ALASKA MISSILE DEFENSE EARLY BIRD WEEKLY

MOTHBALLED POST NOW FRONT LINE, FORT GREELY: FIRST DIRT TURNED FOR MISSILE DEFENSE SILOS, Anchorage Daily News, June 16, 2002. In a groundbreaking ceremony as surreal as it was significant, this remote mothballed U.S. Army post officially became the country's first line of defense against a nuclear missile attack. The ceremony Saturday hinged on an international event: The United States withdrew last Thursday from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia to allow President Bush to pursue plans for a missile defense system. The test range at Greely is part of a $7.5 billion missile system designed to shoot incoming missiles down 140 miles above the earth. Coupled with plans for facilities at Kodiak and Shemya Island in the Aleutians, it's also the costliest construction project to hit the state since the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Current plans don't call for real launches of armed missiles. But switching the test interceptors over would be easy, military officials have said. A strategy of missile defense is vital to safeguard the United States against 17 or 18 rogue nations with access to nuclear or biological weapons, Sen. Ted Stevens said as he walked back to his seat under the tent. The dignitaries and the media detoured past Greely's main gate, where a group of protesters waited. The military is paying $325 million to the government's contractor, Fluor Alaska, to build a missile assembly building and a command center and install fiber-optic systems, said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency. Everything is supposed to be finished by Sept. 30, 2004.

ARMY PROPOSES EXPANDED FLIGHT TEST PLAN FOR PAC-3 BEYOND IOT&E PHASE, Defense Daily, June 17, 2002. Though the initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) testing of the Lockheed Martin [LMT] Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile ended this month, the Army wants to continue flying the missile to wring out some glitches that cropped up in the flight test program to date, according to a top service official. "We have a program in place to fix the issues that cropped up in IOT&E," Army Brig. Gen. John Urias, program executive officer for air and missile defense and deputy commanding general for Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said at a breakfast sponsored by the National Defense University Foundation on Friday.

ATTACKS ON ALASKA DEEMED UNLIKELY, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, June 16, 2002. Alaskans who see a missile defense system as a high-profile target more than a high-tech security blanket shouldn't worry, according to analysts from a couple of Washington, D.C., think tanks who usually disagree on all matters missile. Alaska won't be a target even with a defense system, they say, because no terrorist with a missile and a mission is going to bother threatening the least-populated region of the United States.

ALASKA IS DESTROYED BY A MISGUIDED MISSILE PLAN, The Herald (Glasgow), June 18, 2002. Alaska is one of those places where you go to be reminded how puny is humankind. It is the world's greatest wilderness, a place of such scale and searing grandeur that it changes the way you look at life. Alaska is being despoiled by a nonsensical sci-fi military game which was started by Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s and is now being played out by an uneasy new-age coalition of Russia and America, with half-hearted backing from Nato. Last weekend at Fort Greely army base, which sits in the heart of Alaska, they held a ceremony. No ordinary ceremony this, but the start of massive works to create five underground missile silos and a satellite communications and command center, part of the infamous (pounds) 20bn national missile defense (NMD) system, and the most insane pet project yet from our allegedly intelligent world leaders. National missile defense is at best a hopeless cartoon fantasy, at worst a reckless act of weapons proliferation.

ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE, MINI-BOMBS, AND HILLARY, Agency WPS, June 21, 2002. The Duma Council met yesterday to discuss an appeal to the president of Russia. Vladimir Putin's attention will be drawn to the fact that absolutely new types of weapons are being invented in the United States. Lawmakers are worried by experiments in the United States with high frequency radio waves and their effect on environment. The weapon will be tested in Alaska in early 2003. An analogous appeal will be made to the UN. Consider what the United States has been doing with eyes not glazed with terrorism-phobia, and you will see that the scope of American preparations can be compared only with the stocks of chemical warfare means in Russia and with the future contours of the Chinese military potential. Construction of six silos began in Alaska last week. Together with a depot for 100 missiles, their construction will be completed in two years. It will cost $325 million. Actually, this is but a small part of the project to the tune of $64 billion which also includes sophisticated radar on the Aleutians and new satellites in orbit. According to the British Observer, Washington and London are working overtime on the program of a new generation of small nuclear devices to be used against underground targets.

