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 enuflect
first, ask questions later. Or so goes the reasoning at the State
Department, the part of government
most likely
to keep missile defense — finally on the cusp of reality — from
ever happening. A February 2 "secret" memorandum from
assistant secretary of state Avis T. Bohlen — a Clinton holdover
— to Secretary Colin Powell nicely captures the institutional mindset
at State. Bohlen recommends doing nothing precipitous on missile
defense — in fact recommends doing nothing at all, at least not
until the completion of another, endless round of consultations,
discussions, and general reassurances and temperature-takings with
almost any foreign power willing to consult and discuss.
"We should
not withdraw from the [Anti-Ballistic Missile] treaty," Bohlen
warns Powell, "until we know what will replace it as part of
a strategic stability framework." That could take a long time.
"We should look for ways to make NMD [national missile defense]
and its evolution appear less threatening to the Russians and, if
possible, the Chinese." "The allies want real consultations
before decisions are made, not briefings on what we have decided."
"Early discussions with the Russians could be a valuable input
to the Administration's policy deliberations." What Bohlen
recommends, in short, is a policy of logorrhea. And early indications
are that Powell is eager to gab. He wanted to continue the Clinton
administration's talks with the North Koreans (the president himself
put the brakes on that idea), and reportedly wanted to continue
the Clinton administration's "experts level" talks with
the Russians on missile defense. (Powell now denies this.) Well,
what are diplomats for, if not talking?
But this is
the now-or-never moment for missile defense. The Bush administration
may be at the apex of its power, and the allies — convinced, for
now, that the administration is serious about missile defense —
are at their most cooperative. If the administration doesn't immediately
begin building a ground-based system — as a first step toward a
larger, more capable defense — and announce our imminent withdrawal
from the ABM Treaty, the status quo will quickly settle back in
again. The schedule for fielding a system would be delayed beyond
2005, pushing it ever further into the mists of the future, and
heightening its political vulnerability to the charge that it will
never be a reality (despite all the billions spent on it). Meanwhile,
the ABM Treaty will remain an archaic and irrational, but unmovable,
obstacle to missile defense. More talk — more diplomatic business-as-usual
— could keep the U.S. from ever defending itself against ballistic-missile
attack.
Appeasement
and Hairsplitting
Talk has never served missile defense well. In 1993, the Clinton
administration slashed funding for the project, denying that the
U.S. faced a missile threat at all. When the Rumsfeld Commission
in 1998 exposed that position as wishful thinking, the administration
resorted to the next best way to kill missile defense — consulting
with the Russians. From early 1999 to the bitter end, the administration
talked to the Russians about modifying the ABM Treaty to allow for
a limited defense system. The talks never actually rose to the level
of full-blown "negotiations" because the Russians insisted
they would only "discuss" the treaty, not negotiate changes.
So, this process
was born in appeasement and sustained by niggling legal hairsplitting.
The Clinton administration proposed a missile system with Russian
sensitivities (such as they are) in mind. The U.S. would ignore
the threat coming from Iran or Iraq because defenses stationed in
the American Northeast — with radars located in England and Greenland
— might seem capable of defending against Russian missiles as well.
Instead, then, the U.S. would focus in the other direction, on the
threat from the Far East. One antimissile site would be built in
Alaska as a first step that would assuage Russian fears and allow
the U.S. eventually to convince Putin & Co. to accept a more
advanced system.
The Clinton
administration initially tried — in a burst of obfuscation of the
sort usually reserved for its jousting with Kenneth Starr — to maintain
that the Alaska site wouldn't violate the ABM Treaty, even though
Article I of the treaty states that a signatory is "not to
deploy ABM systems for a defense of the territory of its country."
Eventually, the administration dropped this argument. It instead
asked the Russians for a special protocol to the treaty that would
permit the Alaska site. In effect, national missile defense would
still be banned, except for this particular national missile defense.
The strategy was to get the Russians to go along with the smaller
changes to the treaty first, then to tackle the really hard question
of whether anything like the ABM Treaty should exist at all. This,
of course, gave Russia an incentive never to agree to the initial
changes, which is exactly what it did, stiffing the U.S. and keeping
the treaty — signed in 1972 — intact.
How to get
out of this trap? Simply begin work on the Alaska system right away.
Though the Clinton administration's rationale for the Alaska plan
was suspect, the system makes sense as a starting point. It would
have two parts: the X-band radar on Shemya (an Alaskan island),
and 100 interceptors in the center of the state. The radar will
be necessary to any comprehensive defense of the U.S., whether this
defense eventually depends on sea-, land-, air-, or space-based
components (or, best, some combination of all in a "layered"
system). And the radar is the element of the Alaska project that
will take the longest to build — work on the forbidding Shemya is
possible only three or four months out of the year; hence the urgency
in getting started this summer. Meanwhile, the 100 interceptors
would have advantages as well. Alaska is closer to North Korea than
to parts of the United States, so the system there would protect
against threats from the Far East. But it also could provide some
coverage for the East Coast, thanks to its location near the top
of the world. (Since there is less longitude at the top, the distances
the interceptors would have to cover are much shorter — a look at
a globe tells the story.)
