Anti-Missile Site to Protect Entire Nation

If an anti-missile system is meant to protect the U.S. population, why put it in one of the nation’s most remote areas?

The initial system the Defense Department is developing as a shield against long-range ballistic missile attack is scheduled to be located about 100 miles north of Grand Forks, N.D., near the isolated village of Nekoma, population 61.

The Pentagon chose that site because Congress, in agreeing last year for the first time to actually build the system, said that it must comply with the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

The ABM Treaty stipulates that each country may have only one anti-missile site. The Soviets chose Moscow in order to protect their capital. The United States chose Grand Forks and actually built an anti-missile system there in 1975 to protect the nearby fields of Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles.

That first system, called Safeguard, was canceled shortly after it became operational, and the site has been largely abandoned.

The Pentagon would like to put anti-missile sites in six additional states to provide broader protection, but the ABM Treaty--and its supporters in Congress--stand in the way.