EDITORIAL: AFTER THE ABM TREATY, Oklahoman, June 20, 2002. Having retired the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Bush administration wasted little time getting on with the next steps in protecting American cities from missile attack. Groundbreaking took place last weekend in Alaska on the first components of a land- based interceptor and, as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz wrote in Friday's Wall Street Journal, "We can now move forward with (a) robust development and testing program." That's the trend line Americans want from their government in Washington: moving forward to anticipate and head off future threats, either intentional or accidental. America mustn't wait until enemies have the means to attack before it tests and deploys adequate defensive safeguards. The ABM treaty blocked important research and development, which is why President Bush announced the U.S. would withdraw from it as of last Thursday. The debate over whether to have missile defense has long been settled. The American people want it because the country will be safer because of it. Delay only helps America's enemies.

GLOBAL NEWS BREAKS #16

MONDAY, JUNE 17, 2002

AFTER U.S. SCRAPS ABM TREATY, RUSSIA REJECTS CURBS OF START II, New York Times, June 15, 2002. One day after the United States formally abandoned the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, Russia responded in curt kind today, saying it was no longer bound by the 1993 accord known as Start II that outlawed multiple-warhead missiles and other especially destabilizing weapons in the two nations' strategic arsenals. Russia's action was the sort of statement that would have induced global seizures a decade ago. This time some experts called it a political gesture, signaling displeasure but little else in a world remade by forces unleashed after the Soviet Union's collapse. But that view was not unanimous, and some American experts said Russia's move could exacerbate a trend toward a more unstable nuclear balance — especially if the current thaw between East and West began to chill. In Washington, a State Department spokesman said tonight that Russia's action "was not unexpected."

USAF EYES RELAY MIRRORS TO EXTEND RANGE OF LASERS, Jane's Defence Weekly, June 19, 2002. High-powered laser weapons are expected to make their operational debut later this decade, according to military planners who say these weapons will revolutionize future battles by giving US forces the ability to hit targets with lethal beams of energy delivered at extreme speed and over great distances. However, as radical as these weapons will be, the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) believes that another concept it is pursuing could further 'revolutionize' the way in which the lasers are used. Building on experiments pioneered under the administration of former US president, Ronald Reagan, the AFRL is developing the technologies to field a constellation of sophisticated airborne and space-based mirrors to relay a laser beam over great distances, thereby expanding significantly the laser's lethal range. The AFRL calls the concept the Evolutionary Aerospace Global Laser Engagement (EAGLE) system. The notion of a relay mirror is not new. Indeed the US Department of Defense has conducted on-orbit experiments with basic mirror designs. The EAGLE concept, however, uses a more sophisticated bifocal design that features one optical system to track the source laser and a second mirror to relay the laser beam to the target.

NEXT NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE TEST INCLUDES SHIP RADAR, Defense Week, June 17, 2002.This August, in the first scheduled test of the U.S. missile shield in the post-ABM Treaty era, an Aegis ship in the Pacific will track a test target in flight, a defense official said. The exercise will mark the first strategic antimissile test involving a ship. Use of the Aegis ship marks the first modest step in a series of ways the U.S. missile-defense program is expected to go beyond the limits imposed by the treaty. The agency will use the integrated flight test to examine if the Aegis radar is a useful tool for a missile defense system, the official said.

LIFE AFTER THE ABM TREATY, Jane's Defence Weekly, June 19, 2002. A lingering vestige of Cold War diplomacy met an unspectacular end on 13 June as the USA formally abandoned the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Gone are the treaty's limitations on development, testing and deployment that applied to previous US administrations. The US Department of Defense (DoD) intends to engage in "robust" development and testing activities. As part of this process, the DoD intends in coming months to expand the nature and scope of the tests to incorporate activities previously prohibited by the now-defunct agreement. Initially, these activities will include more mundane exercises like using certain radar systems against new sets of targets and merging sensor data from different systems. Later exercises will see land- and sea-based and airborne systems, designed originally to counter shorter-range threats, engage more longer-range targets. Longer-term activities will include space-based exercises. For the DoD's Missile Defense Agency (MDA), this new era represents a time of great opportunity. Conversely, agency officials acknowledge that many significant challenges remain in fielding a reliable and effective architecture. "Our program is now entering a new phase, moving from technology development to system engineering, and we face a very significant challenge of integrating many diverse elements into one system," said MDA director US Air Force Lt Gen Ronald Kadish.

