. And the computers must be fast ?
so fast they would be to today's technol-
ogy what an F-16 is to a biplane.
The Pentagon is counting on new
semiconductor-chip design and new
ways of linking computers together to
provide this raw processing power. Even
critics admit these approaches hold
promise.
The hardware program is not insur-
mountable;' says John Kogut, a Univer-
sity of Illinois physicist who opposes
41A
BritiAChigthitel9PiedY COMPtiterS
th opetifiliVabbtfter Viaiter. Mitle'ogut
and other critics claim that software
poses unsolvable problems for ballistic
missile defense.
Everyone involved agrees that writ-
ing SDI's software would be a monu-
mental task, the data-processing equiv-
alent of building the Great Pyramids of
Giza. A ballistic missile defense would
need from 10 million to 100 million lines
of software code that would tolerate
faults ? "understand what is a hiccup,
and fix it," in the words of Offut.
Judgments of whether the job can be
done at all depend crucially on new tech-
nology. To scientists working on SDI, a
coming generation of software whiz kids
will use new computer technologies,
such as artificial intelligence (AI), which
tries to duplicate ap expert's thought
process in software, to perfect strategic-
defense computer programs.
"Artificial intelligence has hada lot
of hype, but its: applicability is teal,"
says Ray Uttz a:technical director at the
Air Forces /tome Air Develociment
Center. '
Air Force researchers using_ Al, for
instance, are now developing a computer
program that would help pilots pick the
safest route through antiaircraft
defenses to a target.
To critics, Al is akin to nuclear fusion
power ? technology that marches
bravely onward, but never seems to get
anywhere. In addition, they claim that
SDI software could never be fully tested
without war, and therefore would not be
trustworthy.
And some engineers say missile-de-
fense programs would inevitably be full
of conceptual errors; humans cannot
foresee and write in computer code all
the things that might happen in a nu-
clear attack.
"Sometime in my lifetime I might see
something like this, but I'm skeptical,"
says Dr. David Redell of the Digital
Equipment Corporation's Systems Re-
search Center.
Missile-defense electronics running at
full speed would have to keep an eye on
all hostile missiles, warheads, and de-
coys; send orders to defensive weapons
about what to shoot; and evaluate battle
progress. To help this command-and-
control process run smoothly, SDI scien-
tists are trying to give the system's
front-line "soldiers" as much responsi-
bility as possible.
Surveillance satellites, for instance,
might have powerful signal processors
on board so they can process their own
raw data. There might be "lieutenant
general" computers in orbit, each capa-
ble of running the battle in its area of the
front.
"That way, the enemy has to take out
lots of things to wreck the system," says
Dr. Charles Johnson, IBM director of
battle-management architectures.
Who is going to
run the system?
But SDI officials are not sure who, or
what, might serve as a missile-defense
commander in chief.
The problem is that a missile-defense
system must have the reflexes of a soc-
cer goalie. Its success might hinge on de-
stroying intercontinental ballistic mis-
siles during their a boost phase, which
currently takes about 3 to 5 minutes.
That does not allow much time to call
the president in from a golf course.
So a US space shield would probably
be controlled by an on-duty, high-rank-
ing military officer, who would watch
over a highly automated system, say
SDI officials. Such delegation of author-
ity is permissible, they say, because a
missile defense system would likely not
use nuclear weapons; set off by accident,
defensive weapons would sparkle harm-
lessly in space.
"Although it might alarm the world,
the consequences of a mistake are mini-
mal," says Dino Lorenzini, head of
SDI's pilot architecture program.
Advancing technology might at some
point bring the president and other civil-
ian leaders in on missile defense deci-
sions, claims Mr. Lorenzini. "They may
have a little electronic gadget embedded
in their carat all times," he says.
Advances in many technologies will
be needed if missile defense is to prove
feasible. Lasers, computers, and com-
munications are just a few of them. But
one of the toughest technical problems,
say a number of scientists, is an obscure
one ? target spotting, or discrimination.
