CURRENT EVENTS UPDATE

Missle Defense

By MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON

No one is as familiar with the frustrations of building missile defenses as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Back in 1975, when Rumsfeld was Gerald Ford’s Defense Secretary—he’s the only person to have held the job twice—he inherited the Pentagon’s first attempt at a missile-defense shield, the $25 billion Safeguard system, designed to protect 150 Minuteman missiles dotting North Dakota.

But cost and technology woes plagued Safeguard. Rumsfeld, a onetime G.O.P. Congressman from Illinois, knew it. Even worse, the Soviets were rendering Safeguard useless by putting multiple warheads atop each of their missiles. After three months as Defense Secretary, under orders from Congress, Rumsfeld shut it down.

So, last week, when Rumsfeld, three months into his second tour of duty as Defense chief, launched an offensive to build another missile defense, it was a surprising new chapter. And when President Bush stepped to the microphone at the National Defense University and declared his unswerving commitment to the costly and controversial project, "Rummy," as old friends call him, stood by proudly. As head of a 1998 panel weighing the ballistic-missile threat faced by the U.S., Rumsfeld had helped build political pressure for just the kind of shield that Bush was proposing. In the quarter-century since he had put Safeguard out of its misery, Rumsfeld had become convinced that national missile defense was not only technologically possible but also essential to America’s national security.

But the reality is that there is no shield at the ready. Simply pouring billions into such programs won’t ensure success anytime soon. Building a missile shield is a challenge on a par with building the atom bomb and putting a man on the moon. Democrats, however, are balking. Even the CIA’s latest threat analysis says the most likely threats are not incoming missiles but rather such portable weapons of mass destruction as truck and suitcase bombs.

So what’s Don Rumsfeld to do? Given the constraints imposed by physics, fiscal reality and foreign policy, the man who served as co-chair of Bob Dole’s failed 1996 campaign will have to use Bill Clinton’s system as his base. Pentagon officials say Bush’s system will have to begin with Clinton’s ground-based system—a handful of missiles deployed as early as 2004—followed by more research into ship- and plane-based interceptors.

While Rumsfeld’s shop faces the challenge of building the shield, it is the nation’s diplomats spreading out over the world who face the equally arduous task of selling it overseas. Washington’s allies and its foes have grown accustomed to dealing with a world filled with nuclear weapons. During the cold war, the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 ensured that the U.S. and the Soviet Union would remain naked to the other’s atomic wrath. While the logic of such mutual assured destruction was ghoulish, it did have one thing going for it: it worked.

Not surprisingly, China reacted most vehemently to the Bush-Rumsfeld speech, saying the U.S. "has violated the ABM Treaty, will destroy the balance of international security forces and could cause a new arms race." Beijing knows even the initially modest system proposed by Clinton could render obsolete their 20 single-warhead, long-range missiles, which can reach the West Coast of America. Once that system is in place, Beijing’s leverage with the U.S.—especially on the touchy topic of Taiwan—could be crippled.

Click here to view a TIME graphic on Missle Defense Systems.

—TIME, May 14, 2001

Questions
1. What is the purpose of a missile-defense system?

2. Why is Rumsfeld’s proposal controversial?

TIME CLASSR OOM