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Threat Assessment: Two Experts Generally Agree With U.S. Missile Threat Review By Steve Hirsch Global Security Newswire WASHINGTON — Two Harvard international security specialists generally lauded the U.S. intelligence community’s recent assessment of the ballistic missile threat facing the United States. Released last week, the intelligence report said if the United States were attacked with weapons of mass destruction, those weapons would probably not be delivered by ballistic missiles. Both experts concurred with that assessment, although one criticized the report on a number of grounds, including its limited coverage. Graham T. Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, said the message of the report is that while evidence supports the need for missile defense against ICBMs, such missiles are not the only, or even the most likely, danger. Although he cited the pressure from whom the Bush administration to highlight the long-range missile threat, Allison said he thought the paper did a good job of stating that the more likely means of delivery are nonmissile means and noting that there are also cruise and short-range missiles that can be launched from ships that are not part of the threat addressed by national missile defense. Missile delivery is the “least likely” way terrorists could deliver a weapon to the United States, he said. Belfer Center research fellow Jim Walsh also lauded the report on a number of grounds, although he was critical on others. He called the report “surprisingly frank” in some ways about the missile threat, citing its conclusions that fewer warheads will be pointed at the United States because of cuts in Russian forces, that North Korea has extended its missile launch moratorium announced in 1999, and that U.S. territory is more likely to be attacked by chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons from nonmissile delivery systems. He criticized the report, however, for not going beyond the numbers of missiles to include technical issues such as guidance systems. “A missile that doesn’t have a guidance system is nothing more than a tube with gasoline shot up into the air — and we saw what that is like during the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein launched the Scuds, he couldn’t point the Scuds and aim them. If they were going to hit somewhere they were going to have to hit by luck … if they were going to do any damage.” Accuracy and guidance are critical, he said, but the phrase “guidance system” does not appear in the intelligence estimate. He also said the report does not properly discuss the question of marrying a particular warhead to a particular missile, meaning that if Iran, for example, were to build an ICBM, that doesn’t mean it will be able to miniaturize a nuclear weapon, put it on a missile and shoot it with accuracy. Walsh also pointed to a report statement that “Beijing is concerned about the survivability of its strategic deterrent against the United States and has a long-running modernization program to develop mobile, solid-propellant ICBMs.” Some missile defense proponents will claim the intelligence report justifies national missile defense efforts, but “the report actually says that the Chinese are building more nuclear weapons because they fear U.S. ability to overwhelm their small nuclear forces,” Walsh said. Missile defense will only add to that, he said, adding that, “This report is saying that the modernization program that began in the ‘80s was motivated by fear of superior U.S. forces, and so they started modernizing. “So what is the likely response if we build missile defense, if that is in fact the case? They will fear our missile capabilities even more and will build more weapons.” Overall, he gave the report credit for “calling it the way it is” and prominently stating that the number of ICBMs pointed at the United States is dropping — although the estimate does say that the probability a missile with a weapon of mass destruction will be used against the U.S. forces or U.S. interests “is higher today than during most of the Cold War, and … will continue to grow as the capabilities of potential adversaries mature.” “It’s hard to agree that there was any time more dangerous in American nuclear history than the 1950s and early 1960s, before we really knew what we were doing,” he said. “What’s closer than the Cuban missile crisis? These other things are smaller countries that have potential … but that’s theoretical, whereas the ‘50s were real and concrete,” he said.
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