Ronald Reagan is in retirement in California, the Cold War is over and the fear of Armageddon no longer disturbs our sleep. But ballistic missile defense remains an obsession among Republicans, who are determined to have it–never mind the cost, never mind the absence of threats and never mind the implausibility of the hope that we can make ourselves invulnerable.
House Republicans, in their Contract with America, promised to erect a missile defense quickly, and in February, they voted to proceed with that goal. The Senate did likewise last week when it approved a measure calling for the United States to deploy a nationwide system “as soon as possible,” even if that means withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia.
The Clinton administration opposes the GOP plans, but it is not in a strong position to argue, since it plans to lavish some $50 billion on “theater” missile-defense projects designed to protect military forces in the field. Critics and supporters both agree those systems come awfully close to a national ABM network. So by one route or another, we are moving in the direction the Republicans want to go–spending huge sums of scarce money on a misbegotten fantasy.
GOP supporters say that Americans, who are shocked when they are told that the United States has no means to shoot down nuclear missiles launched against our cities, want such protection at the earliest possible date. But Americans would feel differently if they knew that such a program will do little to shelter us from enemy attack–and will most likely heighten the risk.
The supposed fear is that a rogue state like Iraq, Iran, North Korea or Libya will attack with nuclear warheads delivered on a long-range ballistic missile. But none of them has either nuclear weapons or intercontinental missiles–and none is likely to get them in the foreseeable future.
The real nuclear threat, if there is one, comes from the same place it always has, just the other side of the Urals. The Russians have been diminishing as a danger–not just because we are on better terms with them now than we were during the Cold War, but because they have agreed to scrap most of their nuclear arsenal under the START I and START II agreements.
Building a national missile defense, though, would put us in clear violation of the ABM accord, which committed both sides to forgo such efforts. If we pull out of that agreement, the Russians have made clear, they will abandon START–which means they will keep more than 8,000 warheads they had planned to dismantle.
The Russians fear that we want to emasculate their nuclear deterrent–giving us the power both to attack them and to ward off any retaliation. We could soon be back in a full-scale arms race, since the Russians could deploy more missiles to overwhelm our defense, not to mention building their own anti-missile system. In the end, we’ll be less secure than if we had left well enough alone.
The Wall Street Journal bids good riddance to the ABM Treaty, which it says reflected the “bizarre” idea “that nuclear war could be averted by leaving both sides vulnerable to `mutual assured destruction.”‘ What do the Journal’s editors suppose has prevented a nuclear war? For nearly half a century, the most powerful enemies in human history stood face to face but never came to blows–for the simple reason that each knew the other could answer any nuclear attack with a devastating barrage of its own.
The push for missile defense assumes that deterrence, which worked against the expansionist superpower that was the Soviet Union, won’t work against fanatical Third World tyrants like Saddam Hussein. But Mao Zedong was the most fearsome and fanatical Third World tyrant of all, and it worked against him. Moammar Gadhafi suddenly stopped bombing Western airliners when he got a surprise visit from the U.S. Air Force. Someday, the Iraqis or North Koreans could conceivably incinerate an American city, but only if they are eager to commit national suicide.
If they are that irrational, a missile defense would be poor insurance. An atomic bomb could be delivered to Manhattan in a civilian airplane, a boat or a Ryder truck. Or–let your imagination run wild–someone could make a bomb out of fertilizer, drive it to Oklahoma City and blow up the federal building. As the Japanese have learned, a modern urban populace is also easy pickings for anyone with a vial of poison gas. Putting up a missile defense is like locking the front door of your house while leaving all the windows open.
But congressional Republicans still dream of an impenetrable shield that will once and for all render us immune to attack, achieving perfect safety from our enemies. The rest of us should be able to see the difference between a dream and a delusion.
