Missile Defense Investments Pay Dividends for Civilians.

• Author: Geisler, Eliezer
• Position: Brief Article

Created in 1984 as the Strategic Defense Initiative, the United States' ballistic missile defense (BMD) program is attempting to develop a complex system of ground-based interceptor missiles, carrying kinetic kill vehicles that would destroy enemy ballistic missiles. Since its inception, the BMD program received about $60 billion, in a continuous flow of about $4 billion annually.

Most of the funding has been allocated to technologies for target surveillance, acquisition, tracking and kill assessment, directed energy weapons and kinetic energy weapons.

To justify these expenditures, the BMD organization has publicized an array of potential benefits that would accrue from its program, in the form of commercial technology spin-offs. (More details are available on the Web site: www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/update.

Among those spin-offs are applications for the automotive industry, computers and space and innovations in medical technologies. For instance, Honeywell's ring laser gyros developed for BMD were used in commercial aircraft such as Boeing's 737s and 777s, with marked improvements in reliability.

If the BMD program proves to be successful, its benefits to national defense will be obvious. In the meantime, it appears that the wrong questions are being asked concerning this program, thus generating biased answers.

All scientific and technological projects that are geared to challenging and complex phenomena are by nature risky, with uncertain results or timelines for success.

There are no guarantees that a chosen technical approach will succeed. In 1909, for instance, Paul Ehrlich discovered the effective use of organic arsenic in the treatment of syphilis--after 605 experimental attempts. He named the compound "Salvarsan (savior of souls) 606."

Arguments that funding the BMD system will lead to a renewed arms race are based on the underlying assumptions that other nations today have the ability to join in such a development. No other country or group of countries has the economic resources to catch up to 15 years of technological development of the U.S. BMD program, or to embark on a continuing effort.

The questions that should be asked are not whether the United States should fund this specific program, but:

* Whether the funds allocated for BMD are science and technology dollars that perhaps should be used for other Pentagon priorities.

* Whether these funds should be reallocated to civilian science programs.

Once we set aside...