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Leading the nuclear race
By
Michelle Ciarrocca
(Posted with permission
from Foreign Policy In Focus)
With
public attention focused on Iraq, the Bush
administration's prized missile defense system has been
far from the limelight. But make no mistake, it's still
chugging along. Many things have changed since the
attacks of September 11, 2001, but the current
administration's stubborn determination to deploy some
kind of missile defense system - whether it works or not
- has not wavered. During President George W Bush's
State of the Union address in January, he said, "This
year, for the first time, we are beginning to field a
defense to protect this nation against ballistic
missiles." However, the truth is, this won't be the
first time.
Under president Richard Nixon, the
Safeguard system was developed and eventually deployed.
That system, using nuclear-tipped interceptors, became
fully operational on October 1, 1975. It was actually
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who pulled the plug on
the system four months later during his first stint in
that position. Rumsfeld announced that the Safeguard
system was being shut down because it was too costly
while offering only meager capability. Today, Rumsfeld
is of a different mindset. Acknowledging that the system
will only be able to deal with a relatively small number
of incoming ballistic missiles, he now calls it "better
than nothing".
In March 1983, president Ronald
Reagan introduced his Strategic Defense Initiative -
Star Wars - as a way to render nuclear weapons "impotent
and obsolete". Since that time the United States has
spent more than US$90 billion (over $143 billion since
the early 1960s) attempting to develop various
approaches to missile defense. Though the current
administration has scaled back Reagan's vision of a
multi-tiered defensive shield fending off thousands of
Soviet missiles, its broad description of the program's
goals is just as ambitious. Bush has pledged to install
a system capable of defending "our friends and allies
and deployed forces overseas" from ballistic-missile
attack.
According to a news release from the
Pentagon, this time around, the initial missile defense
capability will build on the Fort Greeley, Alaska,
test-bed site and include up to 10 land-based
interceptors in Alaska and California by next year.
Another 10 interceptors could be added in 2005. The
Pentagon says it will employ an "evolutionary approach
to the development and deployment of missile defenses
over time" and it envisages a layered system comprising
ground-based and sea-based interceptors alongside
upgraded versions of the short-range Patriot system.
Bush's decision to start with a modest missile
defense shield may have been prompted by the string of
test failures that preceded it. As the New York Times
reported, the $100 million test conducted last December
11 failed when the interceptor "missed its intended
target by hundreds of miles and burned up in the
atmosphere, while the mock enemy warhead it was meant to
destroy zoomed by unscathed".
As with previous
failures, officials were quick to deny dismissively that
the malfunction had anything to do with advanced missile
technology. Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Rick Lehner of
the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said the US has been
successfully separating boosters from their payloads for
50 years. However, the same problem had occurred during
an intercept test in July 2000.
The 2004 budget
requests $9.1 billion for missile defense programs, a
hefty increase over the amount in the last budget of the
administration of president Bill Clinton ($5.4 billion)
and $1.5 billion more than this year. The Pentagon is
projecting yearly missile defense funding to reach $11.5
billion by 2007. Though substantially surpassing the
Clinton administration's spending on missile defense,
these sums represent only the down payment on the actual
cost of deploying the system.
The Bush
administration has been increasing its support for
missile defense while dismantling the international
arms-control regime both by withdrawing from the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and by putting forth a new
nuclear-war-fighting doctrine. Whereas Reagan left
office saying that a nuclear war can never be won and
must never be fought, two decades later, the word coming
from the Bush administration is that nuclear weapons are
here to stay. Bush's "new idea" is that the United
States should develop flexible nuclear weapons that can
be employed in a variety of circumstances from busting
Saddam Hussein's underground bunkers to bailing out US
forces in a conventional conflict. Following the
recommendations from the Bush administration's Nuclear
Posture Review (NPR), the declared role of US nuclear
weapons could change from a tool of deterrence and a
weapon of last resort to a central, usable component of
the US anti-terror arsenal.
Problems with
current US policy
The threats that a missile defense
system is meant to address have been greatly
exaggerated.
The Bush administration is rushing to
deploy a missile defense system before it has been
sufficiently tested.
The resurgence of Star Wars has been
politically driven, spurred on by the missile defense
lobby, which is thoroughly entrenched in the Bush
administration.