To see a rocket roaring up in boost
phase all you need are binoculars and a
relatively close seat. The trouble starts
when the rocket burns out, and thou-
sands of cold, dark warheads separate
and go coasting across cold, dark space.
Critics, such as IBM scientist Rich-
ard Garwin, say that in this obscurity no
electronic eye could reliably tell nuclear
reentry vehicles from clever decoys.
Military researchers are more
optimistic.
"Finding them will require a
multisensor approach," says Frank
Rehn, a technical director at Rome Air
Development Center.
Space-based radar might locate ob-
jects coming up through the clouds.
Huge arrays of infrared detectors might
pick up the trail, and lasers might push
the objects, determining if they are war-
heads or lightweight balloons.
Much of the work on missile-defense
sensors might be applied to other mili-
tary missions. The Air Force, for in-
stance, wants to use space-based radar
to detect cruise missiles. Today's experi-
mental "stealth" airplanes, intended to
be almost invisible to current radar,
might well look big as blimps to sensors
developed by SDI work, according to
scientists in and outside of government.
These fancy new surveillance eyes in
the sky would require large ftmounts of
electric power. In fact, generating power
in orbit is itself a key problem facing
SDI researchers. Around the SDI office,
officials joke privately about running ex-
tension cords up into space.
Big battle-management satellites
might need 75 kilowatts of power ?
about as much as Skylab produced, says
an SDI official. But the vast expanse of
solar panels that Skylab used would be
vulnerable in the heat of battle.
Exotic-weapons platforms would
need even more electric power. Electro-
magnetic railguns might use short
bursts of 1 gigawatt (1 million kilowatts);
some types of lasers might need bursts
in the 40-gigawatt range.
Among the power technologies SDI is
looking at are chemically powered gener-
ators, advanced batteries, and small,
orbiting nuclear reartnrc The National
Aeronautics and Space Administration,
the Department of Energy, and SDI are
working on the SP-100, a space reactor
that might produce up to 2 megawatts.
"Even without SDI, this nation will
have to face the political reality of ac-
cepting space nuclear power," says Air
Force Col. George Hess, director of
SDI's program in survivability,
lethality, and key technologies.
It seems that any robust missile de-
fense would inevitably count on some
large components in space. They may be
nuclear reactors and lasers; they may
simply be large banks of infrared
"eyes." Somehow, these things would
have to be sent into orbit, and that is yet
another large problem.
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MIDCOURSE
PHASE
POST-BOOST
PHASE
Surveillance
satellite
? Battle
_management
Battle
management
satellite
BOOST
PHASE
Weapon
Sensors tor
ground ha-ad
into, unto,.
Managing the bathe
High cost of
space transport
It's a problem because currently
transporting an object into space costs
more than plating it with gold. The
launch price for a satellite now hovers
around $1,400 a pound. Unless that can
be cut to $140 a pound or less, a space-
based missile defense would probably be
too expensive, SDI officials say.
As far as SDI is concerned, the space
shuttle is only a pickup truck ? it can
carry about 30 metric tons. The Fletcher
panel, a Reagan-appointed group,
headed by James C. Fletcher, which
studied missile-defense technologies,
concluded that SDI needs a fleet of big
rockets able to boost 100 metric tons into
low-Earth orbit and beyond.
In addition "there's pome advanced
ideas for vehicles that tale off from run-
ways and then go supersonic [into
orbit]," says Gerald Yonas, SDI chief
scientist. "Those advanced ideas will
come along in the fullness of time."
The issue of cost, evidenced in the
problem of space transport, hangs over
the whole SDI program. Reagan admin-
istration officials have said that they
would not favor deployment of a ballis-
tic missile defense unless it is cheaper
for the US to strengthen its shield than it
is for the Soviets to increase their offen-
sive forces.
Even if that condition is met, the
overall price of the shield could still give
Congress sticker shock. As a recent
Congressional Office of Technology As-
sessment report notes, "the cost and ef-
fort of a space-based [defense] does not
end with deployment. Even in the ab-
sence of hostile action, there will have to
be constant activity in space, occasion-
ally with human presence, to maintain a
working system."
