United Press International,
WASHINGTON: When President Ronald Reagan first unfolded the vision of ballistic missile defense a quarter century ago, his vision was of an “Astrodome defense” — the high-tech equivalent of an impregnable fortification that could and would protect the United States and other nations for many years to come from the threat of nuclear missile attack.
But at a time when more nations than ever before are jumping onboard the BMD express and joining the United States in developing it, and when the United States and other nations are chalking up successes in developing the necessary technology almost by the week, the strategic and technical reality of BMD is very different. It is real; it is in many respects technically feasible and some aspects of it are already with us — and have been, in fact, for at least a decade and a half. But that reality is not Astrodome. It is rather the High Frontier equivalent of the great Naval Arms Race before World War I and the Air Power arms race before World War II.
In other words, BMD, not merely as it exists and is today and is conceptualized by Pentagon planners for the foreseeable future, but in its essential nature, is not a secure fortification but a never-ending race against a formidable, evolving and adaptive enemy.
This is already the case in the renewed strategic arms race between the United States and Russia which, as detailed in previous BMD Focus columns, is already developing a pace, complexity and cost on both sides not seen since the last great nuclear missile arms spurt of the Cold War a quarter of a century ago.
But the same dynamic of consistently evolving forces of ballistic missile offense and defense, each seeking continually to leapfrog and negate the most recent advances of each other, can also now be seen in two spin-off nuclear races in different parts of the world: Those between India and Pakistan and between Israel and Iran.
Examples of this ever changing “leap frog” reality in BMD are on every side.
The United States is now giving increasing consideration to boost phase interceptor systems to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles when they are in their first and hitherto slowest, and therefore most vulnerable, ascent stage after launching.
But Russia and now even Iran are responding to this threat by pushing ahead with the development and deployment as fast as possible of solid fuel missiles that accelerate far faster out of the silo. The latest upgraded versions of Russian land-mobile SS-27 Topol-M and Bulava, submarine-launched ICBMs will therefore be solid fuel-powered. They will also be launched in far lower courses making them, again, less vulnerable to interceptor destruction during flight, and they are being upgraded to carry Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) warheads, each of which will also have its own independent maneuvering capabilities to again throw off interceptor missiles.
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