Since September 11, 2001, Bush
has been painting a picture of "unprecedented threats"
to the United States, highlighting the threat of a
hostile state or terrorist group armed with weapons of
mass destruction and the means to deliver them. However,
Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace has pointed out that "there are
fewer nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the
world and fewer nations pursuing these weapons than
there were 10, 15, or 20 years ago".
Even the
December 2001 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
disagrees with Bush's claims. The NIE noted that "US
territory is more likely to be attacked" with weapons of
mass destruction by countries or terrorist groups using
"ships, trucks, airplanes, or other means" than by
anyone using a long-range ballistic missile. Such
delivery systems are less expensive than those needed
for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and,
unlike missiles, non-missile systems can be covertly
developed and employed in an attempt to evade
retaliation. They can also be deployed in ways that will
evade ballistic-missile defenses, rendering the costly
investments in these systems irrelevant.
Beyond
the issue of whether or not the threat warrants an
elaborate, though partial, missile defense system is the
fact that the proposed system has yet to show that it
can effectively defend the United States against a
ballistic-missile attack. As former Pentagon testing
official Philip Coyle has repeatedly pointed out, "There
is nothing that the DOD [Department of Defense] has done
that is as difficult."
In eight highly scripted
tests, the ground-based system, which is most developed
and the backbone of the Bush administration's scheme,
has failed three times. Compare that with Nixon's
Safeguard system, which underwent 111 tests, including
58 successful target intercepts in 70 attempts. And the
few successful intercept tests of the Bush system are
marred by how simple and predictable the variables were
compared with the uncertainties of a real
ballistic-missile attack. Furthermore, all the tests to
date - successful and unsuccessful - used a beacon
inside the mock warhead, which helps guide the intercept
missile to the target. Lieutenant-General Ronald Kadish,
director of the MDA, was adamant in saying that the data
from the beacon do not assist the interceptor in the
final targeting of the kill vehicle. But they certainly
make the job a lot easier.
A report from the
Union of Concerned Scientists shows that although the
target and interceptor start out 5,000 miles away from
each other, a transponder guides the interceptor to
within 400 meters of the warhead. Pentagon officials
claim that the transponder has to be used, because
existing Pacific radars are located in less-than-ideal
places for testing. Maybe this is part of any
weapons-testing program - you've got to walk before you
can run - but the Bush administration wants to deploy
them before they've even taken a step. Defense
contractor Raytheon won a $350 million contract to
develop the X-band radar; however, it won't be ready for
testing until 2005, after the Bush administration has
deployed the system.
The Pentagon's own director
of test and evaluation, Thomas Christie, noted in his
annual report that "due to the stage of development and
the following testing limitations, the GMD [ground-based
mid-course missile defense] element has yet to
demonstrate significant operational capability".
Elaborating to the Senate Armed Services Committee in
April, Christie continued, "This conclusion is based on
the fact that many essential components of the GMD
element have yet to be built." Similar concerns exist
for the sea-based systems.
One obvious
"solution" to test failures is to cancel the tests, and
that's exactly what the Bush administration has sought
to do. The Pentagon has canceled three of five intercept
tests of the ground-based system that were scheduled
before the 2004 deployment date. The president's 2004
budget included language that would have formally waived
the system from testing requirements; fortunately, the
language was removed. As Senator Carl Levin said, "That
law exists to prevent the production and fielding of a
weapons system that doesn't work right."
After
the president's deployment announcement, Senator Jack
Reed got to the heart of the matter: "The president's
decision to deploy an untested national missile defense
system has more to do with politics than effective
military strategy." What else would explain the rush to
deploy and get something in the ground by October 2004,
conveniently right before the elections?
More
than any administration in history, the Bush team has
relied on the expertise of former weapons contractors to
outline US defense needs. Thirty-two Bush appointees are
former executives, consultants or major shareholders of
top weapons contractors, including appointees with ties
to major missile defense contractors Lockheed Martin,
Raytheon, Boeing and Northrop Grumman. At a time when
corporate scandals are making headlines, the Bush
administration's reliance on individuals with ties to
the arms industry to fill major posts in the
national-security bureaucracy deserves far greater
scrutiny than it has received to date.
In
addition to the dozens of former weapons executives in
the Bush administration, personnel from conservative,
corporate-backed think-tanks such as the Center for
Security Policy, the Project for a New American Century,
and the American Enterprise Institute are now ensconced
in key policymaking posts. Their fingerprints can be
seen on virtually every major element of the Bush
national-security strategy, from the doctrines of
preemptive strikes and regime change in Iraq, to the
administration's aggressive nuclear posture and
commitment to deploying a Star Wars-style missile
defense system.
