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Strike back at the Empire

Just what is President George Bush's missile defense plan for ? Could it ever usher in an era of global peace ? Or merely line the coffers of the US's giant military-industrial complex ? Richard L. Garwin has access, as they say in Washington circles. The top physicist has only just been named as the designer of the first hydrogen test bomb, which vaporised a Pacific island in 1952. He's also been an adviser to several administrations in the US. Which makes his critique even more powerful. Dan Charles asked him why his name has been hidden for so long, if he's proud of his achievement - and whether he thinks history is being repeated

Exactly what is President Bush proposing with this missile defence shield ?

When Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative went underground and became the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the Star Wars folk never went away. So when BMDO was trying to do short-range missile defence, they were always there making the technologies as useful as possible for national missile defence, extending the requirement of protecting US troops to include the protection of Allied capitals. The argument was that if you couldn't protect the capitals, people wouldn't let the US use their territory. But the real reason was that if you build in the requirement for defending whole countries, you're on your way to defending the US. Then, in 1999, Congress passed the National Missile Defense Act and Clinton signed it, and said it was the policy of the US to deploy missile defence as soon as technologically feasible. But that system would never have worked because of countermeasures such as simple decoy warheads, as I've argued in many speeches and articles.

But you're in favour of something that's technically more feasible ?

This NMD system ostensibly had the goal of destroying a few missiles that might be launched from North Korea, Iran or Iraq - these "rogue states". I've been trying to get them to recognise that the only way to handle those missiles is not through mid-course intercept, which is too readily countered, but through boost-phase intercept. And there we are in luck. Because Iraq and North Korea are tiny - you could intercept any potential Iraqi ICBM from a single site in eastern Turkey. Russia might even agree to permit such a limited system under the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans "interfering with strategic ballistic missiles in flight trajectory". The system I propose poses no threat to Russian or US strategic missiles, so we could agree to interpret "strategic" as applying only to the forces of a party to the treaty. So why should we upset the apple cart and eliminate the treaty ? This, of course, is the intention of some of the supporters of NMD. If they got only that, they'd be satisfied.

What was your motivation for speaking out so strongly against the original plans for Star Wars ?

Well, I knew something about it. And people who know something about something have a responsibility to inform other people. So I did. I also thought SDI was a bad thing because it was destabilising, it was deceptive, it was bad for democracy. Here you had a president - Reagan - who really didn't know about these things, introducing in his 1983 speech, with no prior consultation with the Secretary of State or Defense Secretary or the technical people in the defence department, this concept of eliminating nuclear weapons only by having a missile defence system, which is itself logical error, because nuclear weapons can be delivered by aircraft, boat, or cruise missiles - none of which the SDI could counter.

Do scientists speak out too seldom ?

Both too seldom and too often. It's often said, particularly in France, that those who know don't say and those who say don't know. But that's simplistic. The fact is, those who know, often really don't know. They have a view, but often their views have not been tempered by discussions with those of different views. And those who say, but don't know - well, unfortunately that's true in many cases because scientists may have political views, and think that they know about something when they really don't.

Should scientists refuse to work on something they think will be used for ill ?

It's a matter of individual conscience. They may say, I won't work on it and I'll try to encourage other people not to work on it because I fear bad uses. They may be right.

You didn't take that view with the H-bomb. How has your involvement just come to light ?

Edward Teller, who's often called the father of the H-bomb, had a heart attack in 1979 and felt he needed to get his recollections on paper, so he called in his friend Jay Keyworth, who was at Los Alamos and who was to become Reagan's science adviser. He brought a tape recorder with him. For some reason, around February or March 2001, Keyworth sent the transcript to Bill Broad, a reporter at "The New York Times."

Did you know anything about the "Teller testament" ?

No. But my role was no secret. In 1981, at a conference in Erice, Sicily, Teller said exactly the same thing. He said: "The shot (the first test of a true H-bomb) was fired almost precisely according to Garwin's design." But a lot of people didn't know of my role, that's absolutely true.

So what was your role ?

In 1950, Enrico Fermi, my thesis sponsor, asked if I might be interested in being a summer consultant to Los Alamos. And so they took me on. Teller had been pushing to work on the H-bomb even before the creation of Los Alamos in 1943, and a lot of people had been turned off by his enthusiasm, because the bomb never worked on paper. Teller had been doing optimistic estimates and calculations for years: the more you calculated, and the more accurately, the less feasible it seemed. In early 1951, Stanislaw Ulam, a creative mathematician at Los Alamos, had the idea of using an auxiliary nuclear explosion to prepare a main charge, to compress deuterium so it would burn faster. Teller's testament states that he told Ulam the best approach was to use the radiant heat from the auxiliary. That's the origin of radiation implosion, and there is a famous paper from 9 March 1951 at Los Alamos, called "Hydrodynamic lenses and radiation mirrors", by Ulam and Teller.

