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World Policy Journal
Volume XV, No 3, Fall 1998
Reagan Redux: The Enduring Myth of Star Wars *
By William D. Hartung
America is in the midst of a full-fledged, bipartisan bout of nostalgia for the glory days of Ronald Reagan. The signs are everywhere. On the Democratic side, President Clinton has decided to kick “unworthy” single mothers off welfare. On the Republican side, there is the “Contract With America,” a hodgepodge of Reaganite ideas that is capped by the suggestion that we move with all due haste to deploy Reagan’s favorite weapons scheme, the Star Wars missile defense system—whether it works or not.
In addition, the Gipper has had large machines and sprawling tracts of infrastructure named after him. For weapons buffs, there is the Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier, which could end up as the most expensive combat ship ever built. And for anyone who can still scrape up the change to fly the shuttle from New York to Washington, there is the bracing experience of hearing the pilot say, “We are now beginning our descent into Ronald Reagan National Airport.” What are we to make of this longing for the return of the Reaganesque? Is it just that we want a “reassuring” presence back at the helm—someone who, like Reagan, could run up the biggest budget deficits in the history of the Republic and still maintain his reputation as a fiscal conservative? Or have we simply exhausted the possibilities of ‘60s and ‘70s nostalgia, so that it is now time for the 1980s to have its moment in the sun?
Perhaps we can begin to answer these questions by examining the fate of one of the more expensive bits of Reagan memorabilia, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as the Star Wars program. Reagan’s dream of a high-tech shield to protect against incoming ballistic missiles is alive and well. The original Star Wars vision—a multi-tiered system of weapons and sensors that could simultaneously destroy thousands of Soviet missiles—has been superseded by the more modest goal of protecting the nation against an accidental missile launch by China or Russia, or deliberate attacks by so-called rogue states like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (none of which currently have missiles that can reach U.S. soil). In keeping with this diminished mission, the 1990s version of Reagan’s dream has been renamed the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) program.
Like the B–2 bomber, which House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich has dubbed the “Dracula weapon” for its remarkable ability to escape the budget cutter’s ax, the Star Wars program is currently rolling merrily along, impervious to technical glitches, cost overruns, and massive shifts in the geopolitical landscape. This aspect of the Star Wars project—its proponents’ unflappable optimism, coupled with a stubborn disregard of hard facts—makes it the perfect monument to Ronald Reagan.
Star Wars: Impotent and Obsolete?
The most remarkable thing about Reagan’s Star Wars plan, which was announced with great fanfare in March 1983 with the ambitious goal of rendering nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete,” is how consistently it has failed to meet virtually every performance goal that has been set out for it.
Many of the weapons that were to make up Reagan’s ambitious “astrodome” defense, such as Dr. Edward Teller’s highly touted x-ray lasers and particle-beam weapons, proved to be uniquely unsuited to the task at hand. As strategic experts John Pike, Bruce Blair, and Stephen Schwartz observe in their pathbreaking new study, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, “the greatest accomplishment of the first four years of the SDI program consisted in learning what technologies did not work. At the beginning, the program contemplated a bewildering array of devices that might be of use in shooting down missiles and warheads. But most of these gadgets, such as railguns, space-based radars, lasers, and particle beams, were found wanting.” 1
The problems with the original Star Wars vision went beyond the failure of individual components to meet minimum performance requirements. The whole concept was fatally flawed. As Canadian computer expert David Parnas pointed out just two years after Reagan’s 1983 Star Wars speech, managing a battle that would involve targeting tens of thousands of incoming missiles, warheads, and decoys without error is beyond the capability of any computer software system. Even a .1 percent failure rate in intercepting incoming nuclear weapons could mean the annihilation of one or more major American cities. Parnas was so convinced of the futility of the Star Wars plan that he resigned his position as a member of SDI’s battle management advisory panel.
