A Maginot Line for Missile Defense.

• Author: HOWELL, LLEWELLYN D.
• Position: Brief Article

AMERICANS are again scurrying through the arguments about whether to try to institute an anti-ballistic missile defense, now dealing with many present and future "rogue" states instead of just the Soviet Union of Ronald Reagan's era. The arguments in favor of such a defense are just as specious today as they were in proposing to spend billions or trillions in creating the "Star Wars" dream. Syndicated columnist Flora Lewis refers to the proposed missile defense as a "frenetic techno-fantasy." She's right on.

The argument in favor of a limited anti-ballistic missile defense is that there are reckless and irrational rogue states that might launch a "nuisance" nuclear attack on the U.S. It would be a nuisance because it couldn't affect America's retaliatory capability and needn't even destroy a major city to make a point. The rogue presumably sees itself as free to throw up a single or a few ballistic missiles to get a news splash. A limited ABM defense system would fix on one rogue and sit in its flight path.

Worse than the inexplicable inadequacies of the anti-missile defense rationale, the ABM argument is being pursued without a context. It is like a chess player planning just one move ahead. Proponents like Timothy Beard and Ivan Eland of the libertarian Cato Institute argue that deterrence won't work against irrational rogues, but also make the assumption the rogues are so thoroughly irrational that they wouldn't anticipate an effective missile defense, despite all the media noise about its construction. They seem to think rogues would be not only irrational, but fundamentally unintelligent and unknowledgeable. Underestimating opponents is a classic strategic mistake.

There are so many significant flaws in the general argument that merely a listing of them could fill a book. Let's look at just the major problems:

Deciding what is a rogue. It would seem that rogue is simply another way of describing countries or governments already listed as terrorist nations by the Department of State, but with some ballistic missile capability. North Korea and Iraq usually get named. Assuming that there is a possibility of rogue behavior within a system like Russia's, this multiplies the number of flight paths that would need to be protected. Potential rogue ballistic behavior could come from North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Russia, China, and maybe other countries. There's no point to a limited system covering a single flight path. Only the...