U.S. Plans I:  Missile Debate Is Over and Bush Won, Prominent Critic Says

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — One of the most prominent voices of the U.S. arms control community has declared that the Bush administration and other proponents of developing a national missile defense have won politically, and that the 20-year debate over whether to pursue such a defense is over.

The view does not necessarily reflect a consensus in the arms control community, with another prominent critic saying the debate should continue.

“I think the great strategic debate over national missile defense is over,” said Joseph Cirincione, speaking to a crowd containing numerous arms control heavyweights Wednesday night who were assembled to preview a television documentary profiling the debate’s major arguments and trends.   Cirincione heads the Nonproliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which hosted the preview. 

Arms control community concerns about the negative implications of withdrawing from the missile defense-limiting 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, he said, have turned out to be wrong.

“Other treaties did not fall like dominoes.  The world did not get destabilized.  The ABM Treaty is dead and it turns out it doesn’t really matter,” he said.

Missile defense opponents had argued that withdrawal from the treaty, commonly referred to as the “cornerstone” of global arms control, would prompt other countries to back away from commitments to other agreements, such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, U.S.-Russian strategic arms reduction pacts and a treaty banning nuclear weapons testing.

The question about missile defense will no longer be whether or not to pursue and deploy it — some sort of limited system will be deployed, Cirincione said.  Rather, questions will persist about how aggressively the United States should pursue missile defenses in light of any evidence they will ever work. 

“I think that the missile defense system is going to be treated like any other defense system now, it is going to be judged on performance, cost and schedule and will compete with other programs for scarce defense dollars,” he said.

Cirincione also raised some eyebrows when asked what it would take for him to support a national missile defense.  Evidence of a proven space-based technology, he said, adding he believes it the only viable approach to national missile defense would be by developing space-based directed energy weapons.

Missile defense proponent David Smith generally agreed with Cirincione’s views.

“One thing that’s new is that Joe Cirincione and I find ourselves in agreement on an awful lot of things these days,” said Smith, senior U.S. arms control official in former President George H.W. Bush’s administration and now chief operating officer of the National Institute for Public Policy.

Baker Spring, a Heritage Foundation missile defense advocate, said the ideological component of the debate over missile defense is fading but is not gone yet.

Death Defying

Charting a roller coaster trajectory, the debate over missile defense has been a core issue for the arms control community since the 1983 unveiling of former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which called for an expanded research and development program of missile defense systems.  Critics dubbed it “Star Wars,” and cast it as excessively costly and technically infeasible.

Advocates would later claim the U.S. commitment to the program, which the Soviet Union could not match other than by expensively ratcheting up nuclear weapons production and deployment, was an important factor leading to the end of the Cold War.  Missile defense opponents seemed to have scored a decisive victory in the early 1990s, however, with the disappearance of the Cold War Soviet nuclear threat, which prompted a dramatic decrease in political support and funding.

Backed by re-emerging, vocal political support in a hotly contested Congress and perceptions of the growing threats posed by North Korea and Iran, however, the fortunes of national missile defense gradually reversed during the past decade, with the annual budget for developing a range of technologies climbing to nearly $8 billion last fiscal year.

Senators and representatives from both parties in hearings as late as this summer did continue to press the administration for answers on questions of whether the systems will ever work, whether the long-term international political implications might outweigh potential benefits and whether they just might be too costly.

For the second year in a row, however, a Senate effort to cut significant funding from the national missile defense resulted in a compromise that allowed the Pentagon to spend the contested money as it wished.

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the Bush administration’s treaty withdrawal in June effectively ended the missile defense debate, Cirincione said.

He also gave credit to Russia for its “historic decision … to realign itself with the West in such a way that there wasn’t an international crisis, as many, including me, predicted there would be.”

Cirincione also cited Russian and Chinese convictions that the system will never actually prove effective.

“Basically Russia and China have come to realize, that although they may not like it, that they may have to live in a world without the ABM Treaty, but it’s probably going to be a world without ballistic missile defense as well because nothing is happening real soon on this,” he said.

Spring cited the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, arguing it changed Russian and U.S. perceptions about the requirements of arms control agreements intended to limit the threats they posed to each other.

“When that ceased to be essentially the pertinent environment, it was inevitable in my judgment that both sides would go back and reassess all of the things that had to do with the notions of strategic stability, and offensive strategic nuclear force requirements, and the wisdom of strategic defenses.”

A Draw

While conceding a loss in the political debate, Cirincione claimed no defeat in the debate over whether the system ultimately will prove effective, or whether it will amount to a colossal waste of billions of dollars.

“Both sides won,” he said.

The arms control community has also prevailed with its view that national missile defense is unlikely to overcome serious technological changes and will prove costly at the expense of other defense priorities, he said, citing continued congressional skepticism and an administration decision to cancel one underdeveloped missile defense program.

