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Time - Man of the Year
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Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso
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061592
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1992-09-22
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THE WEEK, Page 20NATIONStar Wars Under Fire
A tough-minded Pentagon puts a damper on Congress's enthusiasm
Weapons change purposes these days as easily as people change
hats. But rumblings from the Pentagon indicate that even the
latest version of Star Wars is in trouble. The first tremor came
in a May 15 memo by Assistant Secretary of Defense David Chu
leaked to the press last week. Haste could make billions of
dollars in waste, warned Chu. The department's top weapons
analyst says plans to deploy 100 ground-based interceptors by
1997 -- rather than 2002, as he recommends -- to fend off
small-scale nuclear attacks cannot proceed without major cost
overruns and performance problems. In the rush to deploy, he
says, the military will have to design and start buying SDI
before any of the missiles, radar or communications involved are
tested. That is hardly a recipe for success: the record of
earlier ground-interceptor tests has been spotty at best. The
proposal, says Chu, violates the fly-before-buy principles that
Pentagon leaders "have labored so hard to put into place." At
week's end the Pentagon bowed to that logic and announced that
it was pushing back the SDI plan by at least a year.
What's the rush? Last year Congress ordered speedy
deployment of the 100-missile complex at Grand Forks, N. Dak.,
the only strategic-defense site permitted by the 1972
Antiballistic Missile Treaty. If that agreement can be
renegotiated with the Russians, congressional SDI-niks hope to
expand Grand Forks into a $35 billion nationwide network of 700
interceptors. But a second leak last week could chill those
plans: a draft Pentagon report now concludes that even the
proposed national-defense site at Grand Forks would violate the
ABM treaty. And that, says Federation of American Scientists
space policy director John Pike, is what all the urgency is
really about. "They're trying to get rid of the ABM treaty
before the magic of Desert Storm fades," observes Pike. "They'll
work out the bugs later. But it's a very expensive form of
diplomacy."