That same year, in 1985, the physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund organized a campaign in which over 7,200 scientists and engineers signed a “pledge of non-participation” in Star Wars research on the grounds that it was a fraudulent and dangerous program. This was all the more remarkable when one considers that the Pentagon was offering to give university-based scientists millions of dollars in research funds to explore missile defense technologies. 2
The daunting technical obstacles to fielding an effective missile defense combined with the end of the Cold War to cool the U.S. government’s ardor for Reagan’s Star Wars plan. By the early 1990s, missile defense was an afterthought on the nation’s security agenda. Yet the Pentagon and the military services have continued to pour research and development money down the drain in the quixotic quest for missile defenses.
According to Stephen Schwartz of the Brookings Institution, the United States has spent $55 billion on missile defense in the 15 years since Reagan launched SDI, with precious little to show for it. 3 The fact that the goal of the program is now far less ambitious than Reagan’s original vision of an impenetrable shield that would protect against thousands of incoming missiles has not measurably improved its potential for success. Blocking a few stray missiles should be easier than blunting a coordinated attack involving tens of thousands of warheads. But to borrow a phrase that Lockheed Martin’s chairman Norman Augustine used in a different context, the missile defense program is still “unblemished by success.”
As Bradley Graham of the Washington Post reported in a front-page article that ran on April 27 of this year, the best known Star Wars component, a “hit-to-kill” vehicle designed to intercept incoming missiles well before they reach U.S. territory, has failed in seven of nine tests conducted in this decade. 4 Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin’s Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) program, a sort of super Patriot missile designed to defend against medium-range ballistic missiles, is zero for five in tests conducted to date. 5
A panel of independent experts appointed by the Pentagon and headed by former air force chief of staff Larry Welch warned in a report issued this past February that the entire ballistic missile defense effort was on a headlong “rush to failure” because of pressure by Congress to deploy a system before adequate testing has been done. 6 The Welch Commission’s warnings echo those issued nearly 20 years ago by the outgoing secretary of defense, Harold Brown, to the incoming Reagan administration regarding the overhyped missile defense efforts of that era.
But the issue of whether or not Star Wars can actually work does not appear to be uppermost in the thinking of its proponents. In August 1993, Tim Weiner of the New York Times revealed that the army had rigged a key 1984 Star Wars test by planting a remote-controlled explosive in the target missile that would cause it blow up on cue whether or not it was hit by the interceptor missile. When Weiner revealed this monstrous deception, former Reagan administration officials argued that it was more important for the Soviets to believe that we could intercept missiles in flight than it was for the United States to actually have had the capability to do so. 7 Of course, if we were to take such thinking to its logical extreme, the United States could today build a cheap “Potemkin” missile defense system under the auspices of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, never mind Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
It is hard to see how we could do worse. We are spending $4 billion a year, year in and year out, for a ballistic missile defense effort that has yet to deploy or successfully test a single reliable device. In fact, the most impressive products to come out of our $55 billion, 15-year investment in missile defenses to date are the flashy “artist’s conceptions” of how future systems might work, which the military services and defense contractors duly trot out whenever Congress threatens to cut back the Star Wars budget by a few hundred million dollars.
Dole, Gingrich, Lott and Star Wars Revival
If Star Wars was a domestic program, it would have long since been slashed to pieces by conservative budget cutters looking for money to pay for tax cuts and budgetary deficit reductions. But as often happens in the warped world of national security thinking, the program has “failed upward” to the point where it may well end up being deployed, whether we need it or not. The latest push for deployment of Star Wars has its roots in Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s master plan, the Contract With America, which was modestly subtitled, “The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey, and the House of Representatives to Change the Nation.” Under the heading “Strong National Defense,” Gingrich and Armey’s “bold plan” of 1994 called for “renewing America’s commitment to an effective national missile defense by requiring the Defense Department to deploy antiballistic missile systems capable of defending the United States against ballistic missile attack.” 8
However, Gingrich and Armey’s Star Wars plans suffered a surprising setback in the summer of 1996, when fiscal conservatives of both parties joined hands with liberal Democrats in the House of Representatives to defeat an amendment that would have mandated deployment of a missile defense system by as early as the year 2000. The decisive factor in stalling Gingrich and Armey’s forced march to deployment was a Congressional Budget Office analysis that reminded members that even a modest ballistic missile defense system could cost tens of billions of dollars. 9
Star Wars fared no better in the brief cameo appearance it made in Bob Dole’s ill-fated 1996 presidential campaign. When Dole tried to whip up fear in California over the dangers of Chinese missiles raining down on Los Angeles, his rhetorical exertions were greeted with a collective yawn by Californians who were more concerned about the state’s floundering economy.
