Missile Defense: Still Mad.

The arms-control brigade has been out in force since President Bush announced his latest moves toward missile defense, but their weaponry is looking a little rusty. Most of it is 20 years old. There is, for example, the charge that developing a missile defense would be prohibitively expensive-even though at the current estimates of several hundred billion dollars it wouldn't cost much more than developing other major, high-end weapons systems. The old chestnut that a system couldn't work has also returned for a command performance, even though the first of the three tests of the ground-based system that the Clinton administration had been pursuing was a success and the two others failed because of low-end technological misfires. The fact is that missile defense, fundamentally, involves gathering and processing information-something at which America excels.

Cost and feasibility are practical worries. The braver arms controllers made the case that missile defense doesn't even make sense in theory. Michael Kinsley, uncharacteristically, advanced the dumbest argument. He pointed out that the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction depended on remaining vulnerable to a Soviet retaliatory strike (hence, the appropriateness of the acronym). The idea was that as long as the Soviets knew that they could survive and retaliate for a U.S. first strike, they wouldn't necessarily have to "use or lose" their nukes. Hence, the "balance of terror." The risk of Reagan's SDI, then, was that it would be just good enough to rebuff a retaliatory strike, thus ungluing the "stability" of MAD. Kinsley worries that the Bush plan will have the same effect today. But the nuclear forces the U.S. would be countering now are too small for MAD to apply. China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran-none of them will soon have survivable nuclear forces in a Soviet sense. If Kinsley is right about the sources of nuclear stability, these nations should be firing nukes at Seattle as soon as they are capable, because if they don't use them, they will lose them. Absurd. Someone get Kinsley an Alka-Seltzer-he has a Cold War hangover.

Writing in Slate, Robert Wright made a more straightforward case-that the likes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il will be deterred from attacking the U.S. by their self-interest, making missile defense unnecessary. Really? What should make us think that such dictators wouldn't be willing to sacrifice their fellow citizens in a crazed cause (it's what they do every day)? Would the U.S., if push came to shove, actually be willing to destroy millions of innocents in retaliation? Are we sure that a given dictator wouldn't have doubts about the answer to this? Even if a rogue doesn't actually launch against the U.S., ICBMs give such states new power to blackmail, outright or subtly, the United States and its allies. Missile defense would eliminate, or at least diminish, that power. But Wright argues that if there's the slightest chance of a rogue missile getting through, even if missile defense is 98 percent effective, the possibility of blackmail remains unchanged. But this is nonsense. If Saddam knew his missile probably wouldn't hit the U.S., but might nevertheless unleash a retaliatory strike against him, both his incentive to push the button and his ability to influence U.S. actions would drastically diminish.

Finally, the arms controllers warn of a renewed arms race, and tout more arms agreements to prevent it. Richard Butler, the man who had the run of Iraq and still couldn't locate and destroy its weapons of mass destruction, rushed to the pages of the New York Times to advocate more financial support for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in lieu of missile defense. But the idea of a new arms race, prompted by missile defense, is absurd. Russia can't afford it. China has been aggressively updating its nuclear force for a decade, even when Clinton was swearing never, ever to try to shoot down any incoming missiles. Butler, like other arms controllers, puts his faith in the Non- Proliferation Treaty (NPT). But whatever its merits, that agreement alone can't be relied on to guarantee U.S. security. Iran, Iraq, and North Korea, among others, have flouted it. As for its successes, are we really supposed to believe that the NPT stopped the likes of Sweden and Burundi from acquiring nuclear weapons? Missile defense will aid the cause of effective non-proliferation more than any treaty, because it will reduce the value of nuclear weapons. There's a reason, for instance, that North Korea doesn't bother to build aircraft carriers- because (besides being expensive) we can easily blow them out of the water.

Finally, as a last resort, missile-defense critics warn that defending against missiles is woefully inadequate since a nuclear bomb could be smuggled into the U.S. in a suitcase. Here they have half a point. By all means, let's continue the effort-billions a year is already spent on it-to defend against terrorists and suitcases, even if Kinsley & Co. eventually find a theoretical reason to oppose doing that too.