Ballistic Missile Defense in the Bush
Defense Review: Problems and Prospects

William Hartung, World Policy Institute, 212-229-5808, ext. 106

In his May 1st speech on U.S. nuclear policy, President Bush reiterated his administration's pledge to deploy a multi-tiered ballistic missile defense system as soon as possible. Information on the cost, timing, and structure of the proposed system will be released soon, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld unveils the results of his review of U.S. defense strategy.

In assessing the administration's approach to missile defense, the following points should be considered:

• Deployment of a missile defense system is neither inevitable nor advisable. There is nothing new about the Bush administration's pro-missile defense rhetoric. Ronald Reagan pledged to build an even more ambitious system that would render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," only to shift gears after daunting technical challenges and radical changes in the global political environment persuaded him to seek substantial reductions in nuclear weapons and put Star Wars on the back burner. In October 1975, the United States actually deployed a ballistic missile defense system in Grand Forks, North Dakota, but the project, known as Safeguard, was fully operational for only four months. The Secretary of Defense who presided over the shutdown of the Safeguard system was Donald Rumsfeld.
• The prospect of an attack on the United States by a nuclear-armed ballistic missile has been greatly exaggerated. Contrary to popular belief, the 1998 Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States--chaired by Donald Rumsfeld and directed by Stephen Cambone, who is now running the Bush administration panel charged with reviewing U.S. ballistic missile defense policy--found no new evidence of an accelerated ballistic missile threat to the United States. Instead, the Rumsfeld Commission report relied on extreme worst case scenarios to pump up the perceived threat. A more balanced assessment suggests that the ballistic missile threat to the United States is smaller now than it was during the Cold War. As the U.S. government's top analyst of ballistic missile threats, Robert Walpole, has repeatedly stated, a ballistic missile is the least likely method a U.S. adversary would choose for delivering a weapon of mass destruction to U.S. territory, because it has a 'return address'--the United States would know where it came from, and would launch a devastating retaliatory strike.
• Rhetoric notwithstanding, President Bush's plans for a ballistic missile system do not entail abandoning the 'grim reality' of Mutually Assured Destruction. In their more honest moments, President Bush and his advisors speak of "refashioning the balance between defense and deterrence," not replacing the Cold War era "balance of terror" with a defensive shield. Given the modest goals that President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld have set for the system in its early stages--basically throwing up a system that might make an adversary 'think twice' about whether its missile could penetrate U.S. defenses--the President's program suggests an attempt to enhance deterrence, not replace it. That being the case, it's hard to see why a hastily crafted defensive system would be more effective in deterring an attack on the United States than the threat of a counter-attack by U.S. nuclear or conventional forces. Dictators and "rogue" leaders have a keenly developed instinct for self-preservation: given this reality, President Bush's suggestion that a Third World tyrant with a handful of ballistic missiles would be less likely to be deterred by the U.S. nuclear arsenal than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War is not persuasive.
• An early decision to break out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and deploy a missile defense system could spark a renewed nuclear arms race. In a May 19, 2000 front page story in the Los Angeles Times, Bob Drogin and Tyler Marshall cited a classified U.S. intelligence assessment which suggested that rapid deployment of missile defenses would set off "an unsettling series of political and military ripple effects . . . that would include a sharp buildup of strategic and medium-range missiles by China, India, and Pakistan and the further spread of military technology to the Middle East."
• There is no workable missile defense on the horizon. The Clinton administration's land-based ballistic missile defense system, which was far less ambitious than the Bush approach, failed two of its first three tests, and scientific critics like Dr. Theodore Postol of MIT have suggested that the entire test series was rigged to exaggerate the capabilities of the system. The "sea-based" boost phase approach that is the new favorite of missile defense advocates is based on a missile that has yet to be designed, much less tested. And the Pentagon hasn't slated the first test of its new space-based laser until at least 2012.
• The multi-tiered approach favored by the Bush administration will be enormously expensive, dwarfing the $60 billion price tag for the Clinton/Gore missile defense plan. In the short-term, R&D resources devoted to missile defense technologies of all sorts will likely increase by at least $2 billion per year. Total missile defense spending could jump from current levels of $5 billion per year to $10 billion or more annually. The whole enterprise, including radars, space-based sensors, and interceptors on land, at sea, on aircraft, and in outer space, could easily cost 3 to 4 times as much as the land-based system proposed by President Clinton, or as much as $240 billion over the next two decades. The Big Four contractors-Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and TRW-have already racked up long-term contracts for missile defense worth in excess of $20 billion, and that's BEFORE they reap the benefits of the new spending that will start to flow under President Bush's more expansive approach.
• Other methods of dealing with Third World ballistic missile threats would be far less costly and far more effective than building a multi-billion dollar missile shield. President Bush's decisions to suspend talks aimed at ending North Korea's ballistic missile programs and to cut funding for threat reduction programs that provide aid for dismantling Russian nuclear weapons and controlling Russian nuclear materials are just the most obvious examples of his administration's unwillingness to utilize diplomatic and economic tools to help prevent the spread of ballistic missiles.

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