Perhaps you had a little trouble understanding why our war hawks – after observing anthrax spores being delivered in the mail – called for the immediate abrogation of the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems.
In that 1972 Treaty – in which there is no mention of anthrax – we and the Soviet Union each agreed never ever to deploy a nationwide defense against nuclear warheads lobbed at each other – in ballistic trajectories – by missiles (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). Of course, if the other side attempts to deliver those nukes by bomber, that’s OK under the ABM treaty. And we’re allowed to blast them out of the sky.
It’s not that we didn’t know how to destroy incoming ICBM nukes. Over-the-horizon radar tells you when the ICBM has lobbed the nuke at you, so you track it and intercept it – just as it starts to re-enter the atmosphere – with your own specially designed “enhanced radiation” nuke. Both sides designed, tested and stockpiled enhanced-radiation ABM nukes.
Meanwhile, in the 1960s, we set out to make our own ICBM nukes invulnerable to the Soviet ABM nukes, making ours as small and as insensitive to nuclear radiation as possible. It cost us many billions of dollars and the Soviets many billions of rubles.
But, before long, both sides realized that defending against a nuke first strike by the other side could require intercepting – more or less simultaneously – several thousand ICBM nukes. Furthermore, it would probably take two out-going ABM nukes to ensure killing each incoming ICBM nuke. The real-time battlefield management problem – target acquisition, target tracking, ABM launch, interception, etc. – was horrendous. The cost was prohibitive and – with the technologies available in the late 1960s – practically undoable.
Now, post Cold War, the ICBM threat confronting the Bush-Cheney National Missile Defense system will amount to only a few incoming nukes, not several thousand. With 21st-century satellite, sensor and supercomputer technology, that battle is manageable. And taking advantage of the new hit-to-kill technology, we could drastically reduce the size, weight and yield of the nukes we need to be sure of killing the incoming ICBM warhead.
The Bush-Quayle administration began to look at “mini-nukes” for ABMs, but when the Clinton-Gore administration came to power and was required by Congress to develop and deploy a limited ABM defense, they shunned nukes entirely. For them, No Nukes is Good Nukes. In fact, Clinton-Gore spent eight years trying to get every nation-state to follow our example and eschew nukes. They failed miserably, of course. Both India and Pakistan confirmed in 1998 what everyone had long suspected: They have nukes. Now, in prosecuting the War Against Terrorism, Bush-Cheney are having to tip-toe around the loudly ticking Islamic bomb. Today, only Pakistan has it, but tomorrow? Iran? Iraq?
The non-nuke ABM system Clinton-Gore pursued was a “bullet-hits-bullet” system. Our hyper-velocity missile would seek, find and smash into the incoming ICBM nuke, while it was still outside the atmosphere, and pulverize it. The problem is that a Clinton-Gore miss-by-an-inch is as bad as a miss-by-a-mile. The way to solve the “miss” problem is to use a nuke, not a bullet. A miss-by-a-mile by a nuke is close enough for government work.
So, if an ICBM warhead is headed towards Seattle, why not nuke it and rest easy? Well, the reason given by Clinton-Gore was that the ICBM warhead might be carrying a few hundred pounds of anthrax spores – rather than a nuke – and such spores were resistant to “enhanced radiation.”
Is anyone crazy enough to use a zillion-dollar missile to deliver a few hundred dollars worth of anthrax to Seattle? Well, we found out after the Gulf War that Saddam Hussein – not having any nukes – had loaded about 50 Scud missiles with anthrax. He never used them, because his scientists never figured out how to disperse it over the target as an aerosol, which is the only way anthrax can be effective as a weapon.
In any case, the Iraqi Scuds have a maximum range of about 450 miles. So, Saddam can’t hit Seattle – which is about 6,780 miles from Baghdad – with a Scud-load of anthrax. He’ll have to find some other delivery system – like the U.S. Postal Service – for Seattle. But he just might reach Tel Aviv with his Scuds. So now do you understand how the war hawks concluded that anthrax spores being delivered to us by mail required our immediate abrogation of the ABM Treaty? You don’t? You’re not alone.
