May, 2001

 

Shield of Dreams

Why National Missile Defense Won't Work

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

By Craig Eisendrath, Gerald E. Marsh, and Melvin A. Goodman

On May 1, 2001, President Bush made his first presidential address on global issues, announcing that the United States "must move beyond the constraints of the thirty-year-old Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty" and deploy an extensive and expensive shield against nuclear missiles. In doing so, the president withdrew the nation's support from principles that have governed the world's nuclear balance for the past three decades. His arguments included support for a wide variety of missile defense systems, including "technologies that might involve land-based and sea-based capabilities to intercept missiles in mid-course or after they reenter the atmosphere." He highlighted the "substantial advantages of intercepting missiles early in their flight, especially in the boost phase," and referred to "promising options for advanced sensors and interceptors that may provide this capability."

The strenuous objections to national missile defense by both our friends and potential enemies, which may delay the programs, and severe technical problems, leave time for genuine debate of a strategic system which, if deployed, will leave this country and the world considerably less secure than it was before.

When analyzed carefully, it will be seen that the Bush round is simply the last of a series of futile attempts to deploy national missile defense; that the threat it is supposed to meet has been systematically exaggerated; that none of the approaches to missile defense being considered works or is likely to work in the foreseeable future; and that deployment will lead to a new arms race, and will likely tear up the fabric of arms control agreements which has improved global security for over thirty years. The cost of missile defense programs, estimated now in excess of $115 billion, will also pull funds away from military housing, health care, readiness and the transformation of the armed forces.

This paper will show that national missile defense reflects an outmoded world view which fosters a unilateralist foreign policy. It will also show that military and diplomatic policies are available which can deliver at a fraction of the cost the results national missile defense is supposed to provide.


The Cold War Prior to "Star Wars"

National missile defense was first proposed to counter a possible massive nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. A nuclear exchange with our principal Cold War rival, with its prospect of one hundred million deaths, was the nightmare scenario which haunted the first planners of an anti-ballistic-missile defense system as they began their work in the early 1960s.

The more scientists and technicians worked on such a system, however, the less feasible it seemed. Prototype systems flunked test after test, or passed tests which so greatly simplified their task that success meant little or nothing. It would always be possible for the Soviets in a real situation to overwhelm the system by launching too many incoming missiles, and it would always be possible for the incoming missiles to avoid being hit by confusing the defending missiles with chaff and decoys. Finally, the cost of meeting an offensive challenge would always be many times higher than the cost of the offensive challenge itself.

After over a decade of research, both sides recognized the futility of going on with a missile defense system neither side could successfully develop. Pentagon planners also realized that the massive amount of dollars spent on a missile defense system which wouldn't work would drain money away from other systems which the military needed to guarantee U.S. security and protect our forces in the field.

Finally, the truth became inescapable. In 1972, President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev agreed to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty which forbade both sides from deploying a national missile-defense system, and restricted the testing which might make such a system possible. The treaty, which did allow the limited deployment of missile defenses, saw the United States install such a system in Grand Forks, North Dakota, at a cost of $6 billion, only to dismantle it immediately when it became clear it would be ineffective. The Soviets also deployed a limited missile defense system around Moscow, called Galosh, which the U.S. analysts also discounted as ineffective.

One of the arguments that led to Senate approval, with only two dissenting votes, of the ABM treaty, in addition to the fact that anti-missile defense didn't work, was the fear that such a system would provoke the Soviet Union to stoke up the arms race, without increasing U.S. security. In other words, we would be worse off with the system than without it. A national missile-defense system was like a cap pistol; the other side, thinking it was real, might shoot a real gun first.

Star Wars

Despite passage of the ABM treaty, the Reagan administration took up the cause again in the 1980s, driven, in part, by the scientist Edward Teller's and the Livermore Laboratory's over-optimistic claims for a new, nuclear-bomb-driven X-ray laser. The rationale for a national missile-defense system was more political than strategic. As President Reagan knew, a generation of Americans had grown up under the shadow of a possible nuclear war. The doctrine of what had become known as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) could be seen as carrying a high moral price; if we could rely on defense, however, we could escape catastrophe without guilt. In addition, a strong nuclear-freeze movement put pressure on President Reagan to come up with an alternative to MAD. Once he proposed his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars," his approval ratings shot up.

