This new ocean, p.80
This New Ocean, page 80
On the other hand, faced with the possibility of lapses in photoreconnaissance coverage for want of new equipment, the technospooks would often leak that problem to their contacts in the Fourth Estate. This resulted in one article in Aviation Week & Space Technology in 1980 warning that U.S. space reconnaissance capability was faltering and another in The New York Times seven years later proclaiming the same thing.
The other strategy was and still is less subtle. It required that high-ranking intelligence officers, like other salesmen, show their wares to presidents, to important congressional committees such as Intelligence and Appropriations, and even to friendly and influential foreign leaders. This is done by competing spy organizations to curry favor with the politicians who hold the purse strings.
That is precisely what Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell were doing when they showed Eisenhower the first Corona imagery in August 1960. And it was what E. Henry Knoche—Enno “Hank” Knoche—a career intelligence analyst who happened to be acting director of the CIA, was doing when he paid a courtesy call on Jimmy Carter in the second-floor Map Room of the White House on the afternoon after Carter’s inauguration in January 1977. Knoche offered the new president his congratulations and spent the next quarter hour showing him the most remarkable pictures. They were the first of a new type of satellite image, and they had come down early on the previous morning, just before Carter took the oath of office. Although their subject was so mundane Knoche could not remember what it was years later, they were supremely important for the technology they represented. There were three or four photographs made from digital imagery that had come into Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in what engineers called “near real time.” That is, they had not been dropped into a bucket the way satellites in the Corona and successor programs had done, but had been sent virtually as the event they recorded happened.
The machine that had done this was a descendent of Samos, the original blurry-eyed near-real-time readout satellite, and was named after its remarkable twenty-foot-long telescope and the sensors at the end of it: Keyhole-11, or simply KH-11. Others knew it by its Byeman code name: “Kennan.”* Still others knew it only by its number: 5501. It all depended on the “compartment” they were in. No. 5501, the first in the series and the one that took the pictures carried by Knoche, had been launched the previous December 19 on a huge Titan 3D.
The KH-11 was the carefully nurtured, fiercely protected, and fabulously expensive brainchild of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. General George J. Keegan Jr., who headed Air Force intelligence at the time and who despised the CIA, said that the TRW-built craft had gone $1 billion over budget.69 Others who did not hate the CIA have generally agreed, but pointed out that by its nature, space reconnaissance was at the very edge of technology and that could be staggeringly expensive. John Pike, a space specialist with the Federation of American Scientists, called the development of reconnaissance satellites in general a “playpen for engineers.” Sure it was. But those who objected to the cost of the KH-11 in particular ignored the fact that launching more than a hundred bucket carriers in the Corona program between 1960 and 1972 alone was also horrendously expensive when the costs of sending transport planes and naval vessels to find and snatch each one of them, plus the cost of flying the film to Washington, is taken into account.70
Whatever it was, the Directorate of Science and Technology and TRW produced a satellite that could have digital imagery with five-inch resolution on monitors at Fort Belvoir within hours, not days, after an event took place. The Soviet Union would launch its own version, inferior to the KH-11, in 1979. Since the systems were digital, they created a revolution in intelligence analysis because they allowed imagery on computer screens to be manipulated in three dimensions. And their sheer number vastly expanded an already large reference file. Once a particular type of aircraft or missile was in the file, imagery that showed only part of it because the rest was hidden by clouds could be made to fill in the whole weapon. But the revolution that started with the KH-11 had a negative side. Imagery came down in an unending torrent that swamped the CIA’s Office of Imagery Analysis, which was responsible for separating what was important from a colossal amount of sheer trivia.
Bud Wheelon, the former deputy director of science and technology for the CIA, maintained after the cold war that in its entirety, the space reconnaissance program was the equivalent of the Apollo program in magnitude and effect. Unlike Apollo, though, it was officially cloaked in absolute secrecy.
Security strictures or not, space reconnaissance was soaked in politics. Wars raged over the costs of the system, with the Air Force almost invariably opposing the dizzingly expensive, high-tech toys that sprang out of the imaginations of the CIA’s engineers and physicists. But as soon as the president—any president—claimed to like the machine, or at least its product, the airmen began maneuvering to control it for fear that the civilians would manipulate and misuse it, in the process undermining the nation’s defense posture. At the same time, photointerpreters, especially in the armed services, had the understandable tendency to see in the imagery what their superiors wanted to be there: so many MiGs, mobile missiles, and motor patrol boats, for example, that would have to be matched.
It is easy, but simplistic, to criticize the generals and admirals for trying to manipulate the intelligence apparatus to their services’ advantage. But it was their responsibility, not the CIA’s, to fight their country’s wars (at least overtly). Most sincerely believed that there was no such thing as being over-prepared for hostilities. But being prepared would accomplish two things: it would dissuade a potential aggressor from attacking and, if attacked, in the view of the general staff, it would ensure the survival of the nation. William E. Colby Jr., a former director of central intelligence who often tangled with General Keegan, was charitable on the issue. “No general ever prepared to win a war by this much,” he said, holding his thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart.
