NARRATOR: In 1983 President Ronald Reagan introduced a plan called the Strategic Defense Initiative, otherwise known as "Star Wars." It was intended to create an impenetrable defense against Soviet ballistic missiles. With the end of the Cold War, the program was slowed down dramatically due to the reduced threats that America faced.

This all changed when Republicans swept into office in 1994. Their "Contract with America" outlined a program that called for reduced government spending, with one controversial exception -- the military budget, which is expected to increase by nearly 10 percent by the turn of the century. A large part of this, up to $60 billion, will be spent on a controversial weapons system most Americans thought had crumbled along with the Berlin Wall: Ballistic Missile Defense -- The Emperor's Newest Clothes.

NARRATOR: Ballistic missile defense is split into two key elements: national defense and theater defense. National Missile Defense, or NMD, is designed to protect against long-range ballistic missiles aimed at the United States. Theater missile defense, or TMD, is designed to protect American troops in foreign military theaters.

Rep. PETER DeFAZIO (D-OR): There have been no feasible technological solutions to make the country safe against -- totally safe against nuclear attack. We have had a policy that's worked for 50 years, and it's called Mutually Assured Destruction. If the issue or the threat to the United States is a ballistic missile, no one -- no one in their right mind is going to launch a missile that could be tracked toward the United States.

NARRATOR: Representative Peter DeFazio believes the Republican Congress is leading the country in the wrong direction.

Rep. DeFAZIO: The real threat, in terms of nuclear weaponry is much more terrorism, someone who puts a small nuclear device in a van, or a rental truck, or in an ancient freighter and brings it into a harbor. But ballistic missiles are an insignificant threat and to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on some fanciful attempt to make us safe from nuclear attack is an extraordinary waste of scarce resources.

NARRATOR: Others, however, believe it is negligent not to have a national missile defense.

BAKER SPRING: There are various focus groups and polling organizations that looked at the missile defense issue and consistently they come up with the finding that many of the American people believe that we are already defended against missile attack. These same people are then even more surprised to learn that it's not a matter of technical inability, but a matter of policy as to why we remain vulnerable.

NARRATOR: It is true the United States does not have a national missile defense system in place. Historically, the United States has favored negotiations over technology to defend against missile threats. On the one hand, the ABM Treaty, signed with the Soviet Union in 1972, limited missile defenses as dangerously destabilizing to the superpowers' nuclear weapons balance. Complementing the ABM Treaty are START I and START II, treaties that reduce the nuclear warheads on each side.

The US has only a very limited theater missile defense: the Patriot missile of Desert Storm fame. Yet contrary to the pictures which filled the airwaves, the Patriot has its problems. John Pike, senior analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, explains.

JOHN PIKE: Folks who watched Operation Desert Storm on TV might have thought that the Patriot worked perfectly. In fact, the Army concluded after the war that it missed more often than it hit over Saudi Arabia and there's compelling evidence that it failed to intercept a single Scud over Israel.

NARRATOR: But the technology does exist to make the Patriot more effective and nearly everyone agrees some sort of limited theater defense is necessary.

WILLIAM PERRY, Secretary of Defense (before Senate Armed Services Committee, 5 March '96): "We believe the threat is here and now and that we should have a robust program to get a deployed system. We have discussed this with our Joint Chiefs, we've discussed it with all of the CINCs, they all agree with that. And they put the first priority in this program is to get a rapid deployment of evolutionary systems, and the second priority is the deliberate deployment of the next generation beyond that."

Rep. JOHN SPRATT (D-SC): Theater missile defense, that's the most immediate threat. Wherever we deploy troops in the world today, almost anyplace, they are potentially faced with the threat of theater missiles which can destroy them in large numbers and destroy materiel. So, that is our most immediate, the most pressing objective, to deal with that particular threat.

NARRATOR: Congressman John Spratt is an influential member of the House National Security Committee.

Rep. SPRATT: We do have -- and this shouldn't be overlooked -- a number of theater missile defense systems in various stages of development. What we tried to do, take the Patriot system to an extended range interceptor with the PAC-3. We also have a follow-on to that or a complement to that known as the THAAD, theater high-altitude interceptor. And we're developing, as well, a ship-based system called the upper tier, the Navy Wide Area Missile Defense system, plus other variations on these things. So, we are concentrating our money on theater missile defense right now.

NARRATOR: There are five major theater defense systems currently in development: PAC III, which is an improved Patriot. MEADS, an international effort to protect ground troops. THAAD, which some analysts believe will be able to protect against strategic missiles, as well. Navy Area Defense, commonly known as lower tier. And Theater Wide Defense, or upper tier. Both Navy lower and upper tier would be based on Aegis-equipped ships.

