Trump's plan to zap incoming missiles with lasers is back to the future: NPR

Earlier this year, President Trump presented an ambitious missile defense plan in the United States. "Our goal is simple," said Trump during a speech in January. "To ensure we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States, anywhere, anytime and anywhere."

To achieve this goal, the new defense budget proposed by the administration provides for hundreds of millions of dollars to study the use of lasers and particle beams in space. "It's a new technology," said the president.

Except that it is not.

The defenses described by Trump almost resemble a ten-year-old program called the Strategic Defense Initiative. This plan was exposed by President Ronald Reagan in a 1983 speech. The Reagan program, dubbed "Star Wars," devised an impenetrable shield that would include orbiting lasers and particle beams to zap the missiles of the planet. 39 Soviet times before they could touch their targets.

"It's remarkable how similar all of this is and I'm not sure it's surprising," said James Acton, co-director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Nuclear Policy Program. Acton says that missile shields are limited by the rules of physics. "Ultimately, missile defense is an extremely complex problem and the means to solve it are very limited."

It is virtually impossible to create a missile shield nationally without building it in space – it is only by taking the ultimate heights that you can defend a target as big as the United States.

Unfortunately, trying to operate in space poses many problems. Technology that is already difficult to use on the ground must withstand extreme heat, freezing cold and cosmic radiation. And if something goes wrong, it can not be fixed.

Despite tens of billions, Reagan's Star Wars program has never produced a shield. But some say it's worth reconsidering.

"It would be remiss of us not to go back and look at these technologies," says Rebeccah Heinrichs, Senior Researcher at the Hudson Institute.

Things have changed since the 1980s: lasers are much smaller and much more powerful; satellites that used to be the size of a school bus can be reduced to the size of a shoebox.

"And we can reduce launch costs, which has been one of the biggest cost drivers," says Heinrichs.

Small satellites combined with new low-cost commercial rockets could make a space-based defense program more affordable, she said.

The Trump administration seems intent on revisiting some of the technologies of the Star Wars era. The President's Budget Plan for 2020 provides $ 116 million for the development of missile-directed energy weapons for missile defense and an additional $ 34 million for particle beams. It also provides $ 132 million for advanced sensors, essential for any space defense. It remains to be seen whether Democrats in the House will accept the funding proposal.

Critics say that a new Star Wars program will probably not result too much. Laura Grego, a physicist from the Union of Concerned Scientists, admits that progress has been made, but nothing has been done. Take particle beams, that is, atomic streams designed to fry a target. Here on Earth, the equipment needed to generate a powerful beam can make miles and use as much electricity as a small city. Nobody has found a way to reduce this technology to the size of a satellite. In 1989, a prototype was launched briefly in space during a suborbital flight. He weighed 2500 pounds and produced a tiny ray that lasted only a few minutes.

"I do not know why they think it's again convenient," Grego said.

And there is another problem that no technology can solve: a space system constantly rotates around the Earth in orbit.

"One weapon is never supposed to be used to function properly, so you need a constellation of these weapons," Grego says. "It becomes very expensive, very fast."

According to a 2012 study by the US National Academy of Sciences, a space-based defense system would require several hundred satellites and could cost up to $ 300 billion.

This figure is also disputed by some who think that space-based defenses deserve a second look. Thomas Karako, director of the missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says it is based on the only technology that could be ready in the foreseeable future: space-based interceptor missiles. Lasers would have longer ranges and require fewer satellites, he notes.

"If we can get that right from the space, I think we should think about it," Karako said.

But for Grego, the renewed focus on technology does not take into account how Reagan ended up reducing the nuclear danger – not through lasers and beams, but through a series of arms control treaties limiting the number and type of nuclear weapons that the United States and the Soviet Union might have.

"It's not because we have excelled in missile defense," she says. "It was only the hard work of treaties and negotiations."