Ultimately, the Reagan administration spent tens of billions of dollars on the development of missile defense which the vast majority of scientists knew couldn't work, and which was banned by treaty. While President Reagan promised a "nuclear shield" that would achieve an "ultimate security" for the American people, such a system was never even conceivable. Nor was a system feasible which would be limited to protecting the ability of U.S. land-based missiles to survive and retaliate against a Soviet first strike. The initial emphasis on the X-ray laser was quietly dropped in 1984, when it became clear the concept was not viable, although the public was not told, and other options were explored, with equally dismal results. No system was ever found to be technically feasible, and no system was deployed. Periodic statements by the Union of Concerned Scientists and other scientific bodies made clear the opinion by the nation's scientists that SDI was not scientifically feasible, was a waste of money, and was a spur to the arms race.

The Bush Years After the Cold War

Although George Bush had disapproved of SDI as vice-president, in his 1988 presidential campaign he came out for full deployment and reinterpreting the ABM treaty. High projected costs, however, led him to abandon the idea of a full NMD system, and to propose a limited system, renamed "Global Protection Against Accidental Launch System" (GPALS). Bush also called for the development of Theater Missile Defense programs against shorter-range missiles.

Waning appropriations were boosted by claims of success, advanced strenuously by then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, of the U.S. Patriot missile during the Gulf War. These claims were later reduced by the General Accounting Office to state that Patriots hit only 9 percent of the Scud warheads, and possibly none. Nevertheless, claims for the success of the Patriot have continued to fuel support for NMD.

Once again, a new anti-missile technology drove appropriations -- autonomous, small kill vehicles lifted into outer space which would engage ICBMs. Called "Brilliant Pebbles," this system, like the X-ray laser, was advanced by Livermore Laboratory. Skyrocketing costs -- an estimated $85 billion -- poor performance, and the clear threat the system posed to the ABM treaty, including strenuous Russian objections, doomed the system, and appropriations decreased. By the end of the Bush administration, over $100 billion had been spent on anti-missile research, making it the largest weapons-research project in history, and with virtually nothing to show for it.

The Clinton Round

Following the 1994 "Contract with America," when the Republican Congress attempted to mandate a national missile defense by 2003, President Clinton vetoed the bill. In 1996 he sought to co-opt the issue by devising a "Three-Plus-Three" program, which supported development of a national missile-defense system over three years, and which designated 2000 as the year in which a decision would be made whether to deploy the system over the following three years. The system which could be deployed by 2003 would consist of twenty ground-based interceptors, which, if they worked, could block missiles launched by "rogue states" or accidental launches by Russia and China.

The option proposed by Clinton was a limited land-based system designed to impact incoming missiles directly in outer space. It was devised to counter a limited ballistic-missile strike by a country like North Korea or Iran; it could not conceivably protect the United States from a major ballistic-missile strike by Russia or even from a significantly smaller strike by China. Estimates of the system's cost ranged from $30 to $60 billion.

On September 1, 2000, President Clinton announced that the decision to deploy a national missile defense system would be left to the next administration. Among the reasons cited were the system's unproven technology, as dramatically brought home by a series of failed tests; the unresolved possibility that countermeasures, such as decoys, could foil it; and the objections of Russia, China, and our NATO allies that deployment would jeopardize the 1972 ABM treaty and the texture of current arms-control agreements. Analysts also pointed out that deployment could lead to a new arms race. If China, for example, in response to NMD, greatly strengthened its force of ICBMs, India and possibly Japan would certainly respond, provoking a response from Pakistan.

Technical evaluation of the testing of national missile defense was complicated by the fact that testing often was conducted in situations considerably simpler than would be presented in reality. For instance, there would be an absence of decoys, or decoys with different reflecting surfaces from the warhead, or prior programmed information given to the anti-missile system of the flight characteristics of the warhead. Still another difficulty was created by the fact that the defense contractors who stood to gain by contracts were conducting the evaluations. Finally, the possibility of fraud and misrepresentation was raised by Dr. Nira Schwartz, a computer software expert at TRW, who maintained that the company had forced her to misrepresent her findings. These allegations are presently being investigated. Similar allegations of misrepresentation were made by Dr. Theodore Postol of M.I.T.

The Bush Round

As part of his campaign, and in the first few weeks of his administration, President George W. Bush called for early deployment of a national missile-defense system, although what kind of system, the schedule for research and development, and deployment dates are yet to be determined.

