US hopes of one day shooting down hostile nuclear missiles, long dubbed the “Star Wars” project, seemed to crash and burn after President Barack Obama cancelled US plans for missile defence in Europe last week. But Star Wars is not dead. Instead, Obama has a new plan that may finally make it realistic.
The original idea was that by 2015, 10 missile launchers would be installed in Poland to shoot down intermediate and long-range nuclear missiles (ICBMs), guided by high-definition radar in the Czech Republic. The technology was to be based on interceptors tested in Alaska and California. But those had a success rate of only 50 per cent, under unrealistically favourable conditions.
One problem is that ICBMs fly as a . It takes a powerful rocket to catch one mid-flight and some miss – especially if the ICBM is accompanied by flak or dummy missiles. The US planned five interceptors for each ICBM, but they are expensive, which limited numbers.
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Apart from the technological headaches, it now appears that the system would have provided little defence against the countries that the US currently considers most threatening. Iran and North Korea have no ICBMs, but they do have hundreds of medium and short-range missiles, said James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, .
The 10 interceptors planned for Poland were supposed to take out two ICBMs heading for the US or western Europe from Iran (see map). They were not placed to hit missiles targeted at Iran’s neighbours, or even at Poland, and certainly could not handle hundreds. What’s more, Iran is thought unlikely to even have ICBMs until 2018 – if ever, given probable US retaliation to the launch of such a missile.
The programme also had political problems. It enraged Russia, leading it to threaten to scupper disarmament talks. Among other objections, Russia feared the interceptors could be modified to become short-range nuclear missiles, according to Cartwright. Obama’s cancellation eases that confrontation.
Meanwhile, the US has been developing an alternative system to shoot down short and medium-range missiles. This has passed eight anti-missile tests since 2007 – and the SM-3 missiles it uses cost a seventh as much as the Polish interceptors.
These are already being deployed as part of the ship-borne Aegis system, whose mobile sensors are less vulnerable targets than the big, fixed Czech radar would have been. Three of these ships will be in place by 2011, Cartwright says.
The US then plans to upgrade Aegis, moving it ashore and improving sensors to treble the area they cover by 2015. By 2018, says Cartwright, airborne sensors and bigger interceptors will defend all of Europe from missiles up to intermediate range. The system should handle ICBMs by 2020 – with Russian collaboration, he hopes.
“By 2018, the Aegis system will defend all of Europe from missiles up to intermediate range”
So missile defence is not dead. The difference, says Jeffrey Lewis of Washington DC think tank the New America Foundation, is that instead of a plan mainly meant to “make a political point to Russia” the US has “a defense that works, against a threat that exists”.
