02/19/13 – Kingston Reif – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest today is Kingston Reif.
He is Director of Nuclear Nonproliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.
He keeps the blog Nukes of Hazard at nukesofhazardblog.com.
And he wrote this piece for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called, Does Missile Defense Work?
And I think that question mark might as well be a no.
Welcome back to the show.
Welcome to the show for the first time.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
Great article.
A very interesting subject to me.
First of all, the amount of money involved.
Second of all, I don't ever want to get nuked in my jammies in the middle of the night if I can avoid it.
And so I sort of kind of somewhere back in the back of my head, I got the idea that maybe it would be legitimate for my government to work on having a missile defense system if they weren't running roughshod, picking fights all over the globe.
But, you know, if they had a real defensive strategy, then maybe I wouldn't have a problem with this.
But then also it would have to work to be worth all the money.
And it sounds to me like you don't think it works very well at all.
Well, I certainly take your sentiment about how clearly none of us wants to have their weapons be used against the United States.
Or as you as you nicely put it, I don't want to be being nuked in my pajamas.
But absolutely, the condition for deploying a missile defense system should be that it proves to be effective in operationally realistic conditions.
That means in conditions that the defense would actually have to combat an enemy missile launch from, say, a North Korea and Iran.
And the testing of our missile defense systems to date has proven that particularly the system that we have to defend against intercontinental range ballistic missiles has not proven to be particularly effective.
Not to mention that Iran has yet to demonstrate a capability to deliver a long range missile capable of reaching the U.S. homeland, nor has North Korea, although it appears to be making progress in that regard, as demonstrated by its recent successful launch of a rocket in December of 2012.
Well, I'd say forget Iran.
That's all just a red herring.
They've demonstrated no interest in obtaining nuclear weapons this entire time.
That's all just a bunch of hype.
North Korea, on the other hand, you know, something different.
And I guess sometime in the future, presumably they will be able to reach San Francisco or something like that with a ballistic missile.
Well, let me ask you this.
When they do all these tests, you know, we hear from time to time, wow, look, they got an interception.
And then we hear a couple of days later, well, you know, they pre-programmed the missiles where in the sky to meet that kind of thing.
Have they ever had a successful test that wasn't put on like that?
Well, I think it is fair to characterize the tests of our long range missile defense interceptors as highly scripted.
For example, to my knowledge, our long range defense system has yet to be tested against potential adversary decoys or countermeasures.
And the U.S. intelligence community believes that if North Korea or Iran decides to and then becomes capable of developing a missile that is capable of hitting the U.S. homeland, they would also have the capability to pretty cheaply develop decoys and countermeasures designed to fool U.S. missile defense systems.
And scientific report after scientific report have made it very clear that in order to be effective, the U.S. missile defense systems will have to demonstrate the capability to deal with decoys and countermeasures, and they have yet to do so.
Furthermore, our existing long range defenses, and note that we have about 30 long range missile defense interceptors deployed in Alaska and California currently, this system has yet to be tested against any kind of target test missile with an intercontinental range.
So that is to say that the system has yet to even be tested against the kind of missile that to be launched from Iran or North Korea that would be needed to hit the United States.
And here's even another one for you.
Of the 30 or so interceptors that we currently have deployed in Alaska and California, approximately 10 of them are a newer, more updated version of the interceptor.
And these newer interceptors have yet to go through a successful flight interceptor test to say nothing about actually being tested against decoys or countermeasures or a target missile with an intercontinental range.
That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
So wait a minute, I ask you, hey, have they ever done a test where they didn't script it and where they it wasn't both missiles weren't pre-programmed where to meet in the air?
And your answer was, actually, no, they never tested them at all.
Never mind, even the scripted ones, that was some other missile model or something, I guess you're telling me.
Well, so basically what I'm trying to say is the existing interceptors that we have, they've been tested in highly scripted conditions, but they haven't been tested in an environment that one might call operationally realistic.
I see.
Okay.
So they have done tests, but just not...
Well, I thought you said not against the kind of missile that North Korea could have.
They haven't been tested against the missile of an intercontinental range.