The systems under discussion include not only the mid-course, land-based system proposed by the Clinton administration, but also "boost-phase" systems, sea-based systems, expanded theater defenses, outer-space laser systems, and nuclear systems. Many of the same people and institutions involved in the earlier Reagan and Bush periods, including Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld; Frank Gaffney, who heads the Center for Security Policy; and Richard Perle, a foreign-policy adviser to President Bush; the Livermore Laboratory; the Heritage Foundation; corporations like Boeing, TRW, Raytheon, and Lockheed-Martin, are again working with members of Congress and contributing to their campaigns to push through national missile defense.

 

The Threat National Missile Defense Is Supposed to Meet

In 1998, the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, made headlines with its dire warning that North Korea, Iran, and Iraq could deploy an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with "little or no warning." A more balanced net assessment of global ballistic missile arsenals over the past fifteen years would reveal that the ballistic-missile threat is confined, limited, and changing relatively slowly. Though the ballistic-missile threat to the United States should not be ignored, it does not justify the rush to deployment of national missile-defense systems.

The 1999 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the ballistic-missile threat concluded that over the next fifteen years the United States "most likely will face ICBM threats from Russia, China and North Korea, probably from Iran, and possibly from Iraq, although the threats will consist of dramatically fewer weapons than today because of significant reductions we expect in Russian strategic forces." This conclusion was essentially reiterated by the 2000 NIE. Specifically, the reports suggested that North Korea might well test a missile which could deliver a several-hundred-kilogram payload to Alaska and Hawaii, and that with North Korean or Russian assistance, Iran could develop a longer-range missile similar to the Korean Taepo-Dong 2.

However, by assessing "projected possible and likely missile developments by 2015 independent of significant political and economic changes," the NIEs may well have overestimated potential ballistic-missile threats from still-developing countries such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. At the same time, they probably underestimated the dangers from existing arsenals in Russia and China, and poorly prepared policymakers for the sharply deteriorated international security environment that would emerge should deployment of national missile defense weaken or destroy the nonproliferation regime.

As analyzed by Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the 1999 NIE con-centrated almost exclusively on the possible threat from North Korea, Iran, and Iraq and emphasized who could test a long-range missile over the next five to ten years. This is a change from the previously established standard of when a country would deploy a long-range missile. This reflects a shift to a series of worst-case assumptions, independent of significant political and economic changes. In addition, the shift in standards from deployment to testing represents a difference of five or more years. Finally, the previous standard had been to estimate the time it would take to threaten the forty-eight continental states with a ballistic missile; the shift to any part of the fifty states represents a change of some five thousand kilometers, and decidedly a reduced threat.

These three changes account for most of the differences between the latest NIEs and earlier estimates. The latest NIEs have led some observers to conclude that there has been a significant technological leap forward in Third World missile systems, when, in fact, there has been only incremental development in programs well known to analysts for years.

North Korea

The threat it poses to the United States should not be ignored, although, like Iran's, it is much smaller than presumed by the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission and the 1999 and 2000 NIEs, and in no way justifies a rush to deployment of a national missile defense.

North Korea maintains one million men under arms; it is the only nation which is presently militarily hostile to the United States; and it has steadily pursued a program to turn short-range Scud technology into longer-range rockets. In the 1990s, it tested and deployed a thousand-kilometer-range missile, the Nodong, based on clustered Scud engines. On August 31, 1998, it tested a Taepo-Dong 1 missile, which is believed to be a Nodong with a Scud-like second stage and a small third-stage kick-motor used in a failed attempt to orbit a small satellite. In addition, according to CIA reports, North Korea could have acquired enough plutonium to build one or two nuclear weapons.

Yet, it is important to realize how small and economically weak North Korea is -- a country intermittently hit by famine with a GNP only 4 percent of Taiwan's. It has only tested two longer-range missiles (it has not tested since 1998), its test facilities are quite primitive, and its missile system is not capable of sustaining multiple launches of missiles.

Moreover, its recent moves, including historic exchanges between the heads of state of North and South Korea in June of 2000, indicate it is coming out of its self-imposed isolation and acting constructively to improve its international position. Continued negotiations between the United States and North Korea could well yield a diplomatic resolution, including a verifiable agreement to end its missile and nuclear programs.

Negotiations have worked in the past. The 1994 Agreed Framework provided a way to verify allegations of missile development; without it, Western observers would not have been allowed to investigate North Korea's Kumchon-Ni facility when suspicious activity took place in 1998.

Despite this impressive record, during his March 7, 2001 meeting with South Korean president Kim Dae Jung, President Bush squandered the opportunity to conclude a verifiable, permanent end to North Korea's long-range missile program. He stated that talks started in the Clinton era would not resume soon but at "some point in the future." This is perhaps risking the best opportunity to defeat potential, long-range North Korean missiles -- by resuming talks with North Korea.