After falling flat in the House and on the presidential campaign trail, interest in ballistic missile defenses has now shifted to the Senate, where Mississippi senator Thad Cochran’s Defend America Act has 50 cosponsors. An attempt to pass Cochran’s bill—which mandates deployment of a limited antiballistic missile system by the year 2003—failed in May of this year, when Star Wars boosters could not muster the 60 votes needed to bring the measure to the Senate floor. In a chilling display of party unity, however, all 55 Republican senators voted to bring the bill to the floor, where it would have passed without difficulty. 10 The anti-Star Wars coalition is stronger in the House, so even if Cochran and Majority Leader Trent Lott succeed in ramming through a Senate bill in support of their goal to see missile defenses deployed by 2003, the House should be able to block the bill in a House–Senate conference.
Despite their recent political setbacks, Star Wars boosters are spoiling for a fight over missile defense. In an excellent article by Carla Anne Robbins that ran in the Wall Street Journal on August 7 of this year, Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson identifies missile defenses as “the most important [security] issue of the 2000 election.” In addition, Robbins reports, Jack Kemp’s Empower America organization is trying to win over some members of the Senate to the cause by running pro-Star Wars radio ads in targeted states like Nevada. Listeners are told: “We are only one vote shy of ensuring the safety of you and your family. But the people standing in the way are Nevada’s own senators.”
For a project so technically deficient to get this close to receiving the go-ahead for deployment suggests that there is more going on here than meets the eye. Indeed, the Star Wars program is driven by deep psychological, political, and economic factors that have made it extremely difficult to stop simply on the merits of the program itself.
Soothing Our Fears: America Invulnerable?
As a nation that has been largely spared foreign intervention or the occupation of its own soil, the United States has developed an approach to national security that is too often based on the unrealistic expectation that we can find a foolproof—technical or political—fix that can protect us in any and every worst-case scenario. This quest for “absolute security,” which James Chace and Caleb Carr analyzed in some detail ten years ago in their book, America Invulnerable, is a fundamental pillar of the Star Wars vision. 11
When Ronald Reagan decided to take the advice of the scientists, soldiers, and businessmen who were pushing the Star Wars plan—led by H–bomb inventor Edward Teller and retired army general Daniel O. Graham, and amply financed by right-wing business leaders like Joseph Coors—his primary concern was to make the American public feel safe from the horrors of a nuclear attack. 12 The only truly effective course—getting rid of nuclear weapons—did not appeal to Reagan and his inner circle at that point, at least not in the manner put forward by the European Nuclear Disarmament (END) movement and the U.S.-based Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign. Instead, Reagan opted to seek a technical “solution” to our nuclear vulnerability by pursuing a multi-tiered antimissile system, which, if fully deployed, could have cost up to $1 trillion. 13
George Keyworth, an Edward Teller protégé who served as Reagan’s science advisor, told television journalist Bill Moyers in 1984 that Reagan was extremely concerned about the nuclear freeze initiative, and that he wanted to respond by doing something that would “give people some hope” that they would not be incinerated in a nuclear holocaust. Reagan’s March 1983 Star Wars speech, with its grand promises to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” and to change “the course of human history,” was the first salvo in the Reagan administration’s campaign to put a positive spin on the nuclear arms race. 14
It may be possible to give the public false hope by offering it a technical fix to the nuclear threat, à la Star Wars, though it would be safer, albeit more difficult, to address the problem directly by drastically reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals. As the nuclear tests in India and Pakistan, and Iran’s test this past summer of a mid-range ballistic missile, begin to attract media attention to the nuclear threat for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the question will be whether the public will succumb to the reassuring (but false) promise of a technical fix to the problem of nuclear weapons.