Would the system survive an attack?
SDI officials say that might depend on a
combination of things, such as physical
shielding of space systems and tactics
(satellites that dodge, perhaps).
"With a lot of Yankee ingenuity, I
think we could build the lasers, build the
particle beams to the required stan-
dards," says Cornelius (Cory) Coll III,
leader of an SDI study group at the Law-
rence Livermore National Laboratory.
"But this defensive system is more than
a sum of its parts."
If I walked into a garage and saw all
these beautiful automobile parts, I
wouldn't know when I put them all to-
gether if I was going to get a Mercedes or
an Edsel. I think putting this together in
a system is going to be the major
challenge."
Fourth of six artides
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r'11"1:47 APPEARED
ON PAGLI-e-----;
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
8 NOvenber 1985
STAR WARS
WILL WOR K ?
The Soviet
strategy
By Scott Armstrong and Peter Grier
Series design and graphics by Robin Jareaux
Washington
The Soviet response to America's "Star
Wars" could be called "The Empire Strikes
Back." It would be a sequel every bit as
important as the first installment, for
Moscow's actions will greatly affect the
value of any United States missile shield.
The USSR's options range from implacable
hostility to guarded cooperation. If the US decides to
build a strategic shield. Soviet planners could go all
out to defeat it by building more offensive weapons,
antisatellite "space mines," and other
countermeasures. Or they could decide to move with
the US toward a world where defenses play a large role
in the superpower relationship.
Protecting their nation against nuclear weapons
is something the Soviets have worked on for a long
time. The USSR is blanketed with defenses against
enemy bombers. A crude antiballistic missile system
now stands guard around Moscow. A Soviet version of
the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) has long
probed the utility of such exotic defensive weapons as
lasers.
Reagan adminiqtration officials in fact charge
that the Soviet Union is preparing to forge ahead on its
own and erect some sort of nationwide defense against
nuclear missiles. But it seems clear that the USSR
space-shield program, while extensive, is in important
ways inferior to its US counterpart.
"Our technology base upon which SDI rests is
sufficiently far ahead of the Soviets that I would say
we are certainly exploiting our edge here," says George
A. Keyworth II, science adviser to President Reagan.
Why should Americans care about
the Soviet response to SDI? Unlike to-
day, when superpowers hold each other
hostage with vast nuclear arsenals,
wouldn't a working space shield allow
the US to control its own destiny?
First, Soviet actions could well deter-
mine whether a US missile defense is
feasible at all. The quality of Soviet
countermeasures would have a large ef-
fect on whether strategic defenses can be
made tough enough to survive at a rea-
sonable price ? and SDI officials insist
that a defense would have to be both
survivable and cost-effective to be
deployed.
Second, a missile shield could not be
thrown up in a day like wallpaper; So-
viet actions could make the world a more
dangerous place during the time between
a US decision to build defenses and ac-
tual deployment. The USSR could
quickly build hundreds of new nuclear
missiles and warheads before a US
space shield was in place, perhaps
unnerving Western publics and provid-
ing an opportunity for the Soviets to
force political concessions from the
West.
And even if the US and USSR decide
that strategic defenses are worth pursu-
ing, their moves toward a defense-domi-
nated world would have to be carefully
coordinated, like those of two men step-
ping into a canoe at once. Otherwise, ei-
ther country might feel itself falling dan-
gerously behind the other, greatly
heightening world tensions.
Joint deployment would be much less
tricky if it were scripted "in advance by
explicit agreement between the United
States and the Soviet Union," points out
a recent Congressional Office of Tech-
nology Assessment report.
Overwhelming
a defensive system
The Soviet Union's initial response tc
a US missile shield could well be to 104
for ways to overwhelm it. They might
stack up new offensive weapons. They
could do this relatively easily by churn-
ing out extra warheads for existing mis-
siles.
The USSR's large SS-18 booster is to-
day limited by arms agreementS, to a
cargo of 10 warheads, but it is capable of
carrying at least 18. Larger forces of
cruise missiles and bombers might also
be built, in an effort to skirt under a US
space-based shield.
