Time for a Little Panic

One can perhaps forgive President Clinton his waverings and wobblings regarding North Korea's nuclear bomb, his abjectly retracted pledge that "North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb," his year of negotiations that yielded nothing but American concessions and North Korean nuclear advances.

One can forgive Clinton this irresolution because it arises out of an understandable fear -- the fear of war. War is what North Korea promises if we do anything serious to stop its nuclear program. And war is a serious thing. One might argue that the world's only superpower ought not be intimidated by the threats of a third-rate power. Still, one can sympathize with the President's dilemma: Risk G.I. lives today in order to avert a nuclear threat tomorrow?

Yet even if one can understand the President's inability to block the spread of nuclear weapons, it is harder to understand his leaving us defenseless should they ever be fired our way. If we cannot deny outlaw states the Bomb, why are we not defending ourselves against it?

This failure to build defenses is all the more glaring because Clinton has made nonproliferation one of his great national-security battle cries. But if nonproliferation fails as the North Koreas and the Irans of the world develop nukes and the missiles to carry them, what then? Then our only defense is defenses: interceptors to knock down ballistic missiles before they can reach our soldiers or our cities. Yet the Clinton policy on defenses is delay and derail.

The Administration slashed five-year funding for missile defenses by more than 50%. It abandoned Bush's plans to deploy a limited ballistic-missile defense for the American homeland. Instead, we were told, we would concentrate on defenses against theater (shorter-range) missiles for our allies and our troops abroad. Now it turns out that the Administration is slowly crippling theater-missile defense too. It is agreeing to severe limitations on TMDS that would effectively abort highly promising Navy and Air Force programs and stunt the growth of the remaining Army program.

Why are we preventing ourselves from building defenses so crucial to America's future security?

Because of a piece of parchment. John Maynard Keynes once said that practical men are the unconscious slaves of a defunct economist. Clinton's arms controllers are the conscious slaves of an obsolete treaty. Twenty-two years ago, we signed a treaty with the Soviet Union to drastically limit missile defenses. The idea was to prevent an offensive-defensive arms race and eliminate the temptation to launch a surprise attack (because an undefended attacker would be open to nuclear retaliation).

But the Soviet Union is gone. The arms race between us is over. The U.S. and Russia are not even aiming missiles at each other. They are aimed at sea, so that even an accidental launch would destroy only fish. The coming threat emanates from elsewhere, from small, determined outlaw states such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq. And before that threat we are helpless.