The U.S. Is Helpless Against a Russian or Chinese Missile Attack . . . Still
It has been the policy of every President, every Congress, and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to leave the people of the United States as captives in a nuclear "game" of chicken. The "game" is called Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD.
Reagan did talk a good line regarding what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative, which the media derisively labeled Star Wars. This would be a defensive system of missiles that would be launched in response to a missile launch by the USSR. A defensive missile originally was to carry a nuclear bomb that would take out the other missile without having to hit it. Later, when the anti-nuclear concerns challenged this obviously efficient technical solution, Edward Teller and Lowell Wood substituted ball bearings for nuclear bombs. They dubbed this brilliant pebbles. That also would have worked.
Something like it had been proposed in 1958. This was project BAMBI. The New York Times wrote about it in 1986.
"Project Defender" got under way in 1958 as a top-secret, multimillion-dollar venture involving thousands of the nation`s best scientists. One proposal was to destroy Soviet missiles early in flight with Ballistic Missile Boost Intercepts--Bambi.The scientists envisioned Bambi as hundreds of space-based battle stations using infrared sensors to track the fiery exhaust of enemy missiles. The Bambi weapon itself, propelled by rockets, would simply smash into the rising enemy missile. To increase the chance of a direct hit, the Bambi weapon would release a 60-foot rotating wire net laced with deadly steel pellets. Components were tested on Atlas and Titan missiles.
I was a proponent of the SDI before Reagan's speech on March 23, 1983. I had been told about it by Gen. Dan Graham, a retired 3-star general. Wikipedia describes his work.
In 1981 Graham founded High Frontier, Inc., a private organization that promotes a kinetic-energy weapons approach to space-based defense with help from members of President Ronald Reagan's "Kitchen Cabinet". According to Graham, he is considered by most to be the actual originator of the Strategic Defense Initiative concept. However, the plan as put forward by Reagan also included an emphasis on directed energy technologies such as lasers and particle beams, in addition to the cheaper, "off the shelf" kinetic energy technologies promoted by Graham and High Frontier.
He was an articulate man, as you can see in this documentary on his project. Just skip the useless non-verbal introduction. Start viewing at 2:30.
I brought Graham and three other retired generals to speak at my conference on national defense in 1981.
I also was a friend of Dr. Angelo Codevilla, who ghost-wrote Graham's book on High Frontier. Codevilla warned me that the SDI would never be deployed. The Pentagon was not in favor of it. They preferred MAD.
He told me that BAMBI had been blocked from the beginning. SDI would be blocked in the 1980's. He also said it would be used to fund billions of dollars of research projects, but it would never be deployed. He was correct on both points.
This meant that the American people would never be defended. If a nuclear war ever broke out, tens of millions of Americans in target areas would die. It was an all-or-nothing policy. So far, it has worked. But it almost failed during the blockade of Soviet ships by the U.S. Navy in the October missile crisis of 1962. It almost failed twice in 1983. I wrote about this last April. Read it here.
Today, we learn that the Russian and Chinese military have missiles that are hypersonic. So what? The old missiles could annihilate us just as easily. The new missiles are for domestic political consumption. They are part of the Chinese and Russian military-industrial complexes.
Our strategists are as committed to MAD today as they were in 1982 and 1960.
In a recent issue of The Hill, we read of testimony last week by General John Hyten, Commander of the Strategic Air Command. He said that the U.S. missile defense cannot intercept hypersonic missiles. "He said that the U.S. is instead relying on nuclear deterrence, or the threat of a retaliatory U.S. strike, as its defense against such missiles." In short, the strategists are still relying on MAD.
“We don't have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us, so our response would be our deterrent force, which would be the triad and the nuclear capabilities that we have to respond to such a threat,” Hyten told the Senate Armed Services Committee.To bolster missile defenses against hypersonics, Hyten advocated space-based sensors.
“I believe we need to pursue improved sensor capabilities to be able to track, characterize and attribute the threats, wherever they come from,” he said. “And, right now, we have a challenge with that, with our current on-orbit space architecture and the limited number of radars that we have around the world. In order to see those threats, I believe we need a new space sensor architecture.”
I see. We need a space-based sensor system. Thank you, General Hyten, for recommending BAMBI. It's a shame you were not yet born when this was first suggested.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I still recommend High Frontier. As a back-up, I recommend a strategy that a former Strategic Air Command pilot told me about in the early 1980's: slow, therefore strictly defensive, dirt-cheap cruise missiles. I wrote about this for Lew Rockwell in 2001. Read it here.