NAVY MISSILE DEFENSE HIT OPENS DOOR FOR VARIETY OF TEST SCENARIOS FROM SEA, Defense Daily, June 17, 2002. The Navy and Missile Defense Agency (MDA) scored a second hit in the Sea-Based Midcourse (SMD) program on Thursday, clearing the way for more complex test shot scenarios and varying target in upcoming tests, program officials said. During the flight test, Flight Mission-3 (FM-3), a Raytheon [RTN] Standard Missile was shot from the Aegis cruiser USS Lake Erie (CG-70) to intercept an Aries ballistic missile target launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. About six minutes after the Aries was launched, Lake Erie's Aegis Weapon System launched an SM-3. About two minutes after the SM-3 launch, the missile's kinetic warhead acquired, tracked, and diverted into the target, demonstrating the SMD system's capability to hit the ballistic missile target in the exoatmosphere, according to MDA and the Navy.

TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 2002

PENTAGON COULD BEGIN DEPLOYMENT OF SOME MISSILE DEFENSES BY 2004, Wall Street Journal June 18, 2002. A Pentagon agency plans to push for accelerating development of a missile-defense shield based at sea. The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said it hopes to deploy sea-based defensive missiles as early as 2004. Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, who heads the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, said in an interview Monday that he expects to recommend the accelerated timetable to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later this summer. Gen. Kadish has been granted wide powers to oversee missile-defense development and has strong support on Capitol Hill. Still, he cautioned that his agency needs to complete its final analysis of last week's test of the sea-based system before he prepares his final recommendations. Gen. Kadish said that by tying in other land-based radar to supplement the picture provided by the Aegis system, defense officials could significantly increase the range and effectiveness of the sea-based system to shoot down missiles within a range of 1,800 to 3,000 miles. Gen. Kadish said that the Pentagon could likely make do with the rockets, ships and radar currently in use for the 1,800- to 3,000-mile-range missiles, which if launched from Iran, Iraq or North Korea could strike U.S. forces and allies but not the continental U.S. To tackle longer-range missiles, which travel at higher speeds and are harder to hit, Gen. Kadish said the Pentagon would need to develop a new missile. To pay for the accelerated test schedule of the sea-based system and a larger missile interceptor Gen. Kadish said he likely would have to shift money away from other missile-defense programs that weren't performing as well. "I don't assume that we are going to get new money," he said. "We have some choices that we are going to have to make." Congress Eyes Burst Of Activity On Defense Bills In Coming Days, Aerospace Daily, June 18, 2002. Congress plans a burst of activity over the next two weeks in an effort to make significant progress on three major defense-related bills before an early-July recess. The House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee plans to meet in closed-door session June 19 to consider its version of the fiscal 2003 defense appropriations bill. Two Air Force programs that have drawn subcommittee criticism - the F-22 Raptor and the Space Based Infrared System-High (SBIRS-High) - are seen as possible targets for spending cuts. The full Appropriations Committee and the full House are slated to take up the bill sometime during the week of June 24-28. The full Senate could take up the FY '03 defense authorization bill as early as June 18.

TAKING THE RIGHT MEASURES TO END THE WMD THREAT, Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2002. Last week's news of the recent arrest of an American felon allegedly scouting for an appropriate site for detonating a "dirty" bomb has reinforced U.S. fears that al Qaeda is plotting another attack. Do they really have the capability to employ weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)? A dirty bomb, a conventional explosive device designed to scatter radioactive materials, is not a WMD unless the builders are sophisticated enough to encase it in highly radioactive material. The more likely design, using radioactive wastes from hospitals and other sources, would probably only poison people in the immediate vicinity. But public knowledge that even a small area had been contaminated could create panic, fulfilling the terrorists' objectives. A true atom bomb would of course be another matter altogether. Even a small nuke would have a tremendous blast effect and would release enough radioactive debris to poison large numbers of people. Contrary to claims by President Bush's natural critics that he is whipping up terrorism fears for political purposes, it should be clear from this catalog of dangerous games that there is plenty to worry about out there. Arms control treaties have little effect on rogue states. That's why the president turned to a policy of preemption. The trick now is to make it work.

