Vaguely space-related, or so I claim.

Yes, I know NMD was not really DOA. No way Cheney-Rumsfeld were going to let their most sacred cow be led to the slaughterhouse.

But the news for NMD has not exactly been great lately. Some of the evidence for this appears below. Congress was less than crazy about NMD, only impressed by its outrageous price-tag. And, since the election, Congress had also shifted from the extreme right to the center right politically. The prospects for NMD were deteriorating a bit.

But the attacks launched against the U.S. today may have been 'just what the doctor ordered' when it comes to NMD. The American public is sure to be up in arms over the potential for 'rogue states' to do it harm, and be willing to support almost any defensive measures, no matter how expensive or uncertain.

The irony is that NMD worked today about as well as it will when deployed, and proved itself yet again impervious to nuclear attack. The fact that the attack was carried out without the help of ballistic missiles and would be unaffected by NMD even if it existed - this fact will probably be overlooked.

Things were looking grim before, though it may have been premature to say NMD was DOA. I'm sure it wasn't. And it may be just as premature to say now that NMD is AOK, but I'd say NMD's chances today are a great deal better than they were yesterday.

Scientists Warn NMD Flawed

Missile Defense Flawed, Scientists Warn
By Paul Hoversten
11 April 2000

The Pentagon's planned National Missile Defense (NMD) system to knock out enemy missiles from rogue nations is fundamentally flawed because it could be easily thwarted, according to a panel of independent senior physicists and engineers.

"The proposed system will not work against the threats it is designed to face," said Kurt Gottfried, a physicist at Cornell University and chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, which released the report Tuesday along with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The report by the 11 senior scientists is the first technical evidence that the system could be defeated by what the scientists called "predictable and practical" responses by attacking countries.

"It's naïve to think a country would build a ballistic missile and not build countermeasures along with it," said Lisbeth Gronlund, a researcher at MIT's Security Studies Program. "I think there's some wishful thinking and some deliberate denial going on...."

For example, warheads containing biological or chemical weapons could be divided into hundreds of "bomblets" atop a single missile, the report said. Once they were dispersed in space, the bomblets would spread over a 15-mile (24-kilometer) area, making it impossible for interceptors to destroy them all.

Or, the warhead could be hidden inside a thin mylar balloon, making it identical to other decoy balloons launched on the missile.

It also could be artificially cooled by liquid nitrogen inside an aluminum shell, thereby fooling heat-seeking satellites designed to locate it in space....

Missile Defense Obstacles

The battle over missile defence
By BBC US State Department Correspondent Richard Lister

... But there are any number of minefields to be crossed along the way.

Not least is the cost, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to be in the region of $60bn.

That is on top of the $60bn that has already been spent researching the concept since it was first proposed by the then President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Supporters argue that it is a small price to pay for the foolproof defence of the nation. But so far, NMD has proved to be anything but foolproof....

NMD all wobbly?

The threat from wobbling warheads

... This week there appeared a new word, a phrase rather, which will very likely bring chuckles to the sceptical allies and a thundering headache to the pro-missile men in the White House and the Pentagon.

The phrase is "spin stabilisation".
Let's go easy with this clumsy phrase which, as I say, will be joyful news to one side and a horror to the other....

But now these nosey-parker experts who've thought twice about this assumption point out that while we're learning to spot and destroy sophisticated spinning tops who know where they're going, we can't detect an incoming warhead that's crude, fired by some rogue, some technological illiterate.

What we are learning to be good at are spin stabilised warheads. The wretched rogue states don't have them....

But there's another complication for our interceptor wizards to face. I mean what about the enemy mixing in with its best warheads, even if they're only tumblers, how about his mixing in flights of dummy tumblers not meant to go anywhere in particular but just to confuse the American Alaska boys...?

But really the first question to answer in any policy the president proposes should be - will it pass the Congress...?

All things considered - the enormous problems of tracking a cheap, wobbly missile, the enormous cost of the shield, the serious doubt about the president's right to cancel ABM and build the shield at all - the prospect for Star Wars II seems, to put it mildly, ill-starred.