So yes, the kind of missile...
So even scripted or not.
Right, right.
So the kind of missile that North Korea would need to reach the U.S. homeland, a missile of that kind of range, no, they have not been tested against them.
Well, all right.
So now tell me this, are these heat-seeking missiles?
Ah, no, they're not heat-seeking missiles.
The idea behind the U.S. missile defense system is called a hit-to-kill.
So during the Cold War, when we were initially interested in developing missile defense systems for a while, we actually flirted with having nuclear-tipped interceptors, the idea being that you just blow up a big area in space and hope to get the incoming missiles.
But obviously, there were a lot of downsides to doing that.
So the idea behind the current defense is to have what's called a kill vehicle atop a long-range booster rocket and to launch this thing into the atmosphere.
And the idea is to hit an incoming enemy missile with this kill vehicle and have the actual force, the kinetic force of the kill vehicle, actually run into an incoming warhead and destroy it kinetically in that way.
So these interceptors don't contain any kind of explosive, just uses the force and speed of the impact with an incoming warhead to destroy it.
And then, so I guess it would just be radar-guided then?
Right, exactly.
And there's a whole network of radars, both based on the ground and in space.
Well, you know, I talked with Gordon Prather about this.
He's a nuclear physicist and former nuclear weapons maker of some kind, I don't know.
And he said that the only approach that could ever work would be what you mentioned there, nuclear-tipped interceptors, really neutron bombs, enhanced radiation bombs, that would go off in space and would attempt to short-circuit all of the wiring.
I guess they could harden it, try to harden them.
If we're talking about the Russians or the Chinese, at least, they could assume, I guess maybe they could harden their electronics or whatever.
But Gordon was saying that, you know, trying to shoot them down with radar-guided or heat-seeking missiles is just a fool's errand.
Trying to hit a bullet with a bullet on the edge of space like that or whatever, it's just never going to happen.
And I guess he's not thinking so much about a single North Korean nuke, although maybe it'd be the same thing.
But certainly, if you're talking about Russian nukes coming over the pole, the only thing you can do is try to set off as many neutron bombs in space as you can and prevent them from coming down on top of the United States.
Well, a couple things about that.
First of all, on the hitting a bullet with a bullet, there have, in fact, been some pretty remarkable technical advances in our ability to, in effect, do missile defense to the point where we have been able to demonstrate a capability to hit a bullet with a bullet.
The problem is we've demonstrated that capability, as you and I discussed earlier, under highly scripted conditions, number one.
And number two, we haven't demonstrated the capability to deal with decoys or countermeasures that an adversary could deploy with its long-range missiles.
And which China and Russia both would have multiple re-entry vehicles that two-thirds of them would be decoys, right?
Exactly, exactly.
And that, we have not been able to demonstrate a capability to do that, despite decades of trying.
In fact, a recent report, which I mentioned in my article, by the National Research Council, really took the agency in the Pentagon, designed with managing and developing our missile defense systems, to task for, as it described, an almost hobby shop approach to dealing with the decoy and countermeasure problem.
And, in fact, noted that we haven't made very much progress in that regard, despite the fact that it's essential to having an effective defense.
And in terms of one of the advantages, getting back to this issue of having nuclear-armed interceptors, obviously, there are many downsides.
But in theory, one of the advantages would be, is that in addition to just destroying the actual warheads, you'd be able to destroy the decoys and countermeasures as well.
And you just, you know, take care of it all.
Well, now, when they did the Iron Dome thing in the last invasion of Gaza, I mean, they're basically just shooting down bottle rockets, and they didn't even do better than 70-something percent, right?
And these are just, they might as well have been throwing rocks over the wall.
Well, and this is, excuse me for a second, this is one of the big misconceptions about the Iron Dome system, which is that it wasn't dealing with the kind of long-range missiles that, you know, a North Korea or Iran, in the event they ever acquired those, would actually launch against the United States.
As you noted, the missiles the Iron Dome was dealing with were very short-range rockets, all of which operated inside of the atmosphere, meaning, you know, there were no real decoys or countermeasures.
