  The most promising way to compute the gravitational waves emitted by binary
black holes (BBHs) in their last dozen orbits, where post-Newtonian techniques
fail, is a quasistationary approximation introduced by Detweiler and being
pursued by Price and others. In this approximation the outgoing gravitational
waves at infinity and downgoing gravitational waves at the holes' horizons are
replaced by standing waves so as to guarantee that the spacetime has a helical
Killing vector field. Because the horizon generators will not, in general, be
tidally locked to the holes' orbital motion, the standing waves will destroy
the horizons, converting the black holes into naked singularities that resemble
black holes down to near the horizon radius. This paper uses a spherically
symmetric, scalar-field model problem to explore in detail the following BBH
issues: (i) The destruction of a horizon by the standing waves. (ii) The
accuracy with which the resulting naked singularity resembles a black hole.
(iii) The conversion of the standing-wave spacetime (with a destroyed horizon)
into a spacetime with downgoing waves by the addition of a ``radiation-reaction
field''. (iv) The accuracy with which the resulting downgoing waves agree with
the downgoing waves of a true black-hole spacetime (with horizon). The model
problem used to study these issues consists of a Schwarzschild black hole
endowed with spherical standing waves of a scalar field. It is found that the
spacetime metric of the singular, standing-wave spacetime, and its
radiation-reaction-field-constructed downgoing waves are quite close to those
for a Schwarzschild black hole with downgoing waves -- sufficiently close to
make the BBH quasistationary approximation look promising for
non-tidally-locked black holes.
