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COMMENT DEFENSE MECHANISMS Issue of 2001-06-11 Posted 2001-06-04 The great White House crusade for missile defense reached an unprecedented level of strangeness the other day. The Bush Administration came up with a startling addition to the list of contractors who stand to profit from its pet military project. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, meet your new colleague: the Russian Rocket Forces. The proposal is for the United States to buy a big consignment of Soviet-designed S-300 air-defense systems and set them up in Europe as part of the American missile shield. We'd pay top dollar, too. The Russian defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, said Russia would be glad to get the business. But he did express some puzzlement about why we would want S-300s, since they are designed to work against airplanes, not ballistic missiles, and he added that his government still has no plans to roll over for a unilateral American withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Missile defense is one of those oddball ideas, like flat taxes and school vouchers, that have hardened into conservative dogma. But it has a weirder, more meandering history than most. It started life in 1983 as a Ronald Reagan "dream," fuelled by Edward Teller briefings and movies old ("Murder in the Air," a 1940 thriller in which Reagan stops a spy from stealing an "inertia projector" that can shoot down distant aircraft) and new ("Star Wars"). The Strategic Defense Initiative was to be an impenetrable umbrella that would keep the United States warm and dry against the ultimate hard rain, a surprise attack by the Soviet arsenal of ten thousand long-range warheads. Apart from President Reagan himself, the only people who took the dream seriously had offices in the Kremlin, where the view was, essentially, "If the Americans can invent the remote control and the working hotel elevator, they can do anything." The market value of the Reagan dream, like that of a dot-com I.P.O., required no proof of viability. Its price peaked at the 1986 summit in Reykjavik, where it drove a deal that would have stopped the Cold War cold, with an agreement between the Soviet Union and the United States to scrap their entire nuclear arsenals. Mikhail Gorbachev's only condition was that Star Wars had to go, too; Reagan's was that it had to stay. Both men were overvaluing something that did not and could not exist; because neither would budge, the deal fell through. The Cold War ended anyway, but missile defense survived. It took its place in conservative hagiography as the symbol of how Reagan's toughness brought down the Soviet empire. (S.D.I. thus became a shield not against missiles but against the awkward fact that Reagan had been ready to give away what conservatives regarded as the store.) In scaled-down form, missile defense spent the nineteen-nineties in development hell; the Clinton Administration, afraid to buck the military-industrial lobby that had formed behind the program, let it limp along and pushed decisions about deployment into the future. With the advent of Bush II and his Bush I-vintage national-security apparatus, the push was on for S.D.I.—renamed National Missile Defense, or N.M.D.—to be, in Pentagon jargon, "ramped up." Colin Powell was in Budapest last week, trying to persuade the other NATO foreign ministers that N.M.D. is needed to defend the United States and its allies and friends against any "state of concern" (the new name for rogue states like North Korea) or terrorist group that might have a weapon of mass destruction and the crazy determination to use it. It was a tough sell, not only because the threat is so hypothetical but also because an intercontinental ballistic missile is such a conspicuous, expensive, and unreliable way to transport a weapon the size of a steamer trunk—kind of like using a mobile home to deliver a pizza. Why not just rent a motorboat or a panel truck instead? Shooting down missiles, though, isn't really what N.M.D. is about. What it's about—besides jobs for the boys (sixty billion dollars, the minimum price for a minimal system, gets a lot of people on the payroll)—is what the Chinese call American global hegemony. (American freedom of action is a nicer way to put it.) The very existence of something designated as N.M.D., the logic goes, might make it harder for rocket-wielding but otherwise weak rogue states to bluff the United States and its allies out of undertaking needed military interventions. Whether the system would work or not is beside the point. There's some merit to this logic, just as there's some merit to the opposing logic that N.M.D. might end up fostering rancor within the alliance, alienating (and financing) the Russians, siphoning funds from other military programs, and prompting the Chinese to build lots more nukes. What there's no merit to is the rush to deploy. If the ideological barnacles on all sides could somehow be scraped off, perhaps the matter could be decided on the basis of cost-effectiveness, economic and diplomatic. Thanks to Europe's resistance and the changeover in the United States Senate, the ramp to N.M.D. just got steeper. This is all to the good. Is missile defense worth the trouble and expense? Could it be made to work well enough to be even remotely credible? Would it make the world a safer place or a more dangerous one? These are complicated questions, and there is only one good way to answer them: very, very slowly. — Hendrik Hertzberg |
