The recent successful intercept by the ExoAtmospheric Kill Vehicle has again raised the profile of the United States' controversial national missile defense (NMD) system. It is deemed to undermine global stability by breaking the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Its cost is derided by all those who feel that $100 billion could be better spent on social programs or other defense spending items. There are also constant claims that such a system would not work, or in any case is designed to face a threat that is obsolete. While all of these arguments make good sound bites for cost cutting politicians, the NMD system promises America a future that is morally superior to the past we will leave behind, less expensive (when put into perspective) than it might seem, and militarily aligned for a defensive peace rather than an offensive war.
The strongest argument, I believe, for the construction of a missile defense system is that its existence would give America an alternative to nuclear deterrence and its innate inhumanity. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 was designed to enforce on both the American sides and the Soviet sides of the Cold War that hecatombs of dead would result from any possible nuclear exchange. All of the apparatus of the nuclear age -- the airborne command posts, the silos buried deep in the plains of North Dakota, the bombers kept ready to take off at a moment's notice -- were designed to ensure the survival of a deterrent force designed to kill millions. World stability from then until now rests on the notion that America deters the killing of its citizens by the threat of killing citizens of the former Soviet Union in numbers so great that counting the dead in order to assemble a case of mass murder against the U.S. President would choke the world's legal system.
This moral depravity would be avoided with missile defense. American safety would be ensured by technology, not offensive threats. If a missile were launched against a credible National Missile Defense System, America could strike back in a more calculated and planned manner against the enemy's military forces rather than impulsively against its citizens.
Yet some believe that a missile defense could never be credible and that even if it were built at an acceptable cost, terrorist attacks with truck and suitcase bombs would simply replace attack with ballistic missiles. These doubting Thomases fail to realize that the terrorist nasties of the world have had ten years of chaos in the former Soviet Union. Over the past ten years, nuclear materials can be purchased with potatoes, missile and warhead scientists prostitute themselves to the highest bidder and fully functioning warheads have no doubt been available for purchase.
Yet over the past ten years no weapon of mass destruction has been used. Certainly we know that fear of retaliation isn't stopping the miscreants, for U.S. retaliation against an elusive threat would be inaccurate and certainly ineffective. In 1998, the Tomahawk attacks against Osama bin Laden's organization destroyed a pharmaceutical factory and killed only a few terrorists at the cost of $50 million. The recent trend towards suicide bombers shows that even death and personal harm does not dissuade committed terrorists from doing their work. We must fall upon the notion that the security services of the free world -- including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation -- are successfully preventing such attacks. The greater truth to be found from ten years of relative calm among nuclear terrorists is that, up until the minute that a terrorist bomb explodes, someone can do something to stop it given sufficient information. Terrorist bombs are more difficult to use than movie terrorists let on. The only type of military threat that is physically impossible to stop is the ballistic threat. And NMD may be a costly boondoggle until that moment when American early warning satellites detect a missile launch and American self-imposed impotence is laid open for the world to see.
The only obstacles to the construction of a missile defense system are legal and fiscal. And these can be neatly addressed by using the proper perspective. For instance, the notion that abrogating the ABM treaty would undermine the credibility of the US as a legal actor on the world stage is flawed. The ABM treaty was made with the Soviet Union, a state that does not exist anymore. Shall we assume that the Russian Federation assumes all of the obligations of its predecessor? No. Once a revolution occurs, the rules of the game need to be renegotiated. The Russian Federation is a clean break from the Soviet Union and new rules need to apply to the U.S. relationship with the Soviet Union.
Moreover, treaties and international agreements have questionable influence in their quest to stop international nasties from completing their nefarious plans. Saddam Hussein duplicitously managed to pull the wool over the U.N. inspectors' eyes until 1996, when an Iraqi defector blew the whistle on his secret weapons programs. In the current Al-Aqsa intifada in Israel, broken cease-fire agreements create distrust in the entire negotiating process and indeed fuel the violence. Treaties are an effect, not a cause, of international cooperation.
Some consider these weapons overpriced and unreliable. These very same parties fail to realize that the scale of government waste built into a $2 trillion annual budget makes the "waste" of $100 billion over ten years look like a rounding error. America should look to other forms of waste before targeting necessary defense projects.
Indeed, the high profile Enhanced Kill Vehicle is only a single part of a three-layer missile defense system. Boost phase and terminal defense intercept research is well underway. Operating on the principle of destroying missiles while the rocket motors are still burning and the missile is over enemy territory, systems such as the Space Based Laser and the Brilliant Pebble system are only hampered by the Weapons in Space treaty and not by the limits of technology. Just recently, terminal defense weapons such as the Theater High Altitude missile system and Patriot PAC-3 have shown promise in defending America against descending warheads. The EKV system is the hardest part of ballistic missile defense -- it attacks a warhead that has no infrared plume at the flight stage where the missile can easily deploy decoys. Boost phase and terminal defense weapons suffer from no such limitations and should not be thought of as suffering the same defects as the EKV.
Thus National Missile Defense would be funded easily if America cut back its appetite for waste and looked with fresh eyes on a world riddled with ballistic threats and hampered by obsolete treaties. An America with a missile defense system could tell itself that it did all that it could do to carry out the government's duty to protect its citizens without threatening those of another country. An America with a missile defense system might be something worthy of defense.