It should also be noted that the threat of military retaliation has deterred North Korea from launching a full-scale attack on South Korea for fifty years, and would most certainly prevent it from launching a missile attack against either the United States or South Korea. Ironically, the United States is focusing on North Korea as the raison d'etre for NMD at the very time that Pyongyang is moderating its policies, improving its relations with South Korea and Japan, and looking for ways to moderate its modest strategic programs.



Iran

In July 2000, Iran completed its first successful test of the Shahab-3, a medium-range missile capable of hitting targets in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Turkey. The missile has never been tested to its claimed range of thirteen hundred kilometers, and is highly inaccurate, with only about a 50 percent chance of landing within four kilometers of its target.

Even if Iran could develop a long-range missile in the near future, it is not clear that Iranian leaders wish to do so. Iran's priority is not to threaten the U.S. homeland but to establish regional hegemony by challenging the supremacy of U.S. military forces in the Middle East. For this objective intercontinental ballistic missiles are unnecessary and the Shahab-3 inconsequential.

Changes in the diplomatic environment could obviate the Iranian threat. If U.S.-Iranian relations continue to warm and the domestic influence of Iranian conservatives wanes, Iranian financial support for missile programs could be cut. Successful U.S. efforts to prevent North Korean, Chinese, and Russian missile exports, upon which the Iranian program depends, would strangle any Iranian program.

Iraq

Even when UN sanctions are lifted, it is unlikely that Iraq could develop an ICBM within the next fifteen years. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to leap from short-range Scuds to intercontinental missiles. Iraqi reluctance to use chemical weapons in the Gulf War indicates that it is subject to the same inhibition in launching missiles, given the capacity of the United States to retaliate.

Nevertheless, Iraq could launch missiles against U.S. troops or allies in the region as it did against Israel in the Gulf War. This is an argument for developing adequate theater defenses. What Iraq is not likely to have in the foreseeable future is any capacity to hit the United States with an ICBM.

Terrorism

Given the enormous expenses and technical difficulties involved in their development, intercontinental ballistic weapons are highly unlikely weapons for terrorists. The 1999 and 2000 NIEs perform a significant service by discussing in greater detail than previous unclassified assessments the dangers posed by delivery vehicles other than ICBMs, including forward-based launchers (sea-based short- or medium-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and aircraft) and covert delivery by ship, plane, or land. These are not delivery systems which could be countered by a NMD system.

Chemical and Biological Weapons

Although NMD has been touted as a defense against biological and chemical weapons, such weapons are not best delivered by ICBMs. Again, terrorists are simply not likely to have access to such missiles, and it is unlikely that nations would waste ICBM capability on such ineffective weapons. Other means of delivery of such weapons -- drug shipments, suitcases, small boats, etc. -- would be more likely.

Why National Missile Defense Won't Work

The most obvious problem facing the Bush administration in its rush to deployment is that it does not have a system which can be reliably deployed. This problem is underscored in the Coyle report of January 200l, prepared by the former head of the Department of Defense's Testing and Evaluation program, and by the Government Accounting Office's February 2001 report on NMD's new satellite-tracking system. The difficulties with current NMD models are those which for the most part have plagued NMD for decades.

The Clinton Mid-Course Model

The national missile-defense system proposed by President Clinton is designed to attack the warhead of an incoming missile in the near-vacuum of space before it reenters the atmosphere; it is therefore a type of mid-course defense. Interception relies on the high relative velocity between the warhead and a hit-to-kill maneuverable "kill vehicle" designed to strike the warhead dead-on, thereby destroying it by the force of the impact. While this is in and of itself a very difficult task, it may actually be achievable, although not with certainty or even with a high success rate given current technology.

But a missile need not carry only a single warhead. It may also carry light-weight chaff (essentially small pieces of wire or aluminum) and decoys that could confuse the interceptor's sensors. The decoys can be lightweight -- a metal-coated Mylar balloon -- since once the payload is in the vacuum of space, all its elements -- warhead, or warheads, decoys, chaff -- travel at the same velocity without any slowing due to atmosphere.

Unfortunately for the defense system, all of the emissions from the reentry vehicle can be mimicked by cheap, lightweight decoys; that is, no fluctuating feature in the signals from decoys and warhead can be used to distinguish one object from another. The number of such decoys deployed on each missile could vary between ten and fifty. The technology of decoys is well within the limits of any country developing the missile system itself; and indeed U.S. intelligence has reported that the Chinese recently tested a missile with decoys and chaff (the Dongfeng-31).