Defending against Rogue States
The latest turn in the Star Wars debate comes courtesy of former Ford administration secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, who chaired a congressionally mandated panel that announced with great fanfare this past July that such “rogue states” as North Korea, Iran, and Iraq may be as little as 5 years away from developing missiles that could reach U.S. soil, not the 10 to 12 years that official U.S. intelligence estimates have been suggesting. When the unclassified summary of the report was released to the public, Newt Gingrich, the primary political sponsor of the Rumsfeld panel, launched into rhetorical overkill, describing the findings as “the most important warning about our national security since the end of the Cold War.” 15
The Rumsfeld report was treated with undue respect by most of the nation’s editors and reporters. Few of the published accounts of the panel’s findings bothered to point out that several key players involved in this allegedly objective exercise are heavily invested in the Star Wars project, politically and economically. Rumsfeld himself was the chair of Bob Dole’s failed 1996 presidential bid, which tried to push Star Wars on a largely uninterested public. More important, Rumsfeld works closely with the Center for Security Policy, a pro-Star Wars think tank run by Frank Gaffney, a former Pentagon official in the Reagan administration, who has devoted his postgovernment career to spreading the Star Wars creed. The center has received over $1 million in donations from companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin (both major beneficiaries of Star Wars research funds).
Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, who also pushed for the Rumsfeld panel, are both firmly on record in favor of deploying a missile defense system as soon as possible. Lott has already managed to get one of the Star Wars laser programs moved to his state. Gingrich, a longtime Star Wars booster, has helped make sure that Congress annually appropriates roughly a billion research dollars more than the Pentagon asks for—to the direct benefit of Lockheed Martin, which maintains a major facility in Marietta, Georgia, just outside the Speaker’s district. 16
One would have thought that self-respecting journalists would have considered the source before uncritically trumpeting the Rumsfeld panel’s findings. The most embarrassing puff piece on the Rumsfeld report came in mid-July, when television talk show host Charlie Rose aired a shamelessly unbalanced presentation featuring Rumsfeld and fellow Republican panelist Paul Wolfowitz, with no one on the other side of the debate present. Rose echoed the tone of controlled hysteria inherent in the Rumsfeld report by repeating Gingrich’s “warning” remark several times during the broadcast. In essence, the segment was an infomercial for the Lott/Gingrich/Rumsfeld view of the looming threat from Third World missiles.
If a Charlie Rose, with a research staff at his disposal, can fall for the Star Wars myth, what chance does the general public have of sorting fact from fiction? On the heels of the Rumsfeld report, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced the results of a poll that asked people whether or not they wanted to be defended from a Chinese missile attack. Not surprisingly, the RNC’s loaded question yielded the intended response: 75 percent of those polled said they wanted to be defended from Chinese ICBMs.
Of course, poll-driven foreign policy discussions have grave weaknesses, the most important being that they fail to provide citizens with the minimal factual information they need to make informed decisions. The reason China will not attack the United States with nuclear missiles is the same now as it was two decades ago—because the minute it did so, China would be exposed to a totally devastating counterattack. The same would hold true for North Korea, Iraq, or Iran, should they ever actually acquire the necessary technology to mount a weapon of mass destruction on a bomb that could reach U.S. soil.
In fact, neither of the two main reasons that Rumsfeld offered in explaining U.S. vulnerability to an attack from Third World ballistic missiles—the availability of technical assistance from other countries and the possibility of a “sneak attack” from a country with a clandestine missile development program—hold up to scrutiny.
