For Our Elites, No Place for Missile Defense?
Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, former cabinet secretaries Shultz, Perry, and Kissinger, along with former Senator Nunn, called for a reconfiguration of nuclear deterrence policies, arguing that in an age of nuclear proliferation the doctrine of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) was obsolete. The doctrine has been the centerpiece of nuclear deterrence since the 1960s and was codified in the 1970s ABM Treaty. Even though the second President Bush withdrew from the treaty after 9/11, the MAD doctrine remains firmly in place.
Briefly, the doctrine of mutual assured destruction originally allowed the former USSR and the U.S. to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, provided they did not exceed certain limits. Purpose: to give each side enough weapons to destroy each other — so that a “balance of terror” was effected, on the theory that neither side would be irrational enough to kill each other off.
To make it work, neither side was to provide for any direct defenses of its own population. Needless to say, the good old USA played it straight. No missile defense. The USSR was a bit more cagey.
That’s history now. But, with more than a dozen different nations now moving to arm themselves with nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the idea of holding populations hostage to an aggressor’s weapons is even more irrational now than it was thirty years ago. The four authors of the essay seem to agree.
Or do they? They call for America retaining “a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear stockpile primarily to deter a nuclear attack [...].” (That’s a good thing.)
But other than that, it appears about all the authors come up with in rounding out their suggestions to eliminate MAD is to strengthen international cooperation. Negotiations are needed, they say, to encourage nuclear-inclined proliferators to give up the notion — presumably by adjudicating whatever regional gripes they have through some international regime, which is not specified. In fact, no specifics are given concerning “cooperation” or “negotiation,” including the call for a mutual U.S.-Russian “build-down” that the world — presumably including China — should follow.
To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, one dog is not barking: missile defense. The irony here is that these national leaders who decry MAD as a relic of the Cold War are the very ones to keep MAD in play by denying the need for missile defense.
Some observations are in order.
Just another link in the chain 0 is using to strangle our defense capabilities and reduce the stature of the U.S. in the world in the process. Golden goals of his stated campaign posture. Do nothing to defend the U.S. or its friends/allies without the explicit permission of the UN. Do not lead in any respect in foreign affairs. Do not fund DoD beyond that absolutely demanded by Congress. Spend so called “peace dividends” on “renewable energy, green jobs, green friends” instead. Why defend something you seem to want to destroy, or at the very least, destroy the idea of American exceptionalism.
Missile defense can be a dangerous thing. The Pentagon is placing more and more faith in it, as in the advanced Patriot missile system and the anti-ballistic missiles placed on a number of our US Navy cruisers. But the problem is, no defensive system is 100% accurate. Some missiles will get through. Unfortunately, those “few” that do get through have the potential of causing massive destruction to this country, causing thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths. So while missile defense certainly is a good thing (and is being pursued), it is not a panacea and certainly will not solve all our problems.
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) has worked over the years, but the problem with it is that it only works against countries that actually FEAR death. What if you have a country armed with nuclear weapons that actually embraces death, like Iran? The psychotic mullahs that rule Iraq actually want to bring on the 12th Imam, or their version of the “End of Times.” That not only makes them incredibly dangerous, but that also means that, eventually, they will find a way to hit you with a nuclear weapon once they get one. Why? Because they will stop at nothing until they do so and because they do not fear any retribution from anyone, be they Christians OR Jews (since Israel has its own nuclear stockpile).
There is only one real answer to this dilemma and that is regime change in Iran. And quickly, before they get a nuclear weapon. This is the only country in the world that is actively pursuing nuclear weapons and has stated that it wants to wipe certain countries off the map (like Israel). Since the mullahs that run Iran don’t fear death, it doesn’t take a genious to know that once they get this weapon they are going to use it. We must stop them before they get a nuclear weapon. MAD doesn’t work against the Iranians and a missile defense system won’t work because there are many ways to smuggle a nuclear bomb inside a western country and then detonating it. So we need to stop the problem before it becomes a major problem.
We are now wasting our time with small countries like Libya, which will not affect the outcome of this issue and that do not represent an immediate threat to this country. What we should be concentrating on is Iran, the country that has the potential of not only destabilizing all of the Middle East, but could also cause a real nuclear war, and soon.
This is the only country in the world that is actively pursuing nuclear weapons and has stated that it wants to wipe certain countries off the map (like Israel).
I think North Korea is clearly pursuing nuclear weapons and, by its tests, has shown that it represents a great risk to nearby countries like Japan in the short term and a substantial threat to the US in the longer term if they are allowed to get the bugs out of their systems.
