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Bush's Anti-Logic Shield

By Robert Wright
Posted Wednesday, May 2, 2001, at 11:30 PM ET
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty

Building the ambitious missile-defense system outlined yesterday by President Bush would mean abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but that has never much bothered the Bush administration. As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld puts it, "The Soviet Union, our partner in that treaty, doesn't exist anymore."

One thing Rumsfeld doesn't bother to add is that when the Soviet Union died, its successor states—most notably Russia—agreed to inherit its treaty commitments. Another thing he doesn't add is that they did so at the insistence of the United States.

In fact, they did so at the insistence of a president named Bush. I guess American officials forgot to tell the Russians that, though the Soviet Union's offspring would be expected to keep treaty commitments, Bush's offspring wouldn't be.

I don't want to make too much of this. After all, George W. Bush now seems to be suggesting not unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty but a negotiated withdrawal—forging a new "cooperative relationship" with Russia. And I guess there's a chance that he means this more sincerely than he meant his pledge to forge a new cooperative relationship with Democrats.

Besides, the main problem with missile defense isn't the legal niceties. The problem is that it lies somewhere on the spectrum from useless to counterproductive. That is, it would either not affect the chances of my dying prematurely or increase them. I don't consider either of these outcomes worth the price tag—which, realistically, is somewhere between $60 billion and $1 trillion.

Exactly how effectively a missile-defense system would fend off missiles is open to debate, but one thing it has already proved its imperviousness to is logic. Bush yesterday trotted out a series of bullet-ridden rationales and held them up proudly, as if oblivious (which he probably is) to the withering criticism they've already been through. For example:

Barbarians at the gate: The basic rationale for missile defense has long been that people like Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il are savages not subject to the deterrent logic of mutually assured destruction. These men, Bush said, are "gripped by an implacable hatred of the United States of America. They hate our friends. They hate our values. … Many care little for the lives of their own people. In such a world, Cold War deterrence is no longer enough."

But of course, Cold War deterrence was never premised on enemy leaders sharing our values, liking us, or even caring whether their own people died. As I've noted before in this space, deterrence assumes only that enemy leaders don't want to die themselves. If Bush thinks Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il don't care about their own survival he should say so, but so far the evidence suggests pretty strongly that these guys are survivors. Of particular relevance: During the Persian Gulf War, after Secretary of State James Baker made a veiled threat to respond with nuclear force to the use of chemical weapons, Hussein kept his ample supply of chemical weapons sheathed.

Nuclear blackmail: In light of this Persian Gulf episode, it's ironic that Bush yesterday cited the war with Iraq as an argument for missile defense: The alliance that rolled back Iraqi aggression "would have faced a very different situation had Hussein been able to blackmail with nuclear weapons."

Of course, it's possible that, even though Hussein would have been bluffing, the bluff would have worked. If enough European and American citizens decided there was at least a tiny chance he'd deliver on his threat, their fear might have proved politically paralyzing. But if a tiny chance of successful nuclear attack is paralyzing, then missile defense isn't going to help. After all, not even supporters of missile defense think it will be 100-percent effective, and most observers think its success rate would be much lower. And, as an extremely perceptive critic of missile defense once wrote, "In the psychology of paralyzing fear, a small but appreciable threat of massive destruction is a small but appreciable threat of massive destruction. If our allies are worried that there's a 5 percent chance of London or Paris going up in flames, it won't help to say, 'Actually the threat is only 2 percent.' " Or 1 percent, or one-half of 1 percent.

Deterring nuclear buildups: Bush said yesterday that missile defense can "strengthen deterrence by reducing the incentive for proliferation." What an odd claim! China has already warned that it would respond to missile defense by accelerating its nuclear missile program—and, unlike Russia (which has made similar noises), China has the money to do so. This would then give India an incentive to accelerate its nuclear program, which would give Pakistan the same incentive.

Even as it provokes weapons proliferation, missile defense will distract us from the longstanding U.S. goal of negotiated nonproliferation. Bush claimed yesterday that part of his "broad strategy" would be "active nonproliferation." Yet the official Bush administration policy is to refuse to discuss nonproliferation with North Korea. After all, if we're going to be snuggled up under our missile-defense blanket, why bother trying to lure North Korea into the modern, civilized world? (And, if you're trying to build political support for missile defense, why give North Korea a chance to show that it's civilizable?)

