The Folly of Missile Defense.

The Clinton Administration's efforts to go forward with missile defense are deeply destabilizing. They will not make the United States safer; they will put us more at risk. And they will drain our Treasury in the process.

The Russians have said, unequivocally, that any effort by the United States to alter or abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty will jeopardize the whole edifice of arms control.

"The prevailing system of arms control agreements is a complex and quite fragile structure," Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said at the United Nations on April 25. "The collapse of the ABM treaty would, therefore, undermine the entirety of disarmament agreements concluded over the last thirty years."

Moscow just ratified the Start II agreement, which will reduce the nuclear warheads of Russia and the United States from around 7,000 to 3,500. In fact, Russia has proposed reducing nuclear warheads on both sides to 1,500 each, though Clinton's Pentagon says that's too low. Such a position leaves little doubt as to which side is more invested in the nuclear arms business.

But if Washington proceeds with missile defense, Russia says it will pull out of Start II and other arms control treaties. Russia would have an incentive to expand, not reduce, its nuclear stockpile because it would fear that the United States, protected by a missile shield, might launch a devastating first strike against its nuclear forces. Russia then might be left with only dozens of nuclear warheads, and the shield is supposed to protect the United States against just such a number.

The Russians are worried about such a scenario in part because the Clinton Administration is proceeding with a sophisticated radar system "on the northern tip of Norway, less than forty miles from the Russian border," writes Theodore Postol in an article entitled "National Missile Defense: The Target Is Russia," which appeared in the March/April issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This radar system at Vardoe, Norway, "can do critical advance work for the national missile defense system," Postol writes. "If the Administration decides this summer to deploy the national missile defense system, it should at least be honest about it. The Pentagon still defines the principal missile threat as Russia, not North Korea. That is why [the radar] is in northern Norway instead of northern Japan."

Postol, a former scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory, is on to something. In mid-April, a Reuters dispatch from Moscow read: "Russia warned Norway that a radar station built by the United States on its soil breached the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and Oslo risked being party to violating the agreement. The Foreign Ministry said that the Have Stare (Globus-2) radar station being assembled by the Americans near the Norwegian town of Vardoe close to the Russian border was designed to track Russian ballistic missiles. The United States says the station will track space debris."

To mollify Moscow, Clinton Administration officials have told the Russians that they don't need to fear a first strike by the United States because their weapons remain on hair-trigger alert. If the Russians saw a first strike coming, they could launch their own missiles before the U.S. ones hit. This "would neutralize the effectiveness of the assault," the U.S. officials said, according to a document published in The New York Times and The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The recklessness of such a negotiating position is almost baffling. Keeping weapons on hair-trigger alert is one of the most dangerous things the nuclear powers can do today. Many times in the last five decades, Washington and Moscow have come within minutes of blowing each other up because of computer errors that mistakenly detected incoming missiles. For the survival of the planet, the first thing the nuclear powers need to do is take missiles off hair-trigger alert. But here's the Clinton Administration all but urging Russia to maintain this launch-on-warning posture!

Then there is the risk "relations with Russia might sour so much" that it stops cooperating with the United States on the loose nukes problem in "countries of the former Soviet Union," warns an April report by the Congressional Budget Office entitled "Budgetary and Technical Implications of the Administration's Plan for National Missile Defense." This schism "might fuel the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," the report says.

Proceeding with missile defense will also put U.S.-China relations on perilous footing. Today, China has about twenty nuclear warheads that could hit the United States. All of these potentially could be rendered useless by the shield, so the United States would be free to launch a first strike against China without fear of retaliation. Aware of its predicament, China is likely to expand rapidly its missile and warhead system if the United States goes forward with missile defense.

That's the nature of the arms race. For the last fifty-five years, whenever one side has made a technological breakthrough, the other side counters it. There is, simply, no technological fix for the problem of nuclear weapons.

What's more, the shield itself is unlikely to be as foolproof as its designers hope. "Any country capable of deploying a long-range missile would also be able to deploy countermeasures that would defeat the planned NMD [national missile defense] system," concludes "Countermeasures," a report released in April by the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nor do the so-called rogue states present much of a missile threat.

First of all, Iraq, Iran, or North Korea would be annihilated if they dared to lob a missile at the United States. These missiles come with return addresses. The Pentagon would be well aware of who sent them, and retaliation would be swift and overwhelming.

Secondly, if these states were dead-set on attacking the United States, it's likely that they would try less traceable weapons, such as backpack or suitcase weapons. The shield is useless against such weapons.

Plus, the weapons programs of these countries can often be degraded by military sanctions or diplomacy. Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been rendered inoperative, and the Clinton Administration has successfully bought off North Korea's nuclear program.

But the Clinton Administration and the Republicans have seized on missile defense as being vital for U.S. security. Why?

Because of profits and politics. A lot of military contractors stand to make billions of dollars off the system. The United States has already spent $60 billion on missile defense and, according to the Congressional Budget Office, it is projected to spend another $60 billion in the next fifteen years. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and other big boys are licking their chops.

On the political side, the Republicans need an issue to show that they are more hawkish than the Democrats, so they have seized upon Star Wars. In response, the Clinton Administration, desperate to get Al Gore elected, has decided to meet them more than half way.

According to Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, White House advisers say "Vice President Al Gore and the Democrats need to proceed with the system to inoculate themselves against Republican criticism of being weak on national defense," The New York Times reported on March 9.

To go ahead with missile defense for crass political purposes, knowing that it carries fundamental risks to world security, is the height of irresponsible leadership.