Finally, the White House or the Department of Defense can go public with what it knows in order to bring political pressure on the opposition, justify foreign policy, or both. One of several classic cases had to do with a Soviet anti-ballistic missile radar whose existence was revealed to the news media almost five months to the day after President Reagan announced his own plans for research on his own anti-ballistic missile system. The leak was soon supplemented by drawings of the large facility both in the press and in the Pentagon’s Soviet Military Power, an alleged inventory of Soviet weapons that was started by the Reagan administration, revised annually, and made public. Soviet Military Power: 1985, which came out as the battle over the new ABM system crested, showed the phased array radar at Krasnoyarsk, plus another at Pushkino, drawings of Soviet Galosh ABMs, and a map of Moscow pinpointing three ABM radar sites and several missile silos. “The Soviet Union is violating the ABM Treaty through the siting, orientation, and capability of the large phased-array, early warning, and ballistic missile target-tracking radar at Krasnoyarsk,” the report charged with some justification. The ABM material typified how U.S. satellite reconnaissance pictures could be used politically without giving away the secret of how they were taken. The Krasnoyarsk radar started a heated debate that took years to resolve.*
Having set out to violate the ABM treaty (the administration’s denials aside), which prohibited the kind of research Reagan wanted, his advisers tried to justify it by arguing that they could prove that the opposition had been first to violate the agreement.
Star Wars (The Weapon)
The most controversial and hotly debated weapon in history after nuclear bombs probably had its roots in the Bible and was spawned, like a whirlwind, by the interaction of three charismatic and devout anti-Communists: a scientist, a politician, and a general.
The scientist was Edward Teller, the godfather of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s preeminent nuclear weapons design facility. The bushy-browed Hungarian-born physicist brought to life an implacable belief in both himself and the existential beauty and wonder of the genie he had played a leading role in pulling out of the jug: the thermonuclear explosion. At one time or another, Teller would advocate using nukes to find oil, dig tunnels and harbors, change the course of rivers, and stop both killer rocks from space and Soviet missiles. It was the last that would fate him to become the scientific equivalent of Rasputin to the president of the United States.
The president was Ronald Reagan, an avowed anti-Communist who had been awed by technology at least since his days of selling General Electric products on television and who was obsessed with the biblical prophecy of Armageddon: of a final battle between good and evil. “For the first time ever,” Reagan told a banquet companion in 1971 when he was governor of California, “everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ.” Between then and the presidential campaign that built in 1979 and 1980, Reagan pondered the ultimate firestorm and the policy of mutual assured destruction (MAD), which held that neither superpower would dare strike the other with nuclear weapons for fear of certain, devastating retaliation. Elaborate technologies were then in place, chiefly the DSP ballistic missile early-warning satellites and their Soviet equivalents, to give enough warning so that the nation being attacked could respond, making a first strike suicidal. But Reagan was understandably stunned to learn on a visit to the North American Aerospace Defense Command Headquarters deep inside Cheyenne Mountain that there was absolutely nothing that could be done to stop even one nuclear warhead from coming down on his country. Seizing on that, and undoubtedly knowing the candidate’s feeling about the cleansing effect of Armageddon, an aide named Martin Anderson put together a policy memorandum suggesting to Governor Reagan that the American people would probably prefer a system that could shoot down enemy missiles to one that relied on the sanity of those they took to be paranoid despots secreted in the Kremlin.
The concept of ballistic missile defense had been around since the advent of the ballistic missile. As early as 1955, the Air Force and Army had competed to produce a ground-based ABM system, with the latter proposing its sleek, pencil-like Nike-Zeus. Since Nike-Zeus had become old technology by the time Kennedy became president, though, the Army developed a successor with McNamara’s approval. It was christened Nike-X. Then it was given a more compelling name: Sentinel. Finally, with Richard M. Nixon in the White House in 1969, a modified version was called Safeguard.
There were two fundamental problems with ballistic missile defense, however, and one of them had to do with physics. The offense had an overwhelming advantage because of the devastation that even one of its warheads could cause if it got through the shield. That was related to the fact that traditional dish radars could not hope to track hundreds of incoming warheads at the same time. And since warheads could not be hit if they could not be tracked, the defense would be saturated if there were very many of them.
