Missile defense.

With public attention focused on Iraq, the Bush administration's prized missile defense system has been far from the limelight. But make no mistake, it's still chugging along. Many things have changed since the September 11th attacks, but the current administration's stubborn determination to deploy some kind of missile defense system--whether it works or not--has not wavered. During President Bush's State of the Union address in January 2003, he said, "This year, for the first time, we are beginning to field a defense to protect this nation against ballistic missiles." However, the truth is, this won't be the first time.

Under President Nixon, the Safeguard system was developed and eventually deployed. That system, using nuclear-tipped interceptors, became fully operational on October 1, 1975. It was actually Donald Rumsfeld who pulled the plug on the system four months later during his first stint as defense secretary. Rumsfeld announced that the Safeguard system was being shut down, because it was too costly while offering only meager capability. Today, Rumsfeld is of a different mindset. Acknowledging that the system will only be able to deal with a relatively small number of incoming ballistic missiles, he now calls it "better than nothing."

In March 1983, President Reagan introduced his Strategic Defense Initiative--Star Wars--as a way to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." Since that time the U.S. has spent more than $90 billion (over $143 billion since the early 1960s) attempting to develop various approaches to missile defense. Though the current administration has scaled back Reagan's vision of a multitiered defensive shield fending off thousands of Soviet missiles, its broad description of the program's goals is just as ambitious. President Bush has pledged to install a system capable of defending "our friends and allies and deployed forces overseas" from ballistic missile attack.

According to a press release from the Pentagon, this time around, the initial missile defense capability will build on the Ft. Greeley, Alaska, test-bed site and include up to 10 land-based interceptors in Alaska and California by 2004. Another 10 interceptors could be added in 2005. The Pentagon says it will be employing an "evolutionary approach to the development and deployment of missile defenses over time," and it envisions a layered system comprising ground-based and sea-based interceptors alongside upgraded versions of the short-range Patriot system.

Bush's decision to start with a modest missile defense shield may have been prompted by the string of test failures that preceded it. As the New York Times reported, the $100 million test conducted on December 11, 2002, failed when the interceptor "missed its intended target by hundreds of miles and burned up in the atmosphere, while the mock enemy warhead it was meant to destroy zoomed by unscathed."

As with previous failures, officials were quick to dismissively deny that the malfunction had anything to do with advanced missile technology. Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Lehner of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said that the U.S. has been successfully separating boosters from their payloads for 50 years. However, the same problem had occurred during an intercept test in July 2000.

The 2004 budget requests $9.1 billion for missile defense programs, a hefty increase over the amount in the last Clinton administration budget ($5.4 billion) and $1.5 billion more than this year. The Pentagon is projecting yearly missile defense funding to reach $11.5 billion by 2007. Though substantially surpassing the Clinton administration's spending on missile defense, these sums represent only the down payment on the actual cost of deploying the system.

The Bush administration has been increasing its support for missile defense while dismantling the international arms control regime both by withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and by putting forth a new nuclear war fighting doctrine. Whereas Ronald Reagan left office saying that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought, two decades later, the word coming from the Bush administration is that nuclear weapons are here to stay. Bush's "new idea" is that the U.S. should develop flexible nuclear weapons that can be employed in a variety of circumstances from busting Saddam Hussein's underground bunkers to bailing out U.S. forces in a conventional conflict. Following the recommendations from the Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the declared role of U.S. nuclear weapons could change from a tool of deterrence and a weapon of last resort to a central, usable component of the U.S. antiterror arsenal.

Key Points

* President Bush has decided to deploy a partial missile defense system by October 1,2004.

* Despite the huge investment in missile defense over the past four decades, the Pentagon has been unable to field a workable system, and major hurdles remain.

* The Bush administration's proposal to deploy a missile defense system, coupled with its aggressive nuclear policy, could halt progress toward nuclear arms reductions.

Michelle Ciarrocca <[e-mail]> is a research associate for the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center at the New School for Social Research.