The Folly of Missile Defense.

The Clinton Administration's efforts to go forward with missile defense are deeply destabilizing. They will not make the United States safer; they will put us more at risk. And they will drain our Treasury in the process.

The Russians have said, unequivocally, that any effort by the United States to alter or abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty will jeopardize the whole edifice of arms control.

"The prevailing system of arms control agreements is a complex and quite fragile structure," Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said at the United Nations on April 25. "The collapse of the ABM treaty would, therefore, undermine the entirety of disarmament agreements concluded over the last thirty years."

Moscow just ratified the Start II agreement, which will reduce the nuclear warheads of Russia and the United States from around 7,000 to 3,500. In fact, Russia has proposed reducing nuclear warheads on both sides to 1,500 each, though Clinton's Pentagon says that's too low. Such a position leaves little doubt as to which side is more invested in the nuclear arms business.

But if Washington proceeds with missile defense, Russia says it will pull out of Start II and other arms control treaties. Russia would have an incentive to expand, not reduce, its nuclear stockpile because it would fear that the United States, protected by a missile shield, might launch a devastating first strike against its nuclear forces. Russia then might be left with only dozens of nuclear warheads, and the shield is supposed to protect the United States against just such a number.

The Russians are worried about such a scenario in part because the Clinton Administration is proceeding with a sophisticated radar system "on the northern tip of Norway, less than forty miles from the Russian border," writes Theodore Postol in an article entitled "National Missile Defense: The Target Is Russia," which appeared in the March/April issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This radar system at Vardoe, Norway, "can do critical advance work for the national missile defense system," Postol writes. "If the Administration decides this summer to deploy the national missile defense system, it should at least be honest about it. The Pentagon still defines the principal missile threat as Russia, not North Korea. That is why [the radar] is in northern Norway instead of northern Japan."

Postol, a former scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory, is on to something. In...