Abstract
Late in the evening of July 7, Ballistic Missile Defense Organization officials gathered around a screen to watch a highly publicized intercept test of the Clinton administration's new national missile defense system. A rocket had taken off from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean with an interceptor targeted on a mock nuclear warhead fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The screen remained blank. The flash that would have indicated a successful hit never came.
Pentagon officials, watched by reporters and a handful of outside observers, were crestfallen. The failure was the second in three intercept attempts by the Pentagon's missile defense office. In fact, according to the General Accounting Office, the “hit-to-kill” technology designed to destroy incoming warheads by smashing into them has failed 11 of 15 times since 1983.
If this most recent test took the wind out of the sails of missile defense program officials, it also deflated the program's political sponsors, who had hoped that a success would propel the program forward, with a deployment decision this year and an operational system by 2005.
But the fiasco was just another of many blows to the program. In late July, 31 Senate Democrats sent a letter to the president (it had been circulated by Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Dick Durbin of Illinois), urging him to defer a deployment decision to the next administration. A few days earlier, 60 House members, led by Maine Democrat Tom Allen, sent a similar letter.
These letters came hard on the heels of a variety of well-coordinated—and sometimes not-so-coordinated—efforts to break what earlier in the year appeared to be an inexorable march toward deployment. In April 2000, a group of scientists organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists and MIT's Security Studies Program released a study raising serious questions about whether the planned interceptors could deal with simple countermeasures and decoys. Pentagon and missile defense proponents have spent months trying to shoot down the study—and they have been just as successful as the interceptor was in shooting down the mock warhead. Pentagon consultant and MIT professor Ted Postol suggested that the Pentagon was simply hiding the fact that its “hit-to-kill” technology will never work.
These scientists were joined four months later on July 6 by 50 Nobel laureates who sent a letter to President Clinton urging him to delay the program. That effort was organized by the Federation of American Scientists. Two foundations, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, put together a list of 15 distinguished individuals that included Sam Nunn, a former senator; William Perry, a former defense secretary; and retired generals John Shalikashvili and Andrew Goodpaster, to counsel delay. The Council for a Livable World Education Fund organized groups of experts on Russia and China to similarly urge a delay in deployment.
Republican leaders joined the call for President Clinton to put off the decision. In late June, the Baltimore Sun quoted Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who “said he is ‘not going to be outraged’ if President Clinton leaves a decision on the system to the next president.” North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms had already made it clear in mid-June that he would be happy if the administration shut off all major national security decisions until after January 20, 2000, when a new president takes office.
Of course, these Republican officials have a different motive than most Democrats: Republicans believe that if George W. Bush becomes president, he will not only decide to deploy a national missile defense system, he will expand it far beyond the “limited” land-based interceptors Clinton has proposed.
One element the Clinton administration planned to consider in making a deployment decision was the reaction of allies. Almost unanimously, however, the allies are not playing ball. Virtually every NATO member, including Germany and France, vehemently opposes the Clinton plan. The Russians and the Chinese have worked overtime to try to derail national missile defense. No country, except perhaps Israel, was willing to support the American effort.
But neither its many failures nor the efforts of its critics have put national missile defense in jeopardy. Far from it, in fact. The push for national missile defense is as intense as ever.
The Pentagon is scheduled to make its recommendation on the program in August, with a presidential decision before the end of the summer. Most observers feel that the test failures and the overwhelming opposition have already led President Clinton to abandon the option of a quick deployment decision or a withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
But Clinton, the great triangulator, has one more alternative to postponing the decision. He could choose to authorize preparations for the construction of a radar station on Shemya Island, Alaska—with construction not actually beginning until the spring of 2001. Administration lawyers are arguing that the first stages of construction would not violate the abm Treaty, an interpretation not everyone buys.
While missile defense proponents have had a setback, they continue to insist that the United States must build a defensive shield as soon as possible. Among Republicans, national missile defense is an article of faith, and many Democrats support deployment as well. Governor Bush is fully committed to an expanded defense system that would include sea- and space-based interceptors.
Vice President Al Gore, Jr. supports the Clinton position of moving forward with the program, although, he says, a decision on deployment should wait until a number of factors are evaluated.
Thus, no matter who is elected president, national missile defense, a program with at least nine lives, will remain a prime national security issue. The program has been abandoned or placed on hold many times, but it always seems to pop up again, each time with a hot new technology to counter some newly discovered threat.
Opponents of missile defense have been playing for time over the past year. A decision not to decide—to leave the program's fate to the next president—is no guarantee that it can be stopped. But delay provides an opportunity for new developments to undermine the case for deployment. Good news—increased rapprochement between North and South Korea or the ultimate victory of the moderates over the hardliners in Iran—could set the program back. So could more test failures.
Many years ago, Boston Braves fans used to chant, “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain,” which meant that after the baseball team used its two top pitchers, it prayed for several days of rainouts until it could get those pitchers back on the mound. Missile defense opponents should pray for more rain delays.