Things That Don’t Work

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

It’s easy to understand why people support the Star Wars anti-missile program. It promises to save us from deadly missiles by using exciting technology to shoot them down in midair. This sounds really awesome, and would be a significant reason for trying to set it up, if it worked. The trouble is that it doesn’t work, and there’s no sign that it’ll ever be close to working.

Fred Kaplan summarized the state of anti-missile technology in a 2004 article:

In the past six years of flight tests, here is what the Pentagon's missile-defense agency has demonstrated: A missile can hit another missile in mid-air as long as a) the operators know exactly where the target missile has come from and where it's going; b) the target missile is flying at a slower-than-normal speed; c) it's transmitting a special beam that exaggerates its radar signature, thus making it easier to track; d) only one target missile has been launched; and e) the "attack" happens in daylight.

Beyond that, the program's managers know nothing—in part because they have never run a test that goes beyond this heavily scripted (it would not be too strong to call it "rigged") scenario.

Kaplan italicizes “can” because even under these favorable conditions, anti-missile systems still don’t always work. Several months after Kaplan’s article, the Missile Defense Agency attempted a test that had been postponed several times because of equipment problems and bad weather. (And yes, it is kind of worrisome that the system is so finicky that it can’t be tested in bad weather.) The test failed, with the interceptor failing to even get off the launch pad. In a retest three months later, the intereceptor failed to launch again.

And then there’s the problem of decoys. As Josh Freiss describes, it’s cheap and simple to confuse missile defense systems by shooting off several mylar balloons as well as a warhead. If the warhead itself is placed inside another balloon, there will be no way for the missile defense system to tell the difference between the real warhead and the decoys. (Since the warhead and the decoys spend a lot of time flying above the atmosphere, where there’s no air resistance, the different weight won’t cause them to fly differently.) In the words of Nobel Prize winning physicist Stephen Weinberg, “We may know the nature of the nuclear warhead. But we will not know what other things are sent along with the warhead in the form of decoys that will exhaust our defenses. I don't see how that problem can ever be solved.”

Rather than letting defense contractors swindle us into spending billions of dollars (currently around $10 billion a year) on a system that doesn’t work and won’t meet the real challenges it faces, there’s plenty of good things we could do to make ourselves safer from missile attack. For example, we could buy up loose nuclear material from poorly guarded facilities in the former USSR. We could provide jobs in America for unemployed Soviet nuclear scientists, so that poverty doesn’t force them to sell their talents to our enemies. There’s also the possibility of using foreign aid to encourage other countries to do what’s right on nuclear proliferation issues. But buying things that don’t work is no solution to our problems.