Updating missile defense

Events in North Korea and Iraq have reminded a broad public, and for good reason, of the dangers of short-range missiles in the hands of rogue states. Unfortunately, one important way to counter such dangers has been put at risk by an obsolete notion of arms control. Deployment of a defense against tactical or "theater" missiles is being thwarted by resistance to changing the international treaty that bans the building of a defense against strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The current fuss has the ring of a debate that raged two or three decades ago when the threat of long-range Soviet and American missiles was foremost in everyone's mind. By forgoing a defense against strategic attack, the then-two great powers meant to assure each other that neither would attack first. This experiment in the balance of terror was codified in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. The treaty was the landmark check on an otherwise unconstrained development of strategic arms. In some quarters it came to be regarded as something of a sacred and inviolable text.

Technology has its way, however, of tripping up diplomats and lawyers. Once thought sharp, the line between missiles that are strategic and proscribed and those that are tactical and permitted has blurred. Successive administrations have sought to redraw the line to legitimize some theater-defense ballistic missiles now banned under the treaty. This would be done not unilaterally but by writing a "clarification" of the treaty in consultation with Russia and other successor states of the former Soviet Union. They appear ready to go along.

More Russian than the Russians, ABM Treaty purists contend that any change in the ABM Treaty would open up the door for strategic rearmament on both the American and Russian sides. The argument evokes its own nostalgia for the brave old world of strategic arms control, and it has its own congressional following.

The Clinton administration remains well advised to proceed with its plans for the new sort of missile defense system. These plans count on consensus with the Russians, exclude rebirth of a space-based Star Wars defense and look to the slow but deliberate deployment of a ground--based, shorter range ABM system appropriate to new times. This is what American defense now requires.

-- The Washington Post