No Defense
Liberal opposition to missile defense in today’s New York Times.

August 7, 2001 4:10 p.m.

iberal opposition to missile defense perhaps reached its logical conclusion in today's New York Times, in an op-ed piece that opposes the very idea of defenses, for any purpose.

"No nation has ever needed a weapon that did not terrify its enemies," writes novelist-historian Caleb Carr, "and we do not need this one [missile defense] now."

This is a fascinating theory, one that it's a shame Carr couldn't share with the Roman soldiers who foolishly carried shields into battle; or the Germans who ill-advisedly strung barbed-wire in front of their trenches in World War I; or the American war planners who unaccountably have placed such a emphasis on stealth technology for their planes.

Neither shields, nor barbed-wire, nor stealth technology are particularly terrifying. But all undeniably have military uses, which makes a hash of Carr's "terror" test for deploying military technology.

More fundamentally, Carr makes the same mistake as do many other missile-defense critics, by assuming that deterrence works only one way — that the United States will deter enemies with offensive weapons, but it would never occur to an adversary to try to deter us. (To critics of missile defense, rogue state leaders are apparently always completely rational, just really, really dumb.)

Carr is right that missile defense is not "terrifying." But ballistic missiles are — hence their utility to enemies of the United States. During the Cold War, the United States used the terrifying threat of a nuclear response to deter the Soviet Union from exploiting its overwhelming conventional superiority in Europe. Hostile powers now hope to apply their nuclear capability in a similar way, to check our overwhelming conventional superiority.

This is why missile defense makes sense even on Carr's own terms. If an offensive weapon is the more useful the more terrifying it is, anything that reduces that terror potential must make a weapon less useful.

In other words, if a North Korean ICBM is unlikely to make it through to the U.S., that ICBM will be much less of a factor in any crisis involving the U.S. It will accordingly be harder for the North Koreans to deter us from deploying our offensive forces against them.

This is how, indirectly, missile defense has an offensive purpose (something Carr resolutely denies). It keeps the U.S. free to act in the world: to deploy its military without fear of provoking a nuclear attack against which it has no defense.

Carr makes much of the failure of the Maginot Line in World War II. The Germans just walked around this formidable trench. In a similar way, Carr argues, U.S. enemies will find another way to deliver a nuclear device here if we build a missile defense.

But no one is suggesting abandoning our extensive counter-terrorism efforts against the liberal's favorite weapon, the "suitcase bomb." We clearly need both a missile defense and an anti-terrorist capability. To suggest that we can do without the former is as ill-advised as arguing that we don't need the latter.

Finally, Carr distorts the Pearl-Harbor analogy, by implying that missile-defense supporters claim defensive technology could have made such an attack impossible. We don't. The real point of the Pearl-Harbor analogy is that enemies of United States don't always behave in the way that we expect them to, and that, though it may seem "irrational" for someone to attack us with a ballistic missile, that in no way makes it impossible.

In sum, in the post-Cold War strategic environment, missile defense may prove as useful and necessary as barbed wire once was.