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'STAR WARS' TRACED TO EISENHOWER ERA

'STAR WARS' TRACED TO EISENHOWER ERA
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October 28, 1986, Section C, Page 1Buy Reprints
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THE quest for ways to shoot down enemy missiles, the goal of President Reagan's ''Star Wars'' plan, is more than a quarter century old, a review of 1950's documents and recently declassified materials show. President Eisenhower began it all in the late 1950's when he embarked on a crash program of research that eventually cost billions of dollars and involved thousands of the nation's best scientists.

By 1972, when the Antiballistic Missile Treaty sharply limited all such work, the quest had produced advances not only in conventional interceptors but in such exotic devices as particle beam and laser weapons.

The story of these early efforts has been lost in the uproar over President Reagan's plan, known officially as the Strategic Defense Initiative. Yet detractors and defenders of ''Star Wars'' agree that this neglected history is crucial to understanding the international debate that has heated up in the wake of the Iceland summit meeting, which ended without agreement when Mr. Reagan refused the Soviet demand for limits on ''Star Wars'' testing.

The current debate centers on the interpretation of small sections of the 1972 treaty, whose overall intent was to ban nationwide antimissile defenses.

Detractors of ''Star Wars,'' including some of the treaty's drafters, say the treaty marked the culmination of long years of failed antimissile research. The futile expenditure of billions of dollars, they say, showed the goal was unattainable, regardless of technological progress. The treaty was drafted to eliminate not only ABM systems already in existence but also those on the horizon.

''We saw what was coming,'' said John B. Rhinelander, legal adviser to negotiators of the ABM treaty and a leading ''Star Wars'' critic. ''We tried to do an end run around lasers and that kind of thing.''

Defenders of ''Star Wars'' disagree, saying progress in top-secret technology in the 1950's and 1960's was considerable and that the 1972 treaty specifically exempted the development and testing of exotic projects such as those now at the forefront of Mr. Reagan's program.

''It doesn't cover the new technologies,'' said James T. Hackett, a former Reagan Administration official now at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization in Washington. The treaty had a loophole, he said, ''to take cognizance of the fact that there were lasers out there.''

No matter how much experts differ on the meaning of the ABM treaty, both sides agree that at the time it was negotiated antimissile weaponry was far more advanced than is generally realized. The history of ABM development illuminates the positions and assumptions of both sides, they say.

The story starts in the late 1940's as American military planners struggled to cope with the threat posed by Soviet long-range bombers carrying nuclear weapons. One interceptor deployed widely throughout the United States in the early 1950's was the Nike missile, named after the winged Greek goddess of victory. Nike was to explode upon striking bombers.

By the mid 1950's, the cost of such ''air defense'' interceptors reached $30 billion a year. Then, in 1957, the Soviet Union tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile. No air-defense weapon was fast enough or accurate enough to stop a speeding warhead from space.

In response to the new ICBM threat, the Eisenhower Administration cut back on defenses against bombers and embarked on a huge, two-track program of antiballistic missile research. One track aimed to upgrade Nike interceptors,radars and computers to try to match the new threat. The other, ''Project Defender,'' explored exotic new antimissile techniques and technologies.

''Project Defender'' got under way in 1958 as a top-secret, multimillion-dollar venture involving thousands of the nation's best scientists. One proposal was to destroy Soviet missiles early in flight with Ballistic Missile Boost Intercepts - Bambi.

The scientists envisioned Bambi as hundreds of space-based battle stations using infrared sensors to track the fiery exhaust of enemy missiles. The Bambi weapon itself, propelled by rockets, would simply smash into the rising enemy missile. To increase the chance of a direct hit, the Bambi weapon would release a 60-foot rotating wire net laced with deadly steel pellets. Components were tested on Atlas and Titan missiles.

''If we went that far, that fast, with a primitive industrial base, I hesitate to think what we could do today,'' said John T. Bosma, an expert on Project Defender who participated in the 1982 High Frontier study that helped pave the way for the ''Star Wars'' plan. The study drew heavily on the Bambi proposal.

In 1959, officials at the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA, decided to explore what they envisioned as the most futuristic arm of all, a new device known as the laser. ''Everybody at APRA was electrified at the thought of being able to create a controlled beam of light of great power,'' said Dr. Gordon Gould, a scientist who succeeded in building one of the world's first lasers in 1961 under a top-secret ARPA contract. He said the Pentagon wanted to see if lasers could be used as ''radars'' that could pinpoint enemy missiles and as ''light guns.''

By March 1962, Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, Air Force Chief of Staff, was predicting the development of ''directed energy weapons'' such as lasers that would ''strike with the speed of light'' to destroy missiles.

