NEW YORK -- Eighteen years ago this week, Ronald Reagan unveiled an ambitious research-and-development program that he claimed would eventually render nuclear weapons "impotent" and "obsolete."
Since then, the nation has spent more than $70 billion in a so-far futile attempt to turn the former president vision of a "Star Wars" missile defense system into reality. As Frances Fitzgerald writes in Way Out There in the Blue, her history of what was then known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. "Every time the program seemed ready to expire, or collapse of its own weight, something would happen to bring it to life again."
The latest "something" keeping the program alive is President George W. Bush.
Bush made two key promises regarding national defense during his presidential campaign.
The first was to reduce the size of the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal and take these weapons off of hair-trigger alert. Bush rightly noted that, "keeping so many weapons on high alert may create unacceptable risks of accidental or unauthorized launch," and called the current situation "another unnecessary vestige of Cold-War confrontation." The Pentagon recently began a comprehensive review of U.S. nuclear policy, the results of which are due to be unveiled later this year.
But Bush also promised to press for the deployment of a massive national missile defense system. Unfortunately Bush fails to see that this too is an "unnecessary vestige of Cold War confrontation." In fact, while the administration has been hard at work creating a sense of inevitability around the deployment of NMD, the fact remains that there is no workable system to deploy. In all likelihood, there never will be one.
Just how big a threat NMD could pose to the nation's security can be found in a report issued last summer by the National Intelligence Council. That report warned that deployment of such a system would likely provoke "an unsettling series of political and military ripple effects . . . that would include a sharp buildup of strategic and medium-range nuclear missiles by China, India and Pakistan and the further spread of military technology in the Middle East."
In addition, pursuing NMD threatens to damage U.S. - Russian relations, not to mention making further reductions in the size of Russia's nuclear arsenal highly unlikely. It seems that the administration is willing to throw away years of work that have actually reduced the size of Russia's nuclear arsenal in order to develop a dubious defense system that, even if it did work, would at best protect the U.S. against a limited missile attack by a "rogue" state.
More ominous is the way the administration appears to be justifying the need for NMD and other military hardware. It appears Bush's nuclear policy will draw heavily on the findings contained in a report released in January by the National Institute for Public Policy. The report was produced under the direction of Dr. Keith Payne, whose main claim to fame is co-authoring a 1980s essay on nuclear war entitled "Victory Is
Possible." Bush National Security Council staffers, Robert Joseph and Stephen Hadley, were involved in the production of this latest study.
The report warns that it's impossible to know what type of security threats the U.S. could face in the future. Therefore, the nation must maintain its current nuclear arsenal, along with the ability to design, build and test new nuclear weapons. The report even recommends the development of "low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapons" -- in other words, nuclear weapons that the U.S. could actually use.
Not surprisingly, the panel which produced this report frowns on arms -control treaties or weapons reductions because the "U.S. policymakers today cannot know the strategic environment of 2005, let alone 2010 or 2020.. There is no basis for expecting that the conditions that may permit deep nuclear reductions today will continue in the future."
Such recommendations threaten to move the United States away from eliminating the dangers posed by nuclear weapons. They stand in stark contrast to the nation's commitment "to pursue negotiations in good faith" towards a nuclear-free world under the auspices of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
If Bush truly hopes to fulfill former President Reagan's vision of making nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete," he show devote his attention to seeking deep reductions in the number of nuclear weapons rather than pursuing a flawed missile defense system. The only sure defense against a nuclear attack is the eventual elimination of all such weapons.
Michelle Ciarrocca is a research associate at the World Policy Institute at The New School in New York.