The Strategic Nightmare That is National Missile Defense
Image Source: Missile Defense Agency – Public Domain
Last month, I wrote about the waste and futility of deploying a national missile defense (NMD), focussing on the technical issues that make the system unnecessary, unworkable and unaffordable. This week, I want to discuss the many strategic problems that NMD will create and the geopolitical problems that will be created. There is nothing positive that can be associated with NMD, and the strategic issues are more threatening than the technical ones. It’s lose-lose in every way!
The off-and-on debate that has revolved around the feasibility and dependability of NMD has been present since the Reagan administration and the mythology associated with Star Wars or the Strategic Defense Initiative. President Ronald Reagan had a huge number of chicken hawks in his administration—Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, Deputy Defense Secretary Richard (the heart of darkness) Perle, and Perle protege Frank Gaffney, who ran his own pro-Star Wars think tank (the Center for Security Policy) on behalf of the Reagan administration. All were opposed to arms control and disarmament.
National security adviser Robert McFarland argued that the only advantage in pursuing NMD was in its value as a bargaining chip. McFarland believed that the threat of NMD could either bring the Chinese into the arms control dialogue or entice the Soviets to reduce their strategic offensive warheads. McFarland wasn’t genuinely interested in constructing NMD; he was more sophisticated than his colleagues in the national security community.
McFarland’s reference to NMD as a bargaining chip suggests the possibility of a reverse domino effect that would involve conciliatory steps that would threat, but not deploy, NMD. A conciliatory U.S. step could be used to invigorate discussions with both China and Russia. Any sign of Chinese restraint could lead, in turn, to India’s willingness to limit its own strategic programs. This raises the possibility of India and Pakistan entering a dialogue to limit strategic weaponry, and possibly try to put the Kashmir issue on the back burner. This kind of strategic thinking doesn’t seem to be present in the Trump administration.
There are numerous strategic problems associated with the construction of NMD, particularly if the international community believes the United States could build a system that actually works. First of all, the construction of NMD would bring Russia and China closer in their already unprecedentedly close relationship. Russia and China have broadened their international standing by bringing North Korea and Iran into the dialogue. Second, our most important European allies—particularly Britain, France, and Germany—will view the NMD as an important step towards a compartmented U.S. security policy that would ultimately decouple U.S. national security from European national security. The erratic behavior of Donald Trump toward our European allies helps to foster European concerns with decoupling. This already has led to serious strategic discussions among Britain, France, and Germany.
A variety of non-proliferation and disarmament measures would be weakened as a result of NMD. First and foremost, non-nuclear states such as Japan and South Korean may decide to seek their own strategic nuclear weaponry as well as NMD. Nuclear states who are not signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty would be less likely to join the NPT arrangement, and nuclear states such as North Korea with small systems would be more inclined to seek greater offensive weaponry to overwhelm an NMD system. The United States would lose any limited leverage that it might have with nuclear weapons states—India, Israel and Pakistan—who are not part of the NPT regime.
A perfectly functional national missile defense is not possible, and Trump’s Golden Dome NMD is more likely to resemble the French Maginot line of the late 1930s, which proved to be irrelevant in facing a German offensive in 1940. The Maginot Line was not extensive enough, and the Germans chose to go around it; the Line had a defensive purpose that could not be shifted to an offensive role, but the same could not be said for Trump and his Golden Dome. NMD, if deployed, could threaten an adversary’s second strike capability.
In any event, national missile defense or the decision to forego national missile defense will play a major role in the configuration of the next nuclear era and the future of arms control and defense. These issues are particularly urgent because the global community is facing the expiration of the last nuclear arms control treaty that exists between Russia and the United States—the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that was signed between President Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin in 2011. It caps each country at the lowest levels of deployed long-range delivery systems (both missiles and bombers) since early in the Cold War. The likelihood of Trump extending an arms control treaty that Obama negotiated is not promising.
The timing of this issue is also important because the United States, China, and Russia are pursuing programs to modernize their strategic programs. The distrust that exists between the United States and China as well as between the United States and Russia complicates all of the arms control issues.
Today’s 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a cruel reminder of the need to address the problems of disarmament and arms control.
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