Toward a new foreign
policy
Key recommendations
Instead of focusing primarily on
military and technical means to deal with the threat of
weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration
should expand and increase funding for non-proliferation
programs.
The US should redouble its diplomatic
efforts to bargain away nascent nuclear-weapons programs
in North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, and India.
The ultimate goal of US nuclear
strategy should be the abolition of nuclear weapons.
It is true that Bush has pledged to reduce
deployed US nuclear weapons. Last May, Bush and Russian
President Vladimir Putin signed the Strategic Offensive
Reductions Treaty, which should reduce each nation's
nuclear arsenal to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads,
although the cuts do not have to take effect until the
expiration date of the treaty: December 31, 2012.
Moreover, there are minimal accounting and verification
measures within the treaty. Besides granting 10 years to
make the reductions, the treaty allows both sides to
keep thousands of their withdrawn warheads in reserve
rather than destroying them, and it gives either party
the right to withdraw from the agreement on just 90
days' notice.
The new arms accord also does
nothing to secure or destroy Russia's massive stockpiles
of nuclear weapons and materials. Shortly before Bush's
inauguration, a bipartisan task force chaired by former
Senate majority leader Howard Baker and former White
House counsel Lloyd Cutler reported that "the most
urgent national security threat to the US today is the
danger that weapons of mass destruction or
weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and
sold to terrorists or hostile nation-states and used
against American troops abroad or citizens at home". The
task force recommended the development of a
$3-billion-per-year, long-term plan to safeguard,
destroy or neutralize Russian nuclear materials. Total
current funding for all non-proliferation programs is
about $1.8 billion.
Even at current funding
levels, major US government non-proliferation programs
have accomplished a tremendous amount, from financing
the destruction of more than 4,400 Russian strategic
nuclear warheads to orchestrating the airlift of nearly
600 kilograms of poorly guarded, highly enriched uranium
from Kazakhstan in 1994. But much more can and should be
done.
The potential benefits of US-Russian
nuclear reductions are overshadowed by the risks posed
from the administration's nuclear plans, which include
dramatically expanding the scenarios in which US nuclear
weapons might be used, producing a new generation of
more usable nuclear-weapons systems, and resuming
nuclear-weapons testing. How likely are countries such
as Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Russia, and China -
all of which have been targeted in Bush's nuclear plan -
to heed the administration's calls to reduce or renounce
their own nuclear arsenals in the face of this new
threat from the United States?
Given
Washington's multibillion-dollar Star Wars plan and
knowing that they may be targeted by a new generation of
US nukes, aren't such countries more likely to beef up
their nuclear stockpiles? Unfortunately, US arms trade
and military assistance policy also deters them from
undertaking any serious nuclear disarmament. For
example, rather than pressing new nuclear nations such
as India, Pakistan, and Israel to give up their nuclear
weapons, Washington has been rewarding these states with
arms sales and military assistance.
The
continued pursuit of a costly missile defense system
will have far-reaching consequences for the future of
arms control and the goal of nuclear abolition. It will
also take precious time, money, and energy from
non-proliferation and diplomatic efforts, which have
proved to be far more productive in reducing the threat
posed by nuclear weapons.
A modest missile
defense program of research, in the range of a few
hundred million dollars per year and focused on
improving the performance of a medium-range defensive
shield to replace the current Patriot system, is
justified as a way to limit the potential damage posed
by the use (or threat of use) of ballistic missiles.
Pentagon test director Thomas Christie rightly noted: "I
recognize and agree, in principle, with the desire to
field new capabilities as soon as possible, but that
desire should be tempered with the responsibility to
ensure that the weapons will not put Americans at
risk."
Ultimately the United States and other
nuclear powers should strive for a nuclear-weapons-free
world by living up to their commitments, signed 30 years
ago under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, "to
reduce and eventually eliminate their vast arsenals of
nuclear weaponry". The abolition of nuclear weapons is
the only reasonable safeguard against the threat of
annihilation. The US must lead the way toward this goal.
Michelle Ciarrocca (ciarrm01@newschool.edu)
is a research associate at the World Policy Institute
and writes regularly for Foreign Policy In Focus.
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy In Focus) |
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