ArmsControlWonk.com

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These two views show a target warhead 350 km directly above the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:45 pm (local time) on 11 January 2010. The image on the left shows what the target warhead (with an altitude of 350 km) would see if it looks at the Sun and the right shows the geometry of the Sun, Earth, and target warhead at at that instant.

I am starting to conclude that the “eyewitness” to the Chinese missile defense test is probably real, the reported time (7:45 pm, “local time”) is reasonable, and the target vehicle was most likely a relatively short range missile such as the DF-21. The slower the target vehicle, the more reasonable the streak seen on the camera phone’s image becomes. One very important question can still be addressed: was the target illuminated by the Sun? The answer to this question is vastly important. If the target could not be illuminated by the sun, it would mean that the Chinese have developed much more sophisticated infrared sensors than they have flown previously. If, on the other hand, it could be illuminated by the sun, perhaps by selecting an intercept point high enough for the sun to illuminate the target, then we are not forced to conclude a dramatic improvement in IR technology.

7:45 pm sounds pretty late at night. (Especially during the winter!) However, we must not forget that China is a very large country that uses a single time zone. That means that when it is 7:45 pm in Beijing, it is also 7:45 pm local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center almost 1,400 km west. On 11 January 2010, that corresponded to11:45 UTC. How high up would the target have to be to still be illuminated by the Sun?

At that time, the Sun was 17.4 degrees below the horizon at Jiuquan SLC. It’s a simple exercise in geometry to show that an object needs to be at an altitude of 305 km or greater if it is to be illuminated by the Sun. That is easily achievable by a DF-21 flying a maximum range trajectory.

I suppose that some people will still want to believe that China has achieved a quantum leap in IR technology. I cannot prove them wrong. However, I believe that such improvements come in systematic ways; especially if the developing country wants to master the technology for the long term. This test is still consistent with the Chinese hit-to-kill technology using a visible light tracker.

Comment [4]

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I’ve been working on a rather long piece about the recent Chinese Ballistic Missile Defense test but persistent reports of an eyewitness (complete with photos) have sidetracked me. These reports purport to be from a Chinese citizen who appears to have witnessed multiple flashes/explosions. (The original English translation seems to have disappeared, luckily I printed it out to pdf, which can be viewed here.) The question is: are these credible reports/photos?

For the moment, let us assume the photograph is associated with the interception. What could it be? My guess is that it is not the initial interception. The eyewitness seems to have watched a number of phenomena in the sky before taking out his cell phone and taking a picture. (That is certainly believable. In fact, it would be too incredible a coincidence for him to capture the interception.) Also, the first things he witnessed do not appear to have been the plume from the interceptor rocket. He certainly would have reported an initial streak of light if that had been the case rather than “moons” appearing.

Instead, the image above could be a large fragment from the target burning up in the atmosphere as it reenters. Using a typical camera phone field of view of 50 degrees implies that the streak is about 1 arc second long. If it originates at about 50 km altitude—somewhere around the altitude where the atmosphere starts to get fairly dense—then that corresponds to about 0.8 km long. Of course, it has been foreshortened by some unknown amount.

For the moment, and for the sake of continuing to speculate, let us assume there is no foreshortening. We might expect a target velocity (depending on the unknown range of the target rocket) to be somewhere between 3 and 6 km/s. With no foreshortening, that implies a “shutter” time of between 0.15 to 0.3 seconds. (Shorter range target rockets would imply longer shutter times.) I’m not an expert on cell phone cameras, but that seems to be somewhat longer than I would expect possible. (Readers?) The inevitable foreshortening would lengthen that shutter time still further and assuming a higher altitude would imply an even longer shutter time. These same arguments rule out this being an image of the initial interception. So the credibility question comes down to: how long does a cell phone camera integrate over a scene at night?

There is still some wiggle room here. I need to try to calculate where in its trajectory (ie what altitude) a piece of debris would become visible but my initial reaction— subject to a lot of further work —is that this is not directly associated with the interception. It is still possible that it is a piece of debris burning up.

Comment [11]

On January 11, 2010, China conducted a test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology within its territory. The test has achieved the expected objective. The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country. (Xinhua File Photo)

Greetings from Andalo.

