Bush was right to focus on missile defense

2004.04.17 — Government | George W Bush | by Barton Castor

Even before 9/11, the White House had a clear goal of ridding the world one sort of terror: the threat of foreign missiles. The Strategic Defense Initiative begun by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s was the first step toward real disarmament. After all, treaties can be broken, but an effective defense against missiles makes them obsolete.

But the senior Bush and Bill Clinton quashed the dream for a missile-free world. To be fair, it would have been a costlier system then (and it will still be costly, mind you) and the technology was younger and less mature. Today, an effective anti-ballistic-missile system is a real possibility and, in fact, probably inevitable.

Once al-Qaeda is destroyed and its lesser members scattered to the winds to sulk in bitter, penniless self-pity, the only enemy America will face (aside from Ted Kennedy) is a handful of countries with ballistic missile capability. These aren't merely the folks in the nuclear club, either. A missile attack against the US on a major city would be devastating, mind-bending tragedy even if it only involved three or four missiles with conventional warheads.

Worse, such an attack could be launched, in theory, from a neutral location, like a desert island or even a submarine. In such a case, the attacker could easily slip away and never be identified. It's no wonder that the president was more concerned with known threats like this than with vague and unconfirmable threats from small terrorist cells.

Until 9/11, the great majority of terrorist attacks were small-scale suicide bombings and such which claimed few lives. The exceptions were the US Marine barracks truck bombing in Lebanon, Timothy McVeigh's unspeakable act of paranoid psychosis, and handful of airplane bombings. But even these exceptions killed hundreds, not thousands. A missile attack on a major US city would likely kill tens of thousands. We're talking secondary explosions of gas mains and gas station tanks sparking raging fires that would consume whole neighborhoods and paralyze and black out the whole city for weeks or months.

Who has or could acquire these missiles? Hard to say. Well, easy to say, really. Anybody. Iran, Syria, and North Korea are obvious. China and Russia certainly have plenty of big-dog nukes that could fall into the wrong hands. India and Pakistan regularly threaten each other with nuclear annihilation. And a host of other unfriendly countries and terrorist organizations have, are acquiring, or could buy long-range missiles, nuclear or conventional.

The threat is greatest from those nations ruled by dictators, who could easily decide to launch an spiteful attack when they realize that they are about to be killed by mobs of their own oppressed citizens anyway.

The Patriot anti-missile system is proven effective, more so today even than during the Gulf War. A kind of scaled-up version, with a few fast missile site and satellite target identification, could protect the East Coast and the West Coast very effectively. They would destroy the incoming missile at the height of their flight, when they are outside the earth's atmosphere. This would essentially eliminate all debris and fallout.

Of course it isn't only the US that has to worry. We're the obvious target, but our allies—Israel in particular—are also vulnerable (and, let's face it, have less resolve and resources for retaliation). A working national missile defense system could likely be scaled up further to include our allies, altho they should chip to defray the cost, of course.

Only when we are protected from long-range missiles launched by terrorists or terrorist states can we say we have truly secured the nation. Anything less is mere wishful thinking and fairy dust.

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