The three lower tier systems -- PAC III, MEADS and Navy Area Defense -- are within the technological grasp of the United States and are widely supported. The upper tier theater missile defenses, THAAD and Navy Theater Wide, are more technologically challenging. But it is in the realm of national, rather than theater missile defense where the real controversy lies.

The Clinton administration proposes to spend money to maintain a technological base which could be used to develop a national missile defense system when needed. If the threat does arise in the future, the US will then be prepared to deploy a system. In doing so, it would be able to use the latest technology.

PAUL KAMINSKI: Our sense here is that what we need is a program to deploy what's needed when it's needed, versus deploying now something that we don't need today and something that well may be inappropriate for the threat that would develop later. That, in a nutshell, is a description of the NMD program that we're recommending.

NARRATOR: Yet others think a system is needed now.

Mr. SPRING: The ballistic missile defense priority of the United States should be to deploy a global missile defense that uses our best technology to provide a defense against long-range and short-range missiles, those that would uphold our security commitments to our allies as well as defend the territories of the United States.

NARRATOR: Baker Spring would like to see a worldwide missile defense system supported by American allies. He believes this would make the US much safer from attack.

Mr. SPRING: I believe the ballistic missile is the most effective weapon that many of these states have. In the Persian Gulf War, Saddam demonstrated why. Saddam Hussein had many weapons at his disposal, including the terrorist weapon, which is the one that critics of missile defense frequently cite. The fact of the matter is that he used the ballistic missile to terrorize Saudi Arabia, to terrorize Israel. It was, in fact, the weapon that was most effective in his arsenal.

NARRATOR: The Republican majority in Congress wants to raise spending on national missile defense and deploy a system by 2003, a plan which President Clinton opposes.

The United States has spent $90 billion on ballistic missile defense efforts since 1962, $70 billion of that since 1983. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the systems Republicans are now pushing would cost $31- to $60 billion. This is seen by some as throwing good money after bad.

Rep. DeFAZIO: They want to deploy anything. They don't know what it'll be, they don't know whether it will work, they're just saying within seven years we will spend $40-, $50 billion more and we will deploy something that might or might not work against threats that perhaps exist or don't exist. It's an extraordinarily irresponsible move by the Republicans.

NARRATOR: John Pike points to the dismal test record of missile defense technologies.

Mr. PIKE: The Star Wars program has been testing new types of interceptors, and they've had a perfect record. They have a perfect record of not being able to hit anything. They have achieved some test objectives, just not intercepted any missiles. They may be able to overcome these problems, but I think that it's clear that the discrimination, what's the real target, and the software reliability problems that we saw in Desert Storm are going to plague any system in the future.

And so, any system that we deploy to deal with theater or national missile defense might intercept some missiles some of the time, but it's certainly not going to intercept all the missiles all of the time.

NARRATOR: The most popular national missile defense system now being considered would be designed to protect America from a limited attack, up to ten missiles, with a 90 percent success rate. However, the other 10 percent may create some problems.

Jack Mendelsohn is the deputy director of the Arms Control Association.

JACK MENDELSOHN: If you're defending against a nuclear weapon, you either defend totally or it's all over. If you're defending against conventional weapons, you can sustain some leakage and not be destroyed totally. So, I think the other aspect of this is, yes, it will work, but it won't work very well against weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons because there will be leakage.

Mr. PIKE: The bottom line is that faced with a nuclear armed adversary, if that system isn't capable of intercepting a 100 percent of the missiles thrown against it, the president is not going to find that to be very comfortable. He's going to be wearing a bulletproof vest, but the adversaries are going to have cop-killer bullets, so it isn't going to help.

NARRATOR: Regardless of the cost, the seemingly insurmountable technological difficulties and the less-than-100 percent success rate, some still believe that a national missile defense is necessary. They point to North Korea as a threat.

Mr. SPRING: Let's take North Korea. Clearly, it has ballistic missiles now which can threaten both the forces of South Korea and the US forces that are deployed to defend South Korea in the event of a conflict. Further, because of the developments in the North Korean ballistic missile program, at least some intelligence estimates show that they may have a missile capable of reaching some areas of the United States by three to five years. So, the threat is not only immediate, particularly in the regional context, it's also something that is growing and is likely to threaten the United States' territory in the not too distant future.

NARRATOR: The missile to which Mr. Spring alludes is the Taipo Dong II, whose reported range may someday allow it to hit several of the unpopulated Aleutian Islands in Alaska. However, the Taipo Dong II is at best on the drawing board. It has never been tested.

Mr. KAMINSKI: "We do not argue a near-term ballistic missile threat to US territory from the so-called rogue nations, but we cannot be complacent about this assessment. However, the threat of long-range missiles from rogue nations could emerge in the future. The intelligence community estimates that this threat would take 15 years to develop, but it could be accelerated if those nations acquired this capability from beyond their borders."

