Proposals for a Limited Missile Defense Create a Political Minefield

Twice in the past 30 years, the United States has debated whether to build defenses against ballistic missile attack. The first led to the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union; the second--centering on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative--was swallowed up in the end-game of Soviet collapse. The issue is coming around for a third time, though for different purposes in a different world.

However, the U.S. proposal to build a limited national missile defense system is also controversial, even with Washington’s allies. And that spells trouble ahead.

As before, the experts disagree about whether missile defenses can work. This is true even though the U.S. goal this time is not to try blunting a major Soviet missile attack--in Reagan’s catch-phrase, to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”--but solely to intercept a handful of missiles that could be launched by North Korea in the near future or by countries like Iraq and Iran later on.

The theory is that our being able to intercept “tens” of missiles would lead any potential small-time aggressor to doubt the effectiveness and hence the value of an offensive arsenal. Some homeland defense also would make more credible U.S. threats of retaliation, using either nuclear or conventional weapons.

These arguments for a limited system bear little resemblance to the flawed case once made for defending against Soviet missile attack, and they are plausible, provided that missile defense is not seen as substituting for efforts to forestall threats from emerging in the first place.

However, many countries are not buying the U.S. logic. In part, this is because positions and concerns from old Cold War debates are being carried over into tomorrow’s world.

The Russians were the first to complain about U.S. limited missile defense plans. For them, the end of nuclear confrontation with the U.S. means that the ABM Treaty has lost much of its former significance. Yet it does remain as a political symbol that, in some unclear way, Russia still must be reckoned with among the great powers. Thus Moscow is stoutly resisting U.S. efforts to revise the treaty, which must be done to accommodate limited missile defense deployments. The Russians see this issue in the same guise as their humiliation over the Kosovo war: further evidence that the United States is shunting them aside.

China opposes U.S. limited missile defense proposals for more practical reasons. Its scientists may be telling the politicians that what the U.S. proposes to do would not, in fact, provide an effective defense against a determined Chinese nuclear attack. However, the politicians worry that the U.S. might not stop there and would instead try to build a robust missile defense system that would attempt to negate tomorrow’s Chinese nuclear arsenal. They also confuse U.S. limited defense of its homeland with possible efforts to defend Taiwan against short-range Chinese rockets. However, scientific logic rarely trumps political suspicion, and in the absence of a serious Washington-Beijing strategic dialogue, the U.S. accent on the word “limited” does not carry conviction in China.

Doubts about U.S. proposals for limited national missile defense also are coming from an unexpected and more serious quarter: most of the European allies.

Many are skeptical about U.S. arguments that Iraq and Iran will be able to deliver weapons of mass destruction against Europe in the next decade or so, and they fault the U.S. for not seeking nonmilitary ways of forestalling such threats. Their doubts about U.S. plans for a limited missile defense also contain an echo of the concerns they expressed about the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative: that for the U.S. to seek shelter behind a technological curtain implies an unwillingness to expose itself to risks shared by the Western alliance as a whole.

Clinton administration officials counter that the allies have it wrong on two counts. First, they should be joining the U.S. in building their own homeland missile defenses rather than pretending that no missile threat could emerge in the Middle East. Second, deploying a limited U.S. homeland defense is not an act of isolation but rather would strengthen Washington’s ability to project military power abroad in defense of American and allied interests, with reduced risk of being deterred by some adversary nation’s tiny missile arsenal.

As eventually happened during the Cold War, in time the strategists and politicians are likely to sort out the solid arguments from the bogus, and limited missile defense will stand or fall on its merits.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has a serious problem. Both political parties have endorsed the goal of deploying a homeland missile defense system when it is technologically ready, and President Clinton must make some key decisions next summer.

Yet the U.S. so far has not clearly placed this issue in a broad, coherent and consistent strategic framework, widely discussed here and abroad. Nor has it yet done the painstaking political spadework, either with allies or with countries like Russia and China that it would prefer not to see become adversaries.