Washington plans to defeat future enemies single-handedly with a new strategy and new types of weapons.
Deep inside Mt. Chonma, 87 miles northwest of the capital city of Pyongyang, North Korea's nuclear technicians feel secure: no weapons ever used in the history of the world could shatter the bastion of rock and concrete behind which they are pursuing their bomb production program. But this sense of security will soon be a thing of the past. If the plans of the weapons tinkerers in the United States materialize, in the future their North Korean counterparts will have to fear a super-hard projectile hurled down from a Titan in space that can break through more than 60 feet of granite and steel reinforced concrete. Its kinetic energy alone will be sufficient to turn the subterranean fortification into a zone of death and the nuclear installations into rubble.
America's new super weapon, according to plans recently disclosed by the Pentagon, will be launched from a space vehicle sent up less than two hours earlier. The "bunker breaker" released by such a "hypersonic cruise vehicle" (HCV) will accelerate to many times the speed of sound solely by virtue of gravitational force and will be steered to its destination by satellite.
The name of this future project is "Falcon." The FALCON (acronym for force application and launch from continental U.S.A.) is expected to be used worldwide for the deployment of military power from U.S. soil. The new strategy is supposed to make the U.S. superpower independent of alliances and give its military an unprecedented global reach.
Last Wednesday a spokesman for the Defense Department announced the start of the project. As soon as this week, orders for the new system will go out to the U.S. weapons industry. And by 2010 preliminary elements of the new arsenal should be available. Fifteen years later, the planners expect to have the supersonic HCVs in their hangars, ready for lift-off. At that time any point on the globe would be within two hours' reach of American weapons. "Our armed forces will be strong enough to prevent any conceivable enemy from making efforts to arm, to overtake the U.S. militarily or even to catch up to us," George W. Bush vows.
In the future the American superpower will be able to protect its interests with military means anywhere in the world, unhampered by potentially unwilling allies. In addition, it could drastically reduce the number of American troops stationed in distant parts of the globe.
So far no defense exists against such a threat from outer space. The supersonic vehicles could be launched from four sites on the American continent - practically unreachable by potential enemies.
The space ferries can maneuver their more than five-ton weapons load in an orbital flight path over any point on earth without requiring take-off clearance or overflight permission. Pentagon planners are already exultantly calling it, "An invincible tactical deterrent against which all enemy defensive measures will be ineffectual."
The system is to be built in two stages. Until 2010 so-called common aero vehicles (CAV), unmanned multi-purpose transporters* will be carried into space by rockets. After that the CAV will steer like a space shuttle, gliding to those points from which its deadly payload will reach its target - with an accuracy that deviates by less that three yards from its targeted destination.
The weapons on the CAVs are derived in part from the present-day U.S. arsenal and include "smart" bombs, cruise missiles, and the new type of "bunker breakers." The CAVs are above all supposed to be able to destroy "hardened and deeply buried targets." Their missiles, the planners stipulate, must reach an impact velocity of at least 2,700 miles per hour.
The HCVs ready to be deployed 15 years later, besides being able to carry a payload twelve times as great, differ primarily in their ability to return like unmanned aircraft to any chosen landing place. These war drones, which can be refueled and armed in hours, would be able to cover any corner of the earth with continuous bombardment. The Pentagon planners describe what they are supposed to accomplish by citing the demands of the Afghanistan War.
If the Falcon had been available in 2001, it would have opened a wide spectrum of deployment possibilities: "Attacks with supersonic, deep penetrating warheads to eliminate al Qaeda groups in their caves; the use of precision bombing to destroy Taliban units, or even the dropping of cheap target-seeking explosive devices which would hunt down terrorist leaders."
Yet for such tasks the new weapons systems face exactly the same obstacles that have caused the failure of today's "smart" weapons: In all the attempts to eliminate the terrorist godfather Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein and his ruling clique with targeted decapitation hits, there was one element lacking: reliable information about their whereabouts.
translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo
source: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/english/0,1518,256227,00.html 21jul03
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