NARRATOR: There is a huge technological jump from building short-range ballistic missiles to intercontinental ballistic missiles. While 24 developing countries now have short-range ballistic missiles, the only countries that can threaten the US homeland are China, Russia, Great Britain and France.

Professor STEPHEN FETTER (press briefing): "Successfully developing long-range multi-stage missiles would require qualitative leaps in technical knowhow along several dimensions, including engine re-entry vehicle and guidance technology. North Korea probably could not develop a missile capable of hitting a major US city within 15 years even if it launched a major effort to do so."

NARRATOR: Stephen Fetter is an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland. He recently spoke at a briefing sponsored by the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers about the threat of ballistic missiles from rogue states and terrorists.

Professor FETTER (same briefing): "A country with one or two nuclear devices would be very reluctant to mount them on missiles. Missiles are unreliable. They place limits on warhead weight and size. And it's hard to deliver chemical and biological weapons with a ballistic missile. A cruise missile, or an arplane, or special operations forces would be much easier."

NARRATOR: Some argue that a country need not go through the trials and huge expense of building its own ballistic missiles. Frank Gaffney is director of the Coalition to Defend America.

FRANK GAFFNEY (Coalition briefing): "You don't have to build the indigenous capability of an industrialized society sufficiently sophisticated to make 747s or even short-range ballistic missiles to get long-range ballistic issiles. You can buy them. You can buy them essentially off the shelf."

Professor FETTER (press briefing): "Now this just seems to be pure fantasy to me for two reasons. First, you don't smuggle a missile out of a country like you would smuggle, say a small amount of plutonium or highly enriched uranium. These are very large objects that are under very tight control in Russia, and at least I'm confident that Russia and the United States, in fact, can keep track of these things. But secondly, and more importantly, if you're Hezbollah and you want to blow something up, a missile has got to be the least efficient way to do it."

NARRATOR: The smuggling of plutonium and highly enriched uranium does, of course, pose a real threat to the United States. These two materials put the "bang" in nuclear weapons.

While missile defenses look skyward for missile threats, they fail to look outward for threats from terrorists.

FRANK von HIPPEL: The ballistic missile defense would focus on the least probable route of attack. It's one which doesn't exist from the Third World and for the rogue states at the moment. And not on -- on all of the other possibilities, the aircraft, ships in harbors, vans coming across a border.

NARRATOR: Frank von Hippel, former science adviser to President Clinton, is now a professor at Princeton University. Dr. Von Hippel is the co-editor of The Last 15 Minutes, a publication of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers.

Dr. Von HIPPEL: In the case of ballistic missiles, you'll know exactly where it comes from because there are early warning satellites, and so there's no hope of escaping some kind of devastating response.

Mr. MENDELSOHN: The investment in time and the telltale marks that are left by a ballistic missile seem to me to indicate that would be the least likely way a rogue nation would threaten the United States. They're much more likely to threaten it the way the New York Trade Center or the Oklahoma City blasts took place. Someone will slip the weapon into the United States, put it in place, and then announce some kind of a blackmail threat.

Mr. PIKE: I think that it's very clear that after Operation Desert Storm, that no country would dare attack the United States using ballistic missiles or weapons of mass destruction. The United States continues to have a massive nuclear arsenal and our retaliation for such an attack would be swift and it would be terrible and the leaders of all potential adversaries know that. Adding a leaky antimissile system that couldn't be relied on isn't going to change that equation.

NARRATOR: Not only would a national missile defense fail to counter terrorist threats, it would also undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile, or ABM, Treaty. Signed in 1972, and later amended in 1974, the ABM Treaty limits the United States and Russia each to a single land-based missile defense site.

In 1975, the United States deployed a ballistic missile defense system for regional defense in North Dakota, within the limits of the treaty. One year later, in 1976, it was dismantled due to its lack of capability and excessive operating costs.

The new Republican-sponsored plan for national ballistic missile defenses advocates coast-to-coast protection, possibly at multiple sites, and perhaps with space-based components. President Clinton, on the other hand, has made clear his support for abiding by the terms of the ABM Treaty.

Rep. SPRATT: Because there's nothing we need to do in the next several years in developing a treaty-compliant, ground-based system which runs afoul of the treaty in any respect at all. So, if we follow the course that the administration's laid out, which I advocate, of developing for deployment, for deployment decision, ground-based, treaty-compliant interceptors, then we're going with what in the near-term is the most attainable technology for missile defense and at the same time maintaining our compliance with the ABM Treaty for several years to come.

NARRATOR: Baker Spring holds the view that the ABM Treaty interferes with America's ability to defend itself.

Mr. SPRING: The ABM Treaty is a relic of the Cold War and I think that what this debate has to demonstrate is that the US can achieve security with lower levels of offensive weapons, the levels that we hope to contain in the START II Treaty, without the ABM Treaty, or at least by moving beyond the ABM Treaty.