China announced that it has conducted a missile defense test. The announcement was very brief:

BEIJING, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) — On January 11, 2010, China conducted a test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology within its territory. The test has achieved the expected objective. The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country.

The Foreign Ministry Spokesperson made slightly more detailed comments, including noting that “The test would neither produce space debris in orbit nor pose a threat to the safety of orbiting spacecraft.”

That China might move some of its “hit to kill” research into the missile defense arena is hardly surprising — Geoff Forden has a post appropriately titled, Told you so.

I am surprised, however, at how smoothly the Chinese have handled the announcement. China is handling this test completely differently than the January 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test — though it is possible the system is the same. In January 2007, China was silent for nearly two weeks following the test, including five days of awkward silence after word leaked to Arms Control Wonk and Aviation Week and Space Technology.

In the aftermath of that debacle, Gregory Kulacki and I were told, and wrote in the Nonproliferation Review, that China had instituted a new procedure for vetting “future tests of potentially sensitive technologies with significant international consequences”:

In the wake of the test many foreign governments criticized the Chinese government for authorizing the test, for not informing them before hand, for failing to respond to requests for clarification, and for blithely dismissing the potential impacts on the future peaceful use of space. Chinese leaders in both the Foreign Ministry and Central Military Commission have struggled to cope with the intensity of the international reaction and the failure of their subordinates to anticipate and respond effectively to foreign inquiries and concerns, a dysfunction that continued for months. A long-planned conference of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, scheduled to be held in Beijing in April 2007, three months after the test, was abruptly canceled without explanation just days before it was scheduled to begin. In retrospect, the Party leadership maintains (and multiple sources confirm as accurate) that the relevant agencies, military and civilian, failed to coordinate well. Somewhere along the line the paper stopped flowing, and responsible individuals at the lower levels of the bureaucracy who had no prior knowledge of the program or the decision to go forward with the test but who did have responsibility for crafting and delivering the post-test message never got their instructions.

[snip]

There seems to be no dispute about the profoundly negative consequences of the Chinese government’s long-delayed response to the unanticipated, intense, and immediate international reaction to the ASAT test. All our sources agree that the delay reflected a significant breakdown in coordination within the Foreign Ministry, and between the Foreign Ministry and the military. In the wake of this failure, according to one source, the leadership will institute a new interagency review process that will be applied to future tests of potentially sensitive technologies with significant international consequences.

It looks like that procedure was in place, and worked very well in this case.

- China announced the test itself, rather than letting the US officials leak the information to Craig Covault at AvWeek.

- China had a prepared Foreign Ministry spokesperson ready to deliver talking points, rather than waiting almost five days to confirm the test with a not very convincing statement.

- China described the test as for missile defense — though it is not clear whether China flew an interceptor against a target — which is very difficult for the United States to criticize, especially in a week in which the US announced the sale PAC-3 interceptors to Taiwan.

- And, for good measure, China made sure to point out that the test “would neither produce space debris in orbit nor pose a threat to the safety of orbiting spacecraft.”

This is progress, though not exactly the sort I had hoped for.

It Might Not Have Been An HQ-9

I suspect this was the same sort of interceptor used in January 2007, though that is simply a guess at this point. (The reference to space debris, however, strikes me as particularly notworthy link to January 2007.)

Xinhua carried the announcement with the above photo — of an HQ-9 air defense missile [of a Chinese air defense missile]. Some colleagues have assumed (quite reasonably) that the test must, therefore, have used [Chinese air defense missile, such as the] HQ-9 missile, which in many ways resembles the Russian S-300 air-defense missile.

I would not/not, however, conclude China used an HQ-9 on the basis of this image. The caption, which I have reproduced with the image, describes it as a “file photo” and the Xinhua photo gallery contains file photos of an HQ-9, an HQ-12 and a DF-21C.

One thing I notice about the statement and selection of pictures is that the Chinese government has gone to great lengths to appear to be providing information, but there really is nothing there at all about the interceptor, the objective of the test, and so forth.

