A Step Closer to Star Wars

By KURT ANDERSEN

Can a U.S.-Soviet space-weapons race be slowed down in time?

In his Star Wars speech last spring, Ronald Reagan suggested that instead of deterring nuclear attack exclusively by threatening nuclear retaliation, the U.S. should build a kind of electronic shield to "intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reach our own soil." Last week that grandiose sci-fi vision moved closer to becoming U.S. policy. Reagan and his National Security Council approved in principle a fiveyear, $21 billion plan to begin more rapidly developing an arsenal of space weapons, in particular orbiting "ray guns" that would fire intense beams of energy at enemy missiles. Said Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb and one of the plan's most enthusiastic advocates: "I don't see a sliver of an argument why we shouldn't bend all our will to develop protective weapons with all possible haste." Indeed, he says, "it may well be a turning point of history."

It may be, but perhaps not in the way Teller imagines. Many other weapons scientists, arms-control experts and Congressmen in both parties see a historic opportunity slipping away: the chance to avoid an arms race in space. Opponents of the space-based defensive system argue that its extraordinarily high cost would be the least of its disadvantages. They insist that the technical obstacles are practically insurmountable and that building such weapons could encourage a panicky, preemptive nuclear attack by the Soviets.

The technology is still comparatively primitive and untested. Even the proponents admit that a battle station firing laser beams could not be deployed much before the end of the century. Besides, the Administration wants to spend only $2.6 billion in fiscal year 1985, an almost negligible sum in the $250 billion annual defense budget, and all the money would be for research and development. Nonetheless, warns a prominent West Coast physicist, "when these projects get up a head of steam, they're almost impossible to stop."

The momentum was building even before Reagan and his NSC gave their collective go-ahead for the five-year plan, which must still be formally proposed to Congress. Early last month the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggested that the year-old Air Force Space Command be subsumed under a new, unified U.S. Space Command for all four service branches. Last week, even as the NSC met at the White House, the Space Shuttle flight crew was 150 miles overhead carrying out exotic experiments, and just a day earlier the Air Force announced that its Airborne Laser Laboratory had used a beam to destroy a target missile flying low and slowly off the California coast. Finally, the Air Force's antisatellite missile, originally set for a test launch last August, remains ready to fly any time the political climate is right. The flight, which was postponed because of tensions over NATO missile deployments in Europe, will be the first test of a true space weapon by the U.S.

Energy-beam weapons are still strictly experimental, but effective antisatellite (ASAT) devices could be deployed in droves within a few years. The Soviets have experimented since the 1960s with ways to destroy satellites. They have developed a rather crude space bomb that is launched into orbit, maneuvered to an enemy satellite and detonated. The U.S. ASAT missile, scheduled to be deployed in 1987, is considerably more sophisticated. The 18-ft.-long missile is carried 18 miles aloft by an F-15 fighter and fired directly toward a satellite; its foot-long nose cone, after homing in by means of eight miniature infrared sensors, does not explode but, propelled by dozens of tiny rocket thrusters, crashes into the enemy satellite at 30,000 m.p.h. "With the F-15 strap-on," says a Pentagon official, "we could clean up the sky in 24 hours." By contrast, each Soviet space bomb, launched by a rocket, could require 24 hours to prepare and move into orbit.

The antisatellite gadgets were invented because space is already militarized. Both superpowers use satellites for secret communications and to spy on each other's military operations. When arms-control treaties refer to "national technical means" of verifying compliance, they essentially mean reconnaissance satellites. The U.S. is exceptionally dependent on its military satellites and so has more to lose in a star war. For now, however, the most critical U.S. spies in the sky are, at 22,300 miles, far too high to be jeopardized by current Soviet ASAT weapons.

Full-scale deployment of antisatellite weapons could create a new, precarious trip wire to war. An ASAT attack on either country's military satellites, partially "blinding" the enemy to possible ICBM attack, might by itself prompt the blinded nation to launch nuclear missiles. Moreover, ASATS would in crease the risk that an electronic malfunction in either country's warning system could be mistaken for an enemy attack.

The antisatellite devices ready for deployment are really just high-tech shrapnel and bullets. The beam, or "directed-energy," weapons Reagan conjured in his speech last spring, on the other hand, would be truly novel. Theoretically, such weapons based in space could be used either to destroy satellites--perhaps by 1990--or to shoot down nuclear missiles.

The basic mechanism of lasers is now familiar: they emit a concentrated stream of intense light powerful enough to melt metal. Experimental U.S. lasers have tracked and destroyed small missiles in flight; last May in California the Airborne Laser Lab was 5 for 5 firing at supersonic Sidewinders. But a device powerful and precise enough to be practical for nuclear defense cannot yet be built.

Says M.I.T. Engineering and Computer Professor Jack Ruina: "I would compare it to going right from the kite stage to the 747." Years further off is the X-ray laser, which would be "bomb pumped," or powered by an internal nuclear explosion. Still more problematic are particle-beam weapons, which would fire streams of atomic particles. "

You can see Buck Rogers coming," says one Pentagon scientist. "The sky's the limit!" Space-weapons enthusiasts propose a "picket line" of enormous lasers orbiting the earth, dozens of "battle stations," each responsible for knocking out as many as 1,000 speeding Soviet ICBMs during the first few minutes of the missiles' flight. By one reckoning, the sheer laser brightness required is a million times as great as what today's lasers can produce. One laser station might require some 660 tons, or 20 full Space Shuttle loads, of hydrogen fluoride to power the device.

