Missile Madness
By Peter A Buxbaum for ISN
"Please join us for a viewing of a modern-day external pageReefer Madness, the Heritage Foundation's film about nuclear threats, 33 Minutes," read the external pageinvitation from the Center for American Progress (CAP), invoking the memory of a 1930s film on the descent into insanity and criminality of a group of marijuana smokers. The film became a cult classic in the 1970s.
That the liberal CAP should be promoting a conservative think tank's film is unusual, except that the point of the program was to expose inaccuracies in the film.
The film's title refers to the time it would take for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), presumably launched by a rogue state such as North Korea or Iran, to reach the continental US.
The issue pits those, like Heritage, who would like to rely on US technological prowess to defeat missile threats against those who believe such measures are futile and would rely instead on deterrence and arms reduction negotiations.
The high-budget, high-definition "33 Minutes" makes an unabashed appeal to raw fear, featuring shots of missile launches surrounded by flames against the backdrop of pictures of vulnerable cities and beaches, all in an effort to explain the need for a national missile defense system to protect the US against the threat of global missile proliferation.
What if, the film asks, a terrorist group were to acquire an ICBM, arm it with a nuclear warhead, shoot it at the US and explode it one kilometer over the center of the country? The resulting electromagnetic pulse could disable much of the electrical infrastructure from New York to Los Angeles.
It goes on to advocate further investments in a space-based, national missile defense system that could intercept and shoot down the incoming missile.
The film's arguments are based on "lies," said Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based nonproliferation and security grant-making organization and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, who spoke at the CAP event, attended by ISN Security Watch.
The lies fall into two basic categories, according to Cirincione: that the technology could work and that the threat is there.
"I would like to have an effective ballistic missile defense system. I would like to have a cure for cancer. I would like to have a really good light beer," said Cirincione. "Some things are just beyond our technological capabilities." As for the threat of a terrorist missile strike, the film "failed to show that any such attack was even remotely likely,” he said.
Cirincione does not oppose all missile defense systems. On the contrary, he supports efforts to bolster theater missile defense, but claims that a national missile defense system that would intercept ICBMs in space is not doable.
"We have the ability to hit a bullet with a bullet, and that is a remarkable technological achievement," Cirincione said, referring to the ability of an interceptor missile to hit and destroy an incoming rocket. "But that is only when the incoming missile is actually cooperating with the defense system."
Long-range missiles have the ability to confound defending missiles in space with countermeasures such as radio-frequency jamming and decoys, Cirincione explained.
The most recent US attempt, on 1 February, to shoot down a ballistic missile mimicking an attack from Iran failed due to a radar malfunction, external pagenews outlets reported.
Theater missile defenses such as the Patriot system, on the other hand, have learned to discern a decoy from a real missile and to overcome other countermeasures.
National vs theater systems
The US military leadership agrees with Cirincione's assessment to the extent that it has cut back on national missile defense programs while bolstering theater systems. In recent years, the Pentagon has cut the ground-based missile defense (GMD), multiple kill vehicle (MKV), kinetic energy interceptor (KEI) and airborne laser (ABL) systems, while adding resources to theater missile defense systems such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THADD) system, the ship-based Aegis ballistic missile defense system and the battle-tested Patriot system.
Overall funding for missile defense stands at $9.2 billion in the US government's fiscal year 2010 budget. The2011 budget request, released by the Pentagon on 1 February, requests $9.9 billion.
For Cirincione, deterrence and negotiations are the key protective measures against long-range state-sponsored missile attacks. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) kept the US and the Soviet Union from nuking each other during the Cold War.
But US conservatives have long felt culturally uncomfortable with such a doctrine undergirding US defense policy, according to Cirincione. "They don't want to feel that kind of vulnerability," he said, "and they don't want to engage with adversaries. They would rather sit back and let a missile defense system protect them."
Conservatives often point to their hero, Ronald Reagan, as the progenitor of national missile defense. But the Star Wars system envisioned by Reagan never came to fruition because it was technically unfeasible, Cirincione pointed out. Conservatives often distort Reagan's record, he added, by ignoring the fact that Reagan negotiated major nuclear arms reduction agreements with the Soviet Union. Since 1987, Cirincione said, the number of long-range ballistic missiles held by nations potentially hostile to the US has shrunk from 3,000 to 900.
The Heritage Foundation argues that today's threats do not resemble the Soviet Union, a country with which the US had a close working relationship, despite many tensions. Instead, rogue states like Iran and North Korea are now developing long-range missile capabilities.
But Cirincione counters that not even the leaders of Iran and North Korea are crazy enough to launch a missile strike against the US homeland. "They know if they did that, their country would cease to exist," he said, referring to the inevitable US counterstrike. "And how long will that take? About 33 minutes."