11 November 2001
State is well situated to defend nation
By Marego Athans
The Baltimore Sun

"If that doesn't demonstrate how badly we need missile defense," he said over supper with his three young sons, "there's nothing better to make the point."

Wiggins is a firefighter at nearby Fort Greely, where work will begin this spring on five missile silos and supporting buildings aimed at testing a missile defense shield by 2004 - if Congress approves. The Pentagon has begun work on the site, clearing 135 acres this fall on an expanse of spruce, birch and cottonwood trees set against majestic vistas of the Granite and Alaska ranges.

President Bush has made the development of a missile defense system - and the abrogation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty - a cornerstone of administration policy, and the diplomatically sensitive issue is expected to dominate summit talks this week with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

The two leaders, who will meet in Washington and at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas, from Tuesday through Thursday, are working toward an agreement that would allow extensive testing of the missile shield and substantially cut the number of strategic warheads the two nations can have. The White House has considered a plan to reduce the number of warheads to between 1,750 and 2,250 for each of the countries, from about 6,000 apiece, but the administration is signaling doubts whether an agreement can be reached by this week's summit.

Before the terror attacks, Putin was adamantly opposed to any compromise over the 1972 treaty, which bans national missile defense systems on the theory that fear of retaliation would deter aggression. The treaty has long been viewed by Russia as the foundation of the two nations' arms control pacts.

But in recent weeks, as Putin and Bush have drawn closer over mutual worries about terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, the Russian president has suggested that he might be amenable to modifying the 29-year-old pact.

Congressional opposition to Bush's missile shield plans eroded after the Sept. 11 attack, clearing the way for a defense appropriations bill that includes $8.3 billion for missile defense.

Eyes on North Korea

While Bush asserted last week that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network was aggressively seeking to obtain nuclear weapons, no credible expert believes that he would be able to launch a long-range missile strike. Instead, the anti-missile shield is being described as protection against an attack by a "rogue nation" like North Korea.

In such a case, Alaska is critical to deflecting a threat. That is because a missile launched from North Korea would find its shortest route to the United States traveling over or near Alaska, and an interceptor missile filed in response from Alaska would have the best chance of knocking it down before it enters the airspace of the continental United States.

For the moment, the Bush administration says it is merely promoting more realistic testing of interceptors by adding Fort Greely and a site on Alaska's Kodiak Island to the Northern Pacific test bed to enable more varied, "multilayered" testing. In other words, various types of missiles could be launched in different directions at the same time, be tracked by radar and satellite, and destroyed by interceptors in mid-flight.

Current testing typically involves two sites - Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The proposed new test bed would fire mock enemy missiles from California and Alaska, and send interceptor missiles from Alaska, Kwajalein Atoll and Navy ships. It might also employ airborne lasers. Radar systems would be upgraded at Beale Air Force Base in California and Cobra Dane on Shemya Island in Alaska's Aleutian island chain.

Eastward test needed

In the current test bed, which was created for testing missiles used in nuclear deterrence, missiles fly east to west. To counter future threats, the United States also needs a west-to-east test to replicate a missile coming from North Korea, said Peter Huessy, a defense consultant.

"You've got a testing facility that isn't actually right for testing," he said, adding that the addition of Alaska to the test bed corrects that problem.

Critics argue that the new Alaska test bed does nothing to promote more realistic testing. The Union of Concerned Scientists has written several position papers picking apart the proposal, saying that it won't work against even limited ballistic missile attacks from emerging missile states.

They also say that the proposed testing at Fort Greely is a veiled effort to deploy missiles there by 2004, a charge the Pentagon denies.

Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the missile defense program, said the Defense Department has always made it clear that it would use the Fort Greely interceptors if needed in an emergency but that the plan is for testing, not deployment. He noted that an earlier plan proposed by the Clinton administration called for 100 deployed missiles at Fort Greely.

"That's the big difference between this program and the old one, which was committed to deploy," he said. "When President Bush came in, everything changed. We're no longer talking about deployment, but a robust test to see what works and to choose from those that show promise."

In many small towns, a plan to put a missile site in their back yard wouldn't fly. But here in Delta Junction, 95 miles south of Fairbanks, five miles up the road from the entrance to Fort Greely (where a sign says "Home of the Rugged Professional"), people couldn't be more pleased.

"Delta grew up around Fort Greely, and people here are very comfortable with the military," said Pete Hallgren, the town's economic development director. "You can sit here at night and hear bombing or artillery. There's a huge amount of acreage, and as far as Deltans are concerned, it's a perfect place to train. Training means dropping bombs and shooting - there's no way around it. People will complain if they shake up the place too much, and then the mayor will call up and say, 'Hey, you guys have all that acreage, can't you drop your [bombs] someplace else?'"

Alaska has a long history in national defense, beginning in earnest during World War II when the U.S. military drove the Japanese from Attu and Kiska in the western Aleutian Islands. Later, Air Force bombers flew strike and reconnaissance missions against Japanese military installations in the northern Kurile Islands.