SAD END TO THE ABM TREATY, The Japan Times, June 18, 2002. The ABM treaty was the foundation of strategic stability during the Cold War. The absence of defensive systems meant that the two superpowers held each other hostage; any military conflict between the two sides risked escalation to a nuclear exchange that would have resulted in horrific casualties on both sides. Missile defense showed promise. Mr. Bush’s decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty was no surprise; he had pledged to proceed with a missile defense program as soon as it was feasible. He did just that. At the same time, Mr. Bush urged the U.S. Congress to develop missile defenses. The enthusiasm for missile defense has not succeeded in masking its biggest flaw: there is no guarantee that it will work. The testing program has been marred by failures; recent tests have reportedly been successful, but doubts about the validity of the tests have grown as details have emerged. An effective shield would allow the U.S. to act with relative impunity, free from the fear of retaliation. That assumed that the system would work. Experts argue that missile defense is vulnerable to decoys; the plans the U.S. has thus far discussed suggest the system will be limited. But the easiest way for China to be sure that it retains a retaliatory capability is to build more missiles. That will encourage India to do the same, which, in turn, will prod Pakistan to respond in kind. North Korea will be watching those developments, as will other governments debating the utility of nuclear weapons. And more weapons deployed means more weapons to protect, more knowledge and materials to control. In other words, nuclear proliferation is a virtual certainty.

LOCKHEED MARTIN PITCHES NAVALIZED PAC-3 FOR NEW ERAAW PROGRAM, Defense Daily, June 18, 2002. Lockheed Martin [LMT] plans to offer a navalized variant of its Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile for the Navy's new program to meet a requirement for the new requirement for an extended range anti-air warfare (ERAAW) missile equipped with an active seeker. The Navy last month solicited information from industry through a notice posted May 17 with Federal Business Opportunities. Navy officials confirmed that there will be a full competition for the ERAAW program and that the program will be funded in the new FY '04 program objective memorandum.

DoD ANNOUNCES POTENTIAL $24 MILLION SALE OF STANDARD MISSILES TO JAPAN, Defense Daily, June 18, 2002. The Pentagon yesterday notified Congress of the potential $24 million sale of Raytheon SM-2 Block III Standard missiles to Japan. The sale also includes 16 Mk 13 Mod 0 missile canisters, spare and repair parts and other items of logistical support. The missiles were budgeted for in Japan's 2002 defense budget. They will arm its fleet of Kongo-class destroyers and are part of a continuing series of purchases to arm the four Aegis-equipped warships.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19, 2002

PENTAGON MAY SEEK MISSILE DEFENSE IN 2004, Washington Times, June 19, 2002. With the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty dead, a Pentagon agency said yesterday it hoped to deploy the initial, sea-based leg of a system to protect America and its allies from missile attack as early as 2004. But private analysts quickly warned that a two-year goal for deploying a warship-based system was unrealistic even with accelerated testing planned in the wake of last week's scrapping by Washington of the 1972 U.S.-Russia ABM Treaty. Any reliable defense against intercontinental missile attack was still a decade away, owing to technology hurdles, they said.

MISSILE WORRIES FOCUS ISRAEL ON NAVY, Washington Post, June 19, 2002. A senior Israeli defense official said that concern about advances in long-range missile capabilities by Iran, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries is driving Israel to develop a more robust sea-based military force. "The entire range of [Israel's] infrastructure, both civilian and military, is within [their] range, and that poses a major threat right now," said the official, who is visiting Washington. He asked to remain anonymous. The new threat, the official said in an interview Monday, "spells very clearly the need for strengthening the Israeli navy's capability . . . to make [it] more effective at projecting power from the sea." New missiles being developed by Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, the official said, are "a cheap and effective way of bypassing their inferiority in the air, and the sheer number of warheads that are now potentially targeting Israel is very, very impressive." He said it threatened "the strategic balance in the Middle East." Asked how the Israeli navy is responding to the new threat, the official said, " 'Counterattack' is not the right wording. It's creating the right balance for a robust deterrence." His remarks came after a report by The Washington Post on Saturday that Israel has acquired three German-made diesel submarines armed with cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The official did not discuss whether the submarines were capable of carrying nuclear weapons but said, "We've had [new] subs for three years. We made no secret about it. We're very good at conventional subs." A study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published last week said that because of the submarines, Israel for the first time has a triad of land, sea and air nuclear weapons.

THE END OF A TREATY AND AN ERA, Washington Times, June 19, 2002. Now that our engineers and scientists ar