The $25 Billion Question

"It is one of the biggest decisions a Secretary of Defense ever had to make," says a Pentagon officer, and he may well be right. For the question that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara must eventually answer is whether to order production and deployment of the Army's Nike-X anti-missile missile system. If McNamara says yes, it will cost the U.S. about $25 billion. And if, as the Army claims, Nike-X would offer the U.S. effective protection against ICBM attack, it would be cheap at the price. What McNamara must decide is whether the Nike-X system, with some of its key components barely off the drawing boards after eight years of effort and some $2 billion in expenditures, will live up to Army expectations.

What is Nike-X? Is it, as might be supposed, a wizard new missile that can seek out and destroy hostile incoming ICBMs? No. It is rather an anti-missile "system," with the most important parts on (or under) the ground.

Revolutionary Radar. Nike-X's brain is a revolutionary, Army-developed multifunction array radar (MAR), which uses lightning-fast electronic switching instead of the conventional radar an tenna to direct its beams, thus can "see" 360DEG at a glance. The Army now has a prototype MAR installation at White Sands, N. Mex., is building another on Kwajalein Island in the Pacific. MAR can 1) detect incoming missiles hundreds of miles away; 2) determine which of the missiles have warheads and which are decoys; and 3) track the missiles as they streak toward their U.S. targets.

As the Army envisions it, MAR control centers across the U.S. will stand sentry duty against ICBM attacks. A MAR center outside New York City, for example, will cover the East Coast from New England to Washington. Each center will have a three-story, underground, concrete-and-steel residence for computers assessing the information given by the radar beams.

Operating in nanoseconds (billionths of a second), the computers will take that information and in turn feed it to the missile sites, where a smaller radar called MSR (for missile site radar) will take over and--unless overruled by monitoring officers--fire the actual anti-missile missiles and keep them on target as they try to intercept.

Worth the Gamble? Nike-X would use two types of missiles. One is the Nike-Zeus, a long-range, supersonic bird that, in tests, has already proved its ability to intercept and down an ICBM traveling 18,000 m.p.h. far above the atmosphere. The other is Sprint, a shorter-range missile with a tremendous but highly classified starting power. Sprint has months, or even years, of testing to go before it can even begin to be considered operational. But the idea is that the Nike-Zeus would go off first, seek out and try to destroy all incoming, outer-atmosphere-level ICBMs. If needed, Sprint would go after the missiles that might get past the Nike-Zeus destroyers or those coming in at lower than 150,000 ft.

Even if a crash program were to be started, it would be 1970 before all of Nike-X's components--MAR, MSR, Nike-Zeus and Sprint--could be tied together into a tested, workable defense package. As of now, Defense Secretary McNamara remains unconvinced that Nike-X is worth a $25 billion gamble. But his mind remains open to the extent that he has budgeted $400 million for further work as an obvious hedge against the day when he must make that decision.

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