By Cliff Montgomery – Nov. 6th, 2011
“Last week marked the two-year anniversary of President Obama’s announcement of what was to be a radical new approach to missile defense — the Phased Adaptive Approach [PAA],” declared Yousaf Butt, a nuclear physicist, in an opinion piece which The New York Times published in September.
Butt also is a scientific consultant for the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), an “organization [which performs]…critical work [on issues]…at the intersection of applied science and security,” according to an FAS self-description found on its website.
The Obama plan seems simple enough. “The United States, working with NATO, would ramp up the deployment of a mix of increasingly sophisticated sea- and land-based missile interceptors around Europe,” stated the Times article, “in an attempt to guard against future Iranian missiles.”
But there may be one little snag.
“Unfortunately…[the Obama plan] will lead to more nuclear weapons and a more dangerous world.
“The main problem is that the type of missile defense the United States and NATO are planning is particularly easy to defeat,” stated Butt in the Times.
“The simplest countermeasures are cheap inflatable balloon decoys,” he added.
“Because the missile defense interceptors try to strike the missile warheads in the vacuum of space,” Butt continued, “these balloons and any warheads would travel together, making it impossible to tell them apart.”
“An enemy bent on delivering a nuclear payload to the United States,” stated Butt, “could inflate many such balloons near the warhead and overwhelm the defense system by swamping it with fake signals.”
“The latest tests of both the ground-based and sea-based missile defense systems have failed — and these were essentially rigged tests,” he pointed out, “where the intercept team knew the precise timing and trajectory of the incoming missile.”
Obama’s apparently useless endeavor will be a massive action.
“According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the planned PAA calls for more than 500 SM-3 interceptors based on 43 ships and two land sites in Europe by 2018,” Butt stated elsewhere in an informative FAS study on the subject, which he penned with Theodore Postol.
The Obama plan has as its basis “the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) program, which is carried out by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and the Navy, and gives Navy Aegis cruisers and destroyers a capability for conducting BMD operations,” states a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report published in April.
And it’s an expensive war measure.
“The Aegis BMD program is funded mostly through MDA’s budget. The Navy’s budget provides additional funding for BMD-related efforts,” continues the CRS study.
“MDA’s proposed FY2012 budget requests a total of $2,380.3 million [$2.38 Billion] in procurement and research and development funding for Aegis BMD efforts,” stated the report.
Now Americans are told their country can’t afford decent schools, decently-paid teachers, actual jobs, roads or health care. So how is it that we can afford a multi-billion dollar action which independent experts insist simply doesn’t work?
It seems the American establishment’s problem is not a lack of money, but a lack of simple common sense.
