By Jed Babbin on 9.5.06 @ 12:08AM
Ballistic missile defense is on the road to reality -- an interview with the Secretary of Defense.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has a suggestion for those who
still doubt we should be building a missile defense system. In my
interview with him last Thursday, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "All anyone
has to do is read the words of the leadership in [North] Korea and
Iran, and look to their behavior with respect to the development of
ballistic missile technologies and nuclear capability." Even for
those of us who have been supporters of missile defense since
President Reagan announced it in 1986, Mr. Rumsfeld's mild
admonition is good advice.
Examining Mr. Rumsfeld's examples -- Kim Jong-il's North Korea
and Ahmadinejad's Iran -- proves the point. After its July missile
tests, the North Korean news agency said that the NK government
denied that it had any obligation to follow the international norms
for missile launches saying, "The [Korean People's Army] will go on
with missile launch exercises as part of its efforts to bolster
deterrent for self-defense in the future, too." It added, "The DPRK
will have no option but to take stronger physical actions of other
forms, should any other country dares take issue with the exercises
and put pressure upon it." As if to prove Mr. Rumsfeld's point,
North Korea's Deputy Chief of its mission to the United Nations
said on June 21, "North Korea as a sovereign state has the right to
develop, test fire and export a missile." (Note the lack of
qualifiers. The North Koreans don't have European manners, so they
don't bother to make a perfunctory statement about exporting only
to those whose surnames aren't bin Laden or Nasrallah or
Ahmadinejad.)
Mr. Ahmadinejad is smarter and cagier. In a long news conference
on August 30 (reported by the Financial Times),
Ahmadinejad continued to deny Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. But
when asked about the UN Security Council and the possibility of
sanctions against Iran he said, "I think the time has passed to
settle problems through using the Security Council as a tool....Our
position is completely clear. Our nation has a right to the
peaceful use of nuclear energy. The Iranian nation has chosen this.
It wants to use [nuclear energy] according to international rules
and regulations, and no one can stop it."
Ahmadinejad said something we all should agree with. The time to
use the UN Security Council as a diplomatic mechanism to stop
Iran's nuclear weapons program has passed. The UN's August 31
deadline came and went, and the EUnuchs are already calling for
more talks with Iran. And, while Ahmadinejad's regime pursues both
nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles of ever-greater capability,
Kofi Annan is developing Neville Chamberlain's art of appeasement
into a science. Ignoring Ahmadinejad's statement of less than a
week ago, Annan -- in Tehran last weekend -- said that, "On the
nuclear issue, [Ahmadinejad] reaffirmed to me Iran's preparedness
and commitment to hold negotiations" with Western powers to find a
solution to the impasse over Tehran's nuclear activities. Once
again, the UN -- and the EU -- do worse than appease. They
establish diplomacy as an end in itself and by so doing doom it to
failure. No matter Iran's intransigence, diplomacy will continue
without requiring Iran to stop its development of nuclear weapons
while the talks go on. Where does that leave us?
With defending ourselves and our allies as best we can. If we
aren't going to strike at Iran's regime or North Korea's missile
capability -- which actions the president has neither disavowed nor
taken steps to accomplish -- we have to undertake to build the best
defenses we can, which means ballistic missile defense.
IN OUR THURSDAY CONVERSATION, Rumsfeld said, "I was there in the
White House when President Reagan made his announcement that
evening about missile defense and the wisdom of it is clearer every
year, that weapons are increasingly more powerful and increasingly
available. We owe it to our people to provide for their protection
and their safety. To be willing to engage in a serious effort over
a sustained period of time to develop the capabilities to deter and
defend against a range of threats."
A lot of research had been done in the fifteen years between
1986 and 2001, but not much else was done because to do so would
have violated the ABM Treaty. Rumsfeld was one of the principal
architects of our exit from that treaty. Rumsfeld credits President
Bush's leadership for what was accomplished. If we hadn't exited
the treaty, we wouldn't be where we are today, or able to have a
fully functioning system in the near future.
When President Bush exercised our option to exit the ABM Treaty,
no one had yet made the decisions to sort out the options and take
the steps necessary to deploying a real defense to missile attack.
Rumsfeld said, "If you may recall, back in the year 2000 this
debate had gotten almost theological. It was a hair knot.
Proponents were adamant and opponents were adamant. Proponents
disagreed as to whether it ought to be space-based, land-based,
sea-based and everyone was quite emotional about it all. And it was
considered a national missile defense system. We shifted it to a
missile defense system in a way that would not have our allies feel
we were looking out for ourselves and not the rest of the world.
And it's made a big difference. We're now getting cooperation from
several countries in Europe. We're getting cooperation from Japan,
and of course the more cooperation you get the more sensors you
have. The more locations you have the more capable the system."
Rumsfeld cut the knot, choosing a primarily ground-based system.
It's not complete, but it is -- right now -- deployed with a
capability that is likely to cancel out North Korea's threat.
Last Friday, in a test of improvements to the already-deployed
parts of the system using sea-based and land-based sensors, the
Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency detected a missile
launched from Alaska, launched an interceptor missile, and
destroyed the target. This successful test followed a number of
failures that opponents say proves the system will never work.
Almost twenty years ago, when working for Lockheed, I got to
know Ben Rich, the genius behind stealth aircraft who was running
the super-secret "Skunk Works." Ben often told the story about how
the Polaris sub-launched ICBM failed in more than a dozen test
launches before its developers made it an innovative and reliable
part of our deterrence force. Rich doubted any developmental system
could survive today's Congressional micromanagement. I asked
Rumsfeld about the prior test failures.
He said, "Each time you conduct an experiment that doesn't work,
you could say it's a failure. On the other hand you could say
you've learned something. Opponents pretend that it's failure. And
it isn't failure at all. If you have intelligent people working on
a serious project and they engage in it they're not going to come
out with it in the first instance with a full system that's
perfect....You have to learn by doing, by testing and
experimenting." Which is just what Ben Rich told me years ago.
Without developmental tests -- failures and successes -- you can't
learn those things that can't be figured out on paper.
What Bush and Rumsfeld have accomplished so far has put America
on the path that will take ballistic missile defense from vision to
reality. But it will take years' more testing and development
before the system is fully deployed, and even after that it will
have to evolve continuously because the threat will as well.
Commitment to continuing what the president and Rumsfeld have begun
should be a litmus test for any 2008 presidential candidate.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004) and, with Edward
Timperlake, Showdown: Why China Wants War With the United
States (Regnery, May 2006 -- click here to obtain a free chapter).
topics:
Iran, United Nations, North Korea, Nuclear Weapons, Energy, Alaska
