On the Right - FAQ: Missile Defense.(Brief Article)(Column)

NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 6

In the matter of Mr. Bush's determination to proceed with an anti- missile system, the fundamental questions are pretty easily analyzed.

The first is feasibility. Some critics of anti-missile defense deplore it on the grounds that it simply will not work. Donald Rumsfeld has said rather plainly that he thinks of himself as an expert on questions having to do with American security, but he is not an expert on anti- missile technology.

No one is, in fact. It is a long distance between conceptual reasoning and empirically tested reasoning. The fancy that a missile shot out of the ground in North Dakota could make its way to a missile shot out of the ground in Iran and interrupt its flight is fanciful only if we can't in fact do it. There has been much celebration among the critics over two theatrical failures in the last year. For the skeptics, it was as if a hidden camera revealed that Christ in fact had not arisen.

The fact remains: What we have not succeeded in doing today ought not to be thought ontologically undoable tomorrow. When in 1958, spurred on by the Soviet Sputnik, we began missile launching in Florida, we had a couple of ignominious failures. But we had then, and don't now, the knowledge that it could work, because the enemy had actuated the idea of a satellite. This challenge will be more difficult, which however leaves it a challenge, something less than the pursuit of the impossible the skeptics are so anxious to postulate.

So then we have the diplomatic question. On Tuesday we had on the front page of the International Herald Tribune two Bronx cheers. Mr. Putin has arranged to meet with the leaders of two rogue nations. And Peking published a newspaper the front page of which depicts Messrs. Bush and Powell as agents of a "space war" against China.

Though not a smiling matter, one smiles. The ...