Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

The Miami Herald

December 19, 2001, Wednesday

SECTION: COMMENTARY

An end to the ABM treaty: Bad idea, bad timing, bad message

The following editorial appeared in the Jewish Star Times, a property of the Miami Herald:

We have said it before, made every argument we could think of that any person of common sense would have a hard time refuting, and yet last week President Bush unilaterally abrogated the ABM treaty in order to build a missile defense system.

It is worth reviewing the reasons we opposed such a move, which were essentially these: The cost of such a system is staggering and a cost-benefit analyses demonstrates that other much more needed programs will bear the burden, including the possibility of further invading the Social Security Trust Fund. The potential of a missile attack on the United States from any source or in any magnitude can be detected so quickly that an instant and overwhelming retaliatory response would follow.

That concept of "Mutually Assured Distruction" kept nuclear war at bay for 50 years when the world was a much more unstable place than it is today. Nuclear devices can now be smuggled into the United States in suitcases, like the millions of pounds of illicit drugs that arrive here each year, requiring no such complex and expensive delivery systems as ICBM's and, unlike ICBM delivery, the perpetrators are much less easily identified and punished. Were these reasons not enough, there are more. China is now increasing its intercontinental ballistic missile production and upgrading what it already has in light of this new escalation in the arms race. In fact, to lessen their opposition to our creating this new system, we tacitly encouraged China to do just that. In the meantime Russia, the most important potential new ally of the United States both economically and militarily, strongly opposes the unilateral decision by the United States to put a treaty negotiated with them in good faith in the trash heap.

Let us not be deceived; the countries capable of building, maintaining, targeting and successfully launching an intercontinental missile attack on the United States are either our outright allies or China and Korea. If we are truly worried about the Chinese missile program, we certainly have done little to talk them out of increased or upgraded production as their program up to now was not considered a sufficient threat. By creating this new 'Star Wars' program we have turned that around, in effect creating a need in China to compete against a new potential threat to their own defense, ourselves.

North Korea on the other hand, though not quite a paper tiger, does not yet possess the capability to be a sufficient threat to justify the building of such a system. A cheaper and more effective method of protecting ourselves from North Korea would be by launching a unilateral strike against their missile facilities, should the international climate change sufficiently to warrant it.

This so-called missile defense shield is the intellectual equivalent of the Maginot line. However good or accurate or sophisticated it is, the very existence of it is an invitation to the creative juices of those who wish us ill to find solutions around it. Ironically, to even the most initiated, those solutions already exist, are cheaper to deliver, don't identify the perpetrator like our spy satellites would in detecting a missile launch, allow for greater flexibility of targeting with devices designed for more surgical destruction and are already thought to be available on the world's black market.

Were all this not enough to have us scratching our heads trying to figure out how any of this can possibly be in the national security interests of the United States, the question remains of how to deal with shortrange missiles containing tactical nuclear or biological weapons. What to do about the Scud-type of mobile launch, short-range missile with the capacity to carry a nuclear or biological warhead; doesn't this type of weapon justify the development of such a system in and of itself? The answer is most certainly yes, but such a system already exists. More important, it does not violate the ABM treaty with the Russians, and does not require the expenditure of the literally hundreds of billions of dollars that President Bush will ultimately have to request of the American taxpayer.

All President Bush has to do to equip us with an anti-missile missile is to buy the Arrow. It was developed by the Israelis, has been successfully field tested to a range of 190 miles and we can be reasonably assured that what is a real tactical weapons threat is now solved, money saved, the Russians now remain our friends and partners for peace, and it is in our arsenal ready for use in months, not years.

The Jewish Star Times is owned by the Miami Herald.

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(c) 2001, The Jewish Star Times

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