Missile Defense and Arms Control: 25 Years Later

Philip Coyle, CDI Senior Advisor
Victoria Samson, CDI Research Analyst

“What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” - President Ronald Reagan, March 23, 1983

Twenty-five years have gone by since President Ronald Reagan gave his speech calling for renewed efforts on a shield that would theoretically protect the United States against a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack. Then called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the program has operated under several different names in the 25 years since, and the budget continues to climb. While roughly $120 billion has been spent to bring his dream to fruition, missile defense has failed to improve national security, potentially endangering the United States by encouraging America’s adversaries to build up large numbers of missiles to overwhelm our scarecrow defenses.

Missile defense has, for better or for worse, been linked in recent political discourse to Ronald Reagan. However, it is often forgotten that the United States has been working on some form of missile defense for the past sixty years, ever since Germany’s V-2 ballistic missiles (sometimes called the first terror weapons) rained down on London during the Blitz. In fact, a missile defense system called “Safeguard,” named as such by the Johnson administration, was powered up on Oct. 1, 1975. Congress voted the next day to turn it off, as it realized that it could very easily be overwhelmed by the USSR’s massive missile arsenal.

The Safeguard system consisted on two different nuclear-tipped interceptors, the “Spartan” and the “Sprint,” both carrying powerful nuclear warheads.  The larger Spartan carried a reported five megaton nuclear warhead. In effect, the idea was that these U.S. nuclear weapons would intercept enemy nuclear weapons out in space. What the effects of that might be on human life was not discussed.

The Reagan plan also used nuclear weapons, but this time the idea was high-powered nuclear-pumped lasers or nuclear-driven particle beams that might bring down enemy missiles.  Operationally effective versions of these concepts never worked, and the program was killed by President George H.W. Bush, and replaced by the “hit-to-kill systems,” including the space-based system called “Brilliant Pebbles.”

At arms control talks with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland in October 1986, Reagan made a colossal blunder. Reagan had offered a treaty to eliminate all U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads by 2000. Gorbachev accepted, provided that Reagan would also agree to limit SDI research to the laboratory for at least five years. Reagan missed a historic opportunity and refused despite the fact that Secretary of State George P. Shultz had advised him that giving away missile defense would be like giving away “the sleeves from our vest.” Then, as now, U.S. missile defenses had no demonstrated capability to defend the United States against an enemy missile attack under realistic operational conditions.  From an operational, military point of view, the SDI was as unreal as “the sleeves from a vest,” and Shultz knew it.

Today the United States’ intended enemy has changed.  Now, the missile threat cited as the justification for the U.S. missile defense system is an ICBM attack from North Korea or Iran.  But the missile defenses being deployed in Alaska and California, and proposed for Europe, still have no demonstrated capability to defend the United States, let alone Europe, under realistic operational conditions. In fact, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency says that at best they can only handle an ICBM attack of maybe one or two rudimentary missiles, and only then if the enemy uses no decoys or countermeasures. This means we are expecting that Iran or North Korea would attack Europe or the U.S. with one missile and then wait to see what might happen – a farcical scenario.   

Currently, the United States has 24 interceptors fielded in Alaska and California to defend against this limited threat. Prototype interceptors have successfully made intercepts in seven out of 13 at-bats during testing. In fact, these tests were highly scripted and included information given to the system that no real enemy would provide in advance of a real-life battle situation. While this is not unusual for a program that is so early in its development cycle, it shows that the claims of effectiveness being made by the Missile Defense Agency are false.

Despite this mediocre test record, the United States is pushing to get six more interceptors deployed by the end of this calendar year and by 2013 have a total of 44. It intends to do so even though many of the interceptors which have already been fielded have flaws serious enough that they are being pulled out of the ground to be fixed. 

Undaunted, the George W. Bush administration is moving ahead with extending missile defense to Europe. Using all its diplomatic might in the remaining months of its term, the administration is pushing to get the Czech Republic and Poland to respectively agree to host a radar and interceptors, ostensibly so that the United States and some of Europe could be protected against a non-existent long-range Iranian ballistic missile threat. This is being done over the strenuous objections of Russia, who sees this move by the United States towards its territory as threatening. Russia, to show the extent of its ire over this move, has threatened to pull out of one treaty (the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty); suspended its participation in another (the 1990 Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty); and indicated it may not renew a third arms control treaty when it runs out next year (the 1991 Strategic Arms Reductions Treaty). Furthermore, Russia has asserted its right to target the proposed European missile defense sites, and to deploy medium-range offensive missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Polish border.  Even with the recent missile defense talks by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates with their Russian counterparts, no solid agreement has been made. In the process of building a missile defense system that has not provided a dependable defense, the United States is exacerbating relations with Russia to a degree not seen since the end of the Cold War. As a result, missile defense is not increasing U.S. security but instead threatening it.

So what is Reagan’s Star Wars legacy? It may not be what missile defense supporters have lobbied for. Often glossed over is the end of his speech:

“I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves.” (Emphasis added)

There have been two op-eds over the past fourteen months by Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz (co-authored with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former Senator Sam Nunn) arguing for taking steps toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. These op-eds have launched credible debate how about that could realistically be accomplished. In October 2007, Stanford’s Hoover Institution hosted a conference titled, “Reykjavik Revisited: Steps toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” where the op-ed writers examined how best to achieve this goal. It is hoped that this initiative will bring us back to the opportunity that Reagan missed at Reykjavik I.