Is America a Sitting Duck?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 14, 1998 | by Kelly Patricia O'Meara

China, Russia and at least 30 other countries could have a bead on the United States with newly developed ballistic missiles, but the U.S. now has no defense against them.

From the time it takes an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, to lift out of its silo, streak silently through space and detonate a nuclear warhead over an American city, the United States would have but a few minutes to detect, track and intercept the incoming missile. However, the nation sustains no capability to destroy such a missile, though hundreds might be targeted here from the former Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China, or PRC, and others

The debate about whether and how the United States should defend against such threats has raged for a quarter-century. With the ever-increasing number of members of the nuclear family flexing their military muscles, the threat and the debate are more intense than ever.

As reporter Bill Gertz wrote in the Washington Times on Nov. 16, China intends to test a mobile DF-31 ICBM this month, giving the Red Chinese a strike capability of 5,000 miles -- enough to reach Hawaii, Alaska and the Northwestern United States -- including the aerospace and high-tech centers of Seattle. This comes as little surprise, however, to the policymakers and analysts alerted to the growing ballistic-missile threat by the July 15, 1998, release of a congressionally mandated study. Conducted by a bipartisan panel tasked with assessing the ballistic threat to the United States and chaired by former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the report is sobering. Information includes:

* The United States well might have little or no warning before operational deployment of new missiles;

* Concerted efforts by a number of overtly or potentially hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads pose a growing threat to the United States; and

* The threat to the United States posed by these emerging capabilities is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the intelligence community.

The Rumsfeld report appeared against a growing public body of information that the PRC, along with Russia, North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan, Syria, Libya and Iraq and a number of other countries all possess or are testing short-, medium- or long-range ballastic missiles. And, in fact, according to U.S. intelligence evaluations, more than 20 Third World countries currently have ballistic-missile programs.

Many of the new players are openly hostile to the United states and display no signs of conforming to the familiar Cold War rules. With the Clinton administration's current policy of sticking to outdated agreements, say congressional critics on both sides of the aisle, the United States only will become more vulnerable. It is a policy that Thomas Moore, a defense expert at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation calls "unprecedented and morally indefensible," adding, "the policy of having no defense has to end."

In the 15 years since the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars," was introduced by President Reagan as a kind of global defense shield, $50 billion has been sunk into various antimissile programs. However, the United States has made no progress in deploying a system to shield the nation from missiles armed with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Critics of missile defense say that the whole idea is misbegotten. Rear Adm. Eugene Carroll of the Center for Defense Information tells Insight, "We should eliminate all such weapons. There is really no foreseeable prospect of designing an effective system."

Proponents of a national missile-defense program, or NMD, such as James Abrahamson, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and former director of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, point to a different problem. They say the country's leaders lack the political will to scrap the obsolete Anti-Ballistic Missile, or ABM, Treaty signed by President Nixon in 1972 and subsequently ratified by the Senate.

Designed to keep the United States and now-defunct Soviet Union defenseless against nuclear attack, the ABM treaty prohibits both countries from deploying systems capable of countering a ballistic-missile attack. The rationale behind the treaty was the argument of then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger that neither side would launch a missile attack knowing that immediate retaliation from the targeted country would assure that both sides would be destroyed. The mutual assurance of destruction -- sometimes referred to with the acronym "MAD" -- would guarantee peace. But 25 years after its enactment, with one of the signatories no longer even a nation, the ABM treaty remains the sole obstacle to protecting American lives from a ballistic-missile attack.

Abrahamson says, "The treaty never stopped the offensive arms race. The Russians went around it, but our advocates would never give up and we were never allowed to go very far in our testing. The treaty is the single biggest reason that missile-defense systems haven't moved forward."