Missile Defense and Neocon Hacks

By Steve Hynd

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the Arms Control Wonk, today rips Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post a new one, calling him a "total neocon hack job" for giving space to two other neocon hack jobs. Eric Edelman and Henry �Trey� Obering - one a former Cheney aide and Bush's undersecretary of defense for policy , the other Bush's Director of the Missile Defense Agency - took to the pages of the WaPo to fearmonger about Iran's supposed missile threat.

Jeffrey writes:

The op-ed is just a smear against the EastWest Institute�s very interesting Joint Threat Assessment. Why Hiatt is pimping inches in the Post to people like Edelman and Obering to use in settling some stupid personal score is beyond me.

Make no mistake, Edelman and Obering have some axe to grind � right down to putting scare quotes around �experts� to describe the Joint Threat Assessment participants. Step back for a second and consider that: Trey Obering is questioning the technical chops of, among others, Richard Garwin.

Garwin received the National Medal of Science. Obering can�t count to eleven without taking his shoes off.

And he publishes the response by EastWest's Richard Garwin and Ted Postol, which I'll also quote in full. The WaPo's Hiatt refused to publish this response to the Edelman/Obering op-ed.

The Wrong Defense and the Wrong Target
by
Richard L. Garwin and Theodore A. Postol
July 8, 2009

Trey Obering and Eric Edelman misrepresent the findings of an East-West Institute study done by a team of Russian and US experts on Iran�s Nuclear and Ballistic Missile Programs and then use these misrepresentations to make arguments that are without merit. They claim that a recently tested Iranian solid propellant ballistic missile represents a threat to Europe (�putting much of Europe within range�) and imply that the Czech radar and Polish interceptors can counter it when in fact the missile is of too short a range to reach most European capitals and even to be engaged by the European missile defense system they advocate.

They also claim that our report incorrectly identifies and discusses serious limitations of the European Midcourse Radar that Gen. Obering was involved in advocating for the Czech Republic when he was director of the Missile Defense Agency. Our study found that the range of this radar against warheads is so short that it cannot provide even rudimentary discrimination capabilities against warheads and decoys launched from Iran to the eastern two thirds of the continental United States and Northern and Western Europe.

Obering and Edelman state that the radar �has been operated in flight tests in the South Pacific for more than eight years.� What they do not say is that the radar was of such short range that it could only be tested against realistic mock warheads at ranges of a few hundred kilometers, where the actual intercept attempts occurred after long-range missiles had already flown thousands of miles to arrive near the radar.

We have recommended to the National Security Adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, that the real capabilities of this radar get high-level technical attention in the president�s Missile Defense Review. If this radar does not have the range to discriminate between warheads and decoys, it will mean that the Missile Defense Agency has committed to a radar that would leave two thirds of the eastern part of the continental United States, as well as Northern and Western Europe, with a defense that cannot tell the difference between warheads and countermeasures so simple that it is impossible to believe they would not, and could not, be used.

The other findings of the East-West Institute Study are also relevant to Obering�s and Edelman�s claims of a dire threat from Iran that requires the immediate adoption of a flawed and untested missile defense system. They are:

- A ballistic missile can only be a nuclear threat if the adversary has a nuclear weapon that the missile can carry.

- The time it would take Iran to have a roughly 2000 km range ballistic missile armed with a nuclear warhead is determined by the time it would take Iran to build a nuclear warhead that is sufficiently light and compact to fly on a ballistic missile. Assuming Iran does not have clandestine enrichment capabilities, it would take Iran about six years to produce such a weapon � starting from the time they expel the International Atomic Energy Agency from their currently monitored nuclear enrichment facilities.

- In the event that Iran could build longer-range missiles that could reach Northern and Western Europe or the United States, they would be very large and cumbersome, and would have to be launched from well-known specialized launch locations. Such missiles would be highly vulnerable to preemption and, as described in our report, to small interceptor missiles based on stealthy drone aircraft to shoot down the lumbering missiles as they are launched.

Unlike the European missile defense, this defense is not subject to countermeasures. We like it, because we like weapons that work!

It's easy to see why the neocons were so worked up. That analysis makes a mockery of most of their fearmongering, which has been stenographed by the West's mainstream media for so long.

Update: Israel's missile defense doesn't work either.

A statement from the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said the mission was an interception test and also exercised the Arrow system's interoperability with other elements of the U.S. ballistic missile defense system.

The tests of the Arrow II system took place over the past week off the coast of California, most recently on Wednesday, the defense officials said. But communication glitches between the missile and the radar led U.S. defense officials to abort the test before an intercepting missile could be fired, they said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose details of the tests.

...Isaac Ben-Israel, a retired general and weapons expert, said the interceptor wasn't fired because it is too expensive to use in a test that isn't expected to go according to plan.

Say Wha'?! I can just imagine my kids using that one: "I skipped my Maths test because I didn't expect it to go according to plan."

Good job there's no such thing as the imminent Iranian nuke threat the neocons and their allies keep babbling about, eh?