The Black Comedy of Missile Defense
By Frances Fitzgerald

This conference on weapons of mass destruction is timely, and I am much honored to be asked to speak here amidst this distinguished group of experts. I am not in their league--I have merely learned a great deal from them.

But then my subject--national missile defenses--is not in the league with weapons of mass destruction. It's probably one of the least powerful weapons on earth. In fact that it isn't a weapon at all yet. Basically it's still just an idea.

That we should be here today talking about national missile defenses involves us all in the comedy--the black comedy, if you will--which that brilliant politician Ronald Reagan set in motion 18 years ago. Yes, it was 18 years ago--some of you were still in grade school at the time--when he made a speech calling upon scientists to render ballistic missiles "impotent and obsolete." What a lovely idea! Unfortunately it was only his idea. (He wrote the speech insert in secret and virtually all of his advisers were appalled!)

And, do you know, the idea came to him because of Jonathan Schell and perhaps some others at this conference! The administration was conducting the largest peace-time military build-up in history, talking publicly about nuclear war-winning capabilities and refusing to engage in arms control talks with the Soviets. Jonathan Schell's book, Fate of the Earth, helped to inspire a massive anti-nuclear movement that threatened the administration's military policies and Reagan's reelection the following year. So, Reagan made this speech as the political dock to the political nettle--casting missile defenses as a way to world peace. His political magic didn't work immediately. Most in Washington and most press commentators thought he had wandered off into some fantasy land. But it worked after his advisers caught on and found other uses for this astonishing idea.

Irrationality of Nuclear Deterrence

What Reagan understood was that deterrence--or the balance of terror--seemed not only irrational to most Americans, but actually unbelievable. Since 1947, when ICBMS were invented, the vast majority of Americans have always responded to polls by saying that they thought we had a defense against ICBMs already. When told we do not, they expressed faith that if American scientists put their minds to it, we could have such a defense quite quickly. A White House poll taken two weeks after Reagan's speech showed that two-thirds of respondents believed we could easily have space-based defenses. Reagan understood that Americans not only had complete faith in science but that they couldn't keep the possibility of nuclear annihilation in their minds for very long. He understood that if it were presented the right way, Americans would see a missile shield as purely pacific and would imagine that others would see it as such.

After all, in his movie career he had played Bass Bancroft, an American secret agent charged with protecting a new superweapon--the Inertia Projector capable of paralyzing all electric currents and destroying all enemy planes in the air. In this movie, called Murder in the Air, a Navy admiral claims that the weapon "not only makes the United States invincible in war but, in doing so, promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered." The audience had no trouble believing that. It was American exceptionalism.

I tell you this not just to amuse you--or to fill you in on history. What Reagan did in that speech and in subsequent speeches was to create a rhetoric that to this day sustains the expensive NMD program. And a rhetoric that--through none of his doing--became a cover story for the pursuit of quite a different agenda.

That's why I find the subject of missile defenses so fascinating. I don't think there's been another public policy issue in the past 50 years--if ever in this country--so wrapped up in a tissue of wishful thinking, myth, obfuscation, and some downright lying. Reagan's fabrication has become a fabric in which Democrats and Republicans alike are now so deeply enmeshed that no politician can tell us that the Emperor has no clothes.

Of course, the U.S. has been doing research on countering ballistic missiles ever since those missiles were invented. The Pentagon was spending about a billion dollars on that research in 1983. What distinguishes the period after Reagan's speech is not the research effort--though the funding soon increased five-fold. It is rather the promise of a near-term deployment of effective population defenses.

In 1986, just a year after the SDI program began, the Reagan administration proposed to develop a multilayered shield, composed of ground- and space-based weapons, that would be ready for deployment in about five years. Conservatives within and outside the administration had insisted that something be put on the track to deployment. The succeeding Bush administration had a similar project. President Bush senior had little interest in missile defenses, but for Republican conservatives, NMD had become a political standard--as central as Right to Life or prayer in the schools. The deployment plan was not shelved with the end of the cold war. It merely shrank a bit and the rationale changed--from countering Soviet missiles to countering a future ICBM threat from "rogue states."

Conservatives Gain Ground, Again

The public, perceiving no such threat, lost interest and eventually forgot about it. On coming into office, the Clinton administration cancelled the deployment plan and shifted 80% of the research money into theater missile defenses. But as the Republicans gained ground in the Congress, the pressures grew to reinstate an NMD. (Among them a North Korean missile test and the Rumsfeld Commission report saying that rogue nations could have ICBMs in five years.) Then came the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and in January 1999--just after Clinton's impeachment--the administration put a limited NMD system (a ground-based interceptor) on the track to deployment.

