Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, September 7, 1993 TAG: 9309290307
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The allegations were first made in a New York Times story in which the officials, all of whom refused to be named, said the deception was aimed originally at getting the former Soviet Union to spend itself into oblivion in an effort to counter the American program.
That much might be defensible. Military subterfuge is much to be preferred over nuclear annihilation in a superpower faceoff. The trouble is, the officials say that Congress became a second target of the big lie, because lawmakers were considering at the time whether to continue funding the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative that Reagan had proposed the year before.
So while Moscow may have been inspired to waste its money pursuing a bogus breakthrough in the hyper-expensive technology of mass destruction, the United States was left in much the same position, not by its enemies but by its own military - if these Army officials and scientists are to be believed.
The most dramatic allegations concern a 1984 test in which a missile launched from California was intercepted and destroyed by a missile launched from the Pacific. The success of the interception was essential, one scientist involved with the project said, because three previous attempts had failed, and hundreds of millions of dollars to continue the program were at stake in Congress.
So, said the scientist, the results were rigged, with the target missile being fitted with a beacon that allowed the defensive missile to home in on it and blow it out of the sky. Just the sort of explosion to shake loose millions of dollars from wavering lawmakers. And just the sort of story to undermine the assertion that the alleged scheme was aimed at the Soviet Union, and not the U.S. Treasury, in the first place.
The general allegation of rigged results was supported by sources, also unnamed, who spoke to The Washington Post, but there is at least one other version of exactly what happened. One former defense official told the Post that he understood the scientists had detonated explosives on the interceptor missile to make it look like it had hit the warhead, and the two may never have collided at all.
Meanwhile, the general in charge of the Ballistic Missile Defense Command at the time says he was unaware of any falsified results, and still insists the test was "absolutely a tremendous success."
Clearly, Congress must get to the truth of what happened. The United States did not spend itself into oblivion, exactly, but it did spend incomprehensible sums - $30 billion, to date - on the program, which has never produced a weapon that can defend this country from missile attack.
The "Star Wars" era already has been declared officially dead, with Secretary of Defense Les Aspin scaling it back to a ground-based system that would defend against short-range, tactical missiles, rather than the national umbrella that Reagan envisioned deflecting a long-range nuclear attack.
These allegations cannot be buried along with that grandiose plan, however. If deception was used to help persuade Congress to spend huge amounts of money on a controversial and scientifically suspect program, the nature and extent of that deception must be investigated fully and the results presented publicly.
The reason is simple enough, but apparently needs to be relearned from time to time in Washington: The executive branch is not supposed to lie to the legislative in order to get what it wants.
The Defense Department has said it will conduct an inquiry into how the test was conducted and how the results were used. But longtime SDI critic David Pryor, the Democratic senator from Arkansas, has asked the General Accounting Office to conduct its own investigation for Congress.
This is an appropriate step. When something as costly as SDI comes under a mushroom cloud of suspicion, an independent investigation and public accounting are called for.
by CNB