China really could have tested anything at all, though my default assumption would be that the missile defense test mirrored the January 2007 ASAT test and its predecessors.

Spread of Hit to Kill Technologies

The event in China is interesting in light of another recent development: India has announced its ABM program will be expanded to include an anti-satellite program.

While China is migrating its anti-satellite research into the missile defense arena, India is doing the opposite. In both cases, however, the technology is fundamentally the same: the development of kinetic energy interceptors — so called “hit-to-kill” technologies that use a bullet to hit a bullet.

In 2007, I tried to make the argument that we were making a mistake to focus on “anti-satellite” weapons — which is a mission. The real danger was the increasing availability of the specific technology — hit-to-kill — that would inevitably spread for both missile defense and anti-satellite applications:

First, once uncommon hit-to-kill technologies are now at the early stages of spreading around the world. Second, the broad focus on space weapons and ASAT technologies, many of which are quite unrealistic and exotic, distracts from the technological challenge posed by the proliferation of hit-to-kill systems. Third, partial arms control measures, such as a ban on kinetic ASAT testing, may mitigate the most threatening aspects of hit-to-kill technology while avoiding some of the difficulties associated with more comprehensive agreements.

I think that is precisely where we are today: The US has pioneered a technology — and encouraged its spread to allies like Israel, Japan and Taiwan among others. Now China and India are racing to join the club. The result, I think, is going to be a significant increase in the vulnerability of space assets.

Upated | 12:49 pm Sean O’Connor, judging by the TEL, suggests that the missile is a Chinese S-300 rather than an HQ-9. Looking at images from the National Day parade and rehearsal, the TEL seems to look different. The most likely candidate is an S-300, but I can’t find a really reliable picture. And, frankly speaking, I haven’t spent much time staring at Chinese air defense missiles, though I suspect that is about to change. Comments are invited.

Comment [42]

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Slide from a talk I gave on Capital Hill (sponsored by the AAAS) in March 2008.

Media reports today indicate that China has tested “ground-based midcourse missile interception technology.” Details necessary for evaluating exactly what system has been tested have not emerged yet. Nevertheless, it bolsters a prediction I made soon after the 2007 ASAT test: that China would continue testing its hit-to-kill technology in the form of a missile defense system. After all, there is no functional difference between an ASAT and a missile defense system; the closing speed is the only important parameter for classifying any exoatmospheric interceptor.

Comment [8]

Scores.

No, not Scores. Scores, as in, “four score and seven years ago …”

Or, as in, the US will deploy “scores” of missile defense interceptors in Europe. Bob Gates defends the Obama Administration’s shift in missile defense architecture in the New York Times, sizing the number of missiles with an archaic measure normally reserved for livestock:

All told, every phase of this plan will include scores of SM-3 missiles, as opposed to the old plan of just 10 ground-based interceptors.

The archaic usage is deliberate. On Monday, a “senior government official” gave a background briefing at the Arms Control Association in which he also deployed the same term to describe the number of interceptors. When asked to clarify “scores,” the senior government official said Administration officials “have a number in mind” but haven’t discussed it with our allies yet. (Indeed, since “burden-sharing” figures so heavily into the discussion, the final number will be negotiated within NATO).

For those of you who, like me, do not normally find ourselves counting sheep and cattle, a “score” numbers 20. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “score” derives from the practice of marking your shephard’s crook while inventorying your herd:

Presumably from the practice, in counting sheep or large herds of cattle, of counting orally from 1 to 20, and making a ‘score’ (sense 9) or notch on a stick, before proceeding to count the next twenty.

Um, ok. So, that also works for missile defense interceptors. I guess.

Administration officials couldn’t really use the awesomely appropriate “boatloads” of missiles — though that would have been perfect — because an an Aegis ship has 90 or 96 VLS tubes and the Navy isn’t keen to put more than two dozen interceptors per ship.

So, instead, we get Bob Gates doing Abe Lincoln.

Comment [5]

Plenty has already been said about last week’s missile defense announcement, with the diplomacy and the politics taking center stage. Now let’s see if we can’t tip the balance back just slightly towards the wonky. After all, that’s where President Obama put the focus on April 5 when he said, “As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven.”

