Word: warheaded
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...Wars almost certainly cannot work. Former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger characterizes the headier versions of a Star Wars plan as "half Buck Rogers, half P.T. Barnum," and even the most ardent proponents generally con- cede that no technology now known or foreseeable could be guaranteed to destroy every warhead the Soviets could launch. Some percentage would always get through, causing death and devastation beyond the mind...
...Star Wars system work in this more limited sense? It will take a long time to find out: though a fairly crude defense could be erected by the early 1990s, some of the more advanced warhead-killing technologies, like lasers and particle beams, seem to be at least 15 to 20 years away from effective use. The obstacles are difficult even to conceive, let alone overcome. One example: tracking enemy missiles, aiming and firing at them, and then assessing almost instantaneously which ones have been hit would require a computer program so complex that it is beyond the ability...
...figures are fairly wild guesses. Indeed, Cory Coll, leader of an S.D.I. research group at the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, predicts it will be five years before any halfway realistic estimate can be made of the cost of developing X-ray lasers as a warhead-killing weapon...
...overcome are reasonably clear. Every proposal for a missile defense system begins with a profile of an enemy nuclear attack. In its roughly 30-minute flight from a silo in Siberia to detonation on top of a Minuteman silo in North Dakota--or above the White House--a Soviet warhead would go through four well-marked stages: 1) Boost. The rocket engines of, say, an SS-18 missile push it up through the atmosphere and into space. 2) Post-boost. On reaching the edge of space five minutes or so after launch, a device known as a bus detaches itself...
Weapons that could attack the warheads differ somewhat by stage of flight, but--and this is a faintly cheering thought to Star Wars researchers--most are $ adaptable to more than one phase. The systems that could zap missiles in boost generally could also hit warheads in post-boost, mid-course and perhaps even re-entry phases. A rundown of the potential missile and warhead killers that are getting the most attention from scientists...