It’s a Case of National Missile Defense Deja Vu

After the second failed attempt out of three to hit a long-range missile warhead with an interceptor, President Bill Clinton must now decide whether to bet that the proposed national missile defense (NMD) will eventually work and start initial construction, or pass the decision to deploy to his successor.

We’ve been here before. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was a bit player in an effort to persuade the U.S. government not to build a national missile defense. Its outcome led to one of the most effective arms-control measures of the 20th century: the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. Thirty years later, the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush’s presidential campaign are pursuing policies sure to undermine, if not totally gut, the ABM treaty and set off a new and costly nuclear-arms race by once more embracing national missile defense.

In many respects--its questionable rationale, its dubious reliability (so far, no truly successful tests of the interceptor missiles), its effect on existing and future arms-control measures--today’s campaign for NMD contains many similarities to the ABM debate of three decades ago.

The focus of the 1968-69 bipartisan effort was the U.S. Senate, where first President Lyndon B. Johnson and then his successor, President Richard M. Nixon, sought approval of a nationwide antiballistic-missile-defense program.

The high point of the debate was the Senate vote, in August 1969, to stop deployment of the Safeguard ABM--ostensibly designed to counter a limited-missile threat from China or other potential small nuclear powers. Sound familiar? It should:

* Then, as now, proponents conceded that planned U.S. defenses could not counter an attack by the other large nuclear power--then the Soviet Union, now Russia.

* Then, as now, proponents argued that the defense would be able to stop an attack from a smaller power.

* Then, as now, they asserted that these smaller nuclear powers would never be able to develop effective countermeasures (decoys, jamming and other techniques to deceive and overwhelm U.S. defenses).

* Then, as now, opponents argued that such countermeasures would be easy and cheap to make and would be well within the capabilities of any military power capable of building nuclear warheads and the ballistic missiles to carry them.

* Then, as now, ballistic-missile defenses would do nothing to protect the United States against cruise missiles launched from submarines or surface ships, nuclear devices concealed in the hulls of merchant ships anchored in U.S. harbors, in pickup trucks driven across U.S. borders or in low-flying, unmanned, light civilian aircraft directed to targets by easily obtained Global Positioning System technology.

After a surprisingly strong showing in 1968, Senate ABM opponents smelled victory. Early in 1969, two highly respected moderate senators, Democrat Philip A. Hart of Michigan and Republican John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, set out to develop a winning bipartisan strategy. They were supported by a group of nongovernmental organizations interested in educating senators, their staffs, the media, labor representatives, education, veterans’ groups, business, religious and peace organizations on the shortcomings of the ABM deployment plan. Senate staff members conducted strategy sessions to hone effective arguments and analyze the positions of potential Senate allies.

One of the Senate leaders was Sen. Albert Gore Sr. (D-Tenn.), widely respected for his dedication, his wit and his general good sense. In deciding to join the anti-ABM fight, he had come a long way from his rural Southern roots. He grasped the significance of the technical and political arguments against the program. More important, he understood the core point that today’s missile-defense advocates seem to ignore: Even a modest ABM deployment would trigger expanded offensive missile programs to overwhelm it--a prescription for an unending nuclear arms race.

The Senate vote was a cliffhanger, with 50 senators for the ABM, and 50 opposed, effectively defeating the measure.

But following the close vote, Nixon used the strength of his opposition to gain domestic support for the ABM treaty that was finally concluded with the Soviet Union in 1972. Over the years that followed, other arms-control negotiations led to a variety of restraints and, eventually, to the reduction and outright elimination of entire families of offensive missiles.

Missile defense resurfaced as an issue in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan surprised nearly everyone (including his secretaries of state and defense) with his surprise announcement of a Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars.” While SDI, entailing extravagant costs and based on unproven technology, was never built, it kept alive the fantastic vision of an impenetrable missile shield, at least in the minds of the Republican right.

But public support for “Star Wars” and a concern about missile defense all but disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now the debate is rejoined, with many of the arguments against ABM deployment as valid today as 30 years ago. Huge potential costs (as high as $60 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office); unknown effectiveness of the planned interceptors; dubious arguments about both the capabilities of supposed enemies and the Russian reaction; and unsupportable assertions that deployment would have no effect on current and future arms-control measures are as critical a set of concerns as they were in 1969.

I accompanied Gore Sr. on some of his 1970 reelection campaign travels through Tennessee. He looked uncomfortable, and he was--standing, literally, on a campaign stump in his freshly starched white shirt and well-shined imported shoes, attempting to reconnect with the farm folks he’d grown up with. He was defeated handily by Republican William E. Brock III, who made effective use of the senator’s doubts about the Vietnam War and his supposed anti-military, anti-defense, soft-on-Russia record. Gore never regretted his choices, but he paid a high political price for his convictions.

Perhaps young Al, who has steadfastly backed the Clinton plan, took the wrong moral from this story.