I’m also concerned about terrorist groups getting nuclear materials. It’s not terribly hard to picture Al-Qaida sympathizers in Pakistan, for example, letting nuclear materials fall into the hands of Osama bin Laden’s minions and then being used against the US, perhaps in the form of a dirty bomb (i.e. a conventional bomb that is shrouded in radioactive materials which, if detonated, would spread radioactive materials all over the blast area). MAD would be of little use in such a situation since reasonable people would be reluctant to nuke, say, Pakistan because a single sympathizer had leaked some nuclear materials to Al-Qaida.
The world keeps getting more and more complicated and once (relatively) simple solutions like MAD just don’t solve our problems any more. It seems like high time for us to work out strategies to deal with all of these threats.
While MAD won’t likely deter terrorist groups, I think it still has an important place in deterring the likes of China if its leadership should decide on a militarily aggressive and expansionist course.
It really doesn’t matter what these ‘highly qualified’ individuals say. We are in the age of ‘tele-prompter diplomacy’.
We are in some deep scat if the United States gets attacked while this child is still in office. If they take out the tele-prompter first, we’ll have literally no response.
Three objections; 1) For me, the major argument against funding and deploying a missile defense is that it would accomplish nothing against a weapon smuggled into the country, or even a nuclear-armed cruise missile. I think we’re all aware of how porous our borders are, and what’s to stop a ship from sailing up the Hudson River?
2) The technology needs considerable development before it achieves 100% reliability–which I feel is necessary if you’re going to rely on it to stop overt attacks.
3) Funding: Very expensive to deploy, more expensive to maintain. And you’ll _still_ need to maintain the US nuclear arsenal as a response first.
Perhaps a better use of available funding would be to enhance intelligence capabilities needed to identify and monitor the terrorist organizations that would not be affected by a missile defense.
PCon2011
1. Your major arguement against funding missile defense is it doesn’t protect us from the least likey nuke attack i.e one smuggled over the border. What about taking the most likely scenarios off the table for our enemies / unstable governments that have this capability?
2. “Technology needs considerable development”. Of course it does – exactly why it needs funding. Again, I guess your argument is if it’s not guaranteed 100% then don’t risk it?
3. Rely on intellegience? See James Clapper as a starting point.
Last point – are you suggesting the US should not maintain it’s Nuclear Aresonal?
Peace thru strength sister.
The technology needs considerable development before it achieves 100% reliability–which I feel is necessary if you’re going to rely on it to stop overt attacks.
I don’t think this is a reasonable standard. No weapon system, heck, no system of any kind, is 100% reliable. The birth control pill is only 98 or 99% effective at the best of times but it is still the best method of birth control available. Would you ban the Pill because it isn’t 100% effective?
I think we have to consider which is the best available system for defending America, taking into account all the factors we can, including not just the effectiveness but also the costs, and go with the best system we can build. Actually, I expect we’d have multiple systems, each covering different aspects of defense. I certainly don’t see America putting all its eggs in one basket and relying on one and only one thing, like MAD or SDI, to protect itself.
Is it me? Or are our “Elites” always WRONG? It’s like, with them, every day is “Opposite day”. What do I mean? Where do you start?
Well….we had a lot of TORRIES, back in the day. “Independence? Revolution? That’s not a good idea.” We got our Country, in SPITE of them.
A lot of ELITES, thought that “Suing for PEACE, with the SOUTH”, instead of “Fighting till VICTORY was achieved”, was a no brainer.
I’m not that keen, on the whole WWI scene, but I do know that, after every WAR, our Elites made sure we DISARMED, thereby insuring that, when the NEXT WAR came around, we were totally UNPREPARED. (They’re STILL doing that)
A lot of the Elites LOVED Hitler. They LOVED Mussolini and Franco. It wasn’t so much, that they hated the Jews (they did) It was the Uniforms and the way they MARCHED in step. And, who doesn’t like that?
In the Cold War they all had a Soft Spot for “Uncle Joe”, (Stalin, not McCarthy) The Soviets had Free Health Care. Everybody had a Job. Everybody had a place to live. The KGB? “Somebody has to keep an eye on the Jews.”
They preferred HO to Nixon. Communism to Corruption. They FOUGHT, tooth and nail, to prevent REAGAN from putting Medium Range Tactical Nukes
(Pershing Missiles), in Western Europe, while, at the same time, having NO PROBLEM with the SAME KIND OF MISSILES, in deployed on the WARSAW PACT side. They HATED Reagan, and LOVED Gorbachev. They still ‘prefer’ Mutual Assured Destruction, over S.D.I. To them, better WE ALL DIE in a Nuclear Mushroom Cloud, than actually deploy something that could SAVE ALL OF US.
