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The test was a triumph of U.S. Military technology, and it made front-page news. On June 10, 1984, an experimental rocket roared off its launch pad on a remote Pacific island and intercepted an incoming ICBM warhead some 100 miles above the Earth. The test, conducted 15 months after Ronald Reagan stunned the world with his plan to protect the United States from missile attacks, was a crucial demonstration of the Pentagon's ability to solve the problems of ballistic-missile defense--problems so difficult that the president's Strategic Defense Initiative was widely and snidely referred to as Star Wars. Crackbrained or not, SDI prompted something like panic in the Kremlin, and, over time, probably helped to push the Soviets into a new round of negotiations that produced the breakthrough nuclear-weapons treaty known as START.
Nine years and $30 billion later, there are allegations that the missile test was a scientific fraud--that the target ICBM carried an electronic homing beacon that enabled the interceptor to find and destroy it in space. These allegations, published in The New York Times last week, were based on interviews with four unnamed former officials of the Reagan administration. The story also charged that administration officials used the faked missile test to fool Congress as well as the Soviets. Sen. David Pryor of Arkansas, a longtime critic of the Star Wars program, has demanded an investigation by the General Accounting Office and the Defense Department. "This looks like pure, out-and-out deception," Pryor said. "It looks to me like the shades of either Oliver North or Irangate, [the executive branch] thumbing [its] nose at the legislative branch." Worse, Pryor added, Congress may have been misled into spending far more on SDI than the program merited.
Enter former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and Maj. Gen. Eugene Fox, who ran the test program for the U.S. Army. Weinberger, who according to the Times had approved the deception, denied that the missile test was rigged or that there was any attempt to mislead Congress into spending more on SDI. And Fox, now retired, said that he and his staff "did not cheat, steal, rob or fake a test," and that he knew nothing about any attempt to deceive the Soviets or Congress. He said it was true that both the target missile and the interceptor rocket had been equipped with beacons, but claimed that the beacons were used to ensure safety and to help those tracking the rockets monitor the intercept attempt. "I didn't get any guidance to do anything [misleading], say anything [misleading] or do any trickery," Fox said.
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Still, Fox conceded that even he could not be absolutely certain there had been no fakery. And John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, a Star Wars critic, said it is "highly plausible" that the test was rigged, arguing that "it would not be difficult for a small group of people to surreptitiously modify [the missiles] to increase the probability of success." "The whole Star Wars program has been characterized by excessive optimism, misrepresentation and outright deception," Pike said, adding that the program was so classified that even some of those in charge may not have known what was going on.
Nobody doubts that Ronald Reagan had high hopes for SDI: the dream of an impervious defense against ICBMs was his dream. But many of his aides thought SDI was impossible--former national-security adviser Robert McFarlane used to refer to it as "the Sting." The program "was a great scam," said former defense official Lawrence Korb. Korb said one of Reagan's advisers was so thrilled by the 1984 test that he "was like a little kid" and "ran it over to Reagan." There was no mention of any electronic beacon in the report, one of Reagan's aides said, "and those of us in the White House had no basis for second-guessing it."
Nobody doubts that some administration officials were perfectly willing to fake missile tests to scare the Soviets. Richard Perle, one of Weinberger's deputies at the Defense Department, said that he and others recommended deceptions, although Perle said he never knew if his "disinformation" proposals were approved. The use of electronic beacons "does not imply deception," Perle said, partly because the beacons themselves could have been monitored by Soviet spy ships presumed to be monitoring the tests. But another source said the electronic signals could have been coded to block Soviet eavesdropping.
The budget for SDI has been drastically cut and Defense Secretary Les Aspin has ordered an investigation to see if the test was faked. Even if no one tried to bamboozle Congress--and Perle pooh-poohs the suggestion--the theory has a lot going for it: it was a decisive moment in the arms race, and the Reagan administration had every reason to want to bluff the Soviets. But it's highly unlikely anyone will find a smoking signal beacon--for if it ever existed, it was destroyed somewhere in space.
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