MAD is an acronym that has a macabre resonance with its meaning. It stands
for mutual assured destruction, an old cold war phrase that captures the idea
that neither the US nor the Soviet Union would dare to attack the other for fear
of swift and total retribution.
This notion helped to keep the nuclear peace for decades, but the US seems
determined to abandon it. The US needs another line of defence, says the
Republican-dominated Congress. It wants the National Missile Defense (NMD)
system, a collection of space and ground-based detectors that would let the US
spot incoming ballistic missiles and knock them out with interceptors fired from
Earth.
The NMD programme hit the headlines last week when its third test flight
bombed. The interceptor failed to separate from its booster rocket and missed the target
(see p 7).
This is the second failure in three outings, and the
project looks to be in a sorry mess. Surely it’s time to abandon the idea?
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If only it were that simple. The dodgy booster used in last week’s test was
only a stand-in for the real thing. The real booster is still being developed,
so the failure says little about how the planned system would work.
More importantly, American politics is driving the project on. President Bill
Clinton must decide this summer whether to deploy the system. If he says no, he
risks damaging the campaign of his deputy, Al Gore, in November’s presidential
election. Presidents-to-be cannot be seen to be soft on defence, and Congress
wants a missile shield. Gore’s Republican opponent, George W. Bush, will keep a
hawk-eyed watch for signs of backsliding. Two misses out of three might give
Clinton breathing space, but stopping the project is not an option.
Put the presidential race to one side, though, and there are many reasons why
this has to be the wrong decision. First, as pointed out by 50 American Nobel
laureates who wrote to Clinton last week, the system will “inevitably lose in an
arms race of improvements to offensive missiles”. The NMD system will not stop
an all-out attack from Russia. It is designed only to intercept launches from
“rogue states” such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq, which are developing
ballistic missiles. These countries are not expected to have more than a handful
of ballistic missiles and limited access to countermeasures, such as decoys and
chaff, which would throw the interceptors off course. By this reasoning, the NMD
system needs only a limited number of interceptors.
But second-guessing an enemy is a gamble. All it would take, says John Pike
of the Federation of American Scientists, is a whisper from Moscow that details
of Russian countermeasures had been smuggled to North Korea to send the Pentagon
into a spin. “It wouldn’t matter if it was true,” says Pike. “We’d have to add
another zero to the number of interceptors.” Even without such a ploy, the
system would have holes, admits Ronald Kadish, who heads the US Ballistic
Missile Defense Organization. “We will never be perfect against every
conceivable countermeasure,” he told a Congressional hearing in June.
This leaky umbrella would have other far-reaching consequences. Deployment of
new missile defence systems is banned by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
That treaty, which the US signed with the Soviet Union, is underpinned by the
notion of mutual assured destruction. Going ahead with the NMD system would
leave the Russians, who are still honouring it, to assume that the US no longer
accepts the notion of MAD.
The result will be a return to the arms race of the 20th century, only worse.
Russia will set up a national interceptor system. The Chinese too will tool up.
India, China’s old adversary, will be obliged to beef up its nuclear arsenal,
which will force Pakistan to do the same. The US may feel safer, but the rest of
the world will become a much more dangerous place.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the NMD programme is that the US feels it
needs protection from rogue states at all. Its own intelligence assessments
reportedly argue that Iraq cannot build a ballistic missile while trade
sanctions stay in place. In June, the leaders of North and South Korea ended
more than 50 years of enmity with a historic meeting, and Pyongyang has reopened
talks with the US over its missile programme. Iran’s revolutionary fanaticism is
giving way to a more moderate line, and Tehran is remaking ties with Western
countries. Why increase your arsenal when rapprochement is in the air?
Behind the NMD programme is the notion that the leaders of rogue states would
be crazy enough to attack the US. But why would they? MAD may not apply to them,
but AD certainly does. Within hours of a missile launch their towns, cities and
people would be radioactive dust. This is the ultimate deterrent, a far better
defence than any number of interceptors.