He predicted that this skeptical view would prove correct.

“I am a technical pessimist on missile defense.  I don’t believe that we’re going to ever, ever have an effective missile defense system. That the cost is simply too high and the technology is just too great,” he said.

Critics Will Keep Fighting

Cirincione’s views on the end of the debate do not necessarily represent a consensus in the anti-missile defense community.

“As a matter of fact, I don’t agree with Joe Cirincione on that and I went up and told him afterwards,” said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World and a long time anti-missile defense lobbyist.

Isaacs agreed that there have not yet been any significant repercussions from the treaty withdrawal, but “we don’t know the long-term implications, we don’t know what China will do.”

“As to say we both won, and the fight’s over and it’s just going to be treated like any old major procurement program, I certainly don’t agree with that … The fight continues,” he said.

Isaacs noted the administration plans to proceed with placing up to six interceptor missile silos at Fort Greely, Alaska, ostensibly for testing but also available for use in the event of an attack.

He said it remains to be decided whether the military will be able to go beyond that and fulfill its plans to deploy ground-based, sea-based and space-based defenses.

“Especially a missile defense system in space has all sorts of other consequences about using space for war, which is a very different concept with very bad implications,” he said.

“That fight certainly has not been settled,” Isaacs said.

Back to top

Russia:  Missile Interceptor Test-Fires Successfully

Russia Wednesday evening launched a successful flight test of a 20-year-old missile interceptor, Moscow’s Interfax reported (see GSN, Oct. 2).  Officials said the launch, which took place in Kazakhstan, was designed to test the interceptor’s reliability.  The success of the launch will allow Russia to extend the interceptor’s service life, said Maj. Gen. Oleg Gromov (Interfax, Oct. 2).

Back to top

U.S. Plans II:  New Radar Could Improve Cruise Missile Defense

U.S. Air Force and defense industry officials are touting a new radar as a “three-dimensional, high-definition, cruise missile defense system,” Aviation Week reported this week (see GSN, Aug. 19).

Northrop Grumman and Raytheon have dramatically upgraded a radar system used for ground surveillance aircraft to create the Multi-Platform Radar Technology Insertion program, officials said.  Improved modules on the radar enable it to detect low-flying cruise missiles at more than 200 miles (see GSN, April 16).

Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles are also being considered for cruise missile defense, according to Paul Meyer, Northrop Grumman’s vice president for business and strategy development.  The aircraft would patrol for cruise missiles 1,000 nautical miles off the U.S. coast and be able to track them closely enough to direct air defense.  The UAV might also be equipped with sensors to detect chemical and biological weapons (David Fulghum, Aviation Week, Sept. 30).

Back to top

Russia:  Moscow Plans Missile Interceptor Test

The Russian Defense Ministry plans to conduct a flight test of a missile interceptor this month, ITAR-Tass reported Monday (see GSN, April 16).  Ministry officials have said they hope the test will help extend the service life of the interceptor, which has been in use for more than 12 years.  If the test is successful, the interceptor’s service life could be extended by an additional three years, according to ITAR-Tass (ITAR-Tass, Sept. 30 in FBIS-SOV, Sept. 30).

Back to top

U.S. Plans:  Army Awards $626 Million Kwajalein Contract

The U.S. Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command has awarded a $626 million dollar contract to Bechtel Corp. and Lockheed Martin to provide logistical, technical and engineering support to the Kwajalein Atoll test site, InsideDefense.com reported yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 9).

At its current value the contract runs for four years but it could be extended to 15 years and be worth up to $2.5 billion.  Located in the Marshall Islands, the Kwajealein Atoll is used for ballistic missile defense testing and space surveillance operations (John Liang, InsideDefense.com, Sept. 25).

Back to top

U.S. Plans:  USS Lake Erie’s Aegis Radar Tracks Missile

The U.S. Missile Defense Agency successfully tracked a missile last week using the Aegis cruiser USS Lake Erie’s SPY-1 radar for the first time, Defense Daily reported Monday (see GSN, Aug. 19).

Technicians tracked a Minuteman 3 ICBM during a Sept. 19 missile test from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California (see GSN, Sept. 20).  The coordinated effort allowed the agency to test the system without firing a separate missile, a spokesman said.

During the test, called a risk reduction flight for the agency’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, the Lake Erie tracked the boosting ballistic missile successfully, fused sensor track data with Vandenburg’s and transmitted the information to other computers in the Ground-based Midcourse Defense loop (see GSN, Aug. 21).  The agency will have data on the test in 70 days, the spokesman said (Kerry Gildea, Defense Daily, Sept. 23).

Back to top

About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines

HOME  |  CONTACT US  |  GET INVOLVED  |  SITE MAP