Action-Reaction Metaphysics and Negligence

On May 1 of this year, President George W. Bush called for a new strategic framework, one allowing the United States "to build missile defenses to counter the different threats of today's world" and encouraging "further cuts in nuclear weapons." ¹ The president's initiative signals Washington's first truly significant departure from its Cold War strategic policy.

Despite dramatic changes in the international system, for eight years the United States has perpetuated the main themes of U.S. Cold War strategic policy. It embraced the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, and thereby the 1960s' deterrence concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD), as the basis for U.S.-Russian strategic relations and arms control negotiations. Correspondingly, the United States perpetuated the legalistic, adversarial strategic arms control process that characterized the Cold War. When the central organizing principle of negotiations is to keep mutual capabilities for nuclear annihilation codified, prospects for political amity are limited. This process was incompatible with the new realities of the post-Cold War landscape, precluding any significant, new strategic arms agreement during the Clinton administration.

As described, the new strategic framework will include the possibility of U.S. unilateral nuclear reductions, in conjunction with the deployment of ballistic missiles defenses (BMD). The president's readiness to leave behind Cold War deterrence concepts and arms control processes is clear.

Obviously discarded, for example, is the belief that has been at the heart of U.S. Cold War arms control policy since the 1960s: that strategic missile defense must undermine deterrence stability and preclude nuclear arms reductions. As several critics of U.S. missile defense have rightly noted, "The SALT I and II negotiations were premised on the assumption that limitations on strategic offensive forces would not be possible without extensive constraints on strategic defenses." ² Bush's call for both nuclear force reductions and missile defense deployment poses a direct challenge to this foundation of Cold War thinking.

Much of the arms control establishment was in high dudgeon following the president's speech. Great resentment greeted his challenge to Cold War-vintage sacred cows and conceptual shibboleths. Missile defense opponents again repeated the SALT I-era assertion that U.S. BMD deployment can only lead challengers to add to their offensive ballistic missile capabilities, thereby overshadowing U.S. defenses and leaving the United States more threatened than it was prior to building the defense. The bottom line of this 1960s-era argument, of course, is that the United States should not start this "action-reaction" process by deploying national missile defenses. As Yogi Berra said, "It's like déjà vu all over again."

The supposed certainty of an action-reaction cycle in response to U.S. missile defense has been so popularized during the previous decades that the charge is asserted gravely as if gospel with every new BMD debate. The only change in today's version of this prediction from its 1960s roots is that Russia is no longer identified as the only potential challenger sure to respond to U.S. defenses with an offensive missile buildup. China, North Korea, and others are now similarly certain to be driven to an unbeatable offensive reaction.

For example, a former senior official in the Clinton administration warned recently that, although the United States cannot perfect missile defense technology, "[e]ven if it were possible, the program would motivate a response from adversaries that would inevitably offset the defense." ³ A recent commentary in the normally staid Business Week confidently predicted that, in response to U.S. missile defense, "China ... is bound to expand its arsenal. It certainly won't stand by and let its small retaliatory capability be blunted by our defense system." ⁴ A joint publication by the Federation of American Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Union of Concerned Scientists similarly asserts that U.S. missile defense "will almost certainly spur China to compensate by building more missiles, both to overwhelm the defense and to make...