THE DENVER POST - Saturday Forum
November 22, 1986
The missed opportunities of Reykjavic may one day loom as the last best chance we had to set a new course toward peaceful accommodation with the Russians. We have been deflected from this path by President Reagan's dogged pursuit of a chimeric dream that most physicists claim is at best technically illusory and hopelessly flawed, at worst an incentive for uncontrolled arms escalation.
Overnight, "star wars" has emerged from the status of an international propaganda ploy to an eminence of pivotal importance in the foreign policy of both sides. Since both sides had clearly enunciated their respective positions on this issue in unmistakable language long before the Iceland meeting took place, the outcome should have surprised no one. Yet the virulence with which each party nailed down his own position has convinced many Americans that in star wars we must have something worth protecting and perfecting, while the Soviets with equal determination see it as something greatly to be feared. What logic could be more compelling, more irrefutable? If the Russians are afraid of it, it must really work.
Indeed the Russians fear star wars, but this fear may have little to do with its potential as an American shield against an offensive nuclear attack.
Every in-depth study by independent physicists has arrived at the same basic conclusion: Star wars is unworkable now and into the foreseeable future, not only because of the great complexity of the problems to be solved, but especially because of the ease with which each system conceived can be defeated by relatively simple countermeasures.
DEFENSIVE, OFFENSIVE
Why then are the Soviets so distraught over a system that can be overcome at so little cost? Perhaps most fundamental reason is that any defensive weapon can in principle be turned into an offensive one in the airspace over the enemy's territory. We must come to terms with the fact that even though we perceive ourselves to be a wonderful, peace-loving, generous and trustworthy people, the Russian Communist leadership for 70 years has distrusted us as much as we have distrusted them.
Even the most ardent advocate of the Strategic Defense Initiative will admit
that star wars cannot be 100 percent effective against an anticipated armada of
perhaps more than 10,000 warheads. Extraordinarily optimistic claims on the
order of 99 percent effectiveness still anticipate allowing 100 bombs through to
destroy about 100 American cities. Even a leaky space defense system implies a
serious threat to the other side, but from a different perspective.
The space-based defense system probably could not contain a first strike by the
Soviets, but it might defend successfully against a retaliatory strike by a
decimated Soviet offensive fleet that had been crippled by a U.S. first strike.
Moreover, after destroying Russian satellites and strategic missiles, the
defensive force could be turned against ground targets.
Suppose, however, that the Communist leadership accepts the notion that the U.S. would not commit a first strike. Any scenario for a successful multi-layered space defense assumes that most of the offensive missiles must be destroyed during their boost phase where the warheads are spatially concentrated and where the launch vehicles are most vulnerable.
It is now a fully accepted thesis that the fast-burn launch vehicles of the future will be vulnerable for only about 50 seconds from the initial moment of a surprise attack. Human intervention on this time scale is clearly out of the question. Decisions that may affect the survival of life on Earth will be in the bands of an enormously sophisticated spaceborne computer system. In a word, the system must be able to "think" for itself. Such systems emulating human logic are called "expert systems." The problem is that they are inherently "brittle" - they tend to fail catastrophically when presented with a problem beyond their purview.
Tens of millions of lines of fault-tolerant code must operate perfectly for such a system to succeed. Currently, techniques to prove the correctness of even 1,000 lines of code have yet to be demonstrated. Whereas the offensive force of either nation may be under the most severe strictures of control through the massive hierarchy of government, an automated space defense system must, under the duress of time constraint, operate on standing orders to shoot to kill when it perceives itself under attack.
There is no way, short of actual nuclear conflict, to demonstrate that the software system will perform as designed. However, no large-scale software system ever built has functioned correctly in its first trial, and none has even approached the vast complexity envisioned for SDI. In the hair-trigger world of today, any false signal inadvertently interpreted as genuine by the automated defense system may precipitate a response from the opposing force, ratcheting quickly to an uncontrolled conflict.
As remote as this may seem to some, one has to appreciate that to the Russian defense ministry, this scenario may appear as a distinct threat.
Consider the X-ray laser, a centerpiece of star wars weaponry. It produces a powerful burst of X-rays by exploding a nuclear bomb over the launch sites. Although most of this energy is wasted, a small part is channeled into lasant rods that are aimed at distinct targets (launched missiles) under the control of the battle management system. The X-rays themselves cannot penetrate the atmosphere, but the exploding bomb produces radioactive fallout which may be spread over vast regions of the USSR.