It’s the same way with ENERGY. They DEMAND Energy Independence. And their solution? NO DRILLING. We have more Oil and Natural Gas in this Country, than the ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST. But, for 30 YEARS, the Elites have made it IMPOSSIBLE to take it out of the ground. WHY?
Barack Hussein Obama/Barry Soetoro/Abu Hussain has just given APPROVAL to BRASIL, for a Deep Water Storage Facility in the GULF. He has LOANED Brazil BILLIONS, so they can DRILL for OIL that they discovered in the waters off their Coastline.
But, he won’t let US drill. Why?
The same ELITES, who demand SOLAR and WIND, are the ones who FIGHT IT, whenever a Solar Farm of Wind Farm is suggested someplace where they can SEE IT.
They make Movies TRASHING our Military. TRASHING our Intelligence Agencies. TRASHING US!
They force Banks to give Home Loans to people with NO MONEY, and then, turn around and BLAME THE BANKS for the Housing Market CRASH.
Ya know…These Elites have always had a soft spot for the Dictator. Castro. Lenin. Stalin. They liked Mugabe and Peron. They LOVE Hugo Chavez. Don’t these kinda guys usually ROUND UP these people, and ship them off to a camp?
I got no problem with that. Anybody else?
Good points all. My opinion is, have plenty of modern nukes AND missile defense. The missile defense is for rogue nations that don’t fear death and the nukes are for those that do. Why does everything have to be an either or proposition?
I am curious about why some commenters think missile defense needs to stop every possible nuclear attack even those occurring because of sea or land means. Although it would be nice to have 100% protection, what we are trying to protect against is a nation-destroying event. One or two suitcase nukes will not take down the US. Multiple missile hits will also not take it down. A full barrage from a large adversary may. Although one or two nukes would not destroy the US, the citizens of those areas sure would be upset. How does it NOT make sense to have the capability to knock down the few missiles that a rouge state could launch? A system predicated on an attack from a rouge nation would be smaller and much less costly than a full shield from any size attack. Protection against the rouges while still having MAD for the major players is a good mix. Thankfully, I am confident that we are pursuing this type of research and will deploy more and more of it in the future. Let’s hope we have it before we are compelled to destroy Iran or North Korea.
Agreed
How does it NOT make sense to have the capability to knock down the few missiles that a rouge state could launch?
I usually manage to hold my tongue when I see typos at PJM but I can’t do it in this case because I’ve seen at least two different comments today, from two different people, that had this same error. The word you want here is rogue, not rouge. Rouge is the French word for the color red and while some of the rogue states may, in fact, be Communist in orientation, that’s not what you are trying to say here.
You are correct. We are drowning in ignorance.
Ballistic Missile Defense = The Maginot Line
In 30 years, as we assess and analyze the battles of World War III, we would identify BMD as The Maginot Line of W.W. III.
Our potential enemies who will fight us in World War will just simply go around BMD, killing a lot of Americans in the process.
Do you think that they are that dumb to rely on missiles if we can neutralize their missiles? They will hit us with other weapons (that we do not know of yet) or will develop missiles immune to BMD or maybe overwhelm BMD with the use of decoys. Or this, or that, or that something else. There are many ors.
If we want to guarantee our safety, we need to strive for international cooperation. I wouldn’t mind doing it with Russia, an ally that we can trust and that has the ear of our enemies (like we have the ear of its enemies).
Either international cooperation or destroy or neuter every other country in the world, which would be impossible.
Wrong. Ballistic Missile Defense is no more a Maginot line than is a AA battery a Maginot line vr’s aircraft.
A couple of obvious errors:
1. If BMD were so easy to just go around, why did our research into a Strategic Defense Initiative eventually bankrupt the USSR?
2. No weapons system or strategy will ever guarantee our safety. Diplomacy even less so, especially with Russia. They have cheated on every treaty they’ve signed. The best we can hope for is deterrence–making a potential attack on the US so costly it would be unthinkable.
Outstanding! You saw how well Kissenger’s detente worked… Nuff said!
R. Daniel McMichael….. you cherry pick your responses. That makes you as chickenshit as obama.
I will no longer respond or read your crap.
PUNK
Good riddance, fool.
Never, ever take anything off the table. Why deal from weakness? The recent START treaty with Lugar at the helm was a giveawey to the Russian Federation and these jokers don’t care who they sell weapons technology to or peaceful reactors like the breeders in Iran. And if you look at the final tally they keep more nukes then we do. What kind of people would do that when you don’t know what nukes have already been smuggled out of there. And everyone thought Reagan was suffering dementia for dealing from strength. 76 year olds perform better than 80 year olds.