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C.
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Attempting to fool the defense is an-
other Soviet option. Missiles could carry
cheap Mylar balloon decoys, as well as
warheads. Warheads could be concealed
inside balloons, to make the defense's
spotting problems even more difficult.
Armor might be tried, too: Coating mis-
sile boosters with some sort of extra pro-
tective layer could make them resistant
to attack by lasers or other directed-
energy weapons.
Perhaps one of the most effective
countermeasures the Soviets could use
would be fast-burn missiles, which
would finish their flaming boost stage in-
side Earth's atmosphere in a short 150
seconds. Fast-burn missiles, would be
safe from neutral particle-beam weapons
and X-ray lasers, which cannot pene-
trate air well; and there would not be
much time for the defense to attack diem
at all before they released their
warheads.
Perfecting a fleet of fast-burn missiles
would, however, take many years and could work on countermeasures against
millions of rubles. a 'US shield while improving their own
Possible Soviet countermeasures are strategic defenses.
being studied very seriously, says SDI The USSR today maintains a large
chief scientist Gerald Yonas, and a US force of traditional air defense weapons
defensive system might well anticipate intended to protect against US bomters
and handle them. and cruise missiles. According to the
For example, one SDI concept calls Pentagon, the Soviets have 1,200 inter-
for using pellets and artifical clouds of ceptor aircraft and 1,200 surface-to-air
gas in space. Like Earth's atmosphere, missile sites dedicated to air defense
the gas would strip away the lighter de- rrussions.
coys, such as balloons, from a group of This screen does not cause that much
warheads. The pellets would actually worry in the US Air Force. The Strategic
shred the decoys. Air Command predicts that for the tore-
Moscow might also simply try to de- seeable future a high percentage of
stroy a US missile shield at the start of American bombers would be able to
hostilities. Space mines, which blow up reach their targets. Years ago, Pentagon
near satellites, could be developed. Ac- planners decided that in today's ballistic
cording to the latest edition of the Penta- missile age defending the US against
gon's "Soviet Military Power," the bombers isn't worth that much effort.
USSR could have ground-based laser There are approximately 300 US-based
antisatellite (ASAT) weapons by the end fighter aircraft dedicated to strategic
of the 1980s; a Soviet ASAT using less defense.
exotic technology has already been As Reagan administration officials
deployed, are fond of pointing out, the USSR also
SDI officials admit that ensuring has the world's only working
survivability of a missile defense is one antiballistic missile (ABM) system, de-
of their hardest challenges. ployed around Moscow
A shield's toughness will depend on Under the terms of the 1972 ABM
the physical protection of. armor and Treaty, both the US and the Soviet
self-defense weapons; tactics, .such as Union have the right to erect one such
evasion by maneuverable satellites; and small defense. The US built one around
national policies, "agreements we might a ballistic-missile field in North Dakota,
have with the Soviets in terms of how we but soon scrapped it as costly and
operate in space," says Ik Dino ineffective.
Lorenzini head of SDI's in-house archi- The Kremlin is currently upgrading
"Clearly, most people would say in a
better and decent world it would be nice
if we could keep space pure and pristine.
I don't think it's responsible for the De-
partment of Defense to take such an al-
truistic point of view," says Air Force
Col. George Hess, director of the SDI
key technologies section.
Soviet emphasis
on strategic defense
Ironically, since the dawn of the nu-
clear age it has usually been the Soviet
Union, not the United States, which
stressed defense against nuclear weap-
ons. Today Moscow complains bitterly
about the US SDI program; in 1967, So-
viet Premier Alexei Kosygin said, "I
think that a defensive system which pre-
vents attack is not a cause of the arms
race."