The other problem was political. Advocates of missile defense argued that it would be stabilizing because it would be able to repel an attack and therefore discourage one from starting. Opponents argued the opposite. They maintained that even a partially effective missile defense would be dangerously destabilizing because it would give its owner enough of an advantage so that it might be tempted to launch a massive preemptive strike against the enemy in the belief that it could stave off its own annihilation in a counterattack. It would be like two men in an arena, each armed with a sword but only one of whom also held a shield. The one with the shield would be tempted to attack his opponent, knowing that he could ward off an attack himself. Seeing that possibility, the opponent would get his own shield and, in order to break the stalemate, a larger sword—still more nuclear weapons to penetrate the missile shield—until the arms race spiraled ever more dangerously out of control.
That was the way the leadership in both Washington and Moscow saw it. Fearing a runaway nuclear arms race, the two superpowers in effect agreed to hold each other hostage by signing the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty as part of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, or SALT 1, in 1972. The agreement stipulated that neither side could have more than two ABM complexes, each with no more than one hundred missiles, to protect its capital and one ICBM site. More to the point, Article 5 was unequivocal in stating that “each party undertakes not to develop, test, or deploy ABM systems or components which are sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile land-based.”78 Each side thus held a gun to the other’s head. Some called it the doctrine of massive retaliation. McNamara was the one who called it “mutual assured destruction.”
But the dream of stopping, or at least decisively blunting, a nuclear attack would not die. Teller believed implicitly in “passive” nuclear defense at the start of the atomic age. “A shelter program would save the great majority of people in the United States even in case of a most ferocious attack,” he argued, and the country could recover from an all-out attack “in a small number of years.” But in the late 1960s he turned his attention to active defense, specifically to the use of so-called nuclear-pumped lasers. He also turned his attention to courting Ronald Reagan when the actor became governor of California in 1966. Both had a dread of communism and a belief that only massive military strength could deter “Russian nibbling” (as the physicist liked to put it) or all-out attack.
General Daniel Graham believed it, too. The former director of the National Security Agency and deputy director of the CIA was a national security adviser to Reagan during his first presidential campaign. Reagan remained amazed and saddened that no technology existed that could protect the United States from even a single nuclear warhead. So, with Anderson’s memorandum in mind, he told Graham to try to come up with one.
The general pondered the problem for months before he came up with a revolutionary idea in 1982. In keeping with the frontier metaphor so beloved by the Air Force (Graham was an Army man), and perhaps also considering his president’s penchant for romanticizing the spirit of the Old West, he called his creation “High Frontier.” In its sheer scope, what Graham came up with was worthy of Hannibal, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, or Napoleon. He proposed nothing less than a Global Ballistic Missile Defense System whose heart would be 432 space-based killer satellites, called “trucks,” that were to be launched in small batches from shuttles the way scorpions lays eggs. There would also be “high-performance space planes,” ground-based lasers, and other weapons off the pages of Flash Gordon that would attack enemy missiles and warheads during every second of their thirty-minute flight to the United States. Graham tried to make his plan more palatable by saying that much of it could be done with “off-the-shelf” components. Maybe off the wizard’s shelf.
Freeman Dyson, the physicist who wanted to send explorers all over creation using atomic explosions, said he thought that Graham’s idea and other notions of ballistic missile defense crystallized the space soldier’s dream. “Enthusiasts for space weaponry,” he wrote,
have always dreamed that their space weapons could dominate ground weapons, that their space forces could impose peace on ground forces. The concrete expression of this dream is a space-based anti-missile system which could reliably destroy any ground-launched or sea-launched missiles in the vulnerable early stages of their flight. In the dream, the space force constantly patrols the planet, ready to kill in a second or two, with a lightning bolt of laser or particle beam energy, every missile which rises from the earth without due notification and authorization.… The celestial lightning bolts, without hurting a single hair of a human head, purges the earth of mass-destruction weapons by the controlled and localized force of a superior technology.
Dyson took the position that nothing of the kind could be accomplished in space without its first being accomplished on Earth; that such a system would make the world more dangerous unless it was put in place after serious disarmament.
But the high-frontier concept so appealed to Reagan, who was already embarked on a massive arms buildup to counter the threat from what he called the “Evil Empire,” that on March 23, 1983, he announced plans to proceed with research on defense against ballistic missiles. Saying he recognized that defensive systems have limitations and “raise certain problems and ambiguities” including “obligations under the ABM treaty,” he publicly called on the scientific community, “those who gave us nuclear weapons to turn their great talent now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
The men of the Pentagon, who remembered quite clearly that the old system had not worked and who had been excluded from the tight White House circle that came up with the new one, were taken by surprise and flabbergasted when they heard the speech. “The Pentagon’s studies were consistently negative,” Graham would later complain. That was about to change.
By October, two ad hoc committees, one headed by Caspar Weinberger, who was now secretary of defense, and the other by James Fletcher, who had left NASA in 1977, concluded that ballistic missile defense showed enough promise to warrant a large research effort. “Powerful new technologies are becoming available that justify a major technology development effort that provides future technical options to implement a defensive strategy,” Fletcher assured the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Development.
