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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