The Flyswatters

In a Kremlin conference room, Nikita Khrushchev casually tossed off a comment that startled a delegation of 14 visiting U.S. editors. The Soviet Union, he said, had developed an anti-missile missile so unerringly accurate that it can "hit a fly in outer space." There were a few scare headlines in the U.S., but intelligence sources voiced strong doubt that Khrushchev's flyswatter really existed. Last week the U.S. answered his boast with a well-timed rejoinder. On Kwajalein atoll in the mid-Pacific, a winged Nike-Zeus missile lurched skyward atop a shaft of flame, soared more than 100,000 feet, and--for the first time--intercepted an intercontinental ballistic missile that had been launched some 20 minutes earlier at 16,000 m.p.h. from California, 4,700 miles away.

When the news of the successful shot reached Washington, Congressmen debating the farm bill in the House burst into applause. California Democrat George P. Miller exultantly called it "one of the greatest breakthroughs in recent defense development." The Army brass who oversee the Nike-Zeus program were jubilant. But just as the Pentagon had taken Khrushchev's boast calmly, so too it restrained its own reaction to the Nike-Zeus success. As far as the Defense Department was concerned, it was merely "part of a continuing development series"--and Secretary Robert S. McNamara had his doubts that it would ever effectively protect the U.S.

Serious Weaknesses. McNamara observed -before the Kwajalein test that it would be conducted under "controlled conditions that differ substantially from actual combat." In last week's test the onrushing Atlas ICBM actually carried a transmitter to clue the slender, 48-ft. Nike-Zeus bird in on its target.* In an actual attack, an ICBM might spew out "decoys" designed to baffle the tracking radar--as was not the case last week--or an ionospheric nuclear blast might knock out the radar altogether. "As advanced as the Nike-Zeus system is--and we believe it to be quite advanced--it has serious weaknesses," said McNamara last winter. "There is widespread doubt as to whether it should ever be deployed." The fact is that nobody has an effective anti-missile missile yet, and some U.S. officials doubt that anyone ever will. But the tests go on in hope of a breakthrough, and the U.S. has spent $1.2 billion on Nike-Zeus since 1956. At Kwajalein, a 600-acre coral speck in the Marshalls, the Army three years ago began building a complete, $75 million installation, a cubist's delight of domes and circles, triangles and squares. Inside the geometric shapes are housed four separate radar networks, the guts of the Nike-Zeus system: one detects ICBMs from 1,000 miles out; another, the "discrimination" radar, distinguishes genuine warheads from decoys and stray space debris; target-tracking radar follows the ICBMs on their reentry; and missile-tracking radar guides the Nike-Zeus to its target. Computers--one capable of 200,000 calculations per second-- handle information so swiftly that the whole process lasts two or three minutes from detection to interception.

For the Nike-Zeus rocket, "interception" does not necessarily mean "a hit.'" Scientists calculate that with a one-kiloton warhead the rocket could either neutralize or destroy a multimegaton monster from a distance of a mile or more. The theory has yet to be tested, but it has silenced critics who originally scorned the plan as a foolhardy attempt to "hit a bullet with a bullet." Says an official of Douglas Aircraft, one of the major contractors for the program: "It's like hitting a bullet with a couple of football stadiums."

No Defense. The Army proposed locating 120 Nike-Zeus batteries around major U.S. targets, each with 50 missiles and with radar capable of tracking three warheads at once. But the cost would have been a stratospheric $10 billion to $14 billion--and McNamara decided that it was not worth it. What would happen, he asked, in a saturation attack? The Army conceded that many missiles would get through, but argued that the expense was justified even if only a few were stopped. Unconvinced, McNamara last March ruled out production of the Nike-Zeus system until its problems were solved --and he clearly doubted that they ever would be.

Seeking alternatives, he turned to "Project Defender," a $100 million-a-year operation under Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, now has 200 civilian contractors at work exploring other anti-missile possibilities. Among them: spraying the path of a missile with pellets to damage the warhead, or putting into orbit anti-missile stations that would detect and kill ICBMs as they leave their launching pads.

For the time being, the shots at Kwajalein will continue, eventually with decoys and radar-jamming techniques to test Nike-Zeus's versatility. "We know of no better solution to the problem,'" said McNamara, but he clearly was unsatisfied with the current state of U.S. anti-missile defenses. "At the present time," said Mc-Narnara when he put the brakes to the program last March, "it appears to us that no amount of money can make possible an absolute defense of this country against the ICBM.'" Despite last week's success, he has not changed his mind.

*Radio signals of another sort were responsible last week for postponing the scheduled launching of an Atlas-Agena B rocket on the start of a 4 1/2-month, 224 million-mile journey to Venus, the earth's sister planet. Mariner I was all set for the shot when an unindentified radio signal detected in the booster rocket made technicians at Cape Canaveral fear a malfunction. Later, they rescheduled the flight, which is aimed at discovering the first accurate data about Venus and its mysterious atmosphere.

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