By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald Correspondent
NEW YORK - As a former husband of Elizabeth Taylor, Senator John Warner of Virginia would seem uniquely qualified to recognise the perils of intemperate passion.
His friends and colleagues warned him that the much-married actress had the makings of a poor political wife.
But Warner marched to the altar regardless, only to find his bride was a profligate spender who insulted his political allies and grew so big on a favoured diet of chocolates, pills and liquor that he preferred to leave her at home rather than share the spotlight with such a larger-than-life liability.
When it was over, after Taylor had thrown yet more business to her divorce lawyers, Warner was quoted as telling friends that he had learned his lesson: Never again would he confuse mere dreams and desire with the hard bed of cold reality.
After the events of the past few months, however, Warner's pledge seems to be another politician's assertion requiring a large amount of salt.
This time, while it is not a woman who has turned his head, the senator's old eagerness to be seduced by fantasy has made him one of Washington's most ardent advocates for the latest incarnation of the Star Wars nuke-proof shield.
This is the brainchild of his old friend Ronald Reagan, who took it upon himself one day in 1983 to add a few unscripted lines to an otherwise unremarkable speech. It was the patriotic duty of scientists and weaponsmiths, Reagan ad libbed, to come up with a defence that would trump a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.
His aides threw a fit, though they kept their objections to themselves. They realised such a system would violate the treaty that banned anti-ballistic missiles. The uneasy, but unbroken, Cold War truce could well end beneath 10,000 mushroom clouds.
Which brings us to one of the strange things about the Pentagon and the way it acquires hot new weapons: Regardless of success or failure, weapons are a lot harder to kill than the soldiers who operate them. Even with a former anti-war protester in the Oval Office, Star Wars came creeping back. The White House of course denies that the defence contractors' unusually generous donations of late to Democratic causes and candidates have the slightest relevance to the debate.
Last weekend, just a week or so after Warner's aides issued a string of press releases reaffirming their master's unqualified support for Star Wars' latest incarnation - now rechristened Theatre High-Altitude Area Defence System - the senator watched in dismay as a much ballyhooed test went gravely astray.
Given the unusual amount of pre-test publicity, Pentagon sceptics had long since concluded that the fix was in. It would not have been the first time.
When the Tomahawk cruise missile was being broken in during the early 1980s, it was later revealed that Air Force generals had arranged to have homing devices stashed inside the targets.
Another project, a radar-controlled Gatling gun known as Divad, was similarly gingered and would probably have been approved for full-scale production if congressional investigators had not blown the whistle.
This time, a target missile fired from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was set to be intercepted over the Pacific by a smaller rocket from Kwajalein atoll. If the test worked, even partially, the White House had let it be known that a prototype anti-missile system would be awarded what the Administration termed its "limited green light."
It did not happen, or even come close to happening. First, a dud battery delayed the test for hours. And then, when the bird was finally airborne, a simple fault in the second-stage separation mechanism sent $US100 million ($207.4 million) worth of high hopes plunging into the ocean.
Was Warner discouraged? Not at all - even though the latest failure brings the score to eight flops and only one, very dubious, success.
"America is defenceless and we cannot live with that," Warner said with unintended irony. Since Warner is also the highly influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and exerts as much influence as the President over the Pentagon's budget, his words carry a megatonnage of weight.
"Early deployment of the system remains imperative if our country is to remain secure," Warner continued. Any problems, his aides later explained, could all be ironed out after the first interceptors are installed on an island in the Aleutians between Alaska and Siberia, where they would (optimistically) take out any nuclear-tipped missiles from North Korea. The fact that Pyongyang's only existing missile is barely capable of reaching Japan, and none too reliably at that, did not chill enthusiasms in the least.
If we pour another $US60 billion into the scheme on top of the $US50 billion already spent, the US would surely get something worthwhile for its money, was the thrust of his remarks. The Pentagon, its contractors, and hundreds of Warner's fellow congressmen - Republicans and Democrats in whose districts parts for the system are being built - shouted their amens. Could so many people be so wrong?
Well, yes, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Professor Theodore Postol, who has been getting up the Pentagon's nose for more than a decade. When the Gulf War ended with the generals congratulating themselves on the Patriot missile's alleged successes at destroying incoming Iraqi Scuds, Postol analysed the data and discovered that the wonder weapon may not have scored even a single kill. The Scuds exploded, he explained in a conclusion later verified by the Government Accounting Office, because President Saddam Hussein had ordered a series of misguided "improvements" that caused the missiles to break up entirely of their own accord.
If you have a mind to hear similar nuts-and-bolts explanations for the latest Star Wars flaws, Postol can list them for hours. His chief objections, however, are simplicity itself.
The first is that an attacker could easily overwhelm any missile defence by launching flocks of cheap and simple decoy warheads.
The second objection - and in Postol's eyes, this is the real sin of Star Wars - is that Warner and his ilk must surely recognise even a "rogue" nation like North Korea would be most unlikely to launch an open nuclear attack. Such a move could only result in a counterstrike of sudden and instantaneous annihilation.
The real threat, he says, is already known to Warner and every other congressman who bothered to read a report entitled "Wild Atom." Compiled six years ago by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies with the help of the FBI, CIA and the US Energy Department, its consultants included some of the very same Pentagon generals now crusading for Star Wars.
The authors noted with alarm that there is nothing - not a single, solitary countermeasure - the world's last superpower could do to prevent "a nondescript freighter with a crude nuclear device in its hold from arriving in Baltimore Harbour."
If that grim day ever comes, Warner can count on a much larger mess than the midden of empty pill bottles and chocolate wrappers which once littered the bedroom he shared with Elizabeth Taylor.
Missile backers keep the faith
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