Walter C. Uhler.com--America's Pursuit of the Ultimate Weapon

From Defense News
June 16, 2002
America's Pursuit of the Ultimate Weapon

By Walter C. Uhler

"The obsessions of the technological utopians derive equally from the deeply and quaintly American belief that all human problems have engineering solutions, and from the profoundly unAmerican … post- Vietnam search for technological silver bullets that will permit U.S. forces to wage war without suffering - or perhaps even inflicting casualties."
—MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, "The Dynamics of Military Revolution"
"Every military weapon ever built has instigated another weapon to counter it."
—Helen Caldicott, "The New Nuclear Danger"
Earlier this spring, within the space of four days, the Washington Post and the New York Times printed articles about America's national missile defense program that spoke volumes about the technological utopianism and recklessness of President George W. Bush's administration.
On April 11, the Post reported that the Defense Department had "opened the door to the possible use of nuclear-tipped interceptors in a national missile defense system." On April 15, the Times reported that senior Pentagon officials, "buoyed by four successful missile defense tests in a row," believe they are "on schedule to open a rudimentary [midcourse] missile defense site in Alaska by the fall of 2004."
What's wrong with this picture? In fact, not one of the four so-called successful mid-course tests seriously addressed the problems posed by decoys. Yet, our own intelligence agencies claim that such decoys will be available to any country capable of launching an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Undeterred, conservative missile defense enthusiasts, including the president, are determined to establish a missile site before the next presidential election.
Many of America's most reputable physicists say it is nearly impossible to identify a warhead hidden inside a decoy surrounded by other identical decoys. The Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty did not prohibit tests against such decoys, yet the Bush administration, in a stunning example of willful strategic illiteracy, announced its intention to withdraw from the treaty before conducting such tests.
Withdrawal not only undermines other treaties favorable to the United States, it virtually guarantees China's nuclear buildup and, as a consequence, ominous nuclear buildups in India and Pakistan. However, lest the public soon conclude that ideology and politics trumped genuine national security in the decision to withdraw, the Bush administration now is reconsidering the possibility of solving the decoy problem with nuclear-tipped interceptors. How quaint.
From the frying pan into the fire. First, use of such interceptors would violate a long-standing moral taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, first and frequent use of nuclear weapons seems to be the order of the day, judging by the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review.
More problematic, according to page 84 of Helen Caldicott's book, are the calculations that "a single [nuclear] bomb exploded 200 miles above the continental United States could paralyze North America, destroying most electronic systems, including long runs of cable, piping, or conduit; large antennae and their feed cables; guy wires and their support lines; overland power and telephone lines; long runs of electrical wiring; railroad tracks; aluminum aircraft bodies; computers; power supplies; alarm systems; intercoms; life-support control systems; transistorized receivers and transmitters; base radio stations; satellites; and some telephone equipment."
When we survey our post-World War II past, however, we find that such problems matter little in America's quest for the ultimate weapon. Might makes right. Witness the atomic bomb. Use of the bomb, efforts to hoard the bomb's secrets - derisively characterized by U.S. Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace as a "scientific Maginot line"- and efforts to intimidate the Soviet Union with "atomic diplomacy" guaranteed a nuclear arms race as soon as Stalin got the bomb.
Eventually confronted with an imposing Soviet nuclear arsenal, President Ronald Reagan offered the fantasy of yet another ultimate weapon, his Star Wars missile shield. And although dismissed by physicist Andrei Sakharov as a "Maginot Line in space," Reagan's conservative heirs now foolishly count on it to eliminate eventually the nuclear threat that its very presence will exacerbate.
Note that for all the fine words in the Joint U.S.-Russian declaration on strategic security signed on May 24, the United States did not agree to place the limits on its future missile defense shield that some prominent Russian officials had predicted.
That is cause for serious concern, because at some point, given its technological utopianism, U.S. efforts to weaponize space will persuade Russia's leaders the United States is not content with a limited shield to protect against rogue states, but intends to pursue a system that would render it invulnerable to any intercontinental ballistic missile attack attack. Not even the calculated, pro-American foreign policy realism practiced by Russian President V1adimir Putin could survive such a threat to Russia's nuclear deterrent.