Ballistic Missile Defense 101

By Gordon Prather

The first thing to be said about ballistic missile defense is that we
don’t need one. What we need is a defense against the nukes that could,
but probably won’t be inserted into ballistic trajectories — ending in
the United States — by launch vehicles — missiles.

Probably won’t, because if a terrorist group or rogue state possessed
only a few nukes — got by hook or crook — a ballistic missile would be
their last choice as a delivery vehicle. Last choice? What would a
terrorist group’s first choice be? Well, they’ve had a lot of success
lately with U-Haul trucks.

If we wish to defend ourselves against ballistic nukes, we have two
options: No.1 we can try to destroy the launch vehicle shortly after
launch but before it inserts the ballistic nuke or No. 2. we can try to
destroy the incoming ballistic nuke shortly before it impacts us. At
the present time, the only option we have for destroying either hostile
launch vehicle or incoming nuke warhead, is with our own warhead,
carried to the point of interception by one of our own vehicles.

In order to destroy their launch vehicle before it has a chance to
insert its warhead into a ballistic trajectory, we must be able to
launch our missile from a site very near to their launch site. Since
our missile has to catch their missile, which has a huge head start, our
missile must be very much faster than theirs, which, in turn, tends to
mean that our missile will have a relatively short range.

In order to destroy the incoming ballistic nuke, we must be able to
launch our very fast, relatively short-range missile from a site very
near the predicted point of impact.

The Clinton-Gore administration, after having done almost nothing to
keep rogue states or terrorist groups from acquiring — by hook or crook
— nukes in the first place, is now trying to persuade Congress to fund
a gigabuck ABM defense system that does neither. The Clinton-Gore ABM
system neither attempts to destroy the launch vehicle post-launch nor
to destroy the ballistic nuke pre-impact.

Instead, the Clinton-Gore proposal is to build two initially, and
later eight more, launch sites in Alaska for our very fast, relatively
short range interceptor missiles, equipped with inert (non-nuke]
warheads. Clinton-Gore plan will site the interceptors in Alaska,
because they figure that the most likely launch site for ballistic nukes
is North Korea. They don’t know where in the U.S. the North Koreans
will intend the ballistic nukes to impact, but they figure that most
North Korea-to-U.S. ballistic trajectories will take the North Korean
nukes over Alaska.

One may be forgiven for asking Clinton-Gore: “Why, after you gave the
North Koreans many billions of dollars in bribes to not develop nukes,
why oh why have you decided that North Korea, of all places in the
world, is the most likely place from which ballistic nukes will be sent
on their way to the United States?”

Who knows? Maybe Clinton-Gore are outraged because the Oriental
despots they bribed didn’t stay bribed. But, you see, do you not, even
if Clinton-Gore don’t, that if the ballistic nukes are sent on their way
to us from anywhere other than North Korea — Cuba for example — the
Clinton-Gore ABM sites in Alaska will be useless.

One may also be forgiven for asking Clinton-Gore: “Why, after the
U.S. has spent many billions of dollars developing and stockpiling
enhanced radiation nukes for our very fast, relatively short range
interceptor missiles, specifically for the purpose of destroying — even
with a near miss — ballistic nukes in flight, why oh why do you insist
on trying to hit those North Korean ballistic nukes with inert bullets
rather than taking them out with a US nuke near miss?”

You recall, do you not, even if Clinton-Gore never knew, that one of
the great World War II war-winning inventions was the U.S.-developed
proximity fuse? Before that invention, if you wanted to shoot down an
airplane, you had to actually hit it — a la Clinton-Gore — with one or
more bullets. But with the proximity fuse, all you had to do was to
fire your projectile in the general direction of the airplane and the
projectile did all the rest, detonating itself, if, and when, it got in
the general proximity of the airplane.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to Clinton-Gore thinking in
Congress and even in the Clinton-Gore Pentagon. After all, it’s not
rocket science. On second thought, maybe it is. For example, instead of
having a few fixed sites in Alaska, which will be useless if the
ballistic nukes originate anywhere else than North Korea, why not just
upgrade the U.S. Fleet Air Defense: the Aegis system? Then the US will
have an effective ABM defense if either the launch site or the intended
impact site is anywhere near the oceans which cover about half of the
earth’s surface.

But the real Clinton-Gore failure responsible for this too-little
too-late attempt to defend the U.S. from loose nukes was not in bribing
despots who wouldn’t stay bribed. It was in not aggressively pursuing
the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici mandates to prevent the proliferation of Soviet
loose nukes, nuke materials, nuke technologies and nuke technologists.
It should have been possible to see to it that rogue states and
terrorist groups never got — by hook or crook — nukes in the first
place. As long as they don’t have nuke warheads on them, why should we
care how many ballistic missiles the bad guys fire at us?

Gordon Prather

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Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. He also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. Read more of Gordon Prather's articles here.