But Alaska
has critics among both liberal and conservative partisans of a sea-based
system. They support converting a tactical missile defense, the
Navy Theater Wide (NTW) system, into one capable of intercepting
strategic missiles. This idea has its attractions: Such a system
would intercept a missile when it is "hot and slow" in
its boost phase — presenting an easier target — rather than try
to destroy it when it is "cold and hard," descending toward
earth at maximum speed. But NTW is behind the ground-based system
in its development — it has never attempted an intercept, even against
a tactical-range target. It is also dependent on the positioning
of ships close to enemy launch sites, which means that it might
not be able to defend against launches far inland or ones that catch
the U.S. unawares. So, it makes sense to build — again, as a first
step toward a more comprehensive, layered system — a ground-based
defense that will be in place to take shots at all incoming missiles.
More important,
breaking ground at Shemya would represent a crucial break with the
ABM Treaty and, by extension, the parchment gods of arms control.
A decision to go ahead — which this year would involve mostly just
digging — would mean that the U.S. is constructing a system that
directly violates the treaty. The only honest thing for Washington
to do in such circumstances would be to announce that it is exercising
its right under the ABM Treaty to withdraw (after giving six months'
notice). Anything short of this would leave the treaty's web of
prohibitions in place to hamper the research, development, and deployment
of defenses. Even if the Russians were, in theory, to agree to changes
in the ABM Treaty immediately, those changes wouldn't go into force
until ratified by the Duma, creating an irresistible opportunity
to string the U.S. along.
Worse
Than Outdated: Dangerous
By now, the ABM Treaty should be a dusty embarrassment to proponents
of arms control. When it was signed, only the Soviet Union deployed
Scud technology. Now, 22 nations do. Missile know-how today spreads
like a social disease. For instance, Russia and then China helped
North Korea develop its own Scuds. North Korea, in turn, marketed
its Scuds to Egypt, Iran, Syria, Vietnam, and the United Arab Emirates.
Meanwhile, its more ambitious No Dong missile — with a range of
1,300 kilometers — has gone to Pakistan, Iran, and Libya. And because
North Korea's Taepo Dong-1 — capable of reaching Alaska and, with
smaller payloads, even the Lower 48 — is a boot-strap creation combining
Scud and No Dong boosters, these other nations are presumably within
reach of having intercontinental ballistic missiles of their own.
While academic theory may have justified the "balance of terror"
with the Soviet Union, by what theory should the U.S. remain vulnerable
to any third-rate power sold missile technology by Russia or China?
The ABM Treaty
is increasingly the international equivalent of the McCain-Feingold
campaign-finance bill, a regulatory nightmare built on flimsy legalisms.
The treaty created an artificial distinction between theater missile
defenses against shorter-range missiles (acceptable) and national
missile defense against longer-range missiles (unacceptable). So
the Clinton administration agonized over whether America's THAAD
theater-defense system violated the treaty. The uncertainty was
understandable, since THAAD was meant to counter China's CSS-2,
a theater-range missile with a range of about 3,000 kilometers.
The least capable strategic missile in the early 1970s was the Soviet
SSN-6, a submarine-launched missile with a range of about 3,000
kilometers. Thus, theater defenses have blended with strategic-missile
defenses. Who's to know what's forbidden and what's not?
Defenders of
the ABM Treaty argue that one parchment irrelevancy justifies another.
If the United States withdraws from the treaty, they contend, it
will lose the START II agreement with the Russians and never be
able to negotiate START III. Yeah, so? The START II accord, with
its emphasis on Cold War arcana such as the "de-MIRVing"
of missiles, already seems an artifact from a bygone era. In any
case, it will never go into force, because the Russian Duma has
made its ratification dependent on the U.S. Senate's swallowing
extensions of the ABM Treaty, which the American body has found
unacceptable. As for a proposed START III agreement, circumstances
have made it a risible redundancy. The Russians built their missiles
with short lifespans, planning to modernize them constantly. The
Russian economy now makes that impossible. The number of Russian
strategic warheads is expected to drop from 6,000 or so to fewer
than 1,500 in 2010, well below the START III target level of 2,000-2,500
warheads. But this doesn't stop the Russians from dangling a START
III agreement as an incentive for the U.S. to preserve the ABM Treaty,
in what would amount to arms-control inanity in the service of arms-control
folly.
Russia is joined
in its braying against missile defense by China, because the countries
have a confluence of interests. To the extent that the U.S. is vulnerable
to missile threats — including to the clients of Russia and China
— its ability to act in the world is circumscribed. So it's in the
interest of both an ex-superpower and a rising Asian power to see
the United States remain naked unto the world. As for the idea that
a missile-defense system would prompt an arms race with China, the
Clinton administration assiduously avoided building a system for
eight years, and the Chinese still amassed an arsenal of intercontinental
missiles. At the moment, of course, the United States is vulnerable
to 100 percent of Chinese missiles. How could it be worse off with
a missile defense that can protect against a Chinese launch, even
if China doubles or triples its force? Only an arms-control expert
could explain that, and his world may be becoming to an end — provided
the Bush administration digs at Shemya and lets the Russians know
that, at least when it comes to more missile-defense negotiations,
silence is golden.
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