That last word, “proven,” helps to explain the several mentions of testing in the White House’s fact sheet. Note the added emphasis in this description of current plans:

• Phase One (in the 2011 timeframe) – Deploy current and proven missile defense systems available in the next two years, including the sea-based Aegis Weapon System, the SM-3 interceptor (Block IA), and sensors such as the forward-based Army Navy/Transportable Radar Surveillance system (AN/TPY-2), to address regional ballistic missile threats to Europe and our deployed personnel and their families;
• Phase Two (in the 2015 timeframe) – After appropriate testing, deploy a more capable version of the SM-3 interceptor (Block IB) in both sea- and land-based configurations, and more advanced sensors, to expand the defended area against short- and medium-range missile threats;
• Phase Three (in the 2018 timeframe) – After development and testing are complete, deploy the more advanced SM-3 Block IIA variant currently under development, to counter short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missile threats; and

• Phase Four (in the 2020 timeframe) – After development and testing are complete, deploy the SM-3 Block IIB to help better cope with medium- and intermediate-range missiles and the potential future ICBM threat to the United States.

If you are wondering about that “current and proven” in Phase One, the manufacturer claims 15 successful SM-3 intercept tests. (Update: MDA has a test record fact sheet. CDI has a detailed rundown through June 2008. And here’s Wikipedia.)

By contrast, when the decision to deploy the previous version of a European defense system was announced in October 2007, not only had the system not been tested, but no plans for testing had been made; so stated an October 2007 report of the Pentagon’s Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E). A test plan was later accepted at the insistence of Congress.

As much as anything else, then, the change from 2007 to 2009 expresses a different philosophy about the need for “proven” systems, meaning ones that have been tested.

In fairness, though, we don’t know what a similar DOT&E report would say today about the new “Phase One.” How fully applicable is past Aegis/SM-3 testing to the proposed deployment? It’s not entirely clear.

Testing Against What?

We’ll also have to wait and see just how rigorous the testing programs are for Phases Two through Four. A nagging problem in the BMDS test regime has been the absence of what MDA calls “complex countermeasures” from its midcourse intercept tests. (The midcourse category includes both GBI—the basis of the discarded European proposal—and SM-3.) David Wright of UCS alluded to this issue in his statement that the new system, like the old, “does not square with technical realities.”

UCS is well-known as a tough critic of midcourse defenses. The organization sponsored the Countermeasures report of 2000, which argued that midcourse systems, which intercept warheads above the atmosphere, can be flummoxed by the attacker’s use of certain technologies, including the creative use of balloon decoys.

MDA’s initial response to this problem was to argue that adversaries like North Korea actually were not yet capable of mastering this level of countermeasures technology. Later, it initiated development of the Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV) system, designed to overcome decoy deployment with large numbers of interceptors.

Unfortunately, MKV is being canceled. According to the Secretary of Defense, it turned out to be “plainly unworkable, prohibitively expensive and could never be practically deployed.” This could be a problem, since surprisingly sophisticated missile developments in Iran, which have led to revised intelligence assessments, make it that much less likely (on the face of it) that challenging countermeasures are still many years away.

So what does the new intelligence estimate say about countermeasures? And how will this issue be reflected in future SM-3 development and testing? Something tells me that we’ll be circling back to these questions at some point.

Update. David Wright and UCS colleague Lisbeth Gronlund now have an essay in the Bulletin laying out the argument against an Aegis-based defense at somewhat greater length. It would be interesting to know what sort of defenses they would prefer for NATO Europe: terminal-phase systems like Patriot? Boost-phase systems like those advocated by Richard Garwin or Ted Postol? Both of these? Nothing at all? There are serious arguments to be made for any of these positions.

Comment [12]

Back in 1970, I had the good fortune of taking a graduate seminar taught by Mort Halperin, who was then working on his book, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, with the help of a very bright research assistant, Arnie Kanter. A second edition of this fine book was published in 2006.

A key chapter, which also appeared as an article in the October 1972 issue of World Politics (“The Decision to Deploy the ABM: Bureaucratic and Domestic Politics in the Johnson Administration”) dealt with President Johnson’s decision to deploy a “light” ABM defense against a minimal Chinese ballistic missile threat.

