North Korea Revives Thoughts of 'Star Wars'

Oct. 11, 2006 — -- North Korea's race to join the nuclear club will undoubtedly re-energize efforts to solve a problem that has haunted civilizations for more than half a century. How does a country protect itself from missiles that can travel across entire oceans, carrying atomic warheads?

Although the United States is building a missile defense system, it has been plagued by failures, and at best it will disable a few missiles speeding toward our shores in what federal officials call a "limited attack."

But most -- by some estimates 80 percent -- will get through this very porous "missile shield."

That leaves us about where we were during the height of the Cold War, but with a different and less potent adversary. Our best defense is the fact that the United Sates is so well armed that to launch an attack on this nation would be suicidal.

We had a name for it, back in the Cold War days. It was "mutual assured destruction," or MAD for short. If you hit us, we'll kill you. What a way to run a world.

But it worked, at least for a while. Now there's a new player in the game, and although it's not known just how lethal the new guy really is, it's clear that we haven't progressed as far as we would have liked.

The truth is that defending against a missile is one of the most daunting technological challenges ever attempted. No matter how it's designed, it's essentially like shooting bullets out of the air before they reach you. Some of the best minds in the world have not been able to figure out exactly how to do that.

The latest effort is being staged on a desolate piece of real estate in the middle of Alaska.

Fort Greely is so contaminated with waste products from early, ill-advised, efforts to develop chemical and biological warfare materials that much of it is off limits. But it is home now to interceptor rockets that are designed to nail missiles coming out of North Korea.

It's a very limited, tightly focused program, at least compared to the all-encompassing defense shield envisioned by President Ronald Reagan.