A woman without a man, puckish feminists used to say, is like a fish without a bicycle. The same could be said of a superpower without a national missile defense.
But telling that to conservatives is not a cost-effective use of your breath. At least since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, they have been obsessed with the idea of deploying a system to fend off a nuclear attack, at the imposing price of $48 billion.
You’d think that the end of the Cold War, which removed the immediate threat posed by 10,000 Soviet warheads, would have dampened their ardor. But like a traveler who responds to getting lost by going faster, missile defense advocates have redoubled their effort. They are not about to be diverted by something as inconsequential as the collapse of our only major enemy.
The conservative view is expressed in lurid terms by the Center for Security Policy, a Washington lobby group headed by former Reagan aide Frank Gaffney. Last month, shortly before President Clinton vetoed a Pentagon authorization bill requiring the deployment of a nationwide anti-ballistic missile network in just seven years, CSP lamented his “determination to leave America defenseless.”
Well, America is defenseless against a missile attack in the same way that Mike Tyson, walking along the street, is defenseless against an assault. Any number of passersby might be able to sneak up from behind and land a sucker punch. But no one is apt to try, for the simple reason that the ensuing events would be terribly unpleasant.
That is precisely why no one is likely to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States, which, in the space of 15 minutes or so, can turn any enemy into the world’s largest source of radioactive charcoal. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, Americans have never relied on defense to foil attacks after they begin; they have relied on deterrence to assure that such attacks don’t occur.
That strategy worked perfectly for four decades against a superpower adversary armed with thousands of nuclear warheads and bent on global domination. But conservatives somehow assume that it can’t work against petty Third World dictators.
The Persian Gulf war provided a lasting boost to advocates of missile defense by unveiling the Patriot, which was seen repeatedly demolishing Iraqi Scuds in the air. But it turned out that all that CNN footage didn’t show what it seemed to show. In reality, the Patriots failed to destroy a single Scud warhead.
John Pike, director of the space policy project at the Federation of American Scientists, says conservatives got the lessons of the Gulf War entirely backward. Missile defense didn’t work in Operation Desert Storm. What did work–spectacularly–was deterrence.
Saddam Hussein could have used chemical or biological weapons against American troops or Saudi Arabian cities. But he knew that would invite nuclear retaliation by the United States. So he went down to defeat with his most fearsome weapons on the shelf.
Even if he or Kim Jong Il or Moammar Gadafi were to acquire nuclear weapons, none would be able to gain anything by using them against us. The only value they have been to any country is defensive–to discourage potential attackers.
But assuming these rogue despots wanted to start a nuclear war, would they employ the intercontinental ballistic missiles that an ABM system is designed to shoot down? Not when there is a multitude of cheaper, simpler and less detectable means of delivery, from a Piper Cub to a rented truck. Ballistic missile defense is the most expensive protection against the least plausible threat.
Advocates say some sort of “peace shield” is needed to protect against something that can’t be deterred: the accidental launch of a nuclear-tipped missile. But this is another exceptionally remote possibility. Despite all the Russian and Chinese missiles pointed at us, none has ever gone off inadvertently. And the best protection against accidental launches is to reach agreement with other nuclear powers to take all missiles off perpetual alert.
The second best protection is to reduce the size of Russia’s missile force, the world’s largest next to ours. But the Russians have made it clear that if we proceed with an ABM program, they will refuse to ratify the START II agreement, which commits them to eliminate some 4,500 warheads–more than half their stockpile. So this effort to make us safer will appreciably degrade our security.
Such inconvenient realities suggest that missile defense is an extravagant fool’s errand. But on this issue, conservatives have never let reality get in their way.
