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.

He never got it. But according to a new book, the late president won his battle anyway, because Star Wars, as it came to be known, wasn't about technology anyway. It was about economics, and it contributed to the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.

In "The Star Wars Enigma: Behind the Scenes of the Cold War Race for Missile Defense," Nigel Hey maintains that Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative may have been a "stupendously elaborate hoax" that worked.

Even many of the scientists involved in the project, and most academicians who knew anything about it, didn't believe it would work. But the Soviets did, and that's what really mattered.

Hey was in a unique position to write this book. He retired a few years ago as a senior administrator at Sandia National Laboratories, one of the country's leading weapons labs, and he had access to many of the prime movers in Star Wars, both in the United States and the Soviet Union.

He calls his story an "enigma" because it's still not clear how much of a role Star Wars played in ending the Cold War.

There were many factors, of course. But the Soviet Union was in deep trouble, both economically and politically, with a military budget that was strangling the country.

Its only claim to super-power status was its war machine, and it maintained that status by building the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

If the United States built an anti-missile system that really worked, it could force the Soviets to do the same, thus producing another arms race that the Kremlin couldn't afford.

Reagan was counting on that when he dropped his bombshell on national television, just hours after some of his closest advisers learned what he was going to say.

"What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?" he asked.

He went on to say that "current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort."

He offered no details, but his brief comments sent thunderbolts around the world.

The Kremlin was working on its own missile defense program, despite claims to the contrary, though it was nothing on the scale suggested by Reagan. But Soviet leaders and scientists also knew that only one country had the resources, and the track record, that might lead to success. That was the United States.

Into the fray came the unlikely figure of Mikhail Gorbachev, a new type of Soviet leader, who was deeply disturbed by what he heard coming out of Washington. He told a meeting of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: "The West clearly wants to pull us into a second scenario of the arms race."

"They are counting on our military exhaustion," he said. Meanwhile, he said, "We are stealing everything from the people, and turning the country into a military camp."

Yet it really wasn't clear, even toward the end, what Star Wars was all about.

Gerald Yonas, a brilliant physicist who ended up masterminding much of the program, said after it was over that the Strategic Defense Initiative wasn't about space-borne battle stations, or x-ray lasers that could shoot missiles out of the sky, or any of the other far-fetched concepts that earned Star Wars its nickname.

"It was a program about human behavior, as indeed deterrence was always a program about human behavior," he wrote. "It was never something to write equations about. It was about psychology."

Did even he believe it was possible to build a 100 percent effective shield that would protect the entire nation, as envisioned by Reagan? Nope.

"I don't know any technical person who believed all of the stuff we said," Yonas told Hey. "We knew it was a game. But the Soviets believed it. They went around in public claiming it was nuts, while privately worrying about the problem and trying to get us to give it up."

Star Wars is gone now, and in its place we have a scaled-down version of missile defense, and even that has a spotty record. But North Korea has given it new life. Let's hope we never have to find out if it really works.