Maybe the biggest problem with missile defense is that it will distract us from what everyone agrees is a more serious threat than ballistic missiles—nuclear or biological weapons smuggled into the United States by boat, plane, or car. In fact, missile defense may expand that threat. Let's suppose that, in the case of the "rogue states," missile defense did have the "deterrent" effect that the Bush administration claims, inducing them to shift resources away from missile construction. What do you think they're going to do with those freed-up resources—give money to the Red Cross? They're going to focus on alternative ways to deliver weapons of mass destruction to the United States. Last night on PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, a missile-defense booster said that "a credible U.S. commitment to missile defense" would "discourage countries from building missiles." These countries, he predicted, would say to themselves: "We're going to put millions of dollars into missiles and the United States is just going to counter them. Let's do something else." Yeah, and I think I know what the "something else" is.

Alluding to the option of smuggling nukes into the United States, someone once compared missile defense to locking just one of your car doors to prevent theft. But, actually, that's too kind to the logic of missile defense. If you don't lock a car door, it is as likely a route of entry as the other door. With missile defense, we're trying to lock a door that was never an attractive route of entry to begin with. Saddam Hussein would rather smuggle a nuke in anonymously than send one over on a missile, since the latter option will get him killed and the former won't.

I live in the Washington, D.C., area, a few miles from ground zero. So I'm all for spending money to reduce the chances that the United States will be subject to nuclear attack. But missile defense is just not the smart way to spend that money.

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Robert Wright, a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, runs the Web site meaningoflife.tv and is the author of The Moral Animal and Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: There are some very good posts and discussions on this article: look for the checkmarks and stars, or click on 'Fray Editor's Picks' to pull up a list of them.]


Reading between the lines of Bush's speech, we can see hints of a retreat dressed up as an advance. In calling for a vague "new framework" for US-Russian relations allowing national-scale missile defense, the new administration has backed away from the specific concepts advanced by its predecessor. The Clinton administration, we should recall, had assembled two significant pieces of its national missile defense puzzle: 1) a system architecture and 2) a draft treaty. Bush, by contrast, has bold, soaring rhetoric. The absence of any specifics suggests that we are further than ever from seeing an actual missile defense deployment. And that's not a bad thing, either.

--Josh Pollack

(To reply, click here.)


I can hardly believe I am going to say this, but this whole missile defense issue shows how sophisticated this administration really is. This isn't about missiles. It's about changing our Cold War paradigm to reflect new realities. This administration wants to drastically cut our nuclear arsenal. This is the proper thing to do because we could never use all the nukes we have now; there is no longer any big nuclear threat; maintaining these nukes are very expensive; and it encourages Russia to keep their nukes. Russia's arsenal is not dangerous because they would use any of it on us. It is dangerous because terrorists can pilfer bomb-making material or buy it from corrupt officials. So how do we scrap most of our nuclear arsenal without the right wing going ballistic? The administration uses the "missile defense" ruse at the same time it develops its conservative bona fides by scraping the ABM Treaty.

I assume that this administration knows that we are decades away from true missile defense. Rumsfeld, Cheney et al. may be hawkish, but they aren't stupid. It is clear from Bush's intentionally vague pronouncements that this is no Reaganesque "Star Wars" program. This will be a bare bones, cheap system that can be used to maybe intercept a single warhead. Maybe the reason Putin seems to be coming around is because we can hire Russian scientists to develop the system. It doesn't matter. This "shield" is not protection against rogue states. Its purpose is to provide cover for scrapping our nuclear arsenal.

I am beginning to appreciate that this administration is talking to its right wing, while acting for us all. Let's hope that this is correct, and it carries over to other areas, like tax policy and the environment

--Cato the Censor

(To reply, click here.)


To Cato the Censor:
Actually, working in the NMD program, I'd believe your position to be a fair possibility. Take a look at just the DOE budget and suppose (or recognize if you prefer) that we actually have an energy supply crisis. Why do you want to spend most of your disposable budget on keeping 3 weapons labs and 2-3 weapons production facilities on life support in order to design and build in the future weapons that you have absolutely no sane use for except to scare off the "barbarians at the gates"? Perhaps, just perhaps, that money would be better spent on more efficient energy production methods? This is totally logical to either a former oil man or an environmental activist who may not be overly impressed by the clean up record at these nuclear lab sites either.

If NMD gets the PRC and Russia on board for a really decisive nuclear warhead reduction agreement, like what happened with chemical and biological weapons, that would be great. Sure, weapons technology isn't going to stand still, but that doesn't mean that you have to spend money on deploying it if you don't need it because there is little to defend against. BTW, if the PRC and Russia pulled the plug out of Pakistan's, Iran's, Iraq's, or North Korea's nuclear programs, those programs would deflate rapidly. The issue is and will always be the big bullies on the block, not the weenies behind them.

--Tom R

(To reply, click here.)

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