The debate over European missile defense

Two former Department of Defense officials from the recent Bush administration—Eric Edelman and Henry Obering —had an opinion piece for the Washington Post last month in which they discussed the Iranian missile threat .

The opinion piece called into question a recent US-Russian joint threat assessment of Iran by the EastWest Institute that included Richard L. Garwin and Theodore A. Postol among their contributors and argued for the rush deployment of a missile defense system in Europe based on the interceptors currently deployed in Alaska.

Although the Washington Post published a letter from Garwin , in which he says missile defense should be held to the same deployment standards of any other weapons system, a longer letter by Garwin and Postol wrote has been circulating on the internet (see below).

Paul Guinnessy

The Wrong Defense and the Wrong TargetbyRichard L. Garwin and Theodore A. PostolJuly 8, 2009

Trey Obering and Eric Edelman misrepresent the findings of an East-West Institute study done by a team of Russian and US experts on Iran’s Nuclear and Ballistic Missile Programs and then use these misrepresentations to make arguments that are without merit. They claim that a recently tested Iranian solid propellant ballistic missile represents a threat to Europe (“putting much of Europe within range”) and imply that the Czech radar and Polish interceptors can counter it when in fact the missile is of too short a range to reach most European capitals and even to be engaged by the European missile defense system they advocate.

They also claim that our report incorrectly identifies and discusses serious limitations of the European Midcourse Radar that Gen. Obering was involved in advocating for the Czech Republic when he was director of the Missile Defense Agency . Our study found that the range of this radar against warheads is so short that it cannot provide even rudimentary discrimination capabilities against warheads and decoys launched from Iran to the eastern two thirds of the continental United States and Northern and Western Europe.

Obering and Edelman state that the radar “has been operated in flight tests in the South Pacific for more than eight years.” What they do not say is that the radar was of such short range that it could only be tested against realistic mock warheads at ranges of a few hundred kilometers, where the actual intercept attempts occurred after long-range missiles had already flown thousands of miles to arrive near the radar.

We have recommended to the National Security Adviser, Gen. James L. Jones , that the real capabilities of this radar get high-level technical attention in the president’s Missile Defense Review . If this radar does not have the range to discriminate between warheads and decoys, it will mean that the Missile Defense Agency has committed to a radar that would leave two thirds of the eastern part of the continental United States, as well as Northern and Western Europe, with a defense that cannot tell the difference between warheads and countermeasures so simple that it is impossible to believe they would not, and could not, be used.

The other findings of the East-West Institute Study are also relevant to Obering’s and Edelman’s claims of a dire threat from Iran that requires the immediate adoption of a flawed and untested missile defense system. They are:

A ballistic missile can only be a nuclear threat if the adversary has a nuclear weapon that the missile can carry.

The time it would take Iran to have a roughly 2000 km range ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead is determined by the time it would take Iran to build a nuclear warhead that is sufficiently light and compact to fly on a ballistic missile. Assuming Iran does not have clandestine enrichment capabilities, it would take Iran about six years to produce such a weapon—starting from the time they expel the International Atomic Energy Agency from their currently monitored nuclear enrichment facilities.

In the event that Iran could build longer-range missiles that could reach Northern and Western Europe or the United States, they would be very large and cumbersome, and would have to be launched from well-known specialized launch locations. Such missiles would be highly vulnerable to preemption and, as described in our report, to small interceptor missiles based on stealthy drone aircraft to shoot down the lumbering missiles as they are launched.

Unlike the European missile defense, this defense is not subject to countermeasures. We like it, because we like weapons that work!