Vince Houghton - Nuking the Moon - And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board

Except for one.

It was ambitious, extraordinarily complicated, and obnoxiously expensive.

But it could work.

Maybe.

They called it Brilliant Pebbles, and it was the best chance we had.

This chapter isall about the acronyms of Armageddon. ICBM, MAD, MIRV, SLBM, BMD, SBI, ABM, BaMBI, NORAD, GPALS, ERINT, HOE, KKV, ERIS, HEDI, DEW, ALL, THAAD, GMD, MIRACL, LACE, CHECMATE, SBKKV, BPI, SSPK… oh yeah, and SDI.

I’ll try my best to not overwhelm you with the technobabble, but it won’t be easy.

The U.S. Army began thinking about missile defense all the way back in World War II. As the German V-2 ballistic missiles started to land in England, the Army scrambled to figure out a way to stop this terrifying new technology. They quickly realized it was hard as hell to do. They failed again and again. Fortunately, the missiles had very little military value outside of scaring the poor English civilians. At that point, their inaccuracy, coupled with their relatively small explosive payload, prevented them from having a significant strategic impact on the war. So the Allies kept their heads down and rode out the barrage until V-2 launch sites could be captured one by one. One day I hope we will figure this thing out, they’d say to themselves. One day.

Seventy-plus years later, and we are still hoping. If a ballistic missile came for us this minute, we’d likely resemble our ancestors in the cold streets of 1940s London: Get your heads down and pray for the best. Maybe we can ride this thing out.

The ballistic missile problem hasn’t been solved, but as I’ll explain, it’s not for lack of trying. Scientists and engineers are still figuring out how to unravel this obscenely complex technological issue. Correction—this is multiple complex technological issues, each one as daunting as the next.

First, how do we detect a missile launch as quickly as possible? This is far easier today, due to advances in intelligence technology like multispectral and hyperspectral remote imaging from satellites and other platforms. But it’s still not perfect.

Second, how can we best track the trajectory of the missile? The sooner we know where it is going, the better. Modern satellites help here too, but aren’t without limitations.

Third, how do we differentiate between real ballistic missiles and decoys warheads that are used to confuse our defensive systems? A smart adversary would launch a combination of real nukes and decoys, with the hope that we would expend our limited resources against the fake nukes while the real ones slip through. Or worse yet, our systems, if automated, might freeze up because their computer brains get overwhelmed by the devious deception.

Fourth, how do we hit a ballistic missile, traveling really, really fast, with whatever we are using as an interceptor?

And fifth, how do we ensure the destruction of the target missile?

All difficult questions. None with an easy solution. Scientists and engineers rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

One of the easiest ways to deal with several of these problems, scientists thought, was to eliminate the need for pinpoint accuracy with our interceptor. How do we do this? Well, by using nuclear weapons, of course. Fight fire with fire. The bad guys send nuclear-armed bombers or missiles our way, we shoot them down with nukes of our own. Everything in the blast radius goes up in smoke.

This was the concept behind America’s first series of surface-to-air (SAM) anti–ballistic missile systems. Building upon the Nike Hercules SAM, which was developed to shoot down enemy bomber formations with a nuclear-tipped warhead, the Nike Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel, and Safeguard programs were all designed to intercept a limited Soviet strategic missile attack with overwhelming force. The problem with all of these systems, however, was that they didn’t stand a chance against a dedicated, all-out Soviet strike. They could be overwhelmed by the use of radar decoys mixed with hundreds, if not thousands, of real warheads. When multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs—a single booster rocket carrying multiple warheads) were developed in the mid-1960s, things got even worse. It was harder and harder to keep the defense in the game. The offense had all the advantages.

And of course, Nike/Sentinel/Safeguard all called for the United States to actually explode nuclear weapons over its own territory . Talk about killing the patient to cure the disease.

Project Defender tried to rectify this. Started in 1958, under the Eisenhower administration, Defender brought together the nation’s top scientific minds to brainstorm ways to keep the country safe from Soviet ICBMs. One proposal that came out of Project Defender was called the Ballistic Missile Boost Intercepts project—that’s right, BaMBI (you can’t say they didn’t have a bit of a warped sense of humor). BaMBI was ambitious. It called for space-based, rocket-powered projectiles to smash into rising enemy missiles, using kinetic energy to accomplish what was known as a “boost phase intercept”—kill the enemy ICBM in its initial boost phase before it had a chance to deploy its MIRVs. In case the kinetic weapon missed (which was… likely), BaMBI also would include a sixty-foot rotating wire net laced with deadly steel pellets to thwack the enemy missile on the way by. Components of BaMBI were tested, but the program looked as though it would cost a ridiculous amount of money (in the tens of billions), and so it was canceled in 1963.

This is a good time to take a brief step back and refresh ourselves on the topic of kinetic energy, because we are going to need it later. Kinetic energy is the energy of motion. An object in motion has kinetic energy. We know from our physics classes (or Bill Nye) that kinetic energy is calculated by taking half the mass of an object and multiplying it by the velocity of that object squared (0.5 m × v 2). This means that even though that five-ton dump truck is going only 10 mph, when it hits us it’s gonna leave a mark. Conversely, if a piece of metal the size of a grain of rice is traveling at an extraordinary velocity, it’s also going to do some serious damage. This is one of the reasons why space is such a dangerous place. Objects in orbit can reach speeds of 22,000 mph. Space debris smaller than half an inch could penetrate the shields of the International Space Station’s crew modules, causing extensive damage or even killing people. Something the size of an orange could shatter a satellite or spacecraft into pieces. Little objects can pack a major punch.

Lock this information away in your mind palace for a couple of minutes. We will get back to kinetic energy weapons shortly. But first we should discuss what are known as directed energy weapons (DEW), because this was the sexy scientific concept du jour of the 1960s, and continued to be the “next big thing” all the way through the early 1980s. The development of what would become the most popular DEW began in the mid-1950s, and was based on an invention by a physicist named Gordon Gould. While Gould was working on his doctorate in optical and microwave spectroscopy at Columbia University in New York, he had an idea that he later said came to him in a flash one night in 1957. He subsequently wrote his revelation down in his research notebook, and made some rough calculations on the feasibility of his new invention, something he was calling “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.”

Gould knew he was on to something big, and scrambled to develop a working prototype. He dropped out of Columbia and joined Technical Research Group, a private research firm, hoping they would fund his project. They did, using a grant from the Pentagon’s newly formed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—now called DARPA, with the “D” for “Defense”). ARPA loved the idea of the laser, but didn’t like Gould all that much. You see, Gould had briefly worked for the Manhattan Project during World War II on the separation of uranium isotopes, but was dropped from the program because of his past ties to the Communist Political Association. Although others in the Manhattan Project also had communist flirtations in their pasts, they were considered integral to the program (like the project’s scientific director, Robert Oppenheimer). Gould was just another scientist, so out he went. When ARPA began considering potential military applications for the laser, they deemed it vital to national security and classified it. Gould, because of his past, could not obtain a security clearance and was shut out of working on his own project.