The engineering necessary to track, aim and focus the beam on a supersonic missile 1,000 miles away is more daunting still. A nearly perfect system might let through, say, 10% of the Soviets' warheads: that margin of error could mean a devastating 960 warheads hitting their U.S. targets in an all-out salvo. "A miss by a millimeter," says M.I.T.'s George Rathjens, a strategic expert, "and you've lost the ball game." In any case, nuclear cruise missiles, which skim along just a few hundred feet above the earth, could not be picked off by beams fired from space. "You can wind up just as dead from a cruise missile as from a ballistic missile," says Stanford Physicist Wolfgang Panofsky.

Even if the antimissile space lasers could be coaxed into operation, critics say, their delicacy would make them easy to foil or destroy. One superpower's directed-energy weapons could easily sizzle those of the enemy; even today's off-the-shelf ASAT weapons could ravage the battle stations. The beams' effects could be mitigated if a targeted ICBM simply rotated, cutting short the time a laser would have to burn a hole in any one spot. Missile skins can be hardened and made reflective. A flock of dummy ICBMs might confuse frantic laser commanders. Says former Lieut. Colonel Robert Bowman, who helped run advanced space-programs development for the Air Force: "No one seems to have explained to the President the great vulnerability of these systems, nor the many countermeasures available to render them useless." Bowman, Ruina, Rathjens, Panofsky and M.I.T. Physicist Kosta Tsipis belong to a small group of arms experts who have been speaking out against Reagan's space-weapons program and supplying technical information to public interest groups and political leaders.

Whatever the problems, the Soviets are surely refining their ASAT technology and developing laser weapons. For the Reagan Administration, that is reason enough to pursue comparable research and development. M.I.T. Professor Stephen Meyer, a Soviet-defense expert, thinks the U.S. technology "needs slow, orderly development." Bowman would continue the Government's modest, undramatic research program for "the legitimate purpose of preventing technological surprise" and developing "countermeasures . . . to negate any Star Wars system the Soviets may try to put up."

Such a hedging enterprise is simply prudent. But working to achieve a decisive edge for the U.S., whatever the superficial appeal, could be dangerous. Deterrence of nuclear war is based on the concept of mutual assured destruction. As long as the U.S. and the Soviet Union each believes that the other would respond to a nuclear attack with a devastating nuclear salvo of its own, neither will risk a first strike. Deterrence requires nuclear stability, with both countries in a state of certain nervous vulnerability--sufficiently well-armed to retaliate if attacked but not strong enough to gamble by launching a first strike.

If and when the laser, or its high-tech cousins, seems able to protect one superpower against an ICBM strike, the tenuous equation will be upset. Neither the U.S. nor the Soviets could afford to let the other side become invulnerable; such a concession would be virtual surrender. Reagan said last spring that the U.S., if it did have space-based missile defenses, would never abuse the shield by launching an offensive first strike. But, concedes Major General John Storrie, an Air Force space official, "we walk a very narrow line in these matters between strategic defense and offense." The Soviets cannot reasonably be expected to stake their survival on Reagan's earnest assertion that "the United States does not start fights."

Some U.S. officials suggest that a well-funded research-and-development program will serve as another bargaining chip in arms-control negotiations. But such a program could just as easily wreck negotiations. Even field-testing antimissile space weapons would likely violate several treaties signed during the past two decades, particularly the 1972 ban on most antiballistic missiles, negotiated to prevent the very sort of instability that space weaponry threatens to create.

So far, the Reagan Administration has shown little interest in any serious attempts to fend off an arms race in space. The U.S. delegation to Geneva's Committee on Disarmament, for instance, is permitted merely to study the technical and legal terrain. At the United Nations the U.S. has ignored the Soviets' draft treaty to outlaw all space weapons. There has been no official U.S. response to Yuri Andropov's August declaration of a unilateral moratorium on Soviet ASAT launches.

Andropov's gesture was at least partly a well-timed propaganda move meant to forestall the imminent test of the first U.S. ASAT missile. The Soviets are also playing on West European skittishness; NATO allies worry about space weapons "decoupling" U.S. and European strategic interests. "There is concern in Europe that this [technology] portends a 'fortress America,' " says Jonathan Alford of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies. "It tends toward the protection of the U.S. and the exposure of Western Europe." Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger flew to Paris last week to reassure the French and NATO allies on this very point. While there, he claimed the Soviets are ahead in antimissile high technology.

Skepticism about Soviet gambits should not preclude serious talks on controlling space weapons. Such devices are inherently destabilizing. Not only would U.S. weapons prompt a redoubled Soviet effort in space but they would be sure to quicken Moscow's buildup of offensive missiles, which in turn would force a feverish U.S. response.

The Reagan Administration may be eager to achieve a clear technical edge, but during the past four decades such strategic leads have always proved temporary. By the time the other side catches up and serious negotiations begin, the investments in the new weapons are so swollen that striking a bargain is all but impossible. It would have been far simpler to negotiate nuclear arms control in the early 1950s, when the technology was primitive and the arsenals dinky, or in the early 1960s, before ICBMs had proliferated. Similarly, it would be easier to bargain and control space weapons right away than a decade hence, after deployment has begun.

"As soon as we test our [ASAT] weapon," says M.I.T.'s Tsipis, "talks will be enormously more difficult." Congress last month decided the space-weapons threshold should not be crossed willy-nilly: ASAT target practice in space may start, the Senate stipulated, but only if the U.S. tries "to negotiate in good faith with the Soviet Union a mutual and verifiable ban on anti-satellite weapons." Says Republican Senator Charles Percy: "This is a unique opportunity to halt a major arms race before it gets off the ground." As progress on other U.S.-Soviet arms-control fronts slows and sputters, that opportunity seems urgent indeed and the consequences of missing it profound. --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Jerry Hannifin and Christopher Redman/ Washington, with other bureaus

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin, Christopher Redman/ Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.