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Foreign Policy
National Missile Defense: An Indefensible
System
By George Lewis, Lisbeth Gronlund, and David
Wright
This abstract is adapted from an article appearing in the Winter 1999-2000 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.
Next summer, President Clinton will decide whether the United States should begin deploying a national missile defense (NMD) system intended to protect the entire country from limited attacks by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) armed with nuclear, biological, or chemical warheads. Such attacks, ranging from a few to a few tens of missiles, fall into three categories: a small accidental or unauthorized launch from Russia, a deliberate or unauthorized attack from China, or a deliberate attack from a hostile emerging missile state that might acquire ICBMs. This last threat—focused on Iran, Iraq, and North Korea—has emerged as the primary argument for a near-term NMD deployment.
The planned national missile defense is more down-to-earth (literally and figuratively) than former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was intended to create a space-based shield against a massive Soviet nuclear attack. In contrast, the current system would use ground-based interceptors to destroy incoming warheads by colliding with them. Indeed, because it is intended to counter a more limited threat than the SDI system, and because it would use existing rather than speculative technology, many assume that, unlike SDI, the NMD system would work against the threat at hand. Moreover, although many observers agree that SDI deployment might well have aggravated the U.S.-Soviet arms race, they assume that, with the end of the cold war and Russia’s declining economy, deploying the NMD system will result in few security costs.
However, neither assumption about the security benefits and costs is warranted. Given today’s technology, the United States can certainly build a system that could destroy one or several ICBM warheads under controlled conditions, in which the characteristics of the target warhead are known and no serious effort is made to defeat the defensive system. However, the essential question is whether the system will be operationally effective—that is, whether the defense would be effective in the real world, where the characteristics of the attack would not be completely known in advance and where the attacker would develop countermeasures to defeat the defense. Many NMD proponents argue that countermeasures are hard to develop and implement. However, there are many countermeasures that are much easier to build and deploy than either an ICBM or a nuclear warhead small enough to be delivered on an ICBM.
It is doubtful that any of the tests planned by the Pentagon will attempt to assess the operational effectiveness of the system against real-world countermeasures. To do so, the countermeasures used would have to be designed by a truly independent group, and the NMD intercept tests would have to be conducted without the operators knowing in advance what countermeasures they would face. There is no indication that such a testing program is even under consideration.
Building a national missile defense system will also incur far-reaching security costs. Despite the much-trumpeted end of the cold war, the United States and Russia continue to rely on nuclear deterrent policies based on deploying large numbers of nuclear-armed missiles ready for immediate launch. The deployment of an NMD system that Russia believes could undermine its deterrent will almost certainly provoke a reaction that will undermine U.S. security.
Many influential military and political leaders in Russia warn that the United States’ disregard of their strategic interests seriously undermines relations between the two countries, especially following the expansion of NATO and the bombing of Kosovo—cases in which Russia also believes its concerns were ignored. Some warn that U.S. NMD plans could become an important issue in the June 2000 presidential election in Russia and lead to the election of a hard-liner.
To maximize its number of survivable missiles, Russia would probably
resist “de-alerting” measures to reduce the rapid-launch
status of its nuclear forces and might even increase the fraction of its
missiles on high-alert status. Such steps would have the side effect of
increasing the risk of an accidental or unauthorized Russian missile
launch, which arguably presents the greatest threat to U.S. security.
China may be even more alarmed than Russia. China’s small deterrent force of roughly 20 ICBMs would be directly threatened by even the first phases of the NMD system. China clearly is capable of expanding its offensive forces in the next few decades by building more missiles and deploying multiple-warhead missiles to overwhelm a national missile defense system. While some modernization of China’s missile forces is likely in any event, deployment of a U.S. missile defense will influence both the timing and scope of those efforts. To preserve its option to enlarge its nuclear arsenal, China might also refuse to participate in a fissile material production cutoff.
In the medium to long run, the price of a national missile defense system deployed by the United States may well be a world with more ICBMs and weapons of mass destruction. Compared with these large and nearly certain security costs, the benefits the planned nmd system would provide are both too small and too uncertain to justify its deployment.
Hitting Them Where It Works by Theodore Postol
References
Joseph Cirincione’s “Why the Right Lost the Missile Defense Debate” (Foreign Policy, Spring 1997)
Cirincione’s “Rush to Failure” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 1998)
Richard L. Garwin’s “The Rumsfeld Report: What We Did” and Lisbeth Gronlund and David Wright’s “The Rumsfeld Report: What They Didn’t Do” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 1998)
John Issacs’ “Missile Defense: It’s Back” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 1999)
George N. Lewis, Theodore A. Postol, and John Pike’s “Why National Missile Defense Won’t Work” (Scientific American, August 1999)
Lewis and Postol’s “Future Challenges to Ballistic Missile Defenses” (IEEE Spectrum, September 1997)