Along with the Republicans, the Democrats in the Congress signed on. From past experience, they knew perfectly well that the public would not listen if told the system wouldn't work for years--if ever.

During the presidential election last year Governor Bush's campaign aides, notably Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration official, criticized the Clinton system as hopelessly inadequate. Bush himself promised to move forward with a multilayered defense of the country that would include sea-, air-, and space-based systems to protect the U.S. and its allies. Then in May this year President Bush gave a much-heralded speech in which he said that his Secretary of Defense had identified a number of "near-term options" that "could allow us to deploy an initial capability against limited threats" from rogue states. From this speech and subsequent officials briefings it seemed that these "near-term options" included land-, sea-, and air-based systems.

Novelties in NMD Promotion Scheme

All of this seemed, well, traditional. But there were novelties to the plan.

First: In his speech Bush calls a "new security framework"--a framework that had just two elements: the promise of unilateral U.S. reductions in strategic weapons and an insistence that the ABM Treaty be abolished--and soon.

Second: In June Secretary Rumsfeld said that the administration might deploy an NMD system even before the testing was completed--as an emergency measure against rogue state threats. It was later announced that this deployment would be made by 2004, an interesting date.

Third: In July Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz announced that the administration had scheduled three NMD testing activities for next spring that might in themselves violate the ABM Treaty.

Then, from June through September 11 the president and his top national security advisers spent most of their time abroad lecturing European, Russian, and Chinese leaders about the seriousness of the threat of an ICBM attack from a rogue state, such as North Korea, Iran, or Iraq, and in talks with their Russian counterparts, made it clear that the U.S. would withdraw from the ABM Treaty whether the Russians agreed or not.

The policy caused real consternation abroad. The Russians, who wanted to make drastic reductions in their strategic arms, objected that an open-ended NMD program might eventually threaten their nuclear deterrent. They offered to amend the treaty to permit unlimited testing, but insisted that the line be drawn on deployment. (Also they called for a new treaty on offensive arms.) The Chinese maintained that the NMD program was aimed at countering their small ICBM force. Our NATO allies (and congressional Democrats) voiced concern that if the U.S. withdrew unilaterally from the treaty, the Russians would try to maintain some of their older weapons, and the Chinese would have more incentive to build a larger ICBM force. If they did increase their forces, the Indians and the Pakistanis would probably follow suit. So there would be more nuclear weapons, and perhaps worse stocks of nuclear materials in not perfectly secure places that might become available to terrorists or rogue states.

The Bush administration paid no attention to these concerns. Officials just went on lecturing. Indeed, they seemed so absorbed in this activity that they did virtually nothing else in regard to foreign policy. In fact, in that period the Bush administration had no foreign policy--except for this lecturing.

September 11 changed all that, but as the recent Bush-Putin meeting showed, the administration still appears intent on getting rid of the ABM Treaty. So let us stop for a moment and ask why.

In a three-day briefing for the press in July this year--a briefing not at all well covered except by the trade/technical press--BMDO officials essentially told reporters that the sea- and air-based systems did not exist and probably wouldn't for a decade or more. As for space-based systems, BMDO officials made it clear that they were so far over the horizon they didn't deserve to be taken seriously now.

That left the Clinton ground-based system--or what is called the "legacy" system--as the only game in town. This system can on occasion do what is described as "hitting a bullet with a bullet." That is an enormous technical feat. But the system isn't a weapon yet, and possibly may never become one. As Richard Perle pointed out in the New York Times last year, when he was pushing sea- and air-based defenses, no one has yet figured out how this system can attack multiple warheads or distinguish warheads from decoys so simple they could be made by anyone who knew how to make an ICBM. Also--as Perle wrote--their radars (some based on small islands in the Pacific) are hopelessly vulnerable to attack.

In early September a senior Pentagon official told a Boston Globe reporter, "The technology has improved quite a bit, but the fundamental problems with missile defenses haven't changed." That about sums it up. Technologists may or may not solve these problems, but if they do, it will certainly take a while--not less than a decade according to conservative estimates.

Administration officials certainly know just how rudimentary the NMD technology is, but so far they have blamed this situation entirely on the constraints of the ABM Treaty and said that there could be no progress unless it is immediately set aside. The contention is an odd one. All NMD technology is at present so primitive that the U.S. could test all of its programs for many years without running up against the treaty. Tacitly the administration has acknowledged this because the three "testing activities" Wolfowitz said might conflict with the treaty next year have little to do with the real challenges of producing an effective NMD system. Two of them involved using naval radars in tests of the ground-based NMD interceptor. The third has to do with the digging of five interceptor silos at Fort Greeley, Alaska--in preparation for a possible emergency deployment.

