Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, is editor of "Repairing the Regime: Preventing the Spread of Weapons of Mass Destruction" (Routledge, 2000).
Is a national missile defense system a real way to protect the United States or would it just prove to be a Maginot Line in space? Insight asked scholars on opposite sides of the issue to weigh in. .
National Missile Defense is America's longest running infomercial. We cannot escape the constant sales pitch for a product we did not know we needed.
Now President George W. Bush has opened the latest campaign to sell it to a reluctant American public. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld upped the ante with a call to develop new weapons for outer space. The president will soon present his official plans, but we already have a good idea what he will propose.
If you think you have heard the arguments of threats, costs, treaties and technology before -- you have. The United States spent more than $120 billion over the past 40 years trying to develop an effective counter to ballistic missiles. Technology after technology was tried and failed.
This was not in any way due to treaty restraints. Although the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty limits testing and deployment of certain national missile defense systems, it does not block research.
The proposed weapons proved infeasible in this basic research phase, including the systems President Ronald Reagan tried out in the Star Wars program: space-based X-ray lasers, chemical lasers, particle-beam weapons, kinetic kill vehicles and ground-based free-electron lasers and interceptors. Conservative advocacy groups championed a plan to quickly upgrade the Navy's Aegis destroyers and cruisers with missile defense weapons. Space weapons would be added soon after.
This is sheer fantasy. The hard truth is that Bush cannot field any national missile defense system during his first term, or during a second term, either. Here's why:
The weapon favored by advocates is called the Navy Theater-Wide System. It is designed to be a defense against medium-range missiles, intercepting them in mid-course. That's after they have been boosted into outer space but before they re-enter the atmosphere over their targets.
Proponents want to soup up this weapon with a bigger interceptor that could strike missiles in the early, boost phase, giving it a capability against long- range missiles. But even the basic version cannot be deployed before 2010, according to the Navy.
Lt. Gen. John Costello, outgoing commander of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, warns that ships may not withstand the stresses from launching the new high-energy interceptors.
So what can Bush do?
The president will deploy the only thing he can: a plan with all the favored weapons sketched in. Official briefings will present optimistic assessments of the proposed systems (as they have for the past 15 years) and emphasize the vision and the concept rather than the cost and technology leaps required.
The plan may also include an "emergency deployment plan" to outfit some Navy ships with test interceptors. This scarecrow option may have appeal for officials eager to deploy anything to get the process rolling. Rhetoric will again shift from "national" to "global" defenses.
All of these plans could proceed, at least initially, without abrogating the ABM treaty. It will take years of research to discover if any of the systems are feasible.
The ABM treaty did not prevent President Richard Nixon from deploying an anti-missile system, or Reagan or George H. W. Bush from spending $60 billion on research, or Clinton from testing his system. Bush could choose to minimize opposition to his plan by beginning slowly, with increased budgets, research and rhetoric, while working with the Russians and others to create a new framework to replace the treaty he abhors.
If he does so, and commits to the dramatic reduction in nuclear weapons he has said he favors, this measured approach could garner international acclaim rather than generate global apprehension. It all depends on whether the president would rather be a statesman or a salesman.
|
If you have come to this page from an outside location click here to get back to mindfully.org |