ARMS-US: Missile Defence Seen as Spurring New Arms Race

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 10 2000 (IPS) - When the celebrated actor Paul Newman starred in a 1966 Alfred Hitchcock spy thriller, ‘Torn Curtain,’ about an “anti-missile missile” that would “make nuclear weapons obsolete,” little did he suspect that it would inspire a fast- rising Republican star and fellow-actor named Ronald Reagan who would pick up the idea and run with it as president 15 years later.

Now, Newman has joined a growing number of groups and individuals who are trying to stop the US government from adding to the more than 60 billion dollars it has already spent on building such a weapon in what has been so far a futile quest to develop a system that will make the nation’s territory and armed forces impregnable to missile attack.

It seems that almost all of the rest of world also opposes a system which critics say may not only be technologically impossible to build, but will almost certainly spur a new and dangerous arms race which will ripple across much of the globe.

Even the US intelligence community is sounding the alarm. In a secret report which it is preparing for the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is expected to warn that any deployment of a US system would likely spur a sharp build-up of strategic and medium-range nuclear missiles first by China, and then by India and Pakistan in a chain reaction that could sweep into the Middle East.

Russia and Washington’s European allies have also expressed very strong reservations about any anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system that would violate the terms of an ABM treaty negotiated between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1972.

But missile defence, which currently costs between 3 and 4 billion dollars a year, will not be easy to stop. The Pentagon’s programme has built up a huge head of institutional steam and enjoys strong political support. Both major-party presidential candidates have committed themselves to building a missile-defence system, although Vice President Gore’s plan, like the Clinton administration’s, is initially more modest than the national system proposed by Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Major defence contractors – notably Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and TRW – are also spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to advance the programme – far more than its opponents can afford.

The basic idea behind any anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system is to destroy enemy missiles bearing nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction before they can destroy their intended targets, be they US troops in the field (theatre missile defence, or TMD) or any US-based target (national missile defence or NMD).

Reagan’s original idea was to base an ABM system in space; hence, it became known as “Star Wars” after another popular movie of the 1970s. Despite billions of dollars in funding, however, Pentagon scientists and contractors could not come up with a feasible plan, and, as the Cold War wound down in the late 1980s, Star Wars was put on the back burner.

That Reagan should have been the first to seriously promote an ABM system was not surprising. His formative years were spent in the isolationist Midwestern part of the country where the notion of a “Fortress America,” detached from the turmoil of pre-World War Two Europe and Asia and free to pursue its own destiny unencumbered by great-power meddling, held special appeal during the 1930s.

Despite the vast changes which have taken place in the 60 years since – not to mention the unquestioned global military dominance enjoyed by the United States today – that dream appears to retain its pull. A series of polls taken in the mid-1990s disclosed that most respondents, having seen Patriot missiles supposedly shoot down Iraqi Scud missiles during the Gulf War, believed that an ABM system was already in place and were outraged when they learned that there was still no defence against incoming ballistic missiles.

Republicans took those poll results very seriously and incorporated a commitment to develop an NMD system into their 1994 “Contract With America” platform by the year 2003. When they swept Congressional elections that November, Bill Clinton decided he, too, had to pay heed.

In 1996, he moved to defuse the issue in advance of that year’s presidential elections by proposing his own plan to develop a system over a three-year period with the option to actually deploy it within another three years. As a pre-emptive political device, it worked perfectly, and few thought that Clinton ever had any intention to proceed with deployment.

In 1998, however, a congressionally mandated Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat, chaired by former Republican Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, found that certain so-called “rogue states” – notably North Korea, Iran, and Iraq – could become capable of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles by 2003. Only one month later, North Korea shocked the world, including US intelligence agencies, by sending a long-range Taepo-dong missile over Japan on a ballistic trajectory.

In response, both houses of Congress passed legislation making it official US policy to deploy a NMD system as soon as technologically feasible. Clinton announced that he would decide by this summer whether to begin construction of such a system, a decision which has now been put off until the Fall.

But the system faces major challenges on both the technological and diplomatic fronts. Just this week, senior scientists who have previously worked on the programme and have been leaked internal documents charged that the “successful” flight tests, in which missiles reportedly hit their targets, have been rigged by the Pentagon in order to hide a fundamental flaw: that the system cannot distinguish between oncoming warheads and decoys which enemies could use to confuse and overwhelm any ABM system.

But the technical problems, which appear no closer to resolution than they did when Reagan launched the programme almost 20 years ago, may yet pale before the international impact of any decision to deploy an ABM system, particularly with respect to Russia and China.

“For them, the response to the deployment of a US missile defence will be the expansion of their offence,” former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara told the Los Angeles Times this week. “That is why this situation is so dangerous.”

The administration has tried to reassure both countries that any deployment would be designed only to defend against missile attacks by rogue states, of which North Korea is most often cited, and would, in any case, not be capable of defending against a massive attack by existing nuclear powers.

While in last week’s summit meeting between Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Moscow indicated some sympathy for US concerns, it also strongly opposes any changes in the ABM treaty the violation of which, it has warned, will excuse it from abiding by the START II treaty.

China is clearer still. It has repeatedly warned that any ABM system, regardless of its size and initial intent, could only undermine global disarmament efforts. Virtually all analysts here believe that Beijing, which currently has only about two dozen intercontinental missiles capable of reaching the United States would respond to such a deployment with a major build-up.

Such a reaction by China, according to the US intelligence community, would almost certainly result in India’s taking similar precautions against Beijing in which case Pakistan would feel obliged to take counter-measures against New Delhi.