In the midst of a global pandemic and hard-fought election season, it is easy to lose sight of the biggest danger to our democracy. The biggest by far is the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
A single North Korean nuclear warhead, delivered against a major American city, could kill more people than all the deaths in the nation’s wars since 1776.
A handful of nuclear warheads delivered against several cities could collapse the national economy.
North Korean leaders know this. It is the main reason why they continue to pour much of their poverty-stricken country’s wealth into developing a nuclear arsenal capable of striking America.
A ground-based interceptor being installed in its silo in 2004. Some interceptors are overdue for ... [+]
They view their long-range missiles and growing stock of nuclear devices as an insurance policy against invasion, and a source of prestige for a nation that has little else to be proud of.
Unlike Russia and China, North Korea might not be deterrable in a crisis. Washington therefore has little choice but to construct defenses capable of intercepting and destroying North Korean missiles if they are ever launched against America.
That has been the conclusion of every U.S. administration since it first became apparent in the 1990s that Pyongyang was on a path to nuclear capability. This is not a partisan issue. Everybody who has studied the issue agrees that North Korea is a dangerous, unpredictable nation.
But when it comes to deciding how best to defend America against the North Korean threat, disagreements arise. The U.S. program to build homeland defenses against missile attack has seen frequent changes in direction, and many bright ideas have faltered long before they came to fruition.
That is what makes the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) program so important. Since 2004 when it was first activated, it has been the only U.S. military program capable of intercepting North Korean nuclear weapons headed for American soil.
GMD is not expensive. Its entire planned budget for the period 2021-2025 amounts to $10 billion—less than a single day’s worth of federal spending at current rates.
Devoting 1-2% of the defense budget to protection of our homeland against the most unpredictable nuclear actor on the world stage is easy to justify. GMD can also be used to intercept other small-scale nuclear threats, such as an accidental launch by Russia or a future Iranian missile attack.
However, North Korea is the main concern today, and U.S. intelligence has been warning that Pyongyang might soon field weapons capable of overwhelming GMD. It has a variety of options, such as proliferating its missiles, arming each one with multiple warheads, or installing decoys.
The Trump Administration’s missile defense review, completed in 2018, anticipated such developments. It called for increasing the number of ground-based interceptors in GMD to 64, upgrading boosters and their kill vehicles, and deploying new tracking radars in the Pacific region.
An initiative was also begun within the Pentagon to develop a next-generation interceptor that could one day replace the existing ground-based interceptor if threats become too challenging.
However, under former Pentagon research and engineering chief Michael Griffin, the process for developing a next-generation system went awry. Griffin terminated an improved kill vehicle intended to make GMD more capable, arguing that starting over was more likely to keep up with all the possible permutations in the North Korean threat.
He was right in a technical sense: even when upgraded, GMD can only cope with 85% of the scenarios U.S. defenders might face from a future North Korean nuclear attack.
Where Griffin went wrong, though, is that he left little room for improving GMD while awaiting the arrival of a next-generation interceptor. That meant the new interceptor needed to be developed and deployed in 2026, because by then GMD in its current configuration might no longer be able to cope with a North Korean attack.
Unfortunately, most missile defense initiatives don’t work out, and even when they do they typically require a lot more time to develop and deploy than the six years implied by Griffin’s plan.
So the U.S. was facing the possibility of at least several years during which it would not possess adequate defenses against a North Korean missile attack.
Griffin’s plan was controversial from the start, but because the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency was part of his portfolio, he was able to block proposals aimed at upgrading GMD to provide an interim solution until the next-gen interceptor was ready.
Congress has not reacted well to this plan. In fiscal 2021 budget deliberations, both authorizing and appropriating committees have insisted on funding improvements to Ground-based Midcourse Defense while expressing skepticism about the proposed next-generation interceptor.
For instance, House appropriators look poised to rescind 2020 funding for the new interceptor while barely providing any funding in 2021. The problem isn’t the new program so much as the absence of a plan for keeping the current program effective until something better is available.
Faced with widespread opposition to his signature initiative, Griffin resigned in July. The Missile Defense Agency is now free to once again discuss upgrades to GMD with Boeing, the prime contractor, and others (Boeing contributes to my think tank).
The likely outcome, and really the only reasonable outcome, is to modernize the kill vehicle and boosters used in the current ground-based interceptor so that they can cope with possible North Korean threats in the mid-term. The next-gen interceptor can come later, if needed.
Thus the main GMD site in Alaska will likely get 20 new interceptors, equipped with an advanced kill vehicle that leverages technology developed under the effort Griffin canceled.
Chances are the missile agency will then go back and modernize the 44 interceptors already sitting in underground silos in Alaska and California, upgrading both the boosters and the kill vehicles.
After all, some of those boosters have been sitting in their silos for nearly 20 years. They either need to be replaced or refurbished to sustain a high degree of readiness.
The amounts of money involved here are trivial compared with the costs that would be incurred if a North Korean nuclear warhead ever reached America.
This is one time when Congress has seen a security challenge more clearly than some Pentagon decisionmakers, so hopefully it will give the Missile Defense Agency the funding needed to keep America’s homeland defended against the most unpredictable nuclear actor currently threatening our nation.
