The Politics: How Did We Get Here?

After many years of being on the "back burner," it is increasingly apparent that a broad consensus is building among Washington policymak-ers to authorize the initial deployment of a national missile defense (NMD) system. This political turnaround is surprising given the decades-long debate about the wisdom of sustaining the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the unwillingness of Presidents Ronald Reagan or George Bush to seek withdrawal from this treaty. What has led to this pronounced shift in attitudes? It is instructive to understand the historical evolution of the political debate to appreciate both where we are and where we might be headed.

Historical Perspectives

It is a completely natural instinct to protect oneself against potential adversaries. The dynamic of measure, countermeasure, and counter-countermeasure has always been at the heart of military affairs. Antisubmarine warfare capabilities and anti-aircraft systems have been central elements of modern military arsenals for more than a half-century. After the United States and the Soviet Union began to deploy nuclear-armed ballistic missiles in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was not at all surprising that each side would in turn seek to acquire missile defenses against these nuclear threats. Indeed, it was the Soviet Union that first deployed an active ABM system around Moscow in the 1960s.

The Johnson-Nixon Years

Strategic writings in the 1960s pointing out that deployment of ABM systems could be "destabilizing" were embraced by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara during the Johnson administration. McNamara's basic argument, in rational and apolitical terms, was that if both Moscow and Washington deployed large numbers of nuclear-armed missiles, each side would be deterred from attacking the other as long as neither side believed it had an ability to disarm the other in a first strike. But if one side then began to deploy extensive ABM systems, in the name of its own defense, the other side could believe it was a provocative act. The reasoning goes as follows: A and B each have extensive offensive nuclear forces. Then A begins to deploy ABM systems. B believes that A plans to launch a first strike against B's nuclear forces and would then use its ABM systems to destroy B's residual retaliatory forces, thereby prevailing in a nuclear exchange.

McNamara believed, and argued to Soviet president Aleksey Kosygin at a U.S.-Soviet summit meeting in 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey, that ABM system deployment was "destabilizing" in two respects: first, it would stimulate arms racing by each side to overcome the defenses of the other, and second, in a crisis, it could provoke a first strike by the side that did not have ABM systems. McNamara argued that "arms race stability" and "crisis stability" could both be preserved, ironically, if both sides were defenseless against nuclear attack. This reasoning gave birth to the notion of "mutual assured destruction" as the bedrock of deterrence in the nuclear age.

Although Kosygin rejected this reasoning at Glassboro, U.S.-Soviet negotiations in the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) led in 1972 to the signing of the ABM Treaty that limited both sides to modest missile defenses.

It is worth recalling this experience because it lies at the root of the current debate on missile defense. In the late 1960s, and through the ratification debate on the ABM Treaty, there was deep division within the U.S. strategic community (perhaps no more than a few hundred civilians and military leaders who paid attention to this issue) on whether this logic made sense. Senator Henry Jackson and his aide Richard Perle (later a high-ranking defense official in the Reagan administration) rejected McNamara's strategic logic. They argued that the United States should exploit its technological edge to protect U.S. cities and military targets from Soviet attack. They also doubted that Soviet officials would respect the treaty.

The ABM Treaty entered into force in...