Media examine missile defense, from SDI to THAAD
A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptor is launched from the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska on 11 July 2017. The weapon system successfully intercepted a ballistic missile target.
US Missile Defense Agency
“When President Ronald Reagan asked physicist George A. Keyworth II to start thinking about how to shoot down an enemy’s ballistic missiles,” began a 6 September Wall Street Journal editorial , “few imagined a world in which a chubby dictator’s missiles and bombs would pose a threat to the US.”
But many did choose sides. The WSJ editors still use the official name from a third of a century ago for Republican Reagan’s vision: Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). They also remember that Democrats immediately mocked SDI as “Star Wars.” That name appears in the first line of the New York Times‘s obituary for Keyworth, who died on 23 August.
The derisive name was “used relentlessly by the press,” the WSJ editors charge. But an informal sampling of recent North Korea–focused media coverage suggests the WSJ might overstate in asserting that “opposition to building antimissile defense systems never relented.” That charge tends to contradict the editors’ own headlined proclamation of Keyworth’s vindication, and it overlooks the differences between the original weapons-in-space vision and the less grandiose evolution of actual antimissile technology.
The Times obituary recalls that candidate SDI weapons “included chemical lasers, particle beams and … the x-ray laser, powered by a hydrogen bomb.” The WSJ editorial expresses gladness that the Keyworth–Reagan vision led to present systems. It concludes, “To the extent the North Korean nuclear threat is at all containable, we have Jay Keyworth to thank.”
In media reporting on antimissile systems, it’s easy to find technological optimism. In the UK, the Telegraph called the US’s THAAD—Terminal High Altitude Area Defense—South Korea’s best antimissile defense and “the most advanced interceptor in the world.” The Sun called THAAD the “doomsday deflector” that’s set to “safeguard” the world. In the US, the Washington Examiner headlined a Reagan-invoking commentary “Missile defense is now the only hope for world peace.”
It’s also easy to find recriminations for the past opposition that the WSJ editorial called relentless. The Washington Post‘s Marc Thiessen indicts Democrats for more than three decades of doing “everything in their power to prevent, obstruct or delay the deployment of ballistic missile defense.” He urges President Trump to
- Deliver immediately to Congress “an emergency supplemental spending bill to speed the deployment of ground-based interceptors.”
- “Revive the Multiple Kill Vehicle, the Airborne Laser and Kinetic Energy Interceptor.”
- “Work with Congress on a long-term plan to build and deploy space-based interceptors.”
A commentary at the American Thinker quotes the view of a Russian Academy of Sciences official that “99% of all Russians believe that Reagan won the Cold War because of his insistence on SDI.”
Much media antimissile-technology coverage and commentary engages actual systems or those in development. In an analysis published in Haaretz, Azriel Bermant of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv declares that Israel’s Iron Dome system has saved thousands of lives. “The United States and its allies are right to bet on missile defense,” he concludes, “but they can’t afford to lose.”
“Nobody knows for sure,” a New York Times analysis cautioned, whether a North Korean ICBM could get past US defenses. “It’s a numbers game that can play to the offense. If the North fires three nuclear warheads and the United States manages to shoot down two, the North would still accomplish much of its objective with just one city’s destruction.” The Times piece continued:
The North is clearly exploring ways to improve its penetration of antimissile defenses, and is likely to investigate others. In March, it simultaneously fired four missiles in a salvo that would make it harder for American defenses to shoot down all the incoming warheads.
Warheads that zig and zag could foil antimissile systems. North Korea recently displayed a missile warhead that boasted fins, implying an interest in such evasions.
A final step would be clouds of inexpensive decoys. Advanced ICBMs carry large sets of such fakes alongside real warheads. The false targets provide protective cover and vastly increase the complexity of the antimissile effort.
The cautious if not outright negative view of antimissile capabilities has been aired at Ars Technica and by missile weaponry expert Joshua Pollack in the Guardian commentary “Why didn’t the US shoot down North Korea’s missile? Maybe it couldn’t.” Pollack began by conjecturing that probably nothing in national defense is understood as poorly as “inherently limited” ballistic missile defense. He wrote:
Perhaps the most attractive sort of defences simply do not exist today, and quite probably never will. So-called boost-phase systems are designed to stop ballistic missiles early in flight, while their engines are still firing and they are ascending into the upper atmosphere and beyond. At times, the US has contemplated a global network of boost-phase interceptors that would whirl around the planet in low-Earth orbit, but the complexity and the economics of the idea are forbidding.
More recently, the US built a prototype “airborne laser"–a massive weapon built into a Boeing 747, designed to burn a hole through an ascending missile, destroying it early in flight. The programme was cancelled on grounds of cost, shortcomings in technology and lack of operational realism: the plane would have to linger dangerously close to enemy territory to have any shot at a missile, making it highly vulnerable to attack just before launch. Opponents could also simply avoid launches from coastal regions.
Pollack cited other concerns including those in a 2012 National Academy report that called for replacing what Pollack sees as the “basket case” of Ground-based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, against ICBMs—North Korean in particular—as they pass above the atmosphere. He also registered concern about size limits for areas defended by terminal-phase interceptors, the ones that aim for missiles in descent. Ballistic missile defense, he concluded, is no panacea.
Nevertheless, antimissile defense systems are reportedly being planned, sought, developed, tested and deployed worldwide.
In July, BBC reported that a string of 13 successful tests of THAAD had been extended by the downing of a target simulating a ballistic intermediate-range missile. THAAD is installed in Guam and South Korea. The US Missile Defense Agency, BBC reported, plans to equip the US Army with 50 more such systems by September 2018.
India Today said India is considering acquiring antimissile defense. Iran, according to the Independent, has tested a system. Fox News reported that following North Korea’s recent test launch of a missile across and high above northern Japan, Japan’s defense ministry asked for record funds for missile defense. Japan Times reported that Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) antimissile systems have been tested at US air bases in Japan.
A two-minute video on the Business Insider website confidently outlines how US forces would counter a multimissile attack from North Korea. Satellites detecting the attacking missiles’ heat signatures would cue terrestrial radars, which in turn would cue warships for mid-course interception or a Guam THAAD battery for descent interception, or both. With a half-minute demonstration video , the UK’s Daily Mail publicized the Royal Navy’s claim to have achieved a “major milestone” with an antimissile system for defending warships.
In a recent Chicago Tribune commentary , John Yoo—Berkeley law professor, geostrategic thinker, and former Bush Justice Department official—called for developing space-based antimissile defense. He predicted a “someday” capability to target ICBMs in their initial boost phase with its vulnerabilities of slowness and detectable engine plumes.
In a May article thin on specifics, China Daily reported that “China has developed a new type of ultrafast anti-missile interceptor.” Following North Korea’s recent nuclear test, a headline at Hong Kong’s English-language South China Morning Post (SCMP) read “China ‘shoots down incoming missiles’ during exercise over waters close to North Korea.” Both the SCMP and Quartz sourced the news from an official Chinese website. China “didn’t give details about the antimissile systems used in the drill,” Quartz said , “but noted they were displayed in a massive military parade recently overseen by president Xi Jinping.”
And whether or not the late physicist Keyworth is vindicated, a ballistic missile defense review is underway at the Pentagon. For increased missile-defense spending, according to Defense News , President Trump has pledged billions.
Steven T. Corneliussen is Physics Today‘s media analyst. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.