Laws of Physics vs. Boost-Phase Missile Defense, Round 1
by Matt Martin
Unless the laws of physics change fundamentally over the next fifteen months, it is virtually guaranteed that at least one of the three missile defense systems the U.S. administration is deploying in October 2004 will be ineffective and a waste of billions of dollars. Most alarming, the Missile Defense Agency, the very agency that controls U.S. missile defense development, has no plans to argue that this conclusion is wrong.
The recent report from the American Physical Society, the nation’s professional society for physicists, on “Boost-Phase Intercept Systems for National Missile Defense” is very careful to limit their conclusions to technical aspects and physics analysis. But it does not take much of a stretch to draw policy conclusions with such devastating statements as “Intercepting missiles while their rockets are still burning would not be an effective approach for defending the U.S. against attacks by an important type of enemy missile.” Unfortunately for us, the type of enemy missile in question is exactly the type of missile that rogue states such as Iran and North Korea are likely to have by the time a boost-phase missile defense system is up and running.
The inherent problems of boost-phase missile defense are purely matters of acceleration, trajectories, weight, and scarcity of time. “Only two to three minutes would be available to achieve a boost-phase intercept, even assuming substantial improvements in systems for detecting and tracking missiles. Consequently, even fast interceptors…would be unable to catch solid-propellant ICBMs in time,” according to the APS Study Group co-chair Frederick Lamb.
Simply put, it is physically impossible to intercept fast ICBMs in their boost phase, because the boost phase is too short, the interceptor basing locations are ineffective, and decision-making would need to be nearly instantaneous. The Study Group investigated all of the boost-phase programs in development or in consideration for development, including land-, sea-, air-based interceptors, space-based interceptors, and the Airborne Laser. One by one, they each fail.
Land-based and sea-based interceptors need to be too close to the enemy—for North Korea, actually based inside North Korea itself. Space-based interceptors would require a “fleet of a thousand or more orbiting satellites just to intercept a single missile.” Airborne Laser would not be able to “disable solid-propellant ICBMs at ranges useful for defending the United States.”
Despite these conclusions, the Missile Defense Agency will spend nearly $1 billion in 2004 on boost-phase missile defense, and the October 2004 deployment announced by President Bush includes “up to 20 sea-based interceptors employed on existing Aegis ships to intercept ballistic missiles in the first few minutes after they are launched, during the boost and ascent phases of flight.”
Following the release of the report, the Missile Defense Agency issued a short statement stating that the agency remains “confident” about in their decisions. “We continue to believe that boost phase technology has great potential, for playing a vital role in a layered missile defense,” according to the statement. A follow-up communication with the agency revealed that they have no plans to issue any further response to the APS report.
While urgent, practical priorities such as homeland security face billions of dollars of budgetary shortfalls now, the administration plans to bury its head in the sand and continue to pour billions into a missile defense approach that cannot be effective either now or in the future. Then again, we can always hold out hope that gravity, the law of conservation of energy, and other principles of physics stop functioning. Maybe then, just maybe, boost-phase missile defense will work.