Thus it is possible that the Soviets
tecture study. f? Moscow's ballistic-missile defense. Fast
Critics often contend that one result nuclear-tipped SH-04 and SH-08 rockets
of Mr. Reagan's push for missile defense are replacing sluggish Galosh intercep-
will be a militarization of the heavens, tor missiles, the system's old standbys.
which have heretofore been a relative Still, "the upgraded Moscow system
sanctuary from humanity's clashes on would be ineffective against a deter-
Earth. mined American strategic strike,"
But with military reconnaissance sat- judges Stanford University arms control
elites already coasting through space expert David Holloway. "But it could
and ASAT weapons in both the US and provide some defense against theater
Soviet arsenals, this militarization has [nuclear missile] systems such as the
in fact already happened, many Penta- Pershing II."
gon officers say.
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The Soviets are also developing new
radar that could enhance their early-
warning and missile-tracking capabili-
ties. This includes a large phased-array
radar near Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia, that
US officials argue violates the ABM
Treaty. The Soviets are also adding new
mobile air-defense radars, which some
analysts say may be able to perform
missile defense duties as well.
Then there is Soviet research into ex-
otic defense technologies, their version
of the US Strategic Defense Initiative. A
recent Pentagon study says the USSR is
devoting far more plant space, capital,
and manpower to such projects than is
the US.
But while broader than its American
counterpart, Soviet work in defense
technology may still not be more
productive.
They are spending five to 10 times
a, much on agriculture as we are, but I
Ion t think anybody is maintaining
there is &grain gap," says John E. Pike,
space policy Analyst at the Federation of
American Scientists and an SDI critic.
The Soviets have long been interested
in directed-energy weapons, destructive
rays that might form part of an ad-
vanced screen against incoming ballistic
missiles.
Some 10,000 Soviet scientists and
half a dozen research facilities are
thought to be working on high-energy la-
sers, for instance.
Soviet laser work may have moved
beyond basic research to the develop-
ment of prototype weapons. At Sary
Shagan, a missile range in Soviet Cen-
tral Asia were some of the most ad-
vanced research is under way, there are
now two lasers that could "blind" low-
orbiting US satellites, charge Pentagon
officials.
If the Soviets skip some testing, the
US Defense Department estimates that
they could deploy an Earth-based laser
shield against missiles in 10 years,
ahead of the SDI timetable. The Soviets
might well choose to do this: Several
times in the oast they have prematurely
deployed new systems of marginal use
in order to beat the US.
The Central Intelligence Agency is a
bit more skeptical of Moscow's pros-
pects. In a report to Congress in June,
the CIA predicted that the USSR could
not deploy a missile-defense system
until after the turn of the century.
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At the very least, Pentagon officials
say, Moscow's work on upgrading ra-
dars and surface-to-air missile sites
means they are better positioned than
the US to build a relatively crude
shield, using off-the-shelf technology
in the next decade or so.
"It would really give us fits if they
did," says one Pentagon official.
If the Soviet Union raced ahead
with its own defense, while bolstering
its offensive arsenal, Kremlin planners
might come to believe they had strate-
gic superiority and could attack the
US, or threaten to attack it, without
fear of retaliation.
' "Like the US, the Soviets have also
long been interested in two other exotic
technologies: particle beams and radio-
frequency beams. Particle beams ?
streams of atoms or subatomic parti-
cles ? are considered mainly useful for
zapping targets in ' space. Radio-fre-
quency beams, which use microwaves,
hold potential for destroying the elec-
tronics of a missile or satellite. The So-
viets hold an edge over the US in both
technologies, according to US intelli-
gence officials, but still have far to go
before they can make actual particle-
beam and radio-frequency weapons.
A broad shield against missiles, par-
ticularly one with some components in
space, needs more than weapons. It
also requires sensors to spot targets,
secure communications links, and com-
puters to run the battle.
SDI officials say progress in these
miscellaneous technologies may make
or break any missile shield, and in
these areas the Soviet Union is prob-
ably far behind the US.
Writing reliable computer software
to run a missile shield, for instance, is
today far beyond the capability of US
engineers. And Soviet computer tech-
nology is at least a generation cruder
than its US counterpart.
