Missile defense—intercepting missiles before they reach detonation altitude—could amplify this protection. The threat is hardly theoretical; as indicated above, Iran has successfully tested a missile in EMP mode. A big and unanswered question is when Iran will have an ICBM ready, to cover the 6,350-mile distance between Tehran and Washington, D.C. One report has Iran already having purchased a pair of Chinese DF-31 ICBMs, whose range is 5,000 miles. These have sufficient range to cover all of Europe.
Iran has already launched small satellites into space. Doing so requires accelerating a rocket to an orbital velocity of five miles per second, faster than the four-mile-per-second velocity achieved by ICBMs that traverse space en route to their targets. Iran’s ICBM quest awaits two milestones: when it miniaturizes nuclear warheads, so they are small and light enough to be carried by Iran’s ballistic missiles; and when it achieves sufficient accuracy to put those missiles close to intended targets. Because Iran’s likely targets will be cities, the ICBMs they deploy need not have the pinpoint accuracy, within the radius of several football fields, achieved by U.S. ICBMs.
Currently Iran has the intermediate-range Shahab-3, with a 1,200-mile reach. To reach the continental United States, a Shahab-3 would have to be launched from a base inside the Western Hemisphere. And as it happens, Iran has found just such a base in Venezuela, courtesy of Venezuela’s anti-American president Hugo Chavez. From Caracas to Miami is 1,000 miles, well within the range of the Shahab-3. But being smaller than an ICBM, Shahab missiles will require warheads of greater miniaturization than those for an ICBM. Chavez may succumb to cancer before 2012 ends, but if his followers seize power, then Iran’s basing option will remain open. Meanwhile, six Persian Gulf states have indicated interest in deploying a missile defense shield backed by the U.S., to counter the growing Iranian threat.
Currently deployed missile defense systems can shoot down intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs), which travel at about two miles per second. At twice that speed ICBMs are far too fast for existing defense systems to reliably track and destroy. America’s current deployment is minimal, and not effective against an EMP launch.
Such launches pose an additional as yet unmet challenge: they follow a steep trajectory that today’s missile defense systems are not designed to intercept. Existing systems intercept warheads as they descend. But an EMP warhead is detonated at maximum altitude, and will have done its work before today’s systems can perform their defensive mission.
What is ultimately needed is a system like the recently cancelled Airborne Laser, which was carried on a Boeing 747 aircraft and aimed at missiles as they rose off the launch pad or in early stages of flight. The ABL was ended because its technology was considered not good enough. We must put American ingenuity to work anew on this vital task. New directed energy systems—especially those based on ships, which would draw from the vast electric power produced aboard ships (far greater than that generated in any aircraft)—offer promise for improved missile defense in the medium and longer term.
Missile defense needs were examined in the Rumsfeld Commission report, which presented four unanimous broad conclusions:
1. Nuclear missile threats posed by hostile nations to America and its allies are growing.
2. Emerging offensive missile capabilities are “broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly” than realized in the intelligence community.
3. The ability of our intelligence to provide “timely and accurate” estimates of these threats is eroding.
4. Warning times are shrinking and may in some cases be minimal.
Given emerging perils, it is essential that missile defense technology be unleashed, not retarded, by existing arms accords, including New START, and that development on multiple types rapidly proceed. The need for this technology is urgent.
Which makes all the more worrisome President Obama’s identification of missile defense as of “particular” interest in accommodating Moscow’s desires after the November election.
The danger of EMP may seem remote. But failure to protect against it—by hardening essential infrastructure and strengthening missile defense—greatly increases the payoff for surprise attacks, and thus the chance they will be carried out and succeed. The potentially catastrophic consequences of EMP underscore the importance of nuclear-age history’s Eleventh Lesson: NEVER ALLOW SINGLE OR LOW-NUMBER POINTS OF CATASTROPHIC VULNERABILITY.
14.
THE PERILOUS PRESENT: BEYOND MYTHIC PASTS AND FANTASY FUTURES
How the Great Democracies Triumphed, and so Were able to Resume the Follies Which Had so Nearly Cost Them Their Life.
LESSONS DRAWN FROM THE NUCLEAR AGE DURING ITS FIRST TWO-THIRDS of a century cannot predict every crisis to come. History does not always repeat itself, but if we are to disregard what history teaches we should have good reason to do so—reason grounded in facts, and logical inferences drawn from those facts. We also should hold a keen appreciation of the intractability of human nature and how that nature affects global politics.
The civilized person recoils at the utter moral insanity and ultimate strategic futility of nuclear war. But defending and preserving civilization from its worst enemies, some of highly dubious stability, necessitates considering how to prevent the very real prospect that nuclear weapons will be used for the first time since 1945. The prospect of such a hideous, civilization-altering event seems to be growing as time passes. There is no time to waste in remedying unfortunate turns in nuclear policy and restoring more prudent policies so as to confront emerging nuclear dangers.
The select community of serious nuclear strategists, often satirized as enamored of matters at once esoteric and macabre, diligently and creatively pondered ways to avoid nuclear Armageddon. They got things right enough to help guide the civilized world through the era of super-power contest. Their collected wisdom coupled with history’s nuclear-age lessons offers the civilized world the best—and the last—chance to defeat the emerging, malignant nuclear actors of the twenty-first century before nuclear demons seize the world stage.
The bombs of 1945 generated a powerful current of opinion among leaders and the citizenry—the belief that those blinding atomic flashes had rendered traditional principles of geopolitics and war obsolete. The advent of the nuclear age coincided with the creation of the United Nations, which was to accomplish after World War II’s global carnage what the League of Nations had failed to do after the slaughter of World War I’s trenches. It is understandable that with tens of millions of lives already lost in what was to prove history’s bloodiest century, the prospect of destruction on a vastly greater scale—made possible by the potentially unlimited thermonuclear power of the hydrogen bomb—would drive pacifist passions and utopian yearnings.
Events since 1945 have proven the dolorous refutation of such beliefs and hopes. The nuclear genie is not only still out of the bottle, it has multiplied. Malignant actors are now in possession of nuclear technology and could well have it within their power to fatally wound modern civilization in the not-too-distant future. The five members of the original nuclear club have been joined by four more, with only one of these, Israel, a truly stable democratic state that would not use nuclear weapons save if its literal survival required it. India is a democracy, fairly stable, but going through an economic and social transformation that will test that stability. Pakistan is rife with Islamist fervor and anti-American passions. A mysterious clique of xenophobic tyrants runs North Korea. Iran is approaching nuclear membership but is neither stable nor pacific in its strategic aspirations. Its revolutionary leaders desire to attain regional hegemony in the Mideast, driving American influence to the periphery, and then ultimately to destroy Western civilization.