And just the difference in speed, for example, between something like Iron Dome and something like an intercontinental ballistic range missile is just, there's a huge orders-of-magnitude difference.
So the challenge in dealing with something like Iron Dome, you know, was much less difficult than longer-range or intercontinental-range ballistic missiles.
That's not to say that what the Israelis did was a remarkable achievement, because they were able to shoot a lot of these sort of more primitive rockets launched from the Gaza Strip down.
But we should be mindful of the fact that there's enormous difference between trying to shoot down slower, shorter-range, much shorter-range rockets, and which, by the way, these rockets were armed with conventional arms, not nuclear weapons.
Right.
And then trying to shoot down, you know, a much longer-range missile that's going much faster, that operates outside the atmosphere, that could include decoys and countermeasures, and that, you know, potentially could have nuclear weapons on it.
Yeah, it's funny how many people cited that as proof of the efficacy.
Missile defense works because of, right, Iron Dome, exactly.
Yeah, it's ridiculous.
Yeah, I think it was Rand Paul was saying, oh, yeah, we ought to ring Washington, D.C. with this.
Like there's, you know, an Indian reservation right outside a town where they're throwing bottle rockets over the wall.
Yeah, well, Paul actually said that we should protect numerous sites in D.C. with a kind of Iron Dome-like system, including the U.S. Capitol.
And we joked internally here at our office that, and noted that, well, in fact, the Capitol already has an Iron Dome.
Yeah, well, don't you go getting detailed on him.
He's going to get lost.
It looks like marble from here.
I don't know.
Anyway, all right.
So listen, let me ask you about money.
I just read a thing this morning at Alternet about here's the top five or top ten military industrial complex fund recipients in Congress.
And Buck McKeon was the number one on the list.
And then I flipped over to your article and I thought, yeah, I did read his name in this thing.
He's the number one proponent of missile defense in Congress.
Well, there certainly is a pork barrel element to the U.S. funding for U.S. missile defense programs.
And it's pretty ingenious if you look at it closely, because nearly every state in the United States has some kind of program related to missile defense, which means a lot of congressional districts have some kind of program related to missile defense.
And this isn't something that's just specific to missile defense.
This relates to other defense programs as well.
So in turn, you have pretty strong bipartisan support overall for the missile defense effort.
Obviously, some members get a little bit more than others.
But that is one thing that advocates of a more sensible approach to missile defense have to take into account, that there is overwhelming bipartisan support for key aspects of the program, in part because there are constituencies for it all across the country.
Can you give us any kind of ballpark about how much money has been spent on this since, I don't know if you want to go back to Reagan or since the 21st century?
Right.
Well, since the Missile Defense Agency, which is the Pentagon agency tasked with developing and researching U.S. missile defense, has a chart up on its website.
And since 1985 is how far back it goes, it lists about well over $150 billion in spending on U.S. missile defense systems.
And I think the most recent chart goes up until about from 1985 to about 2011.
So that's $150 billion in a period of about 25 years or so.
But that doesn't include a lot of the expenditures on missile defense systems before 1985, and there were many.
Nor does it include expenditures on missile defense systems that sort of fall outside the jurisdiction of the Missile Defense Agency.
For example, the U.S. Army's Patriot missile defense system, which most people have probably heard of.
So it's an enormous amount of money.
I don't have an exact figure.
But as I said, the Missile Defense Agency has the figure of about $150 billion.
All right.
Now, really, most importantly, I guess it's sort of a good thing we save this till last.
You talk about in your article the false sense of security that that assuming, well, never mind if it works, right?
If D.C. believes that it works, then that means that they basically have better armor to wear to their fistfight, which just is a bad incentive for them to go and cause more trouble.
And then you also mentioned in there how China might react.
Say we start putting more and more missile defense systems installed in South Korea that, you know, to them, we have this whole other Asia pivot policy, obviously, which is all about containing them.
They're going to see, oh, yeah, right.
The threat of a North Korean missile as a red herring and that the whole thing is really about them just the same way as the Russians don't believe for a minute.
And why would they?
That missile defense systems installed in Poland have anything to do with Iran when it's all about creating the ability to do a first strike on them.