During the Cold War, when the Soviet Union developed a long-range bomber and nuclear weapons, Alaska became a key site for defending the United States from the north. The state became home to a progression of radar systems, including the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line across Alaska and northern Canada, constructed in the mid-1950s.

Unique position

In this latest chapter, the Pentagon argues that Alaska is uniquely positioned to defend all 50 states from a missile strike. Here is how it is supposed to work:

A network of radar and satellites would detect the launch of an enemy ballistic missile and track it, triggering the release of one or more interceptor missiles to destroy the incoming missile, its warhead or both.

Ground-based interceptors are equipped with two booster stages and a shroud that contains a "kill vehicle." That's the system's bullet, designed to hit the target at 15,000 miles per hour, a force that defense officials say can destroy any warhead.

As soon as an enemy missile is fired, a satellite spots the plume of the launching rocket, and the control center jumps into action.

Radar begins tracking the missile and gathering data, such as trajectory and the likely point of impact, relayed from space-based sensors and ground-based radar. About 20 minutes after the enemy missile is launched, an interceptor takes off, programmed with information collected from the radar. About 2 1/2 minutes after takeoff, the kill vehicle separates from the booster.

Just before this separation - about 1,400 miles from the target - the kill vehicle is given a final reading about the target. It then begins calibrating its sensors, performing such functions as a "star shot," in which the kill vehicle seeks out a constellation of stars that it's programmed to look for.

Once calibrated, the kill vehicle guides itself toward the target, about six minutes after takeoff. If the mission is successful, the kill vehicle will collide with the target 120 to 200 miles above Earth.

All of this must be done within a half-hour after the enemy missile takes off.

The process is very complex - and some prominent scientists who oppose the Bush plan say it won't be effective.

One is David Wright, a senior staff scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Security Studies Program. He was part of a panel of scientists who recently looked at the missile defense system proposed by the Clinton administration, which was technologically similar to the one now proposed.

The panel focused on how difficult it might be for a country such as North Korea to design countermeasures to fool the defense - such as decoy warheads, balloons hiding warheads, or a cone on the warhead filled with liquid nitrogen to cool off the surface so the heat sensor on the kill vehicle won't recognize it.

"The technologies required to do those things are simpler than the technologies required to build a ballistic missile system in the first place," he said. "Our conclusion is [U.S. officials] can go ahead and build the system and get it to work on test range targets where they don't have an enemy trying to fool them. And even if it has gone through a successful test program, the United States would have virtually no confidence in its ability to stop an attack from a country like North Korea."

Rebutting the critics

Lehner disputed the scientists' criticism. He said that the type of warhead North Korea is likely to acquire is a fairly rudimentary sort, less aerodynamically advanced than a Russian or Chinese warhead, and wouldn't be able to bear the weight of extra payloads containing countermeasures such as Wright described.

"To be able to boost that payload six, seven, 8,000 miles is a huge step," he said. "For every pound you put on the front end of the missile, your range goes down accordingly. It's no easy feat to be able to build rocket motors necessary to throw a payload that far.

"And the development of those countermeasures are not that simple," Lehner said. "It took the U.S. many years to develop the countermeasures for analysis purposes."

While an anti-missile shield would not have prevented the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, both sides argue that the tragedy bolstered their case.

Critics say the suicide hijackings prove that defense money is needed to combat terrorism through intelligence and other means.

Bush and other proponents say the attacks underscore the need to defend the nation on all fronts because terrorists and nations that support them have weapons of mass destruction, or are seeking to acquire them. If they had had long-range missiles on Sept. 11, they would have used them, according to this argument.

Voices against the project

In August, eight arms control and environmental organizations sued the Pentagon to stop work on the missile defense project, saying that potential dangers to public safety and the environment had not been properly studied.

Also, while support for the missile defense project is strong in Alaska, pockets of opposition remain.

On Kodiak Island, where the Pentagon wants to build two missile silos on a commercial rocket launch complex for use in the testing program, a group of residents is vocally opposing the project, which they fear will harm the environment and ruin the character of their island - home to some of the world's biggest brown bears, best salmon fishing and hundreds of gray whales right off the coast.

The group began meeting in 1995 amid plans for the commercial launch site, which they suspected wouldn't make money and would end up a government-subsidized project.

"The talk about constructing silos was something we never would have imagined," said Mike Sirofchuck, one of the group's leaders.

But in Delta Junction, people are quick to argue that there's nothing nuclear about a missile shield, that it's just a "smart rock that goes up and blows up the missile with its own fuel," in the words of Mayor Roy Gilbertson.

The town of 3,400 was pinched by severe military cuts during the past few years that left Fort Greely - long a cold-weather testing site for everything from boots to bombs - with only a skeleton work force. Now, the town welcomes missile defense as an economic lifeline. But people here also see national defense as part of their duty.

"The patriotism aspect is extremely strong among Deltans," said Hallgren. "I grew up in Chicago, and no doubt there were nukes pointed at Chicago, which made me a victim for no good reason. Now, living in Delta, the only reason someone would point a nuke at Delta is because we're trying to defend Baltimore. That makes my being a target have a point."