NARRATOR: The ABM Treaty was prompted by three factors: The high cost of missile defense efforts, the inability to create effective systems and, more importantly, the belief that any competition for defensive weapons would add fuel to the dangerous race for offensive weapons.

Mr. PIKE: I think the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty strengthens American security because it's the key to reducing the number of nuclear weapons that the Russians have that might be fired against us. That was why we signed it in 1972, that's why we've enforced it ever since, and that's why we need to continue to enforce it in the future.

NARRATOR: The ABM Treaty is regarded by the Russians and many others as the foundation for every major nuclear arms control treaty, including the Non-Proliferation Treaty, designed to limit the spread of nuclear weapons; the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START I, which took the first steps to reduce the long-range nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union; and the START II Treaty, signed in January 1993, which will further cut the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia.

Adherence to these treaties could be undermined should the United States violate the ABM Treaty to prepare for a threat which may never materialize. This would bring desirable reductions in offensive weapons to a screeching halt.

Dr. Von HIPPEL: In my view, the national missile defense program would make the US less safe by blocking cooperative elimination of many more nuclear weapons than we could ever hope to intercept.

Rep. SPRATT: The single most effective thing we can do right now to reduce the threat of missile attack against the continental United States is to implement START I and ratify and then implement START II. Those two treaties will reduce the number of warheads deployable against us, usable against us, from over 8000 to just over 3500.

NARRATOR: Instead of building defenses against a future threat which may never materialize, there may be more viable, less costly, and more effective ways to protect the United States from attack.

Dr. Von HIPPEL: A much more cost-effective and effective form of defense would be to cooperate with Russia to eliminate as many of the warheads as we can on both sides, to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention to reduce the threat of chemical weapons from the Third World, to strengthen the verification of the biological weapons convention, to work with Russia on strengthening the security of nuclear materials in Russia so they won't appear on the black market.

NARRATOR: The United States has programs that are meant to secure nuclear material and destroy weapons in the former Soviet Union. In 1996, Congress cut funding for the cooperative threat reduction program by $71 million. Meanwhile, it doubled spending on national missile defenses, raising it by $360 million.

Secretary Perry (5 March '96, Senate committee): "When I first went to (Russian site name) in March of '94, that site at (same site name) had 700 nuclear warheads all aimed at targets in the United States. By this June, when this task is ompleted, that missile field will have been entirely converted to a wheat field. That is the product -- in our program, that is the product of this cooperative threat reduction program and that is the sort of thing you are buying with the $327 million invested in this cooperative reduction program.

NARRATOR: Ballistic missile defenses only address the last 15 minutes of the nuclear attack scenario, the amount of time the United States would have to recognize and shoot down an incoming long-range ballistic missile. Critics believe that by focussing on ballistic missile defenses other measures which could stop a ballistic missile attack are being ignored.

Dr. Von HIPPEL: It's perverse, I think, that we're spending so much money on this least probable and this most counter-productive form of defense and that we're not working cooperatively to eliminate these warheads instead of waiting for the last 15 minutes to try to intercept them.

Mr. MENDELSOHN: It's not going to be settled overnight. Some people, as I tried to indicate earlier, just have an intuitive, intestinal feeling that defenses are good for you. Others understand that they really can cause you problems if you're in a potential adversarial relationship. Others believe American money and technology can do anything. Others say that's an illusion, we ought to be careful about, you know, the technological superiority of the United States, an old argument that's called the "fallacy of the last move." That we're going to do something so good that it'll never be beaten.

NARRATOR: The question of technology versus arms controls boils down to this: Should the United States rely on futuristic technologies focussed on the final 15 minutes after a missile is launched towards the United States? Or should it use the estimated 15 years before the presumed threat evolves to push for arms control agreements that have been and will continue to be useful in increasing our national security?

With the safety of the United States and $60 billion riding on the outcome, all Americans have a stake in the answer.

ADM JOHN SHANAHAN (USN, Ret.): Some of our lawmakers want to build a shield to protect the United States from a limited ballistic missile attack. But the likelihood of such an attack is minuscule. The only nations which currently have the ability to strike the United States directly with a ballistic missile are Russia, China, Great Britain and France. If any other nations or terrorist groups wanted to attack the United States, why would they go to the trouble and expense of building or buying ballistic missiles when they could put a bomb in a suitcase and stash it in the back of a U-Haul or sail it into New York Harbor?

We all want to protect the United States from attack, but we should not be putting all of our eggs in the one basket called ballistic missile defense. We need to stop missiles before they are launched and control the nuclear warheads and the materials needed to make them before the next explosion to rock New York or Oklahoma City is from a nuclear device.

For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I am Jack Shanahan.

Produced by the Center