The Ploy That Fell to Earth

By Bruce van Voorst/Washington

One night in June 1984, a test ICBM soared up from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Thousands of miles away in the middle of the Pacific, another rocket was launched on Kwajalein Island. It contained an infrared sensor powerful enough to detect heat from a human body 1,000 miles away. Closing at 15,000 m.p.h., the rocket locked onto the ICBM, intercepting it in midflight and destroying it by sheer physical impact. So devastating was the hit that the remaining shards of the ICBM's warhead measured less than an inch across.

Pentagon officials were ecstatic about the results of the $300 million test. It was, declared one official, like "hitting a bullet with a bullet." Moreover, it was proof of the potential of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative. It seemed to signal an important first step in building a high- tech astro-shield against nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles from the Soviet Union. A Wall Street Journal editorial proclaimed, STAR WARS WORKS.

But did it? Last week a report in the New York Times alleged that the test was a fraud and that the results had been rigged. While that may have served as part of a cold war strategy to deceive the Soviets into spending their way into oblivion to counter SDI, similar misinformation was provided to Congress to persuade it to fund the program with huge sums -- $31 billion to date. Clearly stung, Defense Secretary Les Aspin, a former Congressman, ordered an internal investigation at the Pentagon. Said he: "Any allegation that the Congress has been misled raises serious questions." Said Senator David Pryor, whose long-standing probe of SDI seems to have triggered the revelations: "It could totally discredit the testing process and the credibility of the Pentagon."

Sources apparently within the SDI program told the Times that the 1984 launchings did not prove the efficacy of the heat-seeking infrared sensor. Rather, the target ICBM carried a beacon that guided the interceptor rocket toward a set-up collision. Officials involved with the test have vigorously defended the test results. Said General Eugene Fox, the retired Army missile- defense chief: "We didn't gimmick anything." William Inglis, the experiment's civilian test director, dismissed the accusations of an SDI hoax as "technical nonsense." There was indeed a beacon, but, said Inglis, it served only for "range safety" purposes, allowing ground crews to destroy the ICBM if it went off course.

Inglis admitted to TIME, however, that some aspects of the test might have enhanced the results and made it easier for the interceptor to find its target. The warhead, for example, was preheated before launch to 100 degreesF to provide a clearer infrared signature. The target warhead also carried explosives to increase the detonation and thus assist ground observations. Says a congressional staff member: "Either could have served to skew the tests."

While SDI's supporters, including top Reagan Administration officials, strenuously deny that the 1984 results were falsified, they all concede that deceptive practices are normal in statecraft. During the '80s a "perception management" program run by the CIA handled a disinformation operation aimed at deceiving the Soviets about U.S. technological research. Among the programs it had a hand in was SDI. A draft of a classified Defense guidance document from that period clearly toes the spend-Moscow-into-the-ground line and reads, "We should seek to open up new areas of military competition and obsolesce previous Soviet investment or employ sophisticated strategic deception options to achieve this end." A former official told TIME, "A lot of time and money has been spent on this." It may have worked. Last year the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Vladimir Lukin, told Robert McFarlane, Reagan's National Security Adviser, that fear of competing with the U.S. in strategic defense "accelerated the Gorbachev revolution by five years."

Gimmicking military-weapons tests is nothing new at the Pentagon. In the mid-1980s congressional investigators determined that aircraft were exploded by remote ground control within seconds of each firing from the Sergeant York antiaircraft gun and that it never actually hit the drone planes. In operational tests of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, ammunition in the turret was replaced with cans of water to douse fires and lower the level of explosions when the vehicle was hit.

The current controversy has cast further doubts on the SDI program, which even in this time of declining defense budgets is still slated for $3 billion in 1995. "This is a body blow to the integrity of everyone who worked on SDI," said Frank Gaffney, director of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy and a diehard Star Warrior. Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's Secretary of Defense, insists that "the test was scientifically based, did succeed and was accurately reported to the Congress and the American public." But he said there may be no overcoming the new allegations: "Once these fairy tales are out, they are picked up as gospel truth by editorial writers and never corrected."

Yet SDI has always been something of a fairy tale. In 1983 scientist Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, promised Reagan that nuclear-generated X rays would destroy warheads. It was a claim accepted by few in the scientific community and has long since proved false. Other SDI-related technologies -- directed energy, chemical lasers, neutron beams -- have turned out to be useless. Last May, Aspin conceded that the decade-long SDI program produced no credible defense against ICBMs. He renamed SDI -- focused now on threats from mid-range rockets like the Scud -- the Ballistic Missile Defense program. It was, said Aspin, "the end of the Star Wars era." True enough, but not the end of Ballistic Missile Defense, which will cost taxpayers a projected $40 billion more over the next six years.

With reporting by Jay Peterzell/Washington