18 December 2004
Missile defense drain
BY RACHEL D'ORO
CToledo Blade
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/2004121...
FOR years the government has been sinking billions of tax dollars into a national missile defense system that doesn't work. The boondoggle begun under President Reagan was a bad idea when critics dubbed it "Star Wars" and complained futilely about the millions being dumped onto its drawing board. The program, designed to protect the nation by intercepting a missile attack, has never come close to fulfilling its promise.
The Bush Administration, which has dumped more than $15 billion into the technically infeasible system over the past four years, barely blinked when it suffered another major setback during a test launch last week.
The interceptor that was supposed to stop a mock warhead never got off the ground. Sort of a paradigm for the program itself.
The $85 million test failure should raise serious questions about the reliability of seven other interceptors loaded in underground silos in California and Alaska. Two years ago President Bush said they would be capable of protecting the United States by the end of this year.
A malfunctioning missile is not an operational one. "The major purpose of this test was to show that the so-called production representative booster with a kill vehicle worked, and it didn't," said Philip Coyle, the chief Pentagon weapons tester from 1994 to 2001. Which could mean engineers may need to modify all the interceptor missiles in silos and in production before they could be assumed operational.
What a disaster. By some accounts the would-be defense system has cost $130 billion so far and is expected to cost another $50 billion over the next five years.
Not only doesn't it work, the purpose is pointless, say defense experts, considering the changing national security threats of the 21st century. The threat of
a ballistic missile attack on the United States-whose launch would be immediately detected by early-warning satellites-is not an overriding one in the post-Cold War era.
The real threat, argue opponents of missile defense, is that today's enemy is more likely to smuggle a weapon of mass destruction into the country - a nuclear, biological, or chemical device
- that could escape detection. The 9/11 terrorist attacks would not have been blunted by the billions spent on missile defense. But who knows if the course of history might have been
different if intelligence had been given the same attention and spending advantage as the administration is lavishing on these missiles.
Despite its woeful record of test failures, its inflated budgets, and outdated mission, Star Wars supporters insist the latest misfire was just an "anomaly" that can be fixed. They can pretend the system is ready for prime time but the proof is in its performance.
