Missile Defense: Still Mad.(Mutual Assured Destruction)(Bush administration's plan for a missile defense system)(Brief Article)

The arms-control brigade has been out in force since President Bush announced his latest moves toward missile defense, but their weaponry is looking a little rusty. Most of it is 20 years old. There is, for example, the charge that developing a missile defense would be prohibitively expensive-even though at the current estimates of several hundred billion dollars it wouldn't cost much more than developing other major, high-end weapons systems. The old chestnut that a system couldn't work has also returned for a command performance, even though the first of the three tests of the ground-based system that the Clinton administration had been pursuing was a success and the two others failed because of low-end technological misfires. The fact is that missile defense, fundamentally, involves gathering and processing information-something at which America excels.

Cost and feasibility are practical worries. The braver arms controllers made the case that missile defense doesn't even make sense in theory. Michael Kinsley, uncharacteristically, advanced the dumbest argument. He pointed out that the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction depended on remaining vulnerable to a Soviet retaliatory strike (hence, the appropriateness of the acronym). The idea was that as long as the Soviets knew that they could survive and retaliate for a U.S. first strike, they wouldn't necessarily have to "use or lose" their nukes. Hence, the "balance of terror." The risk of Reagan's SDI, then, was that it would be just good enough to rebuff a retaliatory strike, thus ungluing the "stability" of MAD. Kinsley worries that the Bush plan will have the same effect today. But the nuclear forces the U.S. would be countering now are too small for MAD to apply. China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran-none of them will soon have survivable nuclear forces in a Soviet sense. If Kinsley is right about the sources of nuclear stability, these nations should be firing nukes at Seattle as soon as they are capable, because if they don't use them, they will lose them. Absurd. Someone get Kinsley an Alka-Seltzer-he has a Cold War hangover.

Writing in Slate, Robert Wright made a more straightforward case-that the likes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il will be deterred from attacking the U.S. by their self-interest, making missile defense unnecessary. Really? What should make us think that such dictators wouldn't be willing to sacrifice their fellow citizens in a crazed cause (it's what they do every day)? Would the U.S., if push came to shove, actually be willing to destroy millions of innocents in retaliation? ...