nuclear-news

The national missile defense fantasy—again

Bulletin, By Joe Cirincione | February 4, 2025

National missile defense advocates live in a world of magic and make-believe. Fantasy replaces science, assertions replace facts, and cartoon weapons replace real capabilities.

This enduring fantasy, however, has real-world consequences.

President Donald Trump’s pledge last week to build “a next-generation missile defense shield” that would “defeat any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland [with] space-based interceptors” has provoked a predictable reaction. Russia blasted Trump’s plan, detailed in his new executive order, “The Iron Dome for America.”

But no magic shield is going to protect the United States against nuclear attack.

An idea that never dies. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Friday of Trump’s plan that “it directly envisages a significant strengthening of the American nuclear arsenal and means for conducting combat operations in space, including the development and deployment of space-based interception systems.”

“We consider this as another confirmation of the US focus on turning space into an arena of armed confrontation… and the deployment of weapons there,” Zakharova added.

The Russian reaction could scuttle Trump’s stated desire to negotiate limits on nuclear weapons. If so, it would repeat the role strategic defenses have played in the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. Efforts to build national defenses always trigger efforts to overcome them with more missiles and other counter-measures—the well-known security dilemma.

Despite all the formidable technical and geopolitical evidence against such schemes, however, “faith in national missile defense never dies,” Washington Post columnist Max Boot observes.

It is no coincidence that Trump’s new order is lifted almost entirely from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 wish list. In the 1980s, the group championed President Ronald Reagan’s original dream to “put in space a shield that missiles could not penetrate—a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain,” as he told a 1986 high school graduating class.

“Like Israel’s highly effective system of the same name, President Trump’s Iron Dome will provide an impenetrable defense for the American people that will bring peace through strength,” Heritage Foundation fellow Victoria Coates said. It “will fulfill President Reagan’s vision for the Strategic Defense Initiative laid out some four decades ago,” she added.

Doomed to fail. Trump’s executive order is a jumble of false claims and imaginary solutions. It begins by declaring that the risk of a missile attack “remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” That would surprise most experts on existential risks. The climate crisis, the threat of new pandemics, artificial intelligence, and crippling cyber attacks are all at least as likely catastrophic events as nuclear weapons delivered by other means. But threat inflation has always been a key part of efforts to justify urgent action and massive investment.

Trump claims that “over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex.” Despite being utter nonsense, this claim has gone largely unchallenged.

While it is true that new technologies have increased the lethality of missiles, the missile threat to the United States has decreased dramatically. Arms control treaties and the collapse of the Soviet Union slashed the number of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed missiles threatening the United States.

In 1985, the Soviet Union deployed 2,345 land-based and submarine-based missiles carrying over 9,300 nuclear warheads. That was the threat Reagan hoped to render “impotent and obsolete” with his missile shield.

Thanks to negotiated agreements, today’s Russia fields only 521 missiles, carrying 2,236 warheads. China’s land-based nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the United States have increased from around 20 in 1985 to some 135 today (carrying 238 warheads) and perhaps 72 single-warhead submarine-based missiles. In sum, the United States today faces roughly one-fifth the number of enemy missiles compared to 40 years ago and one-quarter of the nuclear warheads (728 vs. 2,365 missiles and 2,546 vs. 9,320 warheads). That is still a very dangerous threat but by no means a greater one.

Where arms control succeeded, missile defense technology failed.

None of the scores of systems developed by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its successor organizations have ever come close to providing the imaginary shield that Reagan promised. National missile defenses did not work then. They do not work now. They will likely never work………………………………………

As it became clear that the space-based laser weapons Edward Teller told Reagan he could build were a fantasy, Reagan and subsequent presidents scaled down the program to try to get some kind of workable defense. But after spending over $415 billion over decades, all the United States has to show for the effort is 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California that can hit a cooperative target in carefully scripted demonstrations—about half of the time. Congress currently allocates $30 billion a year on missile defense and defeat programs, most run by the SDI successor, the Missile Defense Agency.

Not an iron dome; more like an iron colander. The major technical problems that remain unresolved—and eventually forced the cancellation of all SDI’s ambitious plans—are the same obstacles that have ruled out an effective ballistic missile defense for more than 60 years:

• the ability of the enemy to overwhelm a system with offensive missiles;
• the questionable survivability of space-based weapons;
• the inability to discriminate among real warheads and hundreds or thousands of decoys;
• the problem of designing battle management, command, control, and communications that could function in a nuclear war; and,
• the low confidence in the ability of the system to work perfectly the first—and, perhaps, only—time it is ever used.

