NEW YORK -- President Bush has presented the outline of his missile-defense program. But it's important to compare his ambitious rhetoric with the realities of existing missile defense projects and the likely reactions that such a missile-defense program will provoke around the world.
First, there is no workable missile defense on the horizon. The Clinton administration's land-based National Missile Defense program, which was far less ambitious than the multi-tiered approach favored by Bush's Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, failed two out of three rudimentary tests. And critics, such Theodore Postol at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have charged that the entire NMD test series was rigged to hide serious flaws in the system.
The sea-based, "boost phase" intercept option favored by many missile-defense advocates would involve building an entirely new interceptor missile which at this time is not even on the drawing boards. And by the Pentagon's own optimistic projections, the first test of its latest space-based laser won't happen until 20'2, at the earliest.
It's important to remember that a ballistic missile is the least likely method an adversary would choose for delivering a nuclear weapon to U.S. soil, according to experts within the intelligence community. That's because a ballistic missile has a "return address" -- the identity of the attacking nation would be known immediately, and that nation would be subjected to a devastating retaliatory attack by U.S. forces.
Beyond that, an early decision to break out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and deploy a missile-defense system could spark a renewed global nuclear arms race, thereby causing more security problems than it will solve. Reports published last year in the Los Angeles Times cited a classified U.S. intelligence assessment which suggested that deployment of a missile defense would set off "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."
The multi-tiered system of the kind preferred by Rumsfeld will be enormously expensive, dwarfing the $60-billion price tag for the Clinton NMD system and creating a huge potential windfall for the major defense contractors. In the short-term, annual research-and-development resources devoted to missile-defense projects of all kinds will probably increase by at least $2 billion per year, bringing total missile-defense spending up to $7 billion per year and making it the largest program in the Pentagon budget.
An accelerated development program that pushes forward land-based, sea-based, and space-based options simultaneously could cost $'0 billion or more a year. The whole effort, including expansion of radars and space-based sensors, construction of interceptor missiles and laser systems, and all the other elements of a multi-tiered system, could cost anywhere from $'20 billion to $240 billion over a twenty-year period.
This represents a huge potential windfall for the four major missile-defense contractors - Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and TRW. These firms have received nearly two-thirds of all missile defense R&D spending over the past several years, and have already racked up long-term missile defense contracts worth in excess of $20 billion.
There are other methods of dealing with the threat of a ballistic missile attack from such nations as North Korea, Iran or Iraq that would be far less costly and far more effective than building a multi-billion dollar missile shield. Bush's decision to walk away from the framework talks with North Korea, just as negotiators were on the brink of instituting a verifiable ban on Pyongyang's ballistic missile testing, production, and exports, is the most obvious example of this administration's unwillingness to utilize hard-headed diplomacy as a tool to prevent the spread of ballistic missiles.
The president's speech suggests that nuclear policy in the Bush administration is dominated by a hard-line group of nuclear unilateralists who are more interested in undermining arms control than they are in coming up with a cost-effective defense strategy. Rumsfeld's longstanding associations with ideologically-driven, pro-missile defense think tanks, like the Center for Security Policy (CSP) and Empower America, go a long way toward explaining his current positions on missile defense. These organizations and their ardent followers believe in "peace through strength, not peace through paper," as U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Az., put it at one CSP gathering.
From the perspective of these anti-arms control ideologues, destroying the ABM treaty is a positive achievement in its own right, regardless of the current status of U.S. missile defense programs.
Add to this the enthusiasm of key Bush advisors for developing a new generation of allegedly more "usable" low-yield nuclear weapons, and it becomes apparent that unless Secretary of State Colin Powell and other moderates within the administration are given a greater say in nuclear weapons policy, Bush runs the risk of encouraging global "nuclear anarchy," a situation under which every nation builds up its own conventional and nuclear arsenal according to a worst case assessment of the intentions and capabilities of its adversaries, real and imagined.
Before he throws away four decades of progress on arms control and risks sparking a new arms race, the president should rethink the consequences of his speech and readjust the direction of his policy to bring it into line with strategic, political and economic realities.
William D. Hartung is the president's fellow at the World Policy
Institute at New School University in New York.