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

Perhaps the greatest advantage of the Brilliant Pebbles concept was its cost. According to Lowell Wood, the expected cost for a single BP could be as little as $100,000 (once mass production techniques were developed, and assuming computer technology continued to advance at its current rate). Now, that might seem like a lot of money for a watermelon-sized piece of nonexploding space metal—particularly considering that the United States could need up to one hundred thousand Pebbles in orbit to fully protect itself from a full-scale Soviet strategic attack—but if you do the math, it really only amounts to $10 billion.

Again, that’s a lot for most of us. But it’s a drop in the bucket for the U.S. government. And it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the price tags of some of the other programs that truly deserved the derisive moniker “Star Wars.”

So what happened to it? Why don’t we have an orbiting horde of swarming micro-missiles waiting to pounce on any national security threat?

Well, for one thing, the Cold War ended. But Brilliant Pebbles didn’t die quite that easily. Although the threat of full-scale war had diminished to almost nothing, the worry was that Soviet missile technology might be sold off as the former Soviet Union liquidated its assets in search of cold hard cash. As a response, the administration of President George H. W. Bush authorized research into a system known as GPALS, or Global Protection Against Limited Strikes.

GPALS would consist of multiple components. One was a new mobile ground-based missile, 750 of which would be deployed along with six ground-based radars (known as terminal phase ground-based radar trackers, or GBRTs). Brilliant Pebbles would constitute the space-based element of GPALS, but the Bush administration called for the addition of approximately sixty low-orbit satellites known as Brilliant Eyes, which would provide the Pebbles with enhanced targeting and tracking information. It was intended to be a fully integrated system, covering all aspects of a nuclear launch—the boost phase, the midcourse phase, and finally the terminal phase. Brilliant Eyes and Brilliant Pebbles would have responsibility for the first two, while the ground-based system would take care of the terminal phase—essentially anything that got through the space-based system.

It might have worked. Maybe.

But it was still prohibitively expensive, and difficult to justify in an increasingly disarming world, where American defense budgets were getting slashed, and regional and asymmetric threats were taking the place of global and great-power conflict. The Clinton administration decided to nix the space-based element of GPALS (Brilliant Eyes and Brilliant Pebbles), and instead invest America’s now-limited defense resources on ground-based systems. Although the George W. Bush administration was more enthusiastic about the broader concept of ballistic missile defense, it agreed with the precedent established by Clinton. The threat was no longer a barrage of Soviet or Chinese MIRVed thermonuclear missiles flying a ballistic trajectory over the Arctic. It was a single missile, launched by a regional power or a rogue state. Iran, Iraq, and North Korea replaced the big bad Russians as America’s immediate defense priority—and our technology evolved, tailored to these new threats.

AND THEN WHAT?

Some historians of science and technology credit a physicist by the name of Theodore Maiman with the invention of the first laser. Maiman worked for the Hughes Aircraft Corporation in California, and in May 1960 he made the shocking announcement of a working laser. And there’s no question this is true, but as we know, there is more to the story. Gordon Gould had the idea for the laser in 1956, and even had his notebook notarized as proof. Because of his political leanings, Gould was kept away from its practical development, but (and here comes the counterfactual!) it’s altogether possible that he would have built a working laser before Maiman if he had been given the chance. In any case, after filing multiple lawsuits trying to get at least some credit for the invention, in 1987 he was finally awarded a patent on the “optical pumping” aspect of lasers, based in part on the designs he sketched out in that notebook three decades earlier. This might not sound like much, but optical pumping devices are used in 80 percent of the industrial, commercial, and medical applications of lasers.

And now he owned the patent.

Scientists and engineershave continued to try and perfect a system for intercepting enemy ballistic missiles. They have yet to be successful, despite now having more than 70 years of practice. but maybe we’ve been thinking the wrong way about this thing all along.

At the end of the Obama administration, the Pentagon wrote a report titled “Declaratory Policy, Concept of Operations, and Employment Guidelines for Left-of-Launch Capability.” While this might sound like a bunch of DoD mumbo-jumbo, it does offer potentially tantalizing hints of what could be on the missile-defense horizon. “Left-of-Launch” means taking out the missile before it has been sent our way. But not with a kinetic attack. Or an X-ray laser. Or a railgun, or anything else we’ve discussed in this chapter.

No. Those would constitute a “use of force” under the United Nations Charter. And that’s what makes this long sentence in the report so interesting:

Although left-of-launch actions that would constitute a use of force likely would require the President’s approval as an exercise of the inherent right of national or collective self-defense, certain actions would not necessarily constitute a use of force under the U.N. Charter, such as gathering intelligence or developing capabilities that could be used in response to an imminent attack [emphasis mine].

Certain actions. Developing capabilities.

Cyber.

The most cost-effective approach to disable a bad guy’s missile—and perhaps the most effective-effective approach—is to develop digital weapons that can scramble launch controls, infect guidance systems, turn off targeting computers, corrupt command and control operations, or muck up parts of the missile’s supply chain.

Create cyber chaos.

Edward Teller would probably approve. But only if you called it Super Cyber, or something.

Iprobably shouldn’t be admitting this (considering where I work), but here it goes anyway: I have a hard time keeping track of the plotlines of all the James Bond movies. Over more than fifty years there have been twenty-five (-six? -seven?) Bond movies, depending on how you count (this question has actually been argued in a court of law). In each one, a suave British secret agent faces diabolical odds and an over-the-top villain. For some reason or another, he jumps out of a perfectly good airplane with a martini in one hand and a ridiculously named blonde in the other. The world is saved. Cue up “God Save the Queen” and let’s do this thing twenty-five more times. [5] And counting. How can anyone keep up?

Every so often, however, there’s a movie, villain, girl, or technology that stands out. Certainly the first and third of the Daniel Craig Bonds were exceptional. [6] Quantum of Solace gets a free pass because of the writers’ strike. Spectre … The henchmen Oddjob and Jaws were a lot of fun, and Ernst Stavro Blofeld is as iconic a baddie as you can get anywhere. Dame Judi Dench as M is as good as gold, [7] Her character is based on Stella Rimington, the first woman to head a Western intelligence agency (MI5). and regardless of who plays Moneypenny, the character remains enduring after all these years.