Finally, the cost of decoys is less than one-hundredth as much as the defensive missile needed to knock it out. This has been the problem plaguing this system from its inception, which has never been solved, and is not likely to be solved in the next few decades.



Testing

None of the national missile defense systems proposed over the past twenty years has ever proven in tests to be technically feasible, and those currently under development are far from promising. The United States is many years away from conducting the kinds of realistic tests that could provide military and political leaders with the confidence they should have in these weapons to deploy them.

An example is the rigged test of October 2, 1999, in which the target followed a preprogrammed flight path to a designated position; the interceptor missile also flew to a preprogrammed position; the decoy had a significantly different thermal temperature from the target; and a Global Positioning Satellite receiver was placed on the target to send its position to ground control.

Inadequate testing also constitutes a problem. The Clinton system faced this problem, as illustrated by the finding of the GAO in 1997 that "Because of the compressed development schedule, only a limited amount of flight test data will be available for the system deployment decision in fiscal year 2000." Inadequate testing is also cited in the Coyle report of January 2001, and flight tests are way behind schedule. In fact, only fifteen intercept attempts outside the atmosphere have been conducted by the Department of Defense since 1982. In only four, or 26 percent, did the anti-missiles actually hit their targets, and none demonstrated an ability to distinguish warheads from realistic decoys. Other missile-defense systems being discussed by the Bush administration have failed to pass their tests or remain seriously undertested.



The Boost-Phase, Sea-Based Model

Boost-phase defense, that is, a defense which attempts to destroy missiles before they enter the upper atmosphere or outer space, is being advanced as an alternative or supplement to the Clinton model. Such a system is less threatening to Russia and China because it cannot readily be expanded to defend against more than a limited attack, and is probably ineffective against China's small arsenal because the interceptors cannot be located close enough to the Chinese launch points. Although boost-phase defenses may be deployed without threatening the arms-control regime, they are only useful in meeting threats from "states of concern," that is, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, which, as we have pointed out, have been vastly exaggerated. (Even against North Korea, boost-phase defenses might well be unable to stop launches over the North Pole.) Boost-phase defenses seem preferable to the defenders because they do not require nuclear weapons and because countermeasures are more difficult in the atmosphere where boost-phase defenses operate.

Boost-phase defenses are designed, for the most part, to be stationed on ships, but there are numerous problems. The most important is that the boost-phase interceptor is too large to fit on any of the standard Navy combat ships without serious structural modifications. Second, boost-phase defenses do not allow enough time -- less than two minutes -- for a human being to make a decision which could lead to war. Third, the cost of stationing enough ships around a potential enemy and keeping crews on combat readiness is astronomical.

The only vehicle presently able to handle boost-phase interceptors is the Trident ballistic missile submarine. These submarines are, in effect, the "ultimate weapon," as measured by their immense destructive capability. Deployment of NMD on these weapons could compromise their invulnerability by forcing them to operate in inappropriate, shallow coastal waters. Even more seriously, a launch by a "rogue" state might well be ambiguous, as it might be a weather or astronomical satellite or an attack. It would be far too risky to have Trident subs respond immediately to such actions.

Finally, the testing of boost-phase defenses lags significantly behind that of mid-course systems. Again, the United States is many years away from conducting the kinds of reliable tests which would allow our government to deploy boost-phase weapons for national defense with any confidence.

Expanded Theater Defenses

Theater defenses, such as the Army's Theater High-Altitude Defense (THAAD) and the Navy's Theater-Wide System, designed for defense against intermediate-range ballistic missiles, have been touted as forming the basis for a full national defense. This is a serious error. The kill vehicles of both systems lack the necessary lateral acceleration capability needed for boost-phase intercept. This is really the end of the story, although the fact that these systems use the wrong kind of sensors, designed for mid-course interception, also makes them inappropriate. The Coyle Report also makes clear that current theater systems are many years away from reliable deployment, even for use at the ranges for which they have been designed.

The Airborne Model

Both the Air Force's Airborne Laser, mounted on a Boeing 747, and space-based lasers fail because of their vulnerability. Anti-aircraft missiles do work, and the components of space-based defenses are sitting ducks for longer-range missiles. Space-based lasers are also quite heavy, require enormous amounts of fuel, and have to be in the right place when a missile is launched. Since they have to be in low-earth orbit to maximize the energy they can put on the missile, to always have one in the right place to destroy an attacking missiles means there must be a very large constellation of lasers in space. This becomes very expensive, very quickly. Still another problem is that space-based systems would violate the 1967 Peaceful Uses of Outer Space Treaty and set a dangerous precedent of weaponizing outer space.

