WASHINGTON TIMES
UNION OF SCIENTISTS HAS DEFENSIBLE CONCERNS (Washington Times title)
LIFTING THE FOG (Garwin/Gottfried suggested title)
Sunday, December 17, 2000
Section: COMMENTARY FORUM
Edition: FINAL
Page: B5

     Ballistic missile defense stirs deep passions for reasons that we have
never fully fathomed. An example is the defamatory attack on us by Evan Gahr
in "Missile defense fog," in Commentary Nov. 28. Mr. Gahr must believe the
Union of Concerned Scientists are ideologically opposed to missile defense,
and claims UCS has resorted to misrepresentation to thwart the deployment of
defenses ready and waiting in the wings.
     This is nonsense. Like any sane person, we would love to be defended
against missile attacks, and have always supported ballistic missile defense
(BMD) research and development. One of us, Richard Garwin, has been directly
involved in BMD work for some 40 years, and a broad range of other military
and intelligence technologies. We also support research on heart disease and
expect physicians to tell us whether a purported cure is effective, whether
there are intolerable side effects and whether the cost exceeds our lifetime
earnings. Our attitude toward BMD systems is equally pragmatic.
     The nation's BMD effort has had three major chapters. Chapter I began with
the construction of a missile defense of Moscow. President Johnson, spurred
by his domestic opposition, proposed a similar defense of American cities
against Chinese missiles. When that was seen to frighten the public and to be
futile, the rationale shifted under President Nixon to defending missile silos
against Soviet attack.
     The President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) had opposed this decision
because our proposed BMD system would be fatally vulnerable to Soviet
countermeasures, such as decoy warheads. Furthermore, Moscow's "defense" has
led us to target even more ICBMs on the Soviet capital to ensure penetration;
surely the Russians could also respond by fielding more ICBMs at a lower cost
than our defenses. The net result would thus be an accelerated nuclear arms
race. Two members of PSAC, Mr. Garwin and Hans Bethe, published an
unclassified analysis in Scientific American and a public debate ensued. The
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was funded at that time, and the first
UCS report, written in 1969 by a group chaired by Kurt Gottfried, was an
analysis of BMD.
     The validity of our assessment was eventually recognized. The
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty was signed in 1972 to avert a further
buildup of offensive forces. And our only ABM site the treaty permitted was
shut down after four months because keeping it operational was too costly.

     Chapter II opened on March 23, 1983, with President Reagan's famous speech
calling on scientists to render "nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." The
technology to accomplish this was then not in sight, as the Pentagon had
testified to Congress earlier that day. Nevertheless, the administration
established the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and committed copious
funding to swiftly turn the president's vision into a reality.
     A year later, with Nobel Prize-winning physicists Bethe and Henry Kendall,
other scientists and Adm. Noel Gayler, former Pacific commander in chief, we
published a series of technical critiques of SDI under the auspices of UCS.
Evidently we were on the mark because the Reagan and Bush administrations
eventually reduced the program sharply as the technologies were proving to be
far more problematic than SDI advocates had realized.
     Mr. Gahr accuses us of claiming infallibility and shows we are not because
of an error in our first 1984 report concerning the number of satellite-based
lasers an SDI system would need. Like all sane scientists, we know we are not
infallible, but we do claim intellectual honesty. We discovered the error
ourselves, and published a correction within the month. In May 1985, in the
scientific journal Nature, Mr. Garwin published a detailed analysis of how
many lasers based in space would be required under various circumstances.
     Missile defense advocates often point to this promptly rectified error to
deflect attention from the fact it did not effect the basic validity of our
SDI critique. They do not acknowledge we assumed that all the technologies
would perform perfectly to the extent allowed by the facts of geography and
the laws of physics. We did this to avoid dubious judgments on the future of
technologies and to identify the hurdles that must be overcome even if the
inevitable gaps between idealized theory and the real world were wished away.
     That gap is exemplified by the U.S.-Israeli Tactical High Energy Laser
(THEL) which Mr. Gahr interprets as the undoing of our SDI critique. THEL is
a ground, not space-based laser, and in this summer's successful tests it
destroyed not ICBMs but considerably slower short-range missiles at a
distances of several miles, whereas the SDI lasers would have had to destroy
much swifter ICBM missiles at ranges of hundreds of miles.
     Where are we now? The United States has a space-based laser demonstration
program, which when successful would still be far from an operation system.
According to a recent Air Force paper by Lt. Col. W.H. Possel, such a laser
might eventually attain one-fifth of the capability we assumed 16 years ago,
and would cost about $80 billion for a constellation of 20 lasers. (To defend
against the Cold War Soviet arsenal, SDI would thus have required many
hundreds of such lasers.)
     Chapter III is still being written. North Korea's missile flight tests
caused President Clinton to move toward deploying the National Missile Defense
(NMDS) system to defend against ICBM attacks by such "rogue" states. Once
again, enthusiasts advocate posthaste deployment.
     As a result, UCS and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology brought
together a group of scientists, some with extensive experience in missile and
weapons technologies. Our April 2000 report warns that the planned NMD system
will not be a effective against the countermeasures that any state able to
field an ICBM must be expected to develop. That "rogue" sates will have this
capability is also predicted by the U.S. intelligence community. Since our
report appeared, an independent review headed by Gen. Larry B. Welch agreed
that the Pentagon has given inadequate attention to the countermeasure
problem, and that a Red Team should be formed to address it.
     To summarize: The problem of defense against intercontinental ballistic
missiles carrying nuclear or biological weapons remains unsolved except for
one narrow possibility that has been vigorously advocated by Mr. Garwin. Such
a "boost phase" system would intercept hostile ICBMs shortly after liftoff,
when they are highly visible and have note yet released their warheads or
decoys.
     Finally, two remarks: Proponents of deploying BMD systems, especially
laymen, often disparage us as technological pessimists. As practicing
physicists for half a century, we have benefited enormously from advances in
technology. Today's research depends on devices that no one imagined when we
were graduate students. But no enemy is committed to incapacitating them -
the study of nature is a very different enterprise from that of facing hostile
humans, as teen-age computer hackers demonstrate.
     As for misrepresentation, from Adm. William Crowe's memoirs we now know
that our assessment of the prospects for SDI was shared by the Joint Chiefs of
Staff when he was JCS chairman during the second Reagan administration.
Especially troubling is his account of how senior officials misrepresented SDI
test data to their colleagues and the president. And we learn that the
president was given deceptive information about the X-ray laser by the people
who convinced him to make his famous speech. Those, like Mr. Gahr, who charge
us with unethical behavior should pause. Is the shoe not on the other
foot?

RICHARD L. GARWIN
     Philip D. Reed Senior Fellow
     The Council on Foreign Relations.

KURT GOTTFRIED
     Professor of physics
     Cornell University
     Chairman