Obama decides against missile system, conservatives up in arms

Predictably, the decision announced by US president Barack Obama to refrain from installing a missile defence system in the Czech Republic and Poland has greatly distressed conservative lobbies in the US.

The Bush administration had conceived this plan ostensibly to defend Eastern Europe from a possible missile attack by Iran. But it was bitterly opposed by Russia as being intended to foil its retaliatory attack if the US attacked Russia with nuclear weapons. In the arcane vocabulary of nuclear deterrence, the key to stability lies in both adversaries in a nuclear dyad retaining the capability to attack the other should it be first attacked; in other words, nuclear deterrence results when both adversaries are equally vulnerable.

But if one or the other adversary secures itself against counter-attack it could be emboldened to attack first in the expectation that it could escape retribution.
Russia has welcomed Obama’s decision since it believed that these missile defences, based on interceptor missiles and advanced radars, had little to do with Iran, but were expressly designed against Russia. For these very reasons, conservative factions in the US have deplored the decision.

Their arguments range from asserting that a missile shield is imperative to defend against an expected Iranian missile attack to providing Israel greater warning time to providing western Europe credible reassurance by linking American-European defences to retaining US credibility in Europe, especially the Czech Republic and Poland that had agreed to host these missile defences despite Russian warnings to cowardly surrender under Russian pressure.

To meet these objections, but also to retain the support of his NATO partners, Obama has unveiled an alternative plan to position interceptor missiles on ships, while noting that Iran is nowhere near being able to deploy long-range missiles. He also plans to open negotiations with Iran which had been shunned by the Bush administration and, earlier by Democrat governments.

Much has been written about the strategic value of missile defences, but the criticism of the sceptics cannot be denied as it carries greater weight. Some 25 years have elapsed since president Ronald Reagan unveiled his ‘Star Wars’ vision in 1983, which envisaged establishing missile defences that would make the US invulnerable against a Soviet missile attack. But this National Missile Defence system is far from being credibly established.

The technical problems of using missiles to destroy incoming missiles are immense. Imagine firing a bullet to destroy another bullet. The precise technical challenge lies in ensuring that this interdiction occurs within the short timeframe available between the launch and impact of the incoming missile. Only 20 to 25 minutes would be available to detect, track and destroy an incoming intercontinental missile and barely a few minutes to interdict an intermediate-range or short-range missile.

There is also the question of numbers of missiles required for a credible missile defence, since it must be anticipated that the adversary would launch several missiles simultaneously,  each equipped with multiple warheads and interspersed with decoys.

The costs would be astronomical. But the major technical argument is that the system must be leak-proof when nuclear weapons enter the equation. A missile shield with even 99 per cent reliability is inadequate for a nuclear missile, because slippage of even one would cause unacceptable damage, as the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over six decades ago, must inform us.

A myth popular among strategists is that emplacing missile defences induces uncertainties and complicates the attacker’s calculations. This is a greatly overstated argument since the attacker can always use multiple missiles and multiple warhead armed missiles. It was, therefore, apparent that missile defence is more a political rather than a military weapon, which has masked its several inadequacies. Obama’s decision to scrap the Central European missile defence system is based on cold realities.

It makes a significant genuflection towards Russia by lowering the salience of nuclear weapons and improving the atmospherics, thereby encouraging further reductions in their nuclear weapon arsenals. Getting down to levels of 1300 strategic nuclear warheads in both countries is being talked about and seems feasible. It could be embedded in a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to replace the existing treaty that expires in December. The possibility of a joint American-Russian missile defence system against Iran has also opened up.

Hopefully this new emerging milieu will also enable more radical measures at the Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2010 to address the generic issue highlighted by Obama in his Prague speech of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons.