Defending the homeland

Russia has recently announced that it is “suspending” its participation in the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) agreement. This 1990 agreement basically formalised liquidation of the Cold War armed confrontation in central Europe. Under its provisions the former Soviet (then Russian) forces in eastern Europe were reduced and then withdrawn, and the large standing NATO army deployed on the former East-West German border was likewise broken up and most of its American component withdrawn.

The Russian “suspension” of (not yet, at least, withdrawal from) CFE was provoked by the American push to install anti-missile defences in central and eastern Europe.

In fact, the Bush administration’s blind pursuit of missile defence technology has blasted a ruinous swathe through the painfully-achieved structure of agreements that supported global stability during or after (in one case, both) the Cold War.

CFE is the latest casualty, but in 2002 Washington unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. That treaty restricted the deployment of missile defence systems, thus exerting downward pressure on the number of offensive missile systems (intercontinental nuclear missiles). But that meant it stood in the way of “missile defense”.

Some may not know how deeply rooted in US political history this idea actually is. In 1983 Ronald Reagan announced with great fanfare his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, which opponents derisively dubbed “Star Wars”). This was a huge research and development program intended, in Reagan’s own words, to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete” by constructing a defensive system which would take out, after launch, all hostile warheads aimed at the US: even if the then Soviets had attacked simultaneously with the thousands of nuclear warheads it could have launched at the US.

To effect this technological marvel there soon emerged proposals for a whole zoo of exotic, not to say science-fictional, weapons and systems, some ground-based, some in orbit. “Directed energy” and “particle beam” weapons, “nuclear-pumped lasers” (you could fire each one just once, because the bomb that did the pumping then destroyed the laser), “battle-mirrors” to reflect laser beams onto their targets. Amid all of these, proposals for anti-ballistic missiles were almost prosaic, but they were there too.

When the Cold War suddenly ended around 1990 (the year of CFE) the massive Soviet nuclear threat - which, make no mistake, had been just as real as the similar US threat to the Soviets - suddenly evaporated. No more need for the huge Star Wars effort. By that stage, however, more than $US17 billion had been spent on SDI: enough to create a substantial military-industrial SDI constituency which, of course, created jobs in numerous American states, thereby garnering self-interested support from the local elected representatives.

By that stage also, two other things were obvious. First, Reagan’s grandiose objectives for SDI were completely unrealisable. Then, as now, there is no defence if you are attacked by thousands of nuclear warheads launched against you on hundreds of missiles. Today, nobody - not even Bush - disputes this truth. Second, the science-fictional technologies were mostly seen for what they were and dumped.

(To this day I don’t see how anyone capable of being elected President of the United States, even someone like Reagan, could have been so gullible as to swallow some of the guff his administration was willing to fund.)

But by 1990 the Republican Party had invested not just $US17 billion of US taxpayers’ money but great gobs of its own political credibility in the idea of “missile defence”. So instead of abandoning the whole mess, the administration of the elder Bush kept it alive by drastically reducing its objectives (instead of “impotent and obsolete” nukes, the new SDI, called GPALS, was to defend against maybe 200 warheads). When the Clinton administration came to office in 1993, the Republicans chivvied and nagged it to fund GPALS. When they got control of Congress in the mid-90s they used it to force a reluctant Clinton to keep the program going.

Nevertheless, Clinton again renamed it (to “National Missile Defense” or NMD) and cut its objectives yet further - from stopping 200 warheads to stopping no more than 20. And in 2000 Clinton refused to authorise deployment of the system because testing had failed to validate it - some components had not been tested at all.

All this changed once the younger Bush became President in 2001. With support from a friendly Congress, Bush charged ahead with “missile defense” as blindly as he charged over his Iraqi precipice.

In the process, he withdrew from the ABM treaty. That action caused Moscow to immediately abandon its long-delayed ratification of the 1993 START 2 treaty, which was to have been the nuclear equivalent of the CFE agreement, placing agreed limits on the long-range nuclear forces of both the US and Russia. A much watered-down treaty of doubtful effectiveness eventually took its place. As a consequence Russian mobile land-based ICBMs, which would have been decommissioned under START 2, now remain in service.

A further consequence was that Russia retained its multiple warhead (MIRV) missiles in service until 2016 (under START 2, they would have been phased out before 2003 and eliminated by 2007). About 190 missiles and many more nuclear warheads are involved.

The younger Bush version of the much-diminished Reagan fantasy is supposed to offer the US a defence against a few warheads launched either accidentally by an existing nuclear power, or deliberately by a “rogue state”. The threats cited by the US included Iraq - we know all about that now, don’t we? - Iran, and North Korea. The latter, of course, is now in the process of dismantling its nuclear program. That leaves just Iran.

I have written about Iran’s nuclear program in On Line Opinion before. But nobody thinks Iran has nukes at present, and the US cannot show that Iran is anywhere near having the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead (if it had one suitable) by missile to the US. In fact the Iranian missile program is still a long way short of such a goal - if indeed that is the Iranian goal - and many obstacles remain.

Consider two other points.

If a “rogue state” launches a missile at the US with, say, a nuclear warhead aboard, then whatever happens with that missile and its target, the United States will know almost in real time where the missile came from. This is so because the US has a sophisticated satellite network capable of detecting the launch site of any significant missile. In fact, Australia hosts an automated ground station for that network at Pine Gap near Alice Springs (the station used to be at Nurrungar near Woomera but when it was automated it was shifted to the already existing electronic intelligence station at Pine Gap).

If, therefore, an Iranian nuclear missile destroyed a US target, Iran would rapidly be identified as the source and would lie wide open to any level of nuclear response the Americans, probably half mad with grief and justified rage, chose to make.

In short, to attack the US with a nuclear missile - especially if you have little if any follow-up capacity - is to invite potential nuclear obliteration in return. This is the essence of deterrence: the cost of launching this kind of an attack can be as high as national suicide. Therefore, unless the regime in Teheran is actually suicidal, it would be deterred from attacking the US. “Missile Defense”, which probably won’t work, is unnecessary.

The difficulty of deploying a reliable missile defence is my second point. Ballistic missiles, and in particular their warheads, travel at speeds we measure in kilometres per second. For this reason the task of shooting one down with an anti-ballistic missile has been likened to hitting a bullet with a bullet, though bullets actually move far slower. The key point is this: to be successful, such a system must be perfect: not even one warhead can be allowed to reach its target. To my mind, construction of a perfect system is in the same league as an “unsinkable” ship (remember the Titanic?) or an “impregnable” fortress (remember Singapore in 1942?).

So, in pursuit of this unachievable “missile defense” fantasy, the much-decayed legacy of Reagan’s Star Wars gullibility, the Bush administration has itself destroyed one long-standing global arms control treaty (the ABM treaty) and provoked the Russians into abandoning another (START 2) and now into suspending a third (CFE). With Iraq, this destruction is indeed a fitting legacy to the neo-conservatives’ mad ideological fantasies.

It is noteworthy that in all of this, both the missile defence madness and of course the rape of Iraq, Bush has been loyally followed into the abyss by his little pet, John Howard. Thus Australia stands as an accomplice not just in the Iraqi disaster but in the ruin of a whole system of carefully constructed treaties intended to support global strategic stability. Gee Johnny, thanks a lot.