As antimissile work forged ahead in the early 1960's, Pentagon planners prepared for manned space missions that could perform surveillance and attacks. The candidate vehicle, a winged forerunner to the space shuttle, got the go-ahead in 1960. It was known as Dynasoar, for Dynamic Soaring, and in 1962 six Air Force pilots were selected to test it in flight. Like the shuttle, Dynasoar and its successors were designed to carry large antimissile payloads into space.

Pentagon planners also began a Satellite Inspection, or Saint, program in which a beam of electrons would be fired from an unmanned Saint vehicle into an enemy target. Emissions from the target would show if it carried a hydrogen bomb. The top-secret idea, perfected in April 1962, was declassified in March 1982.

As some scientists raced ahead on such exotic projects as Bambi and Saint, others worked on the more conventional goal of perfecting ground-based interceptor missiles. One was Nike-Zeus. It was to carry a one-megaton nuclear warhead, which would ease the job of destroying enemy missiles. The prime contractor was the telephone company's respected research arm, A.T.&T. Bell Laboratories. Bell Labs had the most difficult job of all: to find a way of guiding Nike-Zeus interceptors toward their targets. About a third of the Nike-Zeus test interceptions were ending in failure.

By 1962, the antimissile quest was under fire from critics who said it was fundamentally flawed. They argued that an enemy, rather than building defenses, would always find it cheaper and easier to outwit antimissile systems - by simply deploying decoys among speeding warheads, for example. The critics centered their attack on Nike-Zeus.

''By the time it is ready, the technology of attack may have pulled far ahead, making the defense instrument obsolete,'' said Dr. Ralph E. Lapp, a physicist and Pentagon consultant, in his 1962 book, ''Kill and Overkill.'' He said it would cost about $60 billion to deploy Nike-Zeus, whose main beneficiaries would be some 80 aerospace companies.

And it was becoming clear that zeroing in on missiles in space was more difficult than expected. One solution was to replace Bambi's spinning nets with nuclear warheads whose explosions in space would knock out targets miles away. One study, conducted by Lockheed, envisoned 3,000 nuclear battle stations in orbit, each armed with a four-megaton warhead.

''We wanted to make sure we really splattered them,'' said Saunders B. Kramer, a former Lockheed engineer.

But antimissile scientists soon discovered a strange new complication. On a warm evening in July 1962, the United States exploded a 1.4-megaton warhead 248 miles above Johnston Atoll, a tiny speck in the Pacific about 800 miles southwest of Hawaii. It was the first large antimissile test in space of nuclear weapons.

''All of a sudden a greenish-white flash lit up all of Hawaii,'' recalled an eyewitness. ''The sky started turning pink, then orange, then red. The heavens were filled with a ghastly light.''

Street lights and power lines suddenly broke down, and burglar alarms started ringing. The Hawaiian electrical systems had been knocked out of whack. Later, scientists dubbed this strange effect the Electromagnetic Pulse, or EMP. A bomb exploded high above Nebraska, they decided, would cause a coast-to-coast EMP, knocking out computers, radars, and communications. Bombs exploded on the ground cause no such problems.

By 1963, these and other problems led the Pentagon to slow the quest. It canceled Dynasoar and some of the more exotic antimissile projects. It also turned Nike-Zeus into the Nike-X research program, which aimed to intercept enemy warheads not in space but in the earth's atmosphere after light-weight decoys had a chance to burn up.

But in 1967, partially in response to antimissile developments in the Soviet Union, the Johnson Administration announced it would build the Sentinel ABM system of ground-based interceptor rockets tipped with nuclear warheads. It was the first Presidential proposal for a nationwide defense. While acknowledging its limits for blunting a full-scale Soviet attack, planners said it could slow a ''light'' strike. The project was managed by the Army.

Also in 1967, the Navy began to study a system known as Sabmis, for Seaborne Anti-Ballistic Missile Intercept System. Fired from ships and submarines located as close as possible to the Arctic Circle, these interceptors were to knock out enemy missiles as they flew over the North Pole.

Not to be outdone, the Air Force in 1968 began to explore interceptors that would be fired from Lockheed C-5A cargo planes to defend American coastal cities from attack by enemy submarines.

In 1969, the Nixon Administration halted the interservice rivalry by scrapping the whole idea of trying to defend cities. Instead it refocused the Army's Sentinel program to defense of only missile silos. The new program was known as Safeguard.

Up to that point, antimissile defense had been only research and development, tests and prototypes, hopes and dreams. But in 1970 the engineers prepared to ''bend metal.''

At the same time, Washington and Moscow had begun to talk about halting the antimissile arms race. Despite progress in all kinds of weaponry, both superpowers had decided that antimissile systems were futile, costly and provocative. First, they reasoned, the technology was inadequate. Second, the move to antimissile defenses would touch off an expensive new round of offensive weaponry meant to try to penetrate those defenses. Finally, defenses threatened to upset the tension that had long kept an uneasy peace between East and West.

