At this point in the plot (as would happen in real life), the missile-defense crews in Alaska launch a Ground-Based Interceptor to shoot down the missile as it arcs above the atmosphere. The crew members, like all the other advisers and technicians in the nuclear enterprise, perform professionally. But the first GBI fails to separate from its rocket booster. Then the second GBI misses the target. After that, the missile enters into its “terminal phase,” plunging back into the atmosphere, darting toward Chicago—and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.
How real is this? Alas, very. In the movie, as the GBIs are fired at the target, the secretary of defense asks the deputy national security adviser whether these interceptors work. The young adviser replies that the task is like “hitting a bullet with a bullet.” In tests, he goes on, they’ve hit the target just 61 percent of the time—
if they first successfully separate from the rocket (and, as the film correctly dramatizes, sometimes they don’t separate). The defense secretary is outraged. “It’s a coin toss?” he shouts into the phone. “That’s what we’ve got for $50 billion?”
I felt like yelling back at the screen, “No, that’s what we’ve got for
$500 billion!” That’s
about how much we’ve spent on the strategic missile-defense program since President Ronald Reagan started it in 1983.
Otherwise, yes, this too is accurate. The tests in real life succeed about half the time—and the people conducting those tests have a lot of time (days, even weeks) to plan them; everyone knows where the mock warhead is coming from, where it’s going, and so forth. A 50-50 record is remarkable for hitting a bullet with a bullet (which is what this weapon sets out to do), but it’s woeful if the downside of that 50-50 means Chicago gets blown to smithereens.