World leaders from Tony Blair to Vladimir Putin talk as if the issue is still unresolved. They act as if their arguments - or threats - could still have an impact. It isn't so. The debate in the US is over. The US is going to build a national missile defence.
Sure, the left (such as it is) will demonstrate. The arms control community will protest about abandoning the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty and prophesy a new arms race. The New York Times will echo the New York chattering classes and denounce the decision. But nobody in Washington will pay the least attention.
Al Gore's lame "me too" stance on missile defence in the election campaign recognised the political reality of the matter-which is that America's decision to deploy defences was really made on 31st August 1998. That was the day North Korea test-launched a Taepo Dong-1 missile which-to the surprise of US spooks-turned out to have a third stage. Though it didn't succeed in launching a small satellite into orbit, as North Korea had hoped, that third stage meant that, theoretically at any rate, the Taepo Dong now had intercontinental range.
Only six weeks before, a bipartisan panel of defence heavyweights, chaired by former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had concluded that hostile nations were working hard to develop missiles with which to threaten the US. The Taepo Dong third stage was thunderous proof of Rumsfeld's verdict. Overnight, the politics of