……………………………………………………………………“There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told Max Boot. “We are not going to escape mutual assured destruction vis-à-vis Russia or China.”

As shown repeatedly over the past 60 years, the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear-armed missiles is to negotiate their elimination. Pretending that there is a magic shield that can be willed into existence will only make the problem of national missile defense worse.  https://thebulletin.org/2025/02/the-national-missile-defense-fantasy-again/

February 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Local opinion: Raytheon pushes The Doomsday Clock closer to midnight

because of their work on both the LRSO and Tomahawk cruise missiles, Raytheon is now seen as the leading contender to produce even more nuclear weapons in the form of new sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. This further escalation would represent a huge setback to hard-won nuclear arms control progress, when nuclear-armed Tomahawks were removed from submarines over 30 years ago.

Jack Cohen-Joppa Special to the Arizona Daily Star, Jan 31, 2025,  31, 2025, https://tucson.com/opinion/column/local-opinion-raytheon-pushes-the-doomsday-clock-closer-to-midnight/article_46da901c-df20-11ef-8e77-235556fbeeb6.html

In Tom Lehrer’s classic Cold War ditty, “So Long Mom,” a nuclear bomber pilot sings, “I’ll look for you when the war is over, an hour and a half from now.”

It’s darkly funny, because even though we don’t talk much about it, we all know it’s true. Planned or imagined, nuclear war scenarios rarely last longer.

But how much time have we got before then? How near is that threat of omnicide today?

The Doomsday Clock is a visual metaphor created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists back in 1947 to illustrate how close we are to global calamity from nuclear weapons and other looming threats to civilization as we know it. Originally set at seven minutes to midnight, in 2023 it advanced to 90 seconds to midnight, largely due to nuclear threats from war in Ukraine.

And Raytheon keeps pushing us closer.

In April 2020, Raytheon, with more than 12,000 local employees and the bulk of its research, development and production based here in Tucson, was awarded a sole-source contract to produce about 1,000 new nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles. Known by the anodyne acronym LRSO (Long Range Stand Off), the missile is arguably both redundant and destabilizing in a time of disappearing nuclear diplomacy.

Not only that, but because of their work on both the LRSO and Tomahawk cruise missiles, Raytheon is now seen as the leading contender to produce even more nuclear weapons in the form of new sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. This further escalation would represent a huge setback to hard-won nuclear arms control progress, when nuclear-armed Tomahawks were removed from submarines over 30 years ago.

Why aren’t we talking about it in Tucson? Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego and Rep. Juan Ciscomani all vote for U.S. nuclear domination. Only Rep. Raul Grijalva has spoken out for the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now adopted by more than half the nations of the world. Despite near-universal condemnation of nuclear weapons by leaders of the world’s religions, we could use more local political and religious leaders speaking out against this blasphemous enterprise in our backyard.

It’s not as if it’s a military secret. The industry press has recently carried reports of LRSO flight tests, budget allocations, production schedules and more. Yet local media have not kept up.

Raytheon also has nothing to say. Usually, Southern Arizona’s largest employer and exporter is mighty proud of the panoply of products in their military portfolio. Their website is filled with fulsome boasts and lurid photos of deadly hardware. But the baddest boy of the bunch is missing in action. The nuclear-armed LRSO only pops up in a handful of financial reports. Raytheon’s original press release heralding the multibillion-dollar contract was posted on its website and quoted by the Tucson media in April 2020. But now it’s gone, simply deleted from its media archive.

Perhaps management has realized that there is nothing to be gained by crowing about their only product that, if used as intended, would be the instrument of multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity (incomprehensible death and devastation, disproportionate civilian casualties, lasting contamination of land and water, etc.). Raytheon’s “products” are certainly nothing I’m proud of as a Tucsonan.

This is the same Raytheon/RTX that last November was fined nearly $1 billion for defrauding the government (i.e., the taxpayer) and paying multiple bribes to promote business with the government of Qatar.

Experts debate whether the LRSO is intended for a nuclear surprise attack, or just another layer of “deterrence.” But if it isn’t meant to be used first, that just makes it fit into plans for a full-scale nuclear war. All ninety minutes of it.

Shouldn’t we all pay more attention, and demand that our elected leaders resist this insanity?

February 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment