Candidates Blow Missile-Defense Issue Out of Proportion

Listen to the mounting debate over building a new national missile-defense system and you would think that the two major presidential candidates, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, are worlds apart.

Trying to portray the president as “soft” on defense policy, Dole and the Republicans have charged that Clinton is refusing to deploy any sort of new system to guard against possible attacks by North Korea or China.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are accusing the GOP of trying to revive President Reagan’s ambitious, and much derided, Strategic Defense Initiative, once known as the “Star Wars” program. They contend that the Republican plan would cost $31 billion to $60 billion.

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But defense analysts say that despite the intensity of the debate, the cross-fire is basically a tempest in a missile silo--a classic example of how candidates, under pressure to come up with a winning issue for the campaign, can blow an issue out of proportion.

In reality, both candidates believe that the United States should be developing a missile-defense system that would be ready to deploy by 2003, and both sides have the same plan in mind: using existing technology to build a system with limited clout.

The differences are primarily over timing. Republicans want the government to commit itself now to installing the system by 2003. Clinton wants to develop the system soon and decide in 1999 whether to deploy it by 2003, depending on the threat at the time.

William Schneider, a political analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says the differences “are all technical,” with no major philosophical or technological gap between the two sides.

“The Republicans are making an issue out of it because they believe that striking a tough pose on defense has always worked for them before,” Schneider said. “But they aren’t getting any traction this time because Americans just don’t feel threatened by missiles.”

This is not the first time that campaign pressures have prompted political candidates to overblow an issue, particularly in the emotion-packed instance of missile defense.

In the 1960 presidential campaign, candidate John F. Kennedy charged the Republicans with building up a “missile gap” by allowing the Soviet Union to outpace the United States.

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As both sides knew at the time, the charge was a false one, but Kennedy succeeded in scoring some hefty points. In the end, Kennedy defeated Republican candidate Richard Nixon, and the “missile gap” issue was a factor.

The irony is that this time around political analysts see little concern among voters about a missile attack.

The most recent U.S. intelligence assessments suggest that the United States is unlikely to face any serious threat of ballistic missile attacks for eight or 10 years--enough time in the administration’s view to move in stages toward building a new system.

U.S. intelligence assessments suggest that although North Korea does not now have the capability to hit American soil with a ballistic missile, it could acquire such weapons in 10 to 12 years. China now has the ability to hit U.S. territory, but it is considered unlikely to risk the retaliation that almost certainly would follow.

Although the administration may not be moving rapidly enough for the Republicans, it is going ahead with similar plans to develop a missile defense within three years, using the same sort of technology the GOP would employ.

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Proponents of the “Defend America Act,” as the GOP plan is called, cite a specially crafted poll that shows that most Americans are surprised to learn that the nation has no real missile-defense system yet. Apparently many people assume that one is in place.

But political analysts such as Thomas Mann, a Brookings Institution scholar, caution that pollsters can obtain similar results on almost any issue that has not been in the limelight for long.

“The capacity for public ‘shock’ about almost any issue is unlimited,” Mann notes, and so, apparently, is the candidates’ capacity to distort positions on key issues:

* Analysts say the Republicans’ claim that Clinton is refusing to go ahead with a national missile-defense program is stretching the facts. Clinton has signed on to developing the same kind of system the GOP wants, and the Pentagon has set up a program to do it.

* Defense experts say the Democrats’ contention that the Republicans are trying to revive the Reagan-era program is misleading.

The program was designed to field a massive, space-based anti-missile “shield” that would protect the United States from an attack involving hundreds of Soviet missiles and was predicated on exotic weapon concepts for which the technology did not exist.

Today’s GOP plan would involve a far more modest ground-based system that would build on missile-defense technology already on the drawing boards and well within the Pentagon’s capability. The administration is banking on the same system.

* Charges by opponents that the GOP plan would cost up to $60 billion are exaggerated. The figures are based on a Congressional Budget Office estimate for a plan far more ambitious than the Republicans’.

More realistic estimates, proffered by the Pentagon, suggest that meeting the timetable the Republicans have laid out would take an extra $3 billion to $5 billion above the $4.8 billion the administration already is figuring for a system that uses 20 interceptors.

The budget office has since “clarified” its stand.

The timing issue itself is not entirely bogus. Developing the system over the next three years and allowing Clinton to wait until then to decide whether to deploy it by 2003 does give the president some wiggle room that he would not have under the GOP plan.

There also is the possibility that, despite today’s more-sanguine assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies, potential adversaries may well develop more sophisticated missile technology sooner than expected, leaving America more vulnerable.

The military underestimated the ability of Islamic dissident groups to explode a 5,000-pound truck-bomb near a U.S. apartment complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Republicans point out.

The administration’s position strikes many analysts as having some merit as well. If the missile threat still seems small when the system is developed, the Pentagon would be able to take time to perfect the technology.