The announcement of the Johnson administration’s decision came in one of the strangest speeches ever given by a Secretary of Defense – Robert McNamara’s address to the United Press International in San Francisco on September 18, 1967. Halperin was working in the Pentagon at the time, and had intimate knowledge of the pressures at work on McNamara and Johnson.

This was the speech in which McNamara railed against the “mad momentum intrinsic to the development of all new nuclear weaponry.” McNamara went on to say,

If a weapon system works – and works well – there is strong pressure from many directions to procure and deploy the weapon out of all proportion to the prudent level required. The danger in deploying this relatively light and reliable (sic) Chinese-oriented ABM system is going to be that pressures will develop to expand it to a heavy Soviet-oriented ABM system.

McNamara was strongly opposed to ABM deployments. So why go down this slippery slope? Because, as Halperin recounts, the Secretary of Defense “was not prepared to push the issue to the point of a break with the President” and because “the ABM was rapidly becoming a symbol of defense preparedness.” Since the Joint Chiefs unanimously supported deployments, as did defense-minded Members of Congress, Johnson and McNamara were in a bind. They didn’t want to destroy prospects for arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union, but neither could they allow the Kremlin to pursue BMD without a rejoinder. Johnson and McNamara threaded this needle by devising the thin veneer of an anti-Chinese deployment.

BMD architectures are especially suitable to hidden agendas – not just because for bureaucratic, domestic, and geopolitical reasons, but also because their symbolism can far exceed their capabilities.

Comment [5]

The Obama Administration has replaced the ground-based missile defense architecture in Europe with a series of theater missile defenses centered on the Aegis system.

I think this makes a lot of sense, as regular readers know, on both technical and political grounds. SECDEF Bob Gates and General Cartwright, Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave a detailed briefing on the technical rationale for the shift to theater defenses:

Since [2006], two important developments have prompted a reassessment of our approach in Europe. First, a change in our intelligence community’s 2006 view of the Iranian threat: The intelligence community now assesses that the threat from Iran’s short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, such as the Shahab-3, is developing more rapidly than previously projected. This poses an increased and more immediate threat to our forces on the European continent, as well as to our allies.

On the other hand, our intelligence assessment also now assesses that the threat of potential Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities has been slower to develop than was estimated in 2006.

The second development relates to our technology. Over the last few years, we have made great strides with missile defense, particularly in our ability to counter short-and-medium-range missiles. We now have proven capabilities to intercept these ballistic missiles with land-and-sea-based interceptors supported by much-improved sensors.

These capabilities offer a variety of options to detect, track and shoot down enemy missiles. This allows us to deploy a distributive sensor network rather than a single fixed site, like the kind slated for the Czech Republic, enabling greater survivability and adaptability.

We have also improved the Standard Missile 3, the SM-3, which has had eight successful flight tests since 2007. These tests have amply demonstrated the SM-3’s capability and have given us greater confidence in the system and its future.

Based on these two factors, we have now the opportunity to deploy new sensors and interceptors, in northern and southern Europe, that near-term can provide missile defense coverage against more immediate threats from Iran or others.

In the initial stage, we will deploy Aegis ships equipped with SM-3 interceptors, which provide the flexibility to move interceptors from one region to another if needed.

The second phase, about 2015, will involve fielding upgraded, land-based SM-3s. Consultations have begun with allies, starting with Poland and the Czech Republic, about hosting a land-based version of the SM-3 and other components of the system. Basing some interceptors on land will provide additional coverage and save costs compared to a purely sea-based approach.

A lot of “smart” people around town will adopt casual cynicism of saying this decision is really about Russia. Don’t believe them.

Gates described the decision as “driven … almost exclusively by the changed intelligence assessment and the enhanced technology.”

Those who would say the decision was about Russia have it backwards — for exhibits A and B check the quotes in stories by WaPo’s Michael D. Shear and Ann Scott Tyson and the NYT’s Peter Baker and Nicholas Kulish.

