Defending Against a Threat That Isn’t : GOP’s mini-’Star Wars’ plan could actually hurt U.S. safety

President Ronald Reagan’s $36-billion program to guard the United States with an antimissile shield--the Strategic Defense Initiative to its proponents, “Star Wars” to its critics--fell victim to its own technological shortcomings and to the lifting of the Soviet missile threat that came with the Cold War’s end. But now a pale clone of the antimissile plan has appeared. As part of the $265-billion defense bill, the Senate is about to vote to require that a small-scale missile defense system be ready for deployment on American territory by 2003.

Both Defense Secretary William J. Perry and Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have said they see no prospect of a ballistic missile threat that would warrant rushing ahead with a deployment program. But congressional Republicans disagree, and they have the votes to make their view stick.

$626-MILLION PRICE: Coming before the Senate is a bill to add $626 million to the $3 billion the Clinton Administration wants for antimissile defenses. Some of that $3 billion is to maintain a “technological readiness” system, a bare-bones mechanism for keeping options open if a national missile defense effort is ever needed. Most of the antimissile funding, though, would be directed where it’s most needed, at developing effective defenses against shorter-range missiles like the Scud, used by Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.

The Republican argument for deploying a national antimissile defense was summed up by Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader and a presidential candidate. “New technology gives even relatively weak adversaries the hope of attacking or blackmailing the United States. This bill takes concrete steps to protect us . . . . “ But protect us against what?

The chance of such rogue states as North Korea, Iraq, Libya and Iran secretly developing and deploying an intercontinental- range missile that could menace the United States with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons is remote. Threats from these states as well as from terrorist groups do exist, but those threats aren’t defined by intercontinental missiles. As the bombings of the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City federal building show, the most credible immediate danger to the nation’s security comes not from a missile launched 5,000 miles away but from more primitive, homemade explosives produced on U.S. soil.

THREAT TO TREATY: The latest language of the antimissile defense provision calls for deployment at a single site within eight years but at multiple sites at some future point. Following through on that intention would require either amending the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which would need Moscow’s agreement, or risking that Russia would respond to the treaty breach by opting out of the START I and START II arms agreements. That would restore to Moscow’s strategic arsenal thousands of nuclear missiles and warheads slated for destruction.

Such a retrograde move would patently diminish rather than enhance national security. As Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) reminded his colleagues, the START treaties offer “a far greater reduction in the nuclear threat than any defensive system could achieve.”

Democrats have succeeded in getting compromise language into the antimissile provision to require that the cost and military effectiveness of any defensive system be weighed before a deployment decision is made. If that requirement passes the Senate and survives a House-Senate conference, it could forestall deployment indefinitely. But those are big ifs. Meanwhile the country faces the somewhat bizarre prospect of being forced to deploy an antimissile system the Pentagon says national security doesn’t require, one that could in fact leave the country less safe than it is now.