At least that would be their assumption, right?
And so they end up by just building this defensive system.
They end up really creating it's just part of an offensive system and one that's more likely to get us into trouble, especially if it seems to undo the old doctrine of mutually assured destruction.
If the American generals think that they really have a chance to take out all or enough of the Russian nukes on the first shot and shoot down whatever's left coming in, that they can get away with a first strike, they might just take it or at least then the Russians trigger finger on on their retaliatory strike has to become that much itchier and closer and, you know, strike on less warning kind of thing.
They really could screw up a lot of the balance of power in the world with this bogus missile defense program is what I'm getting at.
No, well, the Russians and the Chinese have clearly expressed a lot of concern about the direction of U.S. missile defense programs.
You are right in noting that one of the risks of specifically designing missile defense against Russia and China is that it is that it could undermine stability with those two countries and cause them to take steps such as perhaps building up their nuclear forces that that in turn are are detrimental to U.S. security.
In Russia's case, they're concerned that that the plan we have for missile defense in Europe will ultimately or later phases of that system could one day be directed at them.
And then, as you sort of alluded to, the Chinese are worried that that the missile defense systems were were building up with our allies in East Asia could also be not simply directed in North Korea, but could be directed at them as well.
And I think that's the case to the extent that we are going to move forward with regional missile defense systems in Europe and in East Asia that we have to be pursuing much more transparency and confidence building with Russia and China about the real intentions for our missile defense programs to ensure that they don't take steps in response to these these deployments that could lessen both our security and the security of our allies.
And today, I don't think we have been nearly transparent enough with with either country about about what it is we're planning to pursue, because if the real intention of these systems is only directed against Iran and North Korea, then there are things that we should be able to do with Russia and China to ensure that it is, in fact, the case.
Right.
But it's not.
That's the thing is it's a ridiculous lie.
And when George Bush first told it, the whole world laughed.
There was Putin was live on on TV that night, laughing and guffawing and slapping his thigh.
And all the TV news people agreed to everybody knew that this is the dumbest thing anybody ever heard.
They're putting missile defense systems in Poland on Russia's border to protect from Iran.
Iran's threat to Poland.
This was a ridiculous joke when they debuted it.
And no one even pretended to take it seriously until Barack Obama repeated the same stupid nonsense.
Well, and this was one of the reasons why ultimately the Obama administration was forced to abandon the Bush administration's plan for putting long range missile defense interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic, because and particularly in the Czech Republic case, they they their parliament was simply not going to accept this plan.
And so I thought they were going ahead in Poland, though, no.
Well, the poll, the polls was a different story.
But we were going to put 10 interceptors in Poland and we were going to put a radar in the Czech Republic.
The Czech the Czechs basically told us, no, you're not putting in a radar in in our country.
So that was one of the reasons why the Obama administration was was decided to to shift course to a system that was, at least at the beginning, based more on U.S. ships in the Mediterranean and that was more mobile and also a system that focused initially on the short and medium range missile threat, which, oh, by the way, also happened to be the kinds of missiles that Iran has.
But back to your point about, you know, the Russian concerns about this system, an interesting opportunity here may be that the later phase of the Obama administration's plan for missile defense in Europe is is supposed to be a system that is designed to deal with a long range missile threat coming from Iran.
Well, one obvious suggestion would be if the Iran missile threat develops much more slowly than anticipated, that the idea being that if they don't actually move forward with developing an intercontinental range missile and there's no indication to this point that they've made a decision to do so, do we really need then to move forward with the fourth phase of the current plan and to put long range interceptors in in Eastern Europe?
If the if the Iranian threat isn't isn't developing as planned, I think there's a case a case to be to be made for not deploying that aspect of the system, which which in turn could assuage Russia's concerns.
There you go.
All right.
I'm sorry we got to leave it there.
Thank you so much for your time, Kingston.
It's been good.
My pleasure, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That is Kingston Reif.
He is director of nuclear nonproliferation at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, and he keeps the blog nukes of hazard at nukes of hazard blog dot com.
And you can check out his recent article at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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