#17 - RW 8-27-04 - RW Home
RIA Novosti
August 25, 2004
STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE: A SECOND LEASE ON LIFE

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political analyst Andrei Kislyakov).

It looks as if at the Republican National Convention in New York, President George W. Bush's party will try to score additional points against its rival party on national security issues. Convention speeches on this subject are being prepared very meticulously. According to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, on August 23, the United States' political and military leaders gathered at the president's ranch in Texas to discuss key defense priorities including, perhaps the most important priority in political and military terms, a new missile defense system. The implementation of such a system will have a serious impact on the military strategic situation in the world in the near future.

Is it really a new system?

On August 18, Mr. Bush made a very serious revelation while addressing employees at a Boeing plant in Philadelphia on the occasion of the deployment of the first ballistic interceptor, part of a limited missile defense, in a silo at the Fort Greely positioning area in Alaska.

According to the president, the loading of the first interceptor into a silo meant the beginning of a missile defense system that was envisioned by Ronald Reagan and that was sorely needed to confront the threats of the 21st century. The president also emphasized that the opponents of a missile defense system lived in the past and the supporter of the system looked to the future.

It should be noted first, that the idea of developing a global missile defense system as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or "Star Wars," did not originate with Mr. Reagan, but rather with staff of the Heritage Foundation, which was created in 1973 under the leadership of ultra-rightwing Senator Barry Goldwater. As Mr. Reagan's mentor, he had a 175-page report drawn up for the president, which served as the basis for the president signing the famed directive No. 119 - the SDI - in January 1984. The goal of SDI was to build a reliable defense umbrella over the United States and its allies. As we see, the missile defense aims and objectives declared by Mr. Bush's men the other day, indeed coincide with those discussed in 1984. In this case, it is interesting to trace how missile defense aspirations were matched against reality then and how it is being done now.

The central task of the Heritage Foundation at that time was to highly publicize the idea of the U.S. possibly gaining strategic superiority over the Soviet Union through the deployment of all sorts of, primarily, space and ground-based assets under a single command and control system. The cost of such total confrontation with the Soviet Union was estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars from the outset.

Work on the SDI proceeded on a large scale, but no serious advances were made in placing space weapons, in particular nuclear pumped lasers, in orbit. This can be explained partly by the weakening of the Soviet Union, which began in the mid-80s and the Soviet Union's final collapse in 1991. In the early 90s, the SDI program was practically closed down.

Were United States' efforts wasted? By no means, considering remarks made by former NASA director James Fletcher, who in the mid-80s led a group that studied SDI defense technologies, concerning the actual mission in that area. As revealed by Mr. Fletcher, the SDI missile defense program was not focused on developing space weapons, the development of which accounted for less than one-quarter of the effort. Most of the work was concerned with developing effective facilities for space observation, detection, tracking and assessment of targets.

In other words, a global network of space reconnaissance was planned to be created on the basis of a powerful satellite group.

Under Secretary of the U.S. Air Force Edward Aldridge outlined the possibilities of such a network in 1984. According to him, the principal advantage to developingorbital space reconnaissance was the creation of favorable conditions for changes in the military policy of the country.

The current picture is very similar. As Russia has repeatedly stressed, in military terms, the very idea of deploying 10 interceptors in Alaska and California does not pose much of a threat.

What is significant is another thing. Practically every missile in countries that are actually enemies of the United States in the next 20 years will be able to reach the U.S. as well as the moon. A possible nuclear missile strike from Russia or China today is about as likely as British or French submarines launching ballistic missiles against the New World. Finally, there are no intelligence reports that claim that known terrorists have the capability of launching a missile that could actually reach the United States.

Against whom are the interceptors aimed? What is their purpose? Indeed, they have no purpose today and absolutely will not have one tomorrow.

However, if these very expensive missiles are deployed, what is the central feature of the "newest" American missile defense? The same feature as in the old one. Space and ground reconnaissance facilities run from one command and control center.

In order to create the missile defense system, the U.S. plans to reactivate old radars and build new ones, both in the U.S. and outside it: in Britain, Greenland, Hungary and the Baltic states. These facilities alone will cover all of Europe. And with the commissioning of a reinforced satellite group based on DSP early warning craft and intelligent information SBIRS, the U.S. will have the entire planet under its eye.

The problem is that the build-up of military space systems, which are not weapons themselves, has the potential to threaten the strategic stability in Russian-American relations. The current trend toward satellites of a military applied nature alone may drive the development of weapons to counter them. And then weapons in space may become a reality. Is this concern for safety?