The Bush Administration placed a midcourse interceptor site and X-band radar within the former Warsaw Pact precisely to make a political point to the Russia, not because it provided the best defense. Aegis was always a better technical option.

Once the White House was no longer motivated to be churlish toward Moscow, that allowed technical considerations at the front of the debate. The fact that this may also open up a world of possibilities with Moscow (and I stress may) is nice, but is not the reason to put theater missile defenses into Europe. The reason is to give NATO allies a defense that works against a threat that exists.

What the Obama team has done is to take Russia out of the equation, not to put it in.

As regular readers know, I’ve long thought the Aegis-based architecture represented a much better solution to defending NATO allies against Iranian ballistic missiles. (See: How Many Aegis Ships To Defend NATO? June 12, 2007 and 4 Aegis Ships to Defend NATO July 16, 2008 ).

Aegis is “probably the one well-run missile defense program” in the US arsenal. Nice to see I am not alone.

Guess How Many Ships?

One little detail — the new architecture includes 2 or 3 Aegis ships in theater. Here is what Gates said:

But on a day-in, day-out basis, we’re looking probably for what we would call a 2.0 presence, maybe a 3.0 presence, so three ships at any given time in and around the Mediterranean and the North Sea, et cetera, to protect areas of interest, and then we would surge additional ships. And part of what’s in the budget is to get us a sufficient number of ships to allow us to have a global deployment of this capability on a constant basis, with a surge capacity to any one theater at a time.

Some of you may recall that General Obering tried to claim that 40 ships would be required, as a way of making more attractive the interceptor in Poland. I found that, um, hard to believe:

[MDA Director General Trey] Obering was obviously aware of the proposal, because his prepared statement included a long dismissal of the mobile systems that asserted the Navy would need 40 Aegis ships to defend Europe:

[snip]

When I read this, I thought 40?

As in FOUR ZERO? Is this like the biblical 40? As in “We don’t know how many, because we only have eyes for ground-based midcourse”?

The Aegis defended area or footprint is supposed to be much, much bigger than Obering’s remarks would suggest.

I suggested that 4 was a more reasonable number than 40.

MDA later admitted that 4 and even 2 were plausible numbers.

Now, here we are with a planned architecture of 2-3 ships (and some supplemental coverage). No wonder some people found Obering to be less than forthright. And, nice to see that those burnout velocity estimates weren’t so far off.

Comment [33]

For reasons not worth going into, lately I’ve been reading an awful lot about ballistic missile warfare. Today’s cutting-edge theater missile made in Russia, China, or the United States is a precision battlefield weapon, suitable for attacking military bases or formations. Or crushing the occasional civilian vehicle, but hey, stuff happens. (See: SS-21 Debris In Georgia, Revisited, June 10, 2009.)

It wasn’t always this way.

Until pretty recently, in fact, missile warfare was the ballistic equivalent of area bombing. Thousands of inaccurate V-2s — like the one shown above at Peenemünde White Sands, apparently — battered London and Antwerp in 1944. Iraq and Iran targeted each other’s cities with ballistic missiles in the 1980s, culminating in a series of demoralizing attacks on Tehran in March and April 1988. After the USSR withdrew its regular forces from Afghanistan, the Red Army unleashed Scud barrages against mujahideen fighters for a time. And Iraq famously employed its “stretched Scuds” against Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar in January and February 1991.

This last episode is remembered as the baptism by fire of the Patriot missile. Despite an initial perception of success, upon close examination, the first time out was a ringing failure. Upgraded systems appear to have worked better in the next war against Iraq in April 2003, despite a handful of friendly-fire incidents. (Update: see also Patriot Performance in Iraq, March 1, 2005, and the DSB report on this subject.) But in the ceaseless competition between offensive and defensive weapons, perfection is simply too much to ask.