Famous within a small circle . . .

It's a famous paper, but it hasn't been read by all that many, because it's still classified. People discussed this and decided it really was the way to go. And that's when I came in. When Teller asked me how to set up a convincing experiment, I asked myself, "Well, what is a convincing experiment ?" I decided that it would be to build the whole thing. So that was my task. I was a particle physicist at the University of Chicago and in my experiments there I had made liquid hydrogen and liquid deuterium targets, so I knew about such designs. I designed what was really a large Dewar flask to hold the liquid deuterium and maybe liquid hydrogen around it. And there was also a "radiation case" that contains the radiation from the primary nuclear explosion so its pressure squeezes the "secondary", the fusion bomb. That's what was built, and that's what worked.

That sounds like professional pride ?

Yes. I've talked with people in Russia and elsewhere, and they're proud of what they did, too, in their atomic bombs and their missiles. It really is good to have people who are interested in their work. Of course, the fact that this work involves weapons sort of reduces one's enthusiasm. I wasn't politically inspired. I didn't have a big antipathy toward - or for that matter, sympathy for - the Soviet Union. But this was what the government was doing, and I thought that if the government has a programme, and it's legal, then scientists as a group have an obligation to help. Individual scientists don't if they don't want to do it. But I found it interesting, and I could contribute.

Do you remember how you felt when you heard about its success ?

I was back at the University of Chicago and heard by telephone from Los Alamos. I never saw a nuclear explosion, and never had an interest in doing so.

You're one of the few scientists around who was there at the start of atomic science. Did your generation bring something unique to debates about scientists and society that is being lost ?

The combination of having actually done these things and then feeling the responsibility of informing the public - that's going to be lost. We have people like me and others who will try to carry it on. But it's not easy, and things are much more hectic now than they used to be.

You helped create something that you wish, in some ideal world, couldn't exist ?

Couldn't exist. Right. Nobody imagined that there would ever be 40,000 H-bombs in the world. So if a fusion bomb hadn't been possible, I think that would have been good. I'm not sure whether it would be to our advantage for fission to be impossible, though. First, this would make lower-level conflict more likely, and as we know from the Second World War, you can kill 50 million people without using nuclear weapons. The other point is the availability of nuclear power, which I favour.

The acronym shield: from SDI to MDS

POPULARLY known as Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative was launched by President Ronald Reagan on 23 March 1983. It caught most of his scientific advisers unawares.

The most prominent idea involved deploying beam weapons on satellites. Edward Teller, the Father of the H-bomb, proposed using thermonuclear explosions to "pump" energy into rods of exotic material. Just before they vaporised, these would emit directed X-ray laser beams.

That didn't work and so the focus shifted to "hit-to-kill" missiles, some known as "smart rocks" because their goal was to bang into incoming warheads in space. Computer scientists furiously debated the feasibility of writing reliable software to detect incoming warheads or to target counterweapons at them.

The strategy was revived by George Bush Junior on 1 May 2001 and renamed the Missile Defense System, aka Son of Star Wars. Bill Clinton had authorised preparatory work, with an anti-missile missile site in Alaska and missile-detecting radars there and in California, Massachusetts, Thule in Greenland, and Fylingdales in Britain. This system would use hit-to-kill missiles.

John Pike of the Virginia-based independent defence consultancy GlobalSecurity.org comments: "We're returning to those thrilling Star Wars days of yesteryear - space-based weapons, sea-based weapons, everything-that-isn't-nailed-down-at-both-ends weapons. They have basically resurrected almost every programme that Reagan proposed and some more his people didn't think of."

These include powerful lasers fuelled by chemical reactions and mounted on aeroplanes or satellites, sea-based missiles to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles in their "launch phase", and "brilliant pebbles" - semi-autonomous satellites that would try to collide with missiles.

So will it all work ? Any missile defence faces a grave problem. An opponent can either launch many more warheads, leading to a new arms race - lucrative for some - or simply launch hundreds of decoys with each warhead. These could be as simple as balloons with a thin metallic coating. Mike Holderness

Copyright 2001 New Scientist, Reed Business Information