"I don't care how big a laser they
can build," says Stephen M. Meyec
Soviet defense specialist at the Massa-
chusetts Institute of Thchnology. "If
they aren't capable of pointing it at
anything, who cares?"
Still, the Pentagon claims that the
scope of Soviet strategic defensive pro-
grams suggests they may be preparing
to burst the limits of the 1972 ABM
Treaty and erect a nationwide missile
defense.
Scum. US CORMS OSOSSISMI
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SOVIET UNION'S STRATEGIC NUCLEAR FORCES
Thus Pentagon officials from De-
fense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger
on down argue that the US SDI is
really not an initiative at all, but a re-
sponse to Soviet actions.
Critics of the US program argue
that this view of the Soviets exagger-
ates their capabilities.
Kremlin officials are not about to or-
der a "breakout" from the ABM
Treats because they' know that doing
90 would be like "throwing gasoline"
on the US SDI effort., says one defense
analyst.
A very tricky
transition period
Critics also are concerned about
SDI's effect on superpower stability
Here they turn the Pentagon's argu-
ment around: If it would destabilize the
nuclear balance for the USSR to de-
ploy defenses ahead of the US,
wouldn't it also be destabilizing for the
US to erect defenses before the USSR?
The transition from today's strate-
gic situation, where superpowers rely
solely on offensive arsenals, W the
world of strategic defense would be a
very delicate dance ? even according
to SDI officials. Few people say the US
could just build defenses on its own,
--
"I think if we've convinced our-
selves this is therway to go, the Soviets
will have convinced themselves this is
the way to go, too," says Dr. Yonne.
Each step toward defenses by both
sides would have to be made glassily
to keep the other fellow from feeling he
was becoming dangerously vulnerable
by being left behind.
Many experts inside and outside
government feel this transition period
would have be to planned in advance
by a superpower agreement.
A. necessary part of this agreement,
these experts say will be strict limits
on offensive arms. Otherwise, defenses
might not be effective enough to make
sense, or cheap enough to afford.
"In my view offensive restraints are
necessary" says Cornelius (Cory) Coll
III, head of an SDI study group at the
Lawrence-Livermore National
Laboratory
Other officials argue that offensive
arms cuts will in fact follow not pre-
cede, deployment of defenses: As
defenses are gradually strengthened,
both sides will see their nuclear weap-
ons becoming less and less useful, and
will become amenable to greater and
greater reductions in their arsenals.
The arms spiral will go down, instead
of up.
"Defensive technology is the en-
abling mechanism that will make this
chemistry of arms reduction work,"
Yonas argues.
If strategic defenses turn out to be
feasible, will the Soviets really agree to
go along? That is difficult for Western-
ers to predict ? it is not for nothing
that Winston Churchill called the So-
viet Union "a riddle wrapped in a mys-
tery inside an enigma."
It is clear that the Soviets are work-
ing on defenses. But in the near term,
most observors don't expect the Soviet
Union to radically accelerate its mili-
tary programs, offensive or defensive,
in response to SDI.
Fbr one thing, too many political
and technical uncertainties surround
the nascent program. In addition, the
Kremlin wouldn't find it easy to divert
resources from other sectors of the
economy ? many of which lag their
Western counterparts.
"They can't afford to plow forward
with an SDI on the American scale,"
says Jonathan Haslam, a Soviet spe-
cialist as Johns Hopkins School of Ad-
vanced International Studies in Wash-
ington.
But the very fact that SDi. exists
has already changed the supefpower
relationship, helping bring Moscow
back to the arms bargaining table,
while at the same time making those
talks more complicated. The issue of
defenses, which has now gone -very
public in the West, is likely to affect su-
perpower relations for some time to
come.
Writes MIT's Stephen Meyer in
Survival, the journal of the Interna-
tional Institute for Strategic Studies in
London:
"Fbr the Soviet Union, the US SDI
program is quickly becoming symbolic
of a more fundamental challenge be-
tween states . . . calling into contention
the political, economic and industrial,
scientific and technological, and mili-
tary potentials of the superpowers."
Filth of six articles
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/09/21 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000302550008-2