Responding to NMD

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): They all hate it, though some are bolder than others about saying so out loud. You cannot find a single ally or former adversary of the United States, or any non-aligned country either, whose leaders have a good word to say about the Bush administration's grandiose plans for National Missile Defense (NMD).

The question is, what can they do about it.

France's President Jacques Chirac attacked NMD earlier this month as an "invitation to (nuclear) proliferation." Despite being "hugely expensive", he warned, it would not work, but would wreck existing international arms control agreements.

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, standing shoulder to shoulder with Vladimir Putin during the Russian president's visit to Ottawa last month, said that "our preoccupation is to make sure the stability that exists at this moment is not undermined by this plan that has been put forward by the Americans."

Two weeks ago Sergei Ivanov, head of Russia's national security adviser, told a security conference in Munich that deploying or even testing an anti-ballistic missile defense would destroy the 1972 ABM treaty, the foundation of all subsequent nuclear arms-control measures.

If the United States broke that treaty, it would "result in annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create the prerequisites for a new arms race, including in outer space."

But U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was at the same conference, refused even to meet Ivanov. Hardly surprising, really, since he recently told Congress that he regards the ABM treaty as "ancient history".

The U.S. is apparently determined to abandon the deterrence doctrine that helped to avoid nuclear war for forty years during the Cold War.

Americans have managed to convince themselves that "rogue states", impoverished countries with a handful of nuclear missiles and no defenses, might one day launch an ICBM attack on the U.S., even though the Soviet Union at the height of its power never dared to do such a thing.

This seems quite dotty to the rest of the world, which observes that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is in the midst of thawing the 50-year freeze in relations with South Korea and that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein did not even dare to use poison gas on the missiles he fired at Israel during the Gulf War.

And if some berserk leader did want to blow up a nuclear weapon on American territory, why use an intercontinental ballistic missile? Why not just put it on a tramp steamer, for example?

Rumsfeld incarnates the new American paranoia, having led the "independent commission" that was set up by the Republican majority in Congress in 1998 to promote the "rogue state" hypothesis in the face of official intelligence assessments that dismissed the danger.

So NMD is going to happen, but in what form? When will the United States actually start deploying hardware that forces other countries to respond?

It may not be for a while, because weapons research and development actually gives the administration's defense industry friends better opportunities for profit than actual weapons production and deployment.

Moreover, R&D is open-ended -- US$122 billion has already been spent on various versions of "Star Wars" -- whereas actual deployment would finally bring the spending to a close.

So the further $60 billion currently earmarked for NMD may all get poured down the research rathole too: all the military- industrial complex need is a steady flow of R&D funds, not a production order.

But what if the Bush administration does deploy a first-phase missile defense aimed at intercepting only a few missiles? Are the Russians and Chinese sophisticated enough to understand that this is all about US domestic political symbolism and feeding the complex, not about actual strategy?

As far as the Russians are concerned, maybe yes, because they already have enough warheads to swamp a 'light' US defensive system even if it did work. If they are patient and very mature, they will wait to see if the U.S. starts building thicker missile defenses before they build lots more multiple-warhead missiles to overwhelm that denser system.

But the Chinese cannot wait. China has shown great restraint and built only a few hundred strategic nuclear warheads since its first nuclear test over three decades ago, so even a light' NMD defense would put in question its ability to retaliate effectively after an American nuclear attack.

China would therefore start building up its nuclear forces at once if the US deployed NMD. Then India, which sees itself as China's nuclear opponent, would start building more nuclear weapons too, and Pakistan, which sees India as its enemy, would respond to that ...

The Times of India summed up the consequences in an editorial last July. "The practical Chinese reaction to (NMD) is likely to be a sharp increase in the number of missiles targeting the US ... Our (Indian) calculations of the number of missiles capable of deterring China would go up sharply, which, in turn, will force Pakistan to boost the number of their own missiles aimed at India.

"Future historians, if indeed there are some left after the Americans are through ... will wonder just what impelled the most powerful country in the world to behave as though it was the most insecure."