Reagan avers that nuclear weapons in space will not be used because of
humanitarian reasons. A more likely reason is that detonating a nuclear bomb in
space will produce instantaneous and lingering effects that virtually obliterate
the battle management communications network, blind the defensive sensors and
damage computer and optical systems.
What about non-nuclear systems? Particle beams used in a manner similar to
X-rays cannot penetrate the atmosphere. Consequently, they cannot hurt people on
the ground. On the other hand, neither can they hurt launch vehicles that burn
out before they breach the top of the atmosphere.
At certain wavelengths, free electron lasers may be generated on the ground, propagated through the atmosphere and reflected from geosynchronous orbit to mirrors over the battleground. If these devastating beams can penetrate the atmosphere going up, they can also do so going down.
Rail guns may rapid-fire projectiles in all directions at velocities of 10 to 20 kilometers per second. Eventually, all these projectiles will reach the ground, with the impact energy of large bombs.
A space war over the Soviet Union can produce incalculable harm for people on the ground, belying Reagan's claim that SDI "won't kill people, it will kill weapons."
Aside from the threat of nuclear war, the Soviets may also fear what a star wars competition will do to their economy. Former President Nixon once termed star wars "the ultimate bargaining chip", primarily because of its enormous cost which he believed the U.S. can afford while the USSR cannot.
It is said that the Russians have been planning and experimenting with their own version of star wars for years. Probably true, but if they believe that competition with the U.S. would be economically ruinous, we may indeed have the ultimate bargaining chip. They cannot develop, test and deploy a space-based system, undetected, any more than we can. The first vestige of such a system in place could be destroyed by a few tons of American placer gravel counter-orbited to Soviet space platforms.
A deal to obviate star wars on both sides should be eminently possible. Instead, star wars proponents have suggested that by building a formidable space defense system we will discourage the Russians from improving or augmenting their present force, causing it to atrophy in time to zero. They also suggest that a defensive system will be cheaper to build than the offensive system it is intended to defeat. This sort of specious reasoning flies in the face of human nature as we know it and disregards the obvious costs of developing new technologies that will require orders of magnitude of improvement before they can even begin to fulfil their intended purpose.
Russian planners no doubt have discovered, as many software experts in this country already know, that building the computing system would be not only catastrophically expensive but also technically infeasible. What horrifies the most sanguine of U.S. experts is not the weapons themselves (considering certain individual components, there may be reason for optimism) but the system architecture and the software development and testing.
A star wars computing system, because of the computing load and the constant threat of destruction, cannot reside in one space platform. Its components must be distributed throughout the fleet, performing a gargantuan task of maintaining control over all its own sensors and weapons while tracking hostile missiles, controlling fire and maintaining a data base on the status of the enemy force as well as its own. It must reconfigure itself after each major contingency, recovering from internal losses caused by overload, equipment failure and enemy action.
STAGGERING LONG-TERM COST
What about the long-term maintenance of a space-based defense system? From a Soviet perspective, the additional cost of supporting a space defense system on a long-term basis would cripple any effort to improve the average Russian's standard of living. The Soviet economy already is staggering under the load of a huge defense budget.
Star wars proponents in the U.S. would have us believe that it is a one-time investment. On the contrary, it has often been suggested that the initial costs will exceed $1 trillion. To maintain it each year it may cost the equivalent of a sizeable segment of the rest of the armed forces - tens to hundreds of billions of dollars.
Will it ever end? Not according to Caspar Weinberger. The secretary of defense says, "I would love to come to a point where we can stop. I can't foresee it." He's probably right. A weapons system of this magnitude will perpetuate itself whether or not it has any lasting value.
Will this madness yield In the face of public indignation? Unlikely. A recent poll by Time magazine cited the American public as being 60 percent in favor of star wars and only 20 percent opposed. The average citizen fully supports the president despite almost zero knowledge of what star wars can or can not accomplish. He has only to point to the obvious Russian discomfiture over the prospect of star wars.
Despite the more rational explanation for that discomfiture - that SDI offers too many opportunities for devastating mistakes - some may still argue, "So what? What's bad for communism has got to be good for democracy."
But in a world already brimming with infinite destructive power, the only rational road to peace must lie along the path of mutual accommodation, neither side seeking military superiority. We must have the wisdom to view this critical issue with the eyes of the enemy and he, likewise, with ours. If we cannot appreciate the Russian worldview, how can we hope that he will begin to appreciate ours?
Howard Garcia is a Boulder scientist and writer