Washington

Bush reveals his plans for missile defence. Credit: NEWSMAKERS

The announcement by President George W. Bush that he plans to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty has been met with concern from leading US physicists.

The reasoning behind Bush's plan to move ahead rapidly with a new missile defence system for the United States and its allies was questioned by physicists at a recent meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) in Washington.

“The last thing the so-called rogue countries would do is launch against the United States, because of the instant retaliation that would result,” Richard Garwin, a retired IBM physicist who has advised the US government on ABM and other technical issues, told the meeting.

Bush has so far offered few details about what his missile defence structure would look like, when it will be deployed or what it would cost. But he has said that the system would be “layered”, meaning that it would involve attempts to intercept missiles at each of their flight stages — during launch, in orbit and during re-entry.

Garwin says that the best prospect of a working system is one that targets the missile during its boost phase, as it moves into orbit. The APS has set up a 12-member panel to look into the feasibility of this approach and deliver an unclassified report by the end of the year, in time to feed into Bush's decision on what systems to build.

The Clinton administration's far less ambitious plan called for a smaller system, with 100 missile interceptors based in Alaska and intended to protect against a limited attack by a 'rogue state'. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Clinton's system would cost about $60 billion to deploy.

Some analysts say that the United States has already spent about $60 billion on missile defence over the past 50 years, including $27 billion on President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, with little to show in return.

Spending on missile defence this year is expected to top $4.9 billion, making it the largest single programme in the defence department, even before the programme is expanded to meet Bush's objectives. Critics say that the Bush initiative is likely to cost $100 billion or more.

Beneficiaries of the programme may include university scientists in fields such as optics and nanotechnology, but the great bulk of the expenditure will be in development, rather than scientific research, according to officials in the defence department.