As for propagation of lasers through the atmosphere, there are numerous reasons why this simply does not work, specifically the turbulence of the atmosphere, the tendency of the laser beam to spread, the efficacy of countermeasures to confuse compensatory mechanisms ("adaptive optical techniques"), divergence of the beam through what is called "thermal blooming," and the use of countermeasures to carry off the heat. In sum, such defenses are still very much at the research stage, and have remained there for well over twenty years.

The Nuclear Model

Once again, the nuclear model is being discussed. For example, Frank Gaffney recently stated in the New York Times, "If we have to, we can absolutely, certifiably destroy incoming ballistic missiles by putting a small nuclear weapon on the front end." But one reason the system used by the Russians in their defense of Moscow -- the "Galosh" system -- was discounted, in addition to the fact that U.S. missiles could overwhelm it, was that the large phased-array radars Galosh relied upon for information needed to guide its battle management radars would be destroyed early in a nuclear exchange.

Putting nuclear weapons on ships would break an important barrier put into place by President George H. Bush and possibly lead to the Russians redeploying nuclear weapons on their ships. Another problem is that it would be difficult for the military to obtain timely permission to launch nuclear-armed interceptors, and the resulting delay could seriously impact their effectiveness. More seriously, the threat cloud, containing the incoming warhead, chaff, and decoys, would have had time to disperse over a considerable range, as the interception would not occur until late in mid-course. Accordingly, it would still be necessary to discriminate between chaff, decoys, and the warhead, a task which is simply not possible. The reason for this is that even nuclear-tipped interceptors must be relatively close to knock out the warhead; moreover, the warhead can be so designed or "hardened" so that this distance must be quite close.

In addition, the use of nuclear weapons is prohibited by the ABM Treaty and their use forbidden in outer space by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Such a use of nuclear weapons would also be destructive of the satellite systems used by advanced countries for communications, weather, and surveillance.

Cost Analysis

On April 2, 2001, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization provided figures to Defense Week which give some indications of the cost of the proposed systems. BMDO states that developing and producing just the eight highest-profile antimissile systems will run around $80 billion, with most of that amount spent by 2010. However, this figure covers only research, not production, and includes only a part of the planned purchases.

When the cost of operating and supporting these systems is added, the figure expands to $115 billion. This figure is also inadequate because the BMDO couldn't give the cost of a number of its systems, so that the figure may well be up to $150 billion, or, indeed, several times even this figure if certain options are fully developed.

The International Political Implications of National Missile Defense

The ABM treaty was based on the realistic proposition that offensive strategic forces could counter any innovations that strategic defenses might offer, and at a significantly lower price. The treaty specifically bans a space-based defense and rules out not just deployment but developmental testing for a national missile defense. It provides a useful impediment to the expansion of the arms race which national missile defense would induce.

Arms-control advocates and international lawyers consider the ABM treaty the backbone of the arms-control regime and an obvious barrier to any current deployment of a national missile defense. The international community also shares this view. A unilateral reinterpretation of the treaty would undermine American credibility abroad and would violate the balance of powers established in the U.S. constitution, if the executive branch unilaterally reinterpreted a treaty that had been ratified by the Senate. While the Reagan administration eventually accepted the restrictions on research of the treaty, the new Bush administration seems prepared to impose unilateral executive reinterpretation or abandon the treaty altogether. Its argument that the treaty is null and void because it was signed with the Soviet Union is specious, as Russia is clearly the legal inheritor of obligations undertaken by its predecessor.

The Russian Reaction

Russia, which continues by orders of magnitude to be the greatest missile threat, considers national missile-defense systems as an attempt to gain "unilateral military and security advantages" as well as a violation of the ABM treaty. Russia has announced plans to dramatically reduce its nuclear arsenal from the approximately six thousand nuclear warheads deployed to under fifteen hundred by the end of the decade. But Russian leaders have warned that future reductions are highly conditioned on the United States not deploying a missile defense system.

