Jonathan Katz has drawn some interesting cartoons of late. One from January accused President Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, of being unable to adjust to a post-Cold War world. The May 9 cartoon characterized missile defense as misguided, reflecting Katz’s inability to adjust to a post-Cold War world. And Wednesday’s cartoon claimed that Bush and Rumsfeld want to leave the United States vulnerable to nuclear missiles, so they can escape to Venus. Or something like that.
To put it plainly, I disagree with every one of those assertions. It’ll be hard to find a place to begin, but let me try: During the Cold War, nuclear launches by either side were prevented through a doctrine called “mutually assured destruction,” in which any missile launch would be retaliated against with enough nukes to destroy the offending country. This policy in fact worked so well that treaties were negotiated specifically to keep this delicate balance intact. One of these was the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty (ABM), which prohibited either side from developing national missile defenses.
The world has changed a lot since then. Two superpowers are no longer a hair trigger away from destroying the world, and the Soviet Union with whom we negotiated the ABM treaty no longer exists. Even the architect of the treaty, Henry Kissinger, now believes it should be scrapped. And despite Katz’s assertion that a missile defense system “may cause global war”- presumably by making Russia mad enough to launch its nuclear arsenal at us – the Russians have been responding favorably to our diplomatic overtures, both overtly and behind the scenes.
Today’s nuclear threats come not from one country with a huge nuclear arsenal, but from several countries, such as Iran, North Korea and Iraq, which are racing to acquire small ones. Will rogue states such as these – some of whom have creditably insane leaders – respond to threats of retaliation the same way the USSR would have? And what about terrorist organizations, which have no borders to retaliate against? It’s a gamble we can not afford to take.
So what reason could there be not to construct a missile defense? Well, one argument that seems to keep coming up is that it will “start a new arms race” as countries try to build enough weapons to overwhelm our shield. But here’s the thing: Every country from India to Pakistan to China is already trying to build as many nuclear weapons as they can. Russia, of course, is all but bankrupt. We couldn’t provoke more nuclear construction if we tried.
Another of Katz’s points is that an anti-missile system is “scientifically impossible.” What kind of a defeatist attitude is that? Imagine if the annual March of Dimes had been stopped because “we’ve tried it for years, and it hasn’t solved our problem.” We might never have developed a polio vaccine. Or what if the Wright brothers had decided that powered flight was “scientifically impossible” after all – and unpopular to boot – and scrapped the idea? Likewise, for missile defense, the stakes are much too high to simply give up.
The clock is ticking. Rumsfeld and Bush are right to pursue their initiatives in every new area of threats caused by the post-Cold War world, from cyber-warfare to biological weaponry, and a missile defense system is an essential part of that plan.