On the American side, treaty framers saw no hope in the current work on advanced technology, whose promise always seemed to recede on the horizon. ''The basic ideas of particle beams were understood back in the 1960's,'' said Spurgeon M. Keeny, a Nixon Administration official involved in the ABM treaty negotiations.

The 1972 treaty limited Washington and Moscow to a token force of 200 antiballistic missiles each, split evenly between two sites. Two years later, the two sides agreed to limit themselves to one site with 100 interceptors.

In 1975, warheads were fitted atop interceptors of the $7 billion Safeguard system, at the allowed site, built at the very northern edge of North Dakota. Safeguard was put in operation on April 1.

Soon after the Safeguard site came to life, Congress voted to close it down because of high cost and ineffectiveness. It was deactivated in 1976. The Russians have kept their ABM system in operation, ringed around Moscow.

In the late 1970's, however, several factors conspired to renew interest in large-scale antimissile systems. First, there was growing fear among military officials that American land-based strategic missiles were becoming vulnerable to a surprise Soviet attack, and a belief that ABM systems might protect at least some American missiles. Second, while critics of ABM systems continued to assert that they were bound to be flawed, costly and dangerous, military scientists kept reporting steady technical progress in the construction of lasers, particle beams and other exotic technologies.

This interest culminated in President Reagan's ''Star Wars'' speech of March 23, 1983, in which he called on the nation's scientists to renew the vigor of their antimissile quest. Soon testing picked up. In the 1984 Homing Overlay Experiment or HOE, the Army fired an earth-based interceptor at a mock warhead, destroying it with a weapon reminiscent of Bambi. The interceptor had been launched from a fixed ABM test range, as permitted by the ABM treaty.

In 1985, however, debate heated up over just how far the Administration could go in testing new kinds of antimissile devices without violating the treaty, which said the parties pledged ''not to develop, test, or deploy ABM systems or components which are sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile-land-based.'' The American negotiators of the treaty said it ruled out tests of space-based devices like Bambi.

But experts at the State and Defense Departments came up with what they call the ''broad'' interpretation, focusing in particular on ''Agreed Statement D'' of the ABM treaty.

''The parties agree,'' Statement D says, ''that in the event ABM systems based on other physical principles and including components capable of substituting for ABM interceptor missiles, ABM launchers, or ABM radars are created in the future, specific limitations on such systems and their components would be subject to discussion.''

Mr. Hackett, the former Reagan Administration official now at the Heritage Foundation, said: ''In theory, the President can develop, test and even produce systems'' to be based in space, ''just so long as they aren't deployed.''

For example, the ''broad'' interpretation holds that a $1 billion ''Star Wars'' laser now being readied in the New Mexican desert will not violate the treaty when, in the 1990's, its beam of concentrated light flashes into space and is bounced off an orbiting mirror to test its ability to destroy Soviet missiles. In contrast, the ''narrow'' interpretation of the treaty, put forth by the framers themselves, holds that the laser can be shot into space, but not bounced off the mirror.

''With space systems, by nature, you're trying to defend the whole country,'' said Dr. Raymond L. Garthoff, who was executive secretary of the ABM delegation in the early 1970's and today is an analyst at the Brookings Institution. ''We were well aware of that. It was our intention to ban defenses for the country as a whole.''

The ''narrow'' interpretation says Agreed Statement D is not a loophole but an open-ended statement meant to gather all possible technical strides under the umbrella of the ABM treaty. The Administration says it is currently abiding by the ''narrow'' interpretation.

In addition to fueling debates on treaty interpretation, the long history of antimissile research figures in the dispute over the feasibility of ABM goals.

''The moral of the story is that people tend to grotesquely overrate the difficulties'' of the Strategic Defense Initiative, said Mr. Bosma, the Project Defender expert. ''Some of the technologies we developed back then were amazing.''

But Mr. Kramer, formerly a Lockheed engineer, said: ''My feeling today is that this whole thing is entirely too complex. The Soviets have 10,000 warheads. Let's say we get 90 percent of them. That's still 1,000 getting through.''

Although ''Star Wars'' advocates disagree, the ABM framers say the immense power of nuclear weapons will continue to hold the upper hand in the future. They remain unswayed by recent tests of antimissile prowess.

''Over the past three years I haven't seen anything that makes me think technology is the way out of the nuclear dilemma,'' said Mr. Rhinelander, the legal adviser to the ABM framers. ''You just can't build a technical defense. Nuclear weapons are too powerful and too widespread. The fundamentals haven't changed one whit.''

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the National edition with the headline: 'STAR WARS' TRACED TO EISENHOWER ERA. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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