The question then was why administration officials wanted to put an end to the ABM Treaty before there was any reason to do so? This summer Condoleezza Rice suggested that the President wanted to commit the United States irrevocably to building missile defenses--and that would be his legacy. However, the policy surely had less to do with the still-ephemeral prospect for population defenses than with the ABM Treaty itself.

As soon as the Strategic Defense Initiative was launched Richard Perle and other conservatives in Washington began to use the popular program as a battering ram against the ABM Treaty--and thus against all strategic arms control. Few--if any--had any illusions about technology. In 1986 Perle said publicly that President Reagan's goal of population defenses was a dream and that the program should be focused on the more attainable goal of a defense for our ICBMs. The conservative attack on the ABM Treaty has continued since then.

No Treaties, No Way

The Bush administration for its part has showed no liking for arms control treaties, or treaties of any kind. In its first eight months in office it effectively stalled the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, refused to sign a verification protocol being developed for a treaty on biological weapons, blocked key provisions of a UN pact to stem the illegal traffic in small arms, and backed away from negotiations with North Korea to end its missile testing and get rid of its nuclear materials. Then, while promising to make cuts in U.S. strategic nuclear weapons, the Bush administration declined to make an agreement with Russia on mutual reductions.

The explanation administration officials offered for their refusal to negotiate offensive reductions with Moscow was that strategic arms control is time consuming and out-dated. The argument is frivolous at best. A more plausible reason lies in a report on U.S. nuclear planning and arms control sponsored by the National Institute of Public Policy that appeared in January 2001. The authors of the report include Stephen J. Hadley and Robert Joseph, now the two officials responsible for strategic policy on Bush's NSC staff and Stephen A. Cambone, now deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, and a number of former Reagan administration officials.

In the report the authors argued that the United States now faces an unpredictable world--one potentially more dangerous than that of the cold war--and that nuclear arms control treaties hinder America's flexibility to adapt its nuclear forces to any threat. "Washington," they argued, "cannot know today whether Russia, or for that matter China, will be neutral, friend, foe, or part of a hostile alliance in the future." Thus, "It cannot therefore be sensible now to codify the character and quantity of U.S. strategic forces to some approximation of parity in U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear force reductions." At present, they wrote, it may suit U.S. interests to make deep reductions, but these cuts should be made unilaterally so that the U.S. preserves the right to develop new weapons when and for whatever purposes it sees fit.

Interestingly enough, the authors spoke of ballistic missile defenses only as defenses for U.S. ICBMs and as an aid to offensive operations against a regional power's mobile missile launchers--such as, presumably, the Iraqi Scuds in the Gulf war. They made no claim for national missile defenses, or for population defenses of any kind.

Implicit in this paper--and in administration policy before September 11--was the assumption that the U.S. as the sole superpower didn't have to make deals with other countries, that its security could best be assured by unfettered autonomy and its ability to deploy superior military force.

Much has changed since September 11. This assumption has clearly proven unworkable in terms of the battle against terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. Therefore, Secretary of State Colin Powell has come out of Coventry, and the balance of forces within the administration has apparently changed.

Then, since September 11 President Putin has given the U.S. invaluable assistance. He has changed the course of Russian foreign policy. The Bush administration owes him a great deal. But what is it going to give him? The ABM Treaty? Any treaty?

We don't really know what happened at the recent Bush-Putin meeting, but it appears that all that Colin Powell and the other internationalists managed to achieve was to get the White House to kick the ABM Treaty issue down the road a piece. But because of the work that has already begun at Fort Greeley the White House can't keep on doing this: the administration will have to decide one way or another quite shortly. Then we will see whether unilateralism or internationalism has prevailed.

Unilateralists Stronger Now

Let me close by saying this. The international issues at stake are crucial, but there's a domestic issue as well: and that's the corruption of the national discussion about weapons of mass destruction. The unilateralists have a principled position: they firmly believe that arms treaties do not serve U.S. national security interests. They're stronger in Washington now than they were during the cold war, and yet they never come out and say this.

Instead they continue to perpetuate, and hide behind, the fiction of national missile defenses. Even in this time of crisis they do not tell us the truth. And the Democrats are not brave enough to tell us the truth, either. Surely this is a disservice to the American public.

(Frances FitzGerald <frankiefitz@hotmail.com> is the author of Way Out There In The Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (2000).)

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