The late, distinguished physicist Wolfgang (Pief) Panofsky sketched out the implications of this fact for defense against nuclear attack as clearly and crisply as I can recall seeing anywhere in a June 2001 article in Arms Control Today:

Nuclear weapons, however, profoundly changed the relationship between offense and defense because they increased the explosive power of a payload of a given weight and size by a factor of one million—a very profound change indeed. The demands on the performance and reliability of defenses against an attack by even a single missile carrying a nuclear weapon must therefore be extremely high for the defense to be considered effective. When the Germans attacked Britain during World War II with primitive ballistic missiles, none were intercepted, but the damage was limited because the missiles carried conventional explosives. Had they carried nuclear warheads, a single missile would have devastated London. Defense against ballistic missiles is therefore a totally different problem depending on whether such missiles carry conventional or nuclear payloads.

One might say that missile defenses can be asked to reduce levels of tolerable harm. They cannot be asked to prevent any and all intolerable harm. For that, of course, we have nuclear deterrence.

Because of space limits, I couldn’t include the lengthy quotation above in my first column at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where Panofsky’s work was published many times. For that, of course, we have blogs.

(See also: “Pief” Panofsky, renowned physicist and arms control advocate, dies at 88, September 25, 2007; and In memoriam: Pief Panofsky, October 2, 2007.)

Comment [11]

Diagram of Iranian liquid-propellant missiles from the EWI-JTA Technical Appendix. The latest debate, however, mainly focuses on Iran’s solid-propellant missiles.

If I knew a year ago what I know now, I wouldn’t have lost so much money in the stock market. But as important as that money would have been when I retire, it was just money. Unfortunately, there is an all too deadly analogy with Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Many very serious and credible analysts firmly believe that Iran is set on getting nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them over large distances.

Given the potential danger posed by Iran’s development of ballistic missiles, the prudent course might appear to be to always err on the side of overestimating Iran’s ability to develop and produce its own long-range missiles. There is, however, reason to avoid like the plague overestimating: it can trigger inappropriate responses such as the invasion of Iraq where WMD was alleged and yet it didn’t exist. We are still suffering from that overestimation and will continue to do so for quite a while. The answer, of course, is to make sure you get it right.

That is why it is important that scholars continue to debate the nature and capability of Iran’s missile development program. One place such a debate is occurring is here, at ArmsControlWonk.com.

Another, is at the East West Institute, where they have set up a on-line forum to discuss the Joint Threat Assessment.

This debate has heated up recently with the exchange between Ted Postol and David Holloway on one side and David Montague, Uzi Rubin, and Dean Wilkening on the other.

In addition to the Joint Threat Assessment, including the technical appendix, the East West Institute has made available a number of additional papers including criticism by Montague, Rubin, and Wilkening, as well as a further response by David Holloway and Ted Postol.

While much of the debate in these papers revolves around technical missile details, the meat of the disagreement is on how much help Iran and North Korea have gotten and how much they might still need in order to develop more capable missiles. The unstated context is, of course, missile defense. Informed readers can examine all the papers and reach their own conclusions.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention my connection with the East-West Institute’s report. I was asked in early December 2008 to participate in a single meeting as an outside commenter on the preliminary findings of the technical sections. I believe the technical sections have changed considerably since then, though I do not know what influence I had. That has been my only connection with the report and, I believe, I can still be considered an independent observer. My thoughts on the Iranian missile development program were evolving at the time of that meeting and they have continued to evolve as more information becomes available. My posts on Armscontrolwonk.com are a good history of this evolution as represented by “snapshots” of my analysis over time. In particular, I have been impressed with what I considered the indigenous advances the Iranians have made.

If anything, I have probably attributed more indigenous capability than is actually the case, as I hope to discuss soon in future ACW posts. However, I believe that Iran is capable of indigenously producing engines for its Shahab missiles. I believe the evidence, such as it is (namely the Iranian production video tape that we have discussed so much here), is strong evidence that they can indigenously produce the second stage engines for the Safir; engines that use more potent propellants. The jury is still out on whether or not Iran can produce the turbopumps for those second-stage engines. (And only circumstantial that they can produce the trubopumps for the first stage, though I come down on the side that they can.) Nevertheless, if I can preempt some of my future posts, I believe Iran is still very dependent on outside expert help in solving technical problems as they arise. At the same time, they resist asking for such help whenever possible so as to develop their own capabilities.

The arguments involved in these reports and the responses they have elicited are important. They deserve careful reading.

Comment [24]