President Putin has repeatedly stated that any move to withdraw from the ABM treaty could lead Russia to treat all existing U.S.-Russian security agreements as null and void. This could lock both countries into unnecessarily large nuclear-weapons inventories for the foreseeable future unless unilateral reciprocal reductions take the place of agreements. As the 2000 NIE points out, Russia could also again deploy shorter-range missiles along its borders and return to multiple warheads for its strategic weapons, thus rejecting a major provision of START II, and could deploy additional countermeasures on its missiles to penetrate the NMD system. In maintaining a larger strategic arsenal than it can adequately support, given its ailing economy, Russia would be more prone to accidental or unauthorized launch of its nuclear ballistic missiles.

The Chinese Reaction

Rather than seeing its own missile system as offensive, China, like Russia, believes that deployment of U.S. missile defenses would be an offensive move. In reaction, China would likely expand its nuclear-weapons arsenal, building more missiles, equipping some with multiple warheads, adding decoys and other countermeasures, and placing them on full alert. China's principal concern is not simply the deployment of U.S. national missile defense but the strengthening of Taiwan through the possible sale or deployment of theater defenses and the sale of U.S. cruisers equipped with Aegis radar. Such moves, in Chinese eyes, could lead to Taiwanese independence.

China's chief arms negotiator, Sha Zukang, has suggested that if Washington went ahead with an NMD deployment designed to intercept "tens of warheads" -- a figure suspiciously close to China's eighteen to twenty single-warhead ballistic missiles -- this would "lead to serious confrontation" and a renunciation of previous undertakings barring nuclear or chemical weapons proliferation and nuclear testing. The 2000 NIE suggests that China might well increase its ICBM arsenal from twenty to two hundred within a few years. Thus, instead of providing security, a deployed NMD system could provoke responses from Russia and China that would actually exacerbate the threat.

Meanwhile, Sino-Russian joint opposition to either a U.S. effort to deploy a national missile defense system or to reinterpret the ABM treaty has led to improved bilateral relations between them. NMD has also given President Putin the opportunity to travel to Europe, China, and North Korea and to suggest a regional defense for Europe, although his ideas are still quite vague.

Further Consequences

Despite U.S. assurances, our NATO allies continue to oppose unilateral deployment by the United States of a national missile-defense system. They fear the Chinese and Russian reaction to NMD, the beginning of a new arms race, the unraveling of the arms-control regime, and the prospect that NMD could "decouple" the United States from Europe.

If China were to increase its arsenal and walk away from nonproliferation, it is very likely that Pakistan and India, both of which detonated nuclear devices in May 1998, would do the same. A breakdown of the arms-control regime would decrease nonproliferation controls and help non-nuclear powers attain their own strategic forces. Not only would this affect Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, but proliferation might spread to countries like Egypt and Libya. Rarely has so much international cooperation been placed at risk for the promise of so little.

American Unilateralism and National Missile Defense

With the end of the Cold War, the United States emerged as the world's only superpower, a position we may well hold for some decades. What we choose to do with this power is up for question. The present administration believes it is our role to attempt to maintain and extend an encompassing world order which we define and which serves our national self-interest without constraint of international treaties or arrangements, including the current arms-control regime; if we do so, it believes the world will benefit. It is no accident that those who support NMD also opposed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) treaties, the Outer Space Treaty, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, and the International Criminal Court. For them, arms control represents a "Cold War mentality."

The other or multilateralist view of the world recognizes that our territorial borders may end at Mexico or Canada, but the financing, ownership, production, and sales of transnational corporations are oblivious of national frontiers. Jurisdictions are becoming transnational, whether for environmental controls, human rights, intellectual property rights, or the maintenance of world peace. The argument that the United States must alone determine everything which affects its citizens, that its sovereignty is absolute, looks backward to a world which is rapidly disappearing.

Adherents of multilateralism hold that in the post-Cold War world our nation's first option for defense should be the strengthening of relations which facilitate mutual security and which make its extension more advantageous. Attacks against the United States and particularly the use of weapons of mass destruction they believe will only be acts of desperation. Because such acts against the world's still remaining superpower would be national suicide, they are considered avoidable through diplomacy and economic initiatives. Attributions of madness or total irrationality to our potential enemies -- "rogue states" -- is then a form of cultural snobbery which we can ill afford. Diplomacy and negotiations and mutually-constraining relations through international agreement are ready options. The vast power both military and economic which the United States possesses can be used to facilitate the move to diplomacy and further conditions of mutuality which make such attacks unthinkable. The notion that the United States, acting alone, can solve its international problems by some technological breakthrough flies in the face of facts.

