Flawed and Dangerous U.S. Missile Defense Plan

Flawed and Dangerous U.S. Missile Defense Plan
http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2010_05/Lewis-Postol

George N. Lewis and Theodore A. Postol

On September 17, 2009, the Obama administration announced that it would shelve the Bush administration's European missile defense system and replace it with an entirely new missile defense architecture. This decision to stop the deployment of 10 interceptors in Poland and an X-band radar in the Czech Republic had two extremely positive results: it scrapped a technically flawed missile defense system that could never produce a useful level of defense for Europe, and it averted a potentially disastrous foreign policy confrontation with Russia.

Less than five months later, in February, the Obama administration produced an extensive elaboration of the September decision in a document called the Ballistic Missile Defense Review Report. The report asserts that ballistic missile defense technologies have already produced a reliable and robust defense of the United States against limited intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attacks. According to the report, the technologies now in hand will make it possible for the United States to build a global missile defense system that is so capable, flexible, and reliable that potential adversaries will see that they have no choice but to de-emphasize their efforts to use ballistic missiles as a way to obtain their political goals.

However, a review of the actual state of missile defense technologies reveals that this new vision put forth by the report is nothing more than a fiction and that the policy strategy that follows from these technical myths could well lead to a foreign policy disaster.

With regard to current missile defense technologies, there are no new material facts to support any of the claims in the report that suggest that the United States is now in a position to defend itself from limited ICBM attacks or that any of the fundamental unsolved problems associated with high-altitude ballistic missile defenses have been solved. In fact, as this article will show, the most recent ballistic missile defense flight-test data released by the Department of Defense and the most recent failed test of the ground-based missile defense system in January show quite the opposite.