The Threat from Wobbling Warheads - 31 August 2001

Once the bomb came out of the bottle we had to learn words that in 1939, when the second war broke out, neither the president of the United States, nor the prime minister of Great Britain, nor even the armies, navies and air forces of the allies, had ever heard of.

First, it was uranium and then uranium 238, from which was produced, we heard, plutonium.

And after that we learned to say missile - or in this country "missul" - and then anti-ballistic missile.

Most recently we've heard ABM over and over from President Bush, who told us, yet again the other day, that the United States will, once and for all, formally reject the last ABM treaty because it took elaborate precautions to prevent a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

And since there is no Soviet Union and Russia is no longer thought of as an enemy then it's time to work out a new treaty based, if Mr Bush has his way, on a defensive missile shield.

An up-to-date, or should I say cutting edge, Star Wars.

To the mockery of most of his allies, President Bush is more than ever determined to build this all-embracing shield. It's meant to put a protective blanket over the United States and Russia, if it's willing, and then the European allies, if they're willing.

But most of them are not willing. Most of them quote the Nobel Prize scientists and the Pentagon officials who say the missile shield hasn't a prayer of working. Whereas Mr Bush quotes the Nobel scientists and the Pentagon officials who say it's entirely feasible.

Anyway President Bush is, I'm told, still gung-ho about it, especially after that third test in the Pacific when our guided missile hit and shattered its dummy target 4,000 miles away.

But the rejoicing in the White House was short-lived. This week there appeared a new word, a phrase rather, which will very likely bring chuckles to the sceptical allies and a thundering headache to the pro-missile men in the White House and the Pentagon.

The phrase is "spin stabilisation".

Let's go easy with this clumsy phrase which, as I say, will be joyful news to one side and a horror to the other.

The rationale for abandoning the ABM treaty, as President Bush keeps on saying, is that it was designed as protection against an enemy that doesn't exist, but made no provision for the new enemies that constantly give us sleepless nights, namely what the West calls rogue states, like Iran, Iraq, North Korea - not to go into the debatable nuclear capacity of several Asian nations.

America's allies who oppose the shield, sometimes called Star Wars II, have argued that those rogue states are not yet a nuclear threat because their arsenals are skimpy and their technology still primitive.

The new discovery, the new phrase, "spin stabilisation" rudely thumbs its nose at both sides.

Several experts, in and out of the federal government, have pointed out an unnoticed fact about the success of the recent missile targeting test.

The warheads, let's call them the enemy warheads, we're learning to hit and destroy from huge distances, spin within a minute radius like tops.

This is not an accident. It's a calculated achievement of their design which ensures their ability to hold direction across thousands of miles and land within a hundred feet or so of the chosen target.

So? Well, so one assumption of our testing has been that any threatening incoming enemy warheads will be as accurate - as sophisticated - as our own.

But now these nosey-parker experts who've thought twice about this assumption point out that while we're learning to spot and destroy sophisticated spinning tops who know where they're going, we can't detect an incoming warhead that's crude, fired by some rogue, some technological illiterate.

What we are learning to be good at are spin stabilised warheads. The wretched rogue states don't have them.

Not to worry, their scientists could say, we may never need them. Just set off these wobbling, tumbling warheads which will fumble their way to a prescribed target - the Empire State building, say, in New York city.

They won't hit it, but they could hit and destroy, say, Long Island.

One anonymous scientist at the Pentagon who's in favour of the president's shield remarked that, while he has no illusions about the difficulties of destroying spin stable missiles, the detection and arresting of crude tumblers, wobblers, presents enormous problems.

Meanwhile this nasty new truth has been put up to the Pentagon and the Pentagon has acted.

It has claimed a small area, a mere hundred-odd acres, of government land, way off in Alaska, on which it is going to begin so-called interceptor flights, intending to search for and destroy our very own dummy, crude, wobbling warheads.

If this sounds like an odd step backwards in the pursuit of technological sophistication the experts are ready to respond "Not so."

It's an experiment involving the most profound and complicated calculations and to succeed it will take - wait for it - years and years.

On the other hand the New York Times seems to think that the research and development of this interceptor method is far enough along so that if North Korea will wait until 2004 the United States will be able to disarm any missile attack with our all powerful interceptors of crude missiles.

Any missile, that is, which the enemy projects toward a picked target.

But there's another complication for our interceptor wizards to face. I mean what about the enemy mixing in with its best warheads, even if they're only tumblers, how about his mixing in flights of dummy tumblers not meant to go anywhere in particular but just to confuse the American Alaska boys?

The confident hope is, of course, that in time the United States will have developed at least three defensive systems, or if you like three systems brilliantly melded into one massive delicate exquisite system which can:

destroy the best spin stabilised warheads money can buy

destroy the targeted but tumbling warheads, so inefficient that they can come only within miles of destroying their target - Philadelphia say, - but will merely atomise the state of Pennsylvania, and

the supreme technological achievement of the 21st Century, surely - the ability to distinguish fake wobbly missiles from real wobbly missiles.

As I say the conquest of these immense niceties is going to take time. But reassurance on this point was brought to all of us recently by the airforce general who's in charge of the while anti-missile programme.

General Ronald T Kadish told a Senate sub-committee about the feasibility of the Alaska experiment - the interceptor flight tests - and he said, and I quote his own memorable words:

"Our test philosophy is to add ..." (note he said "to add" not to solve) "... to add, step by step, complexities over time. It is a walk-before-you-run, learn-as-you-go, development approach."

Ach, so!

Well so far we've been discussing the technical feasibility of Mr Bush's missile shield - can it be done, can it work?

But really the first question to answer in any policy the president proposes should be - will it pass the Congress?

I wonder how many times in the past fifty-odd years have I said "the president will do this and that", all the headlines say "president to do so and so", "to present this budget".

It means, in the American system, the president would like to do this and that.

In a parliamentary system the prime minister's budget is the one that's going to be acted on. Here it has a long ride through both houses of Congress before it can possibly be passed, and usually greatly adjusted.

Here, you may have noticed, people - as distinct from politicians - voters who are, say, against the missile shield, don't get so alarmed or - a favourite European word - so appalled by a presidential policy because they've known since kindergarten that "the President proposes, the Congress disposes".

But quite apart from the colossal cost of the shield, even supposing that the House - the keeper of the money bags - appropriates the money, which is a very big supposition indeed, there's suddenly come up, and from a weighty authority, the question of whether the president has the constitutional right to reject the ABM treaty.

Two centuries ago the Supreme Court ruled that just as a president requires the approval of two thirds of the Senate to sign a treaty with a foreign nation, the same rule applies to his rejecting one.

But in 1978 the late Senator Barry Goldwater brought suit against President Jimmy Carter for putting an end to the United States' mutual defence treaty with Taiwan.

It went right up to the Supreme Court which decided by six to three that President Carter's act was a political decision not suitable for resolution by the courts but should be left to, I quote "the executive and legislative branches."

Now a famous constitutional lawyer has come forward with a strong proposal that, as soon as Congress reassembles next week, after its summer break, the Senate foreign relations committee should meet to consider the president's missile plan - which of course violates the ABM treaty - and decide whether cancelling a treaty requires the Senate's consent just as concluding one does.

If the court followed the Goldwater ruling any president could unilaterally, all on his own, take the United States out of the United Nations, take them out of Nato.

All things considered - the enormous problems of tracking a cheap, wobbly missile, the enormous cost of the shield, the serious doubt about the president's right to cancel ABM and build the shield at all - the prospect for Star Wars II seems, to put it mildly, ill-starred.

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