How Should America Respond?
On this very issue of foreign assistance to countries seeking the means to deliver weapons of mass destruction, the United States has been part of the problem, not part of the solution. U.S. sales of advanced F–16 fighter jets to Pakistan have provided that nation with a reliable, reusable means of delivering a crude nuclear device, whether or not its much vaunted missile program ever succeeds. And when President Bush broke a decade-old pledge to China by selling 150 F–16s to Taiwan during the 1992 presidential campaign, he did irreparable harm to U.S. security relations with Beijing, making it that much harder for Washington to ride herd on China’s transfers of missile technology to Pakistan, Syria, and other customers of ill repute.
More recently, as we have now learned in connection with the ongoing White House fundraising scandals, the Clinton administration has made it much easier for companies like Loral and Hughes Electronics (both major contributors of soft money to the Democratic Party) to transfer satellite technology and services to China, some of which has helped Beijing improve the accuracy of its ballistic missiles. Therefore, if Rumsfeld and others believe that foreign technology transfers are driving the Third World missile threat, their first priority should be to get the U.S. government to tighten up its own policy on exports of missile-related technologies. Only then can we credibly press countries like China and Russia to curb their own dangerous exports of missile and nuclear weapons components. 17
As for the “sneak attack” argument, it is even weaker upon examination than the foreign assistance argument. As Paul Wolfowitz put the case to Charlie Rose, a closed society like North Korea might possibly be able to hide an entire ballistic missile development effort up to the moment of the first test, after which point that nation could be ready to launch a missile attack on the United States within six months.
Wolfowitz’s scenario is farfetched for many reasons. First and foremost, unless a foreign leader is on a suicide mission, there is no logic to using a single ballistic missile (or even a handful of them) to attack the United States. If the leaders of Iraq or North Korea were to take such a foolish step, all they would accomplish would be to announce to the world where the attack came from—unlike concealing a bomb in a suitcase, it is not possible to hide the origination point of a ballistic missile launch. Having made that announcement (and used up its stockpile of ballistic missiles in the process), the aggressor nation would then be completely unable to defend itself from a U.S. counterattack using nuclear or conventional bombs.
Moreover, it is quite likely that any attempt by a Third World “rogue state” to develop ballistic missiles that could reach the United States would be stopped long before a system could be deployed. After its first test, the nation in question would most likely face a preemptive strike against its missile production facilities (unlike research sites, such facilities would be extremely difficult to hide). Thus, the “sneak attack” rational for Star Wars is wholly implausible.
Furthermore, as Rumsfeld panel member Richard Garwin noted in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, no defensive system currently under consideration could completely neutralize the threat posed by even a small number of ballistic missiles. Garwin rightly observes that “the best way to defend against possible attack is to prevent countries like North Korea, Iran, and Iraq from getting these missiles in the first place.” 18
Missile development efforts in the Third World are much more worrisome for their regional security implications than for their purported threat to the American homeland. The fact that Iran has recently tested a missile that can reach Israel is a real security concern, as is the nascent race between India and Pakistan to test nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. But these regional threats could be more easily addressed with a robust research program on defenses against medium-range missiles that would cost no more than $500 million to $1 billion per year—a small fraction of the bloated $4 billion per year now going for Star Wars research. But, of course, a focus on the real threats would hardly be enough to keep the Boeings and Lockheed Martins feeding at the Pentagon trough in the style to which they have become accustomed.
