President Ronald Reagan first called for an anti-ballistic missile defense system on March 23, 1983, yet its advocates are fuming that 15 years and over $40 billion later they still don't have their beloved "Star Wars" system. Star Wars promoters simply cannot reconcile themselves with the fact that the United States is not currently capable of overcoming the tremendous technological obstacles that building an effective national missile defense, or NMD, system entails, despite spending $4 billion a year and repeated Pentagon pleas for patience. Rather, they argue, the issue has become a question of political will.
The current policy of allowing the technology to progress until a viable threat emerges is inadequate, they argue. In the most recent attempt to foist expensive missile defenses on the American public, Sen. Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican, has introduced legislation, S1873, that calls for deploying "as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense System capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack." This translates into a call to deploy defenses against intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, whether or not any adversary possesses these sophisticated weapons and without regard to the affordability of an NMD system.
Although missile defense sounds like prudent insurance against potential adversaries, it offers no protection against America's real security threats such as terrorism, religious fundamentalism, environmental degradation, and political disintegration. While the U.S. media may hype the threat posed by the Saddam Husseins of the world, Chicago Bulls star Dennis Rodman has a better chance of winning the Nobel Peace Prize than these petty tyrants have of acquiring an ICBM. The fact is, among our potential adversaries today, only Russia and China have ballistic missiles with sufficient range to strike even one of the 50 states.
Defending against an attack from Moscow or Beijing, however, is not the motivation behind Cochran's plan. To offset Chinese and Russian ICBMs, the United States continues to rely on its own deterrent capability while working to reduce the number of ICBMs aimed at it through international agreements. Rather, S1873 argues that "the long-range ballistic missile threat to the United States is increasing" from potential adversaries in the developing world. It cites several undesirables such as Muammar Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein as a threat because they "have stated their intention to acquire intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of attacking the United States."
Desire, however, should not be confused with capability. Claims that Libya could acquire an ICBM because it wants to is akin to Marion Barry arguing that since he manages the District of Columbia's recreation department, he can balance Washington's budget.
The bill further argues that the "Intelligence Community has failed to anticipate many past technological innovations," noting North Korean and Iranian advances in developing medium-range missiles. These steps, it is suggested, will allow them to development ICBMs. Why North Korea or Iran--two states that have acquired shorter-range missiles--for what they believe are valid regional security concerns would be willing or able to expend the enormous resources necessary to build an ICBM is not explained. If Tehran or Pyongyong were to threaten the United States, they would likely use their shorter-range missiles against American troops abroad, which U.S. theater missile defenses already under development could defend against, but an NMD system could not.
Fortunately, no new country has gained the ability to strike the U.S. heartland with long-range ballistic missiles since President Reagan first gave his speech 15 years ago. Moreover, a 1995 national intelligence estimate, NIE 95-19, found that "no country, other than the major declare nuclear powers, will develop or otherwise acquire a ballistic missile in the next 15 years that could threaten the contiguous 48 states or Canada." After rancorous complaints by missile defense supports that the NIE 95-19 findings were skewed by political pressure, an independent commission headed by former CIA director Robert Gates was established to investigate. Despite the complaints, the Gates commission supported the NIE, noting that "the intelligence community has a strong case that for sound technical reasons the United States is unlikely to face an indigenously developed and tested intercontinental ballistic missile threat from the third world before 2010, even taking into account the acquisition of foreign hardware and technical assistance, and that case is even stronger than was presented in the estimate."
Recent statements by Department of Defense and intelligence officials also support this assessment. They see no evidence that the United States faces a long-range missile threat from any Third World adversary. The reason that no other state has, or soon will have, the ability to join the elite ICBM club is that there is a vast difference between building primitive, short-range systems like the Scud missiles Saddam Hussein used in the Gulf War, and being able to produce long-range weapons. Ballistic missiles with ranges of greater than approximately 2,400 miles must travel through space and require the mastery of sophisticated re-entry, staging, materials, and advanced guidance technologies in order to accurately strike their targets. Would-be proliferators must also develop a much more powerful engine to carry the missile on its long journey, in addition to mastering the other technologies with which it would have little experience. It took the United States eight years to meet this challenge and build its first ICBM; why should we believe that less-capable states could develop one sooner?
