Airborne Laser To Die As Well
President Obama will enter a deal with the Russians where the United States will agree to drop or defer indefinitely plans for a European Missile Defense (EMD), even though it is clear now that the Russians wouldn’t be able to live up to their part of the deal: persuading Iran to surrender its nuclear program and long-range missiles.
So said Dan Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a think tank near the Pentagon that focuses on defense and other issues, speaking in an interview with Space & Missile Defense Report.
The Russian Kommersant news organization reported that Obama offered Russia a deal where the United States would back away from EMD, and in exchange Russia would offer to press Iran to give up its nuclear program and missiles.
Just how that would work was unclear, given that Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Iran isn’t about to drop its outlaw ways and abide by agreements that would bar its nuclear program, and Goure agrees that “there is no reason for Iran to give up” its forbidden programs. Iran defiantly opposes Western and United Nations demands that it do so. Goure said the tools that might be used to pressure Iran are insufficient, predicting that Iran won’t bow to threats or lost trade, choosing instead to continue its nuclear and missile programs.
Goure traced the bizarre logic, or illogic, of this situation:
Although Obama since has denied he made such an offer to Moscow, “I think he made an offer,” Goure said. “This clearly was the first bid in a negotiation.”
How Obama avoids appearing to flunk his first test on the international stage, seeming to cave to Russian threats against the EMD, is not immediately apparent.
True, if a deal resulted in Iran surrendering its nuclear program and missiles, that would be a victory for the United States. “If a deal were struck and successfully completed,” then Washington would be “in OK shape,” Goure said.
It also would be true that if the Russians persuaded Iran to drop its nuclear program and delivery systems, then the need for the EMD shield also “goes away,” Goure observed.
But if Clinton is correct — and many others also think that Iran cannot be pressured into surrendering its nuclear program — then if the United States agrees to drop or defer EMD indefinitely, Washington will have traded away its defense of Europe and the United States against Iranian missiles, ultimately getting no denuclearization of Iran in return.
This would be untenable, Goure pointed out. The United States can’t sit back and agree to countenance a rogue state such as Iran becoming nuclear-armed, a dangerous situation in the midst of the Middle East, whether the fissile material is in the form of highly enriched uranium being produced in thousands of spinning centrifuges, or plutonium obtained from the emergent nuclear reactor at Bushehr. (Please see centrifuges story in Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, March 2, 2009.)
If the United States agrees to dump or defer EMD indefinitely, without gaining an Iranian nuclear disarmament, then “we have traded away our defense, and the threat is still” a reality, Goure noted.
Further, aside from leaving the United States and its allies defenseless against Iranian missile attacks, such an outcome would suggest to those friendly nations that Obama “values the Russians more than the allies,” in effect saying to them that “your security is second to relations with the Russians.”
If Iran develops nuclear weapons, and miniaturizes them to place atop ICBMs that it already knows how to build, would the old doctrine of mutual assured destruction that stayed the hands of leaders in the former Soviet Union likewise mean Tehran wouldn’t dare use its nukes?
The situation isn’t the same, Goure said. Iran couldn’t destroy the United States, although U.S. nuclear forces could overwhelmingly destroy Iran. But that may not matter to Iranian leaders.
The key here is that the United States needs some means of ensuring that Iran wouldn’t attempt a nuclear attack, Goure said.
And that means that “we certainly need missile defense” in Europe able to knock down Iranian missiles, he said. If Tehran is aware that any missiles it launches will be blown to pieces by the EMD, then Tehran won’t launch them in the first place.
“The only way” to “deter Iran is by having a very effective missile defense,” Goure said.
Otherwise, other Middle Eastern nations, including allies such as Saudi Arabia, will say that a nuclear-armed Iran means that they also must develop nuclear weapons, turning the volatile region into an atomic powder keg. “They will say, ‘We need nuclear weapons,'” Goure predicted, with those allies asserting that the United States might not be willing to use its nuclear weapons on Iran to defend those allied nations.
Despite all this, however, Obama wishes to avoid providing the billions of dollars that constructing EMD would cost. Yet “he can’t just do nothing” in the face of a rapidly escalating Iranian missile threat, because “nobody’s going to buy that” as a feasible strategy for countering the danger, Goure said.
So Obama will execute a deal with the Russians where the United States agrees to deal away the EMD, and Obama thereby will “get ride of [a missile defense program] he doesn’t want.”
The EMD would be a variant of the Ground-base Midcourse Defense (GMD) system now installed and operational in Alaska and California. Those installations aim to defeat missiles that might be launched from another rogue state, North Korea. The GMD is the only U.S. system able to take down ICBMs, at least until the Airborne Laser (ABL) is developed. The EMD, GMD and ABL programs all are led by one contractor, The Boeing Co. [BA]. The GMD program also is at budgetary risk this year, with a key House chairperson, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) criticizing its testing. (Please see Space & Missile Defense Report, Monday, Feb. 16, 2009.)
Instead, she and some other Democrats say the United States could forego the EMD, and try using the sea-based Aegis weapon control system and Standard Missile interceptors against Iranian missiles. Lockheed Martin Corp. [LMT] makes the Aegis system, while Raytheon Co. [RTN] contributes Standard Missiles.
That would “gut missile defense” in favor of something “cheap and ineffective,” Goure said. But “these guys don’t seem to care all that much.”
Retired Lt. Gen. Henry A. “Trey” Obering III, former director of the Missile Defense Agency, noted recently that even if one attempted to substitute Aegis ships for the EMD, one still would have to construct the EMD radar in the Czech Republic to provide data the Aegis system would require to locate, track and intercept an Iranian missile.
The ABL program also will die, with Democrats deciding to “drop it as too expensive,” Goure said. It is planned as a system killing enemy missiles of varying ranges just after they rise from the launch pad or silo, while they are in the vulnerable “boost” phase where their hot missile exhaust makes them easily tracked and killed, before they have time to spew forth multiple warheads or confusing chaff or decoys.
In place of the ABL, Goure indicted, Congress may continue the other nascent boost-phase program, the Kinetic Energy Interceptor by Northrop Grumman Corp. [NOC], along with Raytheon, Orbital Sciences Corp. [ORB] and Alliant Techsystems Inc. [ATK].