Missile Defense: The Time Is Now
Stop talking and start building.

By Richard Lowry, NR's editor.
From the April 2, 2001, issue of National Review

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.