FEATURE4 Missile Defence
Missile defence has come a long way since the late President Ronald Reagan called on American scientists in a speech in 1983 to create what became known as a “Star Wars” shield to protect the United States from a mass Soviet nuclear strike.
While the politics of such a vision led to new confrontations with the Russians and threatened to provoke a space arms race, American scientists and engineers, backed by funding approved by Congress, got on with the job of meeting their President’s wishes.
Since 1985, when the research and development effort began in earnest, the US has spent or earmarked more than $124 billion (£75 billion) on the Star Wars scheme and nearly $8 billion has been approved for next year.
The world security environment has now changed dramatically, and the Star Wars programme has metamorphosed into the “son of Star Wars” — less ambitious and more focused but still expensive and politically provocative.
In the intervening years, however, huge technological progress has been made, and the basic idea of intercepting an incoming nuclear ballistic missile or group of missiles has been proven.
The ground-based interceptors located in Alaska and California have no warheads. All they have to do is hit an incoming re-entry vehicle (the nuclear, chemical or biological warhead) in space. The interceptor, travelling at 7,000mph only has to nick the enemy warhead, exceeding 15,000 miles an hour, for the result to be an explosion of debris and dust.
There were some early test failures but the Americans are now happy that this element of the missile defence programme will work against a limited nuclear strike from a country such as North Korea.
The original Star Wars concept of a layered missile defence still applies but the Reagan dream, which included the idea of space-based platforms equipped with particle-beam firing weapons, has been reduced to a more realistic and more affordable system.
This includes equipping US Navy Aegis-class warships with weapons capable of knocking out enemy missiles in the so-called mid-course or terminal phase of their journey.
This component of the son of Star Wars has also been proven and is already in service. About 15 US destroyers and three cruisers have been fitted with Standard missiles that are capable of intercepting enemy rockets, just like the systems based at Fort Greely in Alaska and at Vandenberg airbase in California.
With such huge funding still being approved by Congress, US scientists have also carried out tests on an airborne laser, fitted to a modified Boeing 747 that can destroy ballistic missiles by heating them until they fail structurally. The megawatt laser can deposit lethal amounts of energy on missiles hundreds of miles from the aircraft and can destroy them in the boost phase of their flight.
None of these systems would function effectively without worldwide missile-tracking radar facilities, and the Americans have been installing such systems in locations around the globe: notably, upgrading the radar early-warning site at RAF Fylingdales in North Yorkshire and deploying X-band radar in Japan and Israel.
The American missile defence experts wanted to install interceptors in Poland and another radar facility in the Czech Republic because technical analysis showed that Poland and the Czech Republic were the optimal locations for fielding US missile defence assets in Europe.
(michael evans , Times Online, 17September2009)