“Whether they realize it or not, they have sold the American people short in three ways:”
What the author fails to address is that some people and cultures are averse to deterrence. The Shiite “Twelvers” (Ahmedinijad belongs to this camp) believe that provoking an armageddon is a *good* thing as it will prompt the return of the Hidden Mahdi and usher in the era of “Islamic justice”. Rafsanjani has argued that in a nuclear exchange with Israel, Iran would be damaged but Israel would be destroyed and Islam would survive triumphant. One simply cannot deter those holding such thinking.
Also recognize that defense and deterrence are not mutually exclusive. Israel’s “Iron Dome” system *could* defend against a small number of missiles, but could be easily overwhelmed. Each defensive missile is far more expensive than each offensive missile. So that defense system must be backed up by the willingness to go offensive, to make them pay a heavy price for aggression.
Weapons of Mass Destruction fall into three classes
with the following _very_ general characteristics:
Chemical – Horrific effects on individuals, but not much
more effective than chemical explosives of equal mass.
Nuclear – Much more destructive power, but released in
too small a space; Call it one bomb for one city.
Biological – No upper limit on death toll, and difficulty
of development dropping from 1st world, to 2nd, to 3rd,
until one day a single mad genius will be able to destroy
human life, or at least society, single-handed.
Bottom line; Pournelle’s CoDominium needs to be updated
and implemented ASAP, with the single, indisputable goal
of closely controlling weapons, production facilities,
and the knowledge base which supports them.
To make it work, neither side was to provide for any direct defenses of its own population. Needless to say, the good old USA played it straight. No missile defense. The USSR was a bit more cagey.
Actually, as I understand it, the treaties provided for ABMs (antiballistic missiles) for the capital of each country. The Soviets built such a system for Moscow but the US declined to build one. [I'm guessing that the optics of building a missile defense system for only one city, Washington, would have been unpalateable for those Congressmen and Senators who represented other major cities. ("What? DC gets a missile defense and we don't get one in L.A./Chicago/New York/etc.? No way!!")]
“Actually, as I understand it, the treaties provided for ABMs (antiballistic missiles) for the capital of each country. The Soviets built such a system for Moscow but the US declined to build one.”
The amended treaty allowed one defensive network per nation. We started building one to protect our Minuteman ICBM sites in North Dakota, but it was never fully finished, and only one launch facility ever came on line for about four months in 1976.
The Russian ABM network around Moscow is still operational.
What we were building:
“The LIM-49A Spartan was a United States Army anti-ballistic missile, whose warheads were developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It was a three-stage, solid-fuel surface-to-air missile that carried a W71 thermonuclear warhead to intercept incoming warheads at high altitude.”–wiki
That’s the right approach, btw. Use a nuke to kill a nuke. It’s doable too. The powers that be just don’t think we (the people of the United States) are important enough to merit wasting a whole lot of money protecting, and that’s why we don’t have a nationwide ABM system. They have more important things to spend our money on…and, we’re totally expendable to the politicos.
Same as it’s ever been.
Late here, but for the record, the US decision not to deploy an operational ABM system is slightly more complicated than has been mentioned. Geography played a HUGE role, (along with “political optics.”) Look at a globe. The Soviet ABM system that would protect its missile fields sitting behind Moscow from ICBMs launched from the US also simultaneously protected Moscow–which is not only the nation’s capital, but also simultaneously the center of its industrial and intellectual power in a way that DC is not. By contrast, any ABM system siting that would protect American missile fields would do only that (given the geographical location of our missile fields/silos) leaving our major civilian centers/cities exposed, thereby leaving a Republican Administration (remember, the ABM treaty was negotiated during the Nixon Admin) open to the charges from the “no-nukes” anti-war extreme left that it did not care about civilians–it only wanted to protect its “war machine.” (Ignoring or not understanding that the deterrence the protection of our missile fields by an ABM system would bring WAS, ipso facto, protection of American civilians en grosso mondo.) It was for these reasons, therefore, that the decision was made not to deploy/make operational the one American ABM site allowed under the treaty.
Whether it’s built or not, we can all agree that the prime targerts of a nuclear strike are the urban vectors of the pestilence we know as liberalism,that is to asy,New York City, L.A.,Chicago, Portland, Bostonn,etc.Were any or all of these virulent libtard hell holes annihilated in a Nuclear strike, the country would be better off for it.