If we want to avoid burdening our children and grandchildren with an unworkable, dangerous, and immensely costly project, the time to start educating ourselves and our fellow citizens about the costs of the Star Wars program is now. Even without a full grasp of the technical issues involved, most people know a boondoggle when they see one. If the technical fiascoes and special interest politics behind the Star Wars facade were to become common knowledge, this program could be relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
In the meantime, anyone who wants to promote Ronald Reagan’s legacy should consider his more constructive contributions to nuclear weapons policy, such as pressing for the elimination of nuclear missiles from Europe or signing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)—the first nuclear arms control agreement in history to actually reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the stockpiles of the superpowers. As Jonathan Schell has pointed out in his recent book, The Gift of Time, with respect to nuclear weapons, Ronald Reagan was the “most fervently abolitionist president of the Cold War period.” 19 So if we must pay homage to Ronald Reagan, let us honor Reagan the nuclear abolitionist, not Reagan the Star Warrior.
Endnotes
*: This article is adapted from a study of the Star Wars lobby that will be released by the World Policy Institute later this year. Back.
Note 1: John Pike, Bruce Blair, and Stephen I. Schwartz, “Defending against the Bomb,” in Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940, ed., Stephen I. Schwartz (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1998), p. 291. Back.
Note 2: Interview with David Wright, July 30, 1998; the author is in possession of a copy of the “pledge of non-participation” that was circulated in 1985/86; see also Charles Mohr, “Scientist Quits Antimissile Panel Saying Task Is Impossible,” New York Times, July 12, 1985, cited in Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit, p. 291. Back.
Note 3: Figure provided by Stephen I. Schwartz, based on his estimates in Atomic Audit, and on more recent missile defense expenditures. Back.
Note 4: Bradley Graham, “Antimissile Program’s Bumpy Path,” Washington Post, April 27, 1998. Back.
Note 5: “Missile Defense System Fails,” Associated Press, May 12, 1998. Back.
Note 6: Report of the Panel on Reducing Risk in Missile Defense Flight Test Programs (Welch Commission), February 27, 1998. The full text of this report is available on the worldwide web via the home page of the Space Policy Project of the Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org/spp/starwars/program/welch/welch-1.htm). Back.
Note 7: Tim Weiner, “Lies and Rigged ‘Star Wars’ Test Fooled the Kremlin, and Congress,” New York Times, August 18, 1993; cited in Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit, p. 295. Back.
Note 8: Contract With America: The Bold Plan by Rep. Newt Gingrich, Rep. Dick Armey, and the House Republicans to Change the Nation (New York: Times Books, 1994), p. 93. Back.
Note 9: Budgetary Implications of S1635—The Defending America Act of 1996 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Budget Office, May 17, 1996); see also, “Star Wars, the Sequel,” New York Times, August 7, 1996. Back.
Note 10: For a summary of the recent debate in the Senate, see William D. Hartung, “Spacey Missile Defense,” The Nation, July 27/August 3, 1998. Back.
Note 11: James Chace and Caleb Carr, America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars (New York: Summit Books, 1988). Back.
Note 12: On the genesis of Star Wars, see Gregg Herken, “The Earthly Origins of Star Wars,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 1987; for the definitive account of Edward Teller’s role, see William J. Broad, Teller’s War: The Top-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). Back.
Note 13: Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit, p. 291, n. 61. Back.
Note 14: Reagan’s speech is cited in Herken, “The Earthly Origins of Star Wars,” p. 20. Back.
Note 15: Jessica Webster and Patrick J. Sloyan, “Panel Gauges a Missile Threat,” Newsday, July 16, 1998. Back.
Note 16: Information on the Center for Security Policy and its links to Donald Rumsfeld is drawn from the center’s 1996 annual report. On Gingrich and Lockheed, see William D. Hartung, “The Speaker from Lockheed?” The Nation, January 30, 1995. Back.
Note 17: For a fuller version of the argument on the need for the United States to take preventive action against nuclear proliferation, see William D. Hartung, “Hypocrisy Paves the Way for Bomb Tests,” Newsday, June 18, 1998. Back.
Note 18: Richard L. Garwin, “Keeping Enemy Missiles at Bay,” New York Times, July 28, 1998. Back.
Note 19: Jonathan Schell, The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998), p. 15. Back.