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The Washington Quarterly 23.3 (2000) 95-108



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A Call to Deploy

Stephen J. Hadley

U.S. National Missile Defense: When and How?

The United States will soon decide whether to begin deploying a national missile defense (NMD) system designed to defend the territory of the United States against ballistic missiles. The system proposed by the Clinton administration is a far cry from the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or "Star Wars," originally proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983. The early SDI concept envisioned an extensive system of ground-based and space-based interceptors designed to defend the U.S. homeland against a massive attack by Soviet strategic ballistic missiles.

By contrast, the system proposed by the Clinton administration would involve up to only 100 land-based interceptors located at a single site in Alaska. This system is intended to provide a very limited defense capable of shooting down 10 to 20 ballistic missile warheads launched at the United States, primarily from North Korea. Such a system would do nothing about the thousands of strategic ballistic missile warheads still deployed by Russia and relatively little about ballistic missiles that might be launched at the United States from countries such as Iraq and Iran in the Middle East. The administration has said it would seek to address the threat from Iran or Iraq in a later Phase 2 deployment, once that threat "emerges."

A Critical Decision

Even the very limited defense system envisaged by the Clinton administration has caused great controversy in the United States and abroad. The stakes could not be higher. Some of its closest allies have complained that [End Page 95] the U.S. effort to defend its territory against ballistic missiles is evidence of a new U.S. "hegemonism" that seeks to make the United States invulnerable to attack while leaving its allies undefended. Key Russian officials have threatened that they would pull out of the START I and START II arms control agreements, which provide for a dramatic reduction in the number of strategic nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia. China has made clear that it would view U.S. NMD deployment as a hostile act, further taxing a U.S.-China relationship already badly strained over the Taiwan issue.

The Clinton administration has said a decision this fall to pursue even the limited system it proposes could require a six-month notice of withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty unless Russia agreed to modify the treaty to permit deployment. The ABM Treaty, between the United States and the Soviet Union, prohibited deploying ABM systems to defend national territory against strategic ballistic missiles. A U.S. notice of withdrawal could touch off an international outcry and confront the new U.S. president in January 2001 with a major diplomatic crisis.

In view of the major consequences of a deployment decision, a number of supporters and critics of NMD have called upon President Bill Clinton to defer the deployment issue to his successor, and some have particularly pressed to defer any effort to reach an agreement with Russia on ABM Treaty modifications. Even assuming the nation needs a national missile defense, does it need to begin deployment now?

This article argues that the United States urgently needs to make a deployment decision. It may already be too late to have a system before the United States will have need to use it. But the decision needs to be the right one--a decision to deploy a system that will adequately meet the defense needs of the nation. The Clinton administration's plan fails to meet this test.

The Urgency of the Threat

Any judgment about the timing of NMD deployment must begin with an appreciation of how long it will take, with its current approach, for the United States to field a defense against the ballistic missile threat. The program proposed by the Clinton administration would not be operational until 2005 at the earliest. A more realistic schedule is probably 2007 or 2008. Any effort to provide comparably effective protection of the United States against...

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