The Secretary Of Missile Defense

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. Safeguard's ghostly remains still litter the prairie just south of the Canadian border.

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. He had reason to beam. After all, Bush was reading from Rumsfeld's script. 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. He had become its chief architect, salesman and even evangelist.

But will Rummy's gambit pay off? Missile-shield backers criticized the Clinton Administration for lacking the political will to construct such a system. Their tone suggested that the project could be accomplished simply by ponying up the money and jawboning U.S. allies into accepting the inevitable. But the reality is that there is no shield at the ready. And because so many of the challenges associated with missile defense are technological--and may require years of trial-and-error development--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. But those challenges were forged amid World War II and the cold war, when the White House, Congress and the public saw their achievement as high national priorities. There is no such consensus on national missile defense. Democrats 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.