'Son of Star Wars' is readied in Alaskan outpost
May 21, 2002
In the place where President Bush has chosen to draw a line in the sand against the ultimate terrorist threat, there is no sand and little sign of terrorists.
There was snow, at least there was until last week. There are moose, stalking over the open ground when the earthmovers allow, and even the odd grizzly bear.
Workers on contract to the US Army Corps of Engineers have been quietly clearing a large T-shaped swath of forest from the Fort Greely military reservation, 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle in the heart of Alaska, for nearly a year.
The site is invisible from civilian roads. The airspace above it is restricted. Visitors are vetted exhaustively and the perimeter is guarded by military police and a newly installed cordon of steel boxes 6ft high and filled with gravel.
Security is tight here and will get tighter. Starting on June 14, six months to the day after Mr Bush announced that the United States was withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed by Presidents Nixon and Brezhnev 30 years ago, excavators will gouge six yawning silos out of the Fort Greely earth.
By 2004 each of them will house a 65ft “exo-atmospheric kill vehicle” designed to intercept incoming nuclear missiles high over the Pacific Ocean.
Whether any of America’s enemies can or would launch a first nuclear strike of this kind is now beside the point. After two decades of debate the talking is over: Mr Bush believes that the threat is credible. Initial construction contracts worth $250 million (£171 million) were awarded last month.
Barring a humiliating U-turn for the White House, America is going to get some sort of missile defence shield, starting in Fort Greely.
It is bitterly cold here in winter, swarms with oversized mosquitoes by May and hauntingly remote, all of which is somehow apt. Few places could reflect more accurately the defiant unilateralism that Mr Bush brings this week to Europe, however artfully clothed in talk of co-operation with Russia.
His missile defence plans are part of a foreign policy based on crushing military superiority that Washington now wants to extend with technologies that none of its allies could conceive of building themselves and to which many of them remain strongly opposed.
The Pentagon insists that Fort Greely will be only a test site, at least at first. But, if the testing goes well, orders could come from Washington for 100 more silos and “kill vehicles” to fill them. There would be plenty of room.
“This is good for us and great for America,” said one local contractor who last week got the go-ahead to build a year-round work camp for 350 labourers on the edge of the reservation. Others in the Alaska Steakhouse in Delta Junction, the only source of liquor in the only civilian settlement within a two-hour drive, overwhelmingly agreed.
A year ago Fort Greely was virtually defunct. Its housing for 400 soldiers and their families stood empty and its pool tables were being sold for $25 each. Now being reborn as science fiction made fact, it is due for an injection of $400 million even if missile defence does not go beyond testing, and billions more if it does.
It is meant to operate as follows: alerted by military satellites over the north Pacific and enhanced early warning radar beacons in Alaska and California, Fort Greely would launch an interceptor roughly 20 minutes into the flight of any hostile ballistic missile heading for America.
Once airborne, the interceptor would be guided by a specially-built X-band radar station, probably installed on Shemya Island in the Aleutians and linked to a Battle Management Command and Control Centre at Fort Greely by 1,000 miles of fibre-optic cable. With three separate systems providing constant real-time telemetry the interceptor would be targeted to within a margin of error of a few feet and would be able to distinguish the incoming warhead from any decoys that it released. It would hit its target 150 miles above the Pacific at 15,000mph and the fruits of years of secret labour for a rogue state, international terrorist group or combination of the two would detonate harmlessly in outer space.
Whether missile defence will actually work is still a multibillion-dollar question. President Reagan’s plans for a space-based “Star Wars” shield were mothballed before they could be tested.
President Bush has enlisted every relevant technology, including giant lasers mounted on Boeing 747s, and is reserving judgment on which to use until the “north Pacific test bed” based at Fort Greely starts producing results.
Those obtained elsewhere are not encouraging. Two of America’s past five anti- missile tests failed when the interceptors missed their targets completely and none of the other three was fully realistic as the kill vehicles were fed their target data by the targets themselves.
Professor Theodore Postol, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claimed last year that the tests had been rigged and that fundamental design flaws meant that the kill vehicles would never find their prey. He had singlehandedly disproved the US Army’s boast of a 96 per cent success rate against Iraqi Scud missiles with the Patriot system during the Gulf War (he says that not a single Scud was intercepted) and the Pentagon took his new intervention seriously enough to send two agents to his office in an apparent attempt to intimidate him. It also demanded that his correspondence be classified. Officials say that his latest claims relate to an interceptor that is no longer being used. Even so, no replacement has been chosen.
That the White House is pressing ahead with missile defence at all has stunned many of its critics into silence. Before the September 11 attacks, Russia, China, most European governments, many US Democrats and some Republicans agreed that any anti-missile shield would be technically fraught, prohibitively expensive, diplomatically risky and above all strategically wrong, since it countered a threat that went out with the Cold War. These critics seized on the September atrocities as tragic proof that America’s enemies would find alternatives to building their own missiles.
Mr Bush and his advisers declared that, on the contrary, if terrorists or states that sponsored them did have missiles, they would use them. Resistance crumbled. Congressional Democrats dropped their vetoes on spending and tests that violated the ABM treaty. The treaty was torn up and “Son of Star Wars” was born.