The Separation of Defense from Other Aspects of Foreign Policy

The unilateralist position has been strengthened by the fact that the defense budget is being handled today in Congress with virtually no connection to funds devoted to other areas of national security, such as international security assistance, economic assistance, and diplomacy. Over 90 percent of the national security budget is directed to military programs, and if military assistance is included, only about 1 percent of the budget is concerned with other areas. This system has resulted in a lopsided reliance on military defense as opposed to other means, and difficulty in seeing the cost-effectiveness of other means of dealing with security problems.

For example, recent missile programs in Iraq and North Korea have led to calls for the building of national missile defense. In both cases, however, it was multilateral activity that proved effective in creating a nuclear freeze and suspension of missile tests. In Iraq, the verification regime of the United Nations led to the identification and destruction of more Iraqi strategic weapons than had the campaigns of Desert Storm. Such lessons should create precedents for greater consideration of non-military options.

It is not difficult to imagine that North Korea's interest in building missiles might well be blunted by an economically advantageous relation with the United States and the world economic community. After all, the promise of increased economic relations with the West was a primary factor in getting North Korea to the negotiations table for the talks that created the 1994 Agreed Framework.

Consideration of national missile defense requires that it be seen as one, not the only means, of dealing with any apparent missile threat, and that its cost be considered competitive with other options.

An Alternative Policy in the National Interest

If the decision is made to go ahead with NMD in the current administration, it will likely involve the destruction of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the cornerstone of U.S. deterrence for the past thirty years; the alienation of Russia and China from the arms-control process; the opposition of our NATO allies; and the end of American leadership to stop proliferation of nuclear weapons. National missile defense would destabilize American national security policy and greatly increase American defense spending. It would register a net decrease in U.S. security, exchanging an inadequate defense for the abrogation of two important treaties and the ensuing instability.

Alternatives to NMD

Instead of national missile defense, the United States should be looking for ways to reduce nuclear inventories in this country and abroad. The United States is in a strong position to accept the unofficial Russian proposal to reduce U.S. nuclear inventory to fifteen hundred strategic weapons and still maintain a credible deterrent. (This policy may emerge after the comprehensive review of the U.S. military being undertaken by the Bush administration, although the danger exists that such cuts will be coupled to the deployment of national missile defense.) The United States should also work closely with Russia to support cooperative efforts to secure Russian nuclear materials and weapons, a policy which is presently under threat should funds be reduced.

The United States should also abandon its launch-on-warning doctrine and its doctrine that we would be the first to employ nuclear weapons under certain circumstances. A no-first-use pledge that included the United States, Russia, and China (already given), and perhaps Britain and France, would make it easier to impose sanctions against any state that was a base for nuclear terrorists or that planned to use nuclear weapons. If the non-first-use states were to support an end to all economic and commercial activity with offending states, or to use conventional military force to enforce air and sea blockades, then there might be less of a threat from so-called rogue states.

A no-first-use pledge by the nuclear powers could also be accompanied by increasing transparency for the weapons programs of the non-nuclear states, including inspection and provisions to control nuclear-related materials such as enriched uranium and plutonium. Integration of the so-called "rogue states" into the global economy, coupled with diplomatic assurances, and balanced by the negative consequences of noncompliance, could produce the desired results far more effectively than national missile defense.

 

The Alternative to Unilateralism

The larger geopolitical issue is whether the United States will continue to follow a policy of unilateralism or pursue a policy of multilateralism. U.S. support for multilateralism in the diplomatic arena would enable Washington to establish the machinery and rules for international peacekeeping, counter-proliferation, and avoidance of regional conflict. A more stable international system should be the goal. National missile defense, which would deny this option, is not in the national interest.



This report is based on excerpts from the forthcoming The Phantom Defense: America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion (Praeger: August, 2001), by Craig Eisendrath, Gerald E. Marsh, and Melvin A. Goodman. The Phantom Defense is a project of the Center for International Policy. The report has also drawn upon:

"National Missile Defenses and Arms Control After Clinton's NMD Decision," by Daryl G. Kimball and Stephen W. Young, Disarmament Forum, First Quarter, 2001.

"National Missile Defense: Troubling Implications for Nonproliferation," by Stephen LaMontagne, Council for a Livable World Education Fund, November, 2000

"Taking National Missile Defense to Sea: A Critique of Sea-Based and Boost-Phase Proposals," by Rodney W. Jones, Council for a Livable World Education Fund, October 2000.

"National Missile Defense: What Does It All Mean? A CDI Issue Brief," Center for Defense Information, September 2000.

"Pushing the Limits: The Decision on National Missile Defense," by Stephen W. Young, Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers and Council for a Livable World Education Fund, July, 2000.