Missile Defense: The Untold Story
By BILL KELLER
In the nearly 40-year fight over building
weapons to shoot down incoming
missiles, the proponents have generally fallen
into two camps, the dreamers and the
schemers.
When the idea of missile defense had its
most celebrated moment under President Reagan, the dreamers — including
the president and the renowned nuclear scientist Edward Teller — seemed
convinced that we could be made invulnerable against nuclear weapons. The
more cynical camp — including the national security adviser, Robert
McFarlane, and the military assistant to the secretary of defense, Colin
Powell — saw an impregnable defense as a pipe dream, but also a useful
bargaining chip. It wouldn't stop a nuclear strike, but it would worry the
Soviet military planners, and make it easier to drive a favorable deal in arms
control talks.
That time around, the schemers had it right. The impermeable superdome
was a technological fantasy, and one that could have bankrupted the national
treasury. Even if it had worked, it would have been dangerous, because it
would have encouraged the illusion that we could win a nuclear war. The
prospect of an American missile defense system did, however, help goad the
Soviets into mutual cuts in our nuclear arsenals.
Now, too, there are dreamers and schemers. The dreamers, possibly
including the president, embrace missile defense at face value, as something
that will make us safer in our beds. Such a system, they assert, will protect us
against a terrorist with a ballistic missile, an accidental launch from the aging
Russian arsenal, or a rogue state bent on demolishing an American city. The
public debate so far has been almost entirely about this dream of missile
defense, which — because it aims to stop a small flock of missiles rather than
Russia's thousands — is technologically more plausible than what President
Reagan had in mind.
The schemer agenda, on the other hand, is about nuclear strategy, a
forbidding subject framed in arcane and speculative language that tends to
scare off laymen. But let's see if we amateurs can get our heads around it.
The concept at the heart of nuclear strategy is deterrence, which means that
our ability to obliterate the enemy prevents him from doing something rash. It
is generally accepted that our nuclear strength deterred the Soviet Union
from raining nuclear warheads on America. But preventing Armageddon was
not the main purpose of our nuclear forces. The foremost purpose was to
stop the Soviet Union from sending its superior non-nuclear armies into
Western Europe. By deliberately leaving open the possibility that we would
go nuclear if Soviet tanks crossed the Fulda Gap into West Germany, we
deterred the Soviets from beginning a conventional war in Europe. Would
we in fact have risked decimating the planet to save Europe? Maybe not, but
the Soviets could never be sure.
The schemers in the current debate fear that any nation with a few nuclear
weapons can do to us what we did to the Soviets — deter us from
projecting our vastly superior conventional forces into the world. This could
mean Iraq or North Korea or Iran, but it most importantly means China. The
real logic of missile defense, to these advocates, is not to defend but to
protect our freedom to attack.
There was a funny misfire of a debate about deterrence earlier this year.
President Bush, arguing the need for missile defense, suggested that a rogue
state might not be restrained by the fear of nuclear annihilation, the way the
Soviet Union was. Critics pounced gleefully: wouldn't North Korea or Iraq
be deterred from launching an unprovoked attack, just as the Soviet Union
was, by the certain knowledge that we could reduce them to molten rubble?
Well, sure they would. Unless we happened to have our tank divisions
parked at the outskirts of their capital, prepared to move in. Under those
circumstances, even a semi-rational megalomaniac like Saddam Hussein
might just decide to launch whatever he had. Or, more to the point, we
couldn't be quite sure he wouldn't. If Saddam had possessed a nuclear
missile in 1991, could we have persuaded such a broad coalition to drive him
from Kuwait? Or, if the Taliban had a single missile capable of pulverizing
Washington, would we have been so quick to go into Afghanistan?
You won't hear President Bush saying so, but the scenario that preoccupies
many of those in and around the Pentagon is this one: Taiwan decides to risk
a climactic break with mainland China. The mainland responds with a military
tantrum. America would like to defend the island democracy against the
Communist giant — but we are backed down by hints that Beijing cares
enough about this issue to launch nuclear missiles. American voters may or
may not support a conventional war for Taiwanese independence; they're
much less likely to support one that risks the obliteration of our cities. Ah,
but if we have an insurance policy, a battery of anti-missile weapons
sufficient (in theory) to neutralize China's two dozen nuclear missiles, we
would feel freer to go to war over Taiwan.
"The logic of missile defense is to make the stakes of power projection
compatible with the risks of power projection," says Keith B. Payne, a
deterrence theory expert and an ardent supporter of missile defense. Missile
defense, in other words, is not about defense. It's about offense.
This debate about missile defense is one we're not having. The schemer
rationale exists mostly between the lines. It is implicit in documents no mere
citizen reads, like the Quadrennial Defense Review, and encoded in
speeches. There is little frank discussion of it in publications for
non-specialists. (One exception is the right- wing National Review, whose
editor, Richard Lowry, has articulated the force projection rationale clearly.)
Why is everyone being so coy about this?
For one thing, the dreamers' just-plain-defense argument is easier to grasp,
and much easier to market. In principle it's hard to argue that a system that
could shoot down a rogue missile or two would be a bad thing to have. Even
liberals are buying into it. Their reservations are framed almost entirely as
variations on: Is it worth the cost? Can we afford the money to make the
thing work? Is it a better value than the alternatives? Is it worth the political
angst of withdrawing from the ABM treaty?
Personally, if missile defense is about defense, I can imagine better ways to
spend $100 billion. Defending our porous seaports against a nuclear device
in a tugboat or shipping container seems like a more urgent investment. And
if we're really worried about an accidental launch from a decaying Russian
missile command center, we might revive a bright idea the physicist Sherman
Frankel developed a decade ago — retrofitting nuclear missiles, ours and
theirs, with devices so they could be disarmed and destroyed after a
mistaken launch. (Incredibly, civilian rockets have post-launch destruct
devices, but not nuclear missiles.) But after Sept. 11, the public is less likely
to quibble over priorities and cost-benefit analysis. If it makes us feel safe,
the mood is, buy it.
The schemers' agenda, on the other hand, makes a more complicated and
uncomfortable debate, because it raises the question of whether missile
defense might, in fact, make the world less safe. "Force projection" has an
unpleasant, bellicose ring to it. It also drives the Chinese up the wall. There
are already plenty of hawks in China who believe we have a long- range
strategy to "contain" it — and the force projection rationale tends to suggest
they are right.
Arguing that we need missile defense to assure we can take the battle to the
nuclear-armed bad guys opens up two ticklish lines of discussion.
One is whether missile defense makes it likelier we will get into a war that is
not essential to our national interests, or that we will move more easily from
containing bad regimes to ousting them, and whether as part of such a
conflict we may find ourselves playing nuclear chicken.
The other is whether missile defense might lead to a new arms-building
competition. If it is true that China cares enough about Taiwan to threaten
nuclear war — that is, if China's ability to deter us with nuclear weapons
really matters to Chinese leaders — then it stands to reason they will work
hard to protect their deterrent. However they do that, by manufacturing more
missiles or putting multiple warheads on each launcher or by a shift in
strategy, a Chinese buildup may well influence the behavior of China's wary
nuclear neighbor India. What India does in turn alarms its nuclear neighbor
Pakistan. If you're following the news, you know that India and Pakistan are
at this moment on the verge of war.
Strategic planners have a technical expression for this kind of discussion. It's
called a can of worms.
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