If a would-be proliferator were ever able to develop an ICBM, the United States would still have sufficient warning to reassess its decision and deploy an NMD system. The development of ballistic missiles require numerous engine and flight tests, which would in themselves reveal to intelligence satellites the presence of a clandestine program. In a recent letter to Congress opposing the Cochran initiative, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Hugh Shelton noted Washington's ability to detect missile developments and said that he was confident that we will have the three years' warning on which our strategy is based.
Defending against an attack by Libya or Iraq, however unlikely, should not focus on ICBMs. A potential aggressor who wishes to use a weapon of mass destruction against the United States is far more likely to deliver it in the back of a van than on top of a ballistic missile. A terrorist attack against the United States involving a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon is cheaper and easier to accomplish then an ICBM strike and, if it fails, is not easily attributable, thereby avoiding the devastating punishment America would surely mete out. As one Congressional opponent of missile defenses put it, "Star Wars is like putting a $5,000 burglar alarm on the front door of your house, and yet keeping the front windows of your house open and the back door of your house unlocked. Now, surely some thug or some terrorist smart enough to put a nuclear warhead on the top of an ICBM missile would have the intelligence to take that warhead, rent a U-Haul truck, and deliver it to any city within the United States.
Building an NMD system will also have negative effects on American security. The real ICBM threat to the United States comes not from proliferation but from Russia's aging missiles, a large part of which Moscow has said it is willing to destroy under future arms-control agreements. There is a catch, however. Fearing the United States could seek the ability to win a nuclear war, Russian has said its compliance with the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START II, and any possible follow-on agreements, will be contingent upon the United States abiding by the Anti Ballistic Missile, or ABM, treaty. Senator Cochran has repeatedly tried to get the United States to abrogate the ABM treaty and deploy large ballistic missile defenses prohibited under that agreement.
A strategy of defending against a missile already in flight and 5 minutes from striking the United States, rather than by negotiating its destruction on the launch pad, is fundamentally flawed. It is analogous to protecting one's family by wearing bulletproof vests instead of taking the guns out of dangerous hands. Most Americans would be loathe to exchange real reductions in an existing threat for the dubious possibility that effective defenses could be built against a still nonexistent threat. However, that is exactly the fortress-America strategy on which deploying an NMD system is based.
Deploying an NMD system would cost the American taxpayers as much as $60 billion dollars, more than twice as much as the U.S. government spent on education this year.
What we would get in return is a military system that has failed one test after another. Of the 20 attempted intercepts of a missile using technology comparable to the NMD, only 6, or 30 percent, have been successful. The last 9 of these attempts were all failures.
Why? Because missile defenses rely on hit-to-kill technology, meaning that one missile must strike another missile at speeds several times faster than a bullet. Hitting a bullet with a bullet has proved to be exceptionally difficult, and, as an independent panel of experts recently concluded, "some of the [missile defense] programs from the outset assumed that the task was significantly easier than it actually is."
Despite these difficulties, the Cochran bill advocates building the technologically complex NMD system before it has proved that it can work. No one would buy a car without first test-driving it, so why must the military be forced to purchase this "car" that has such a high failure rate?
As was the case 15 years ago, national missile defenses still are based more on political pipe dreams than on actual scientific capability and are likely to waste more billions of hard-earned tax dollars. If Americans really want to protect our families, we shouldn't worry about some dictator in a far-off impoverished land trying to rain missiles down on our houses. Rather, we should safeguard our children's futures by not allowing America to be robbed blind by congressionally mandated gold-plated military boondoggles such as Star Wars. If we learned nothing from the movie Star Wars, we should remember that one technological innovation is never the last word.
For more information please email Andrew Koch