Exploring the High-Tech Frontier

Advocates conjure up visions of death rays flashing across thousands of miles of space to zap Soviet missiles as they rise. Critics counter with derisive pictures of the most supersophisticated Star Wars weaponry foiled by something as simple as grains of beach sand scattered in orbit. Back and forth go the millions of words of argument that have been resounding since Ronald Reagan unveiled his Star Wars plan in 1983. But the essential question raised by all the debate can be put into just three words: Can it work?

The answer depends heavily on what is meant by "work." If the meaning is Reagan's original vision of a defense that would banish the terror of nuclear war forever, by making the U.S. invulnerable to assault, then Star Wars almost certainly cannot work. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger characterizes the headier versions of a Star Wars plan as "half Buck Rogers, half P.T. Barnum," and even the most ardent proponents generally con- cede that no technology now known or foreseeable could be guaranteed to destroy every warhead the Soviets could launch. Some percentage would always get through, causing death and devastation beyond the mind of man.

But supporters of the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.) increasingly argue that a defense need not be perfect or even near perfect to be worth building. Their vision is of a system that would wipe out a high enough proportion of attacking warheads to shift the odds dramatically against a Soviet first strike's succeeding. According to this view, deterrence would not be transcended, as Reagan dreams, but it would be vastly strengthened.

Can a Star Wars system work in this more limited sense? It will take a long time to find out: though a fairly crude defense could be erected by the early 1990s, some of the more advanced warhead-killing technologies, like lasers and particle beams, seem to be at least 15 to 20 years away from effective use. The obstacles are difficult even to conceive, let alone overcome. One example: tracking enemy missiles, aiming and firing at them, and then assessing almost instantaneously which ones have been hit would require a computer program so complex that it is beyond the ability of human beings to write it unaided. They would have to write instructions that special computer programs could translate into detailed Star Wars software.

To build an effective ballistic missile defense, the U.S. might have to repeal Murphy's Law ("If anything can go wrong, it will"). All parts of the S.D.I. would have to mesh smoothly without ever being tested under battle conditions. Worst of all, perhaps, critics can suggest a host of relatively simple countermeasures that might outfox the most sophisticated defense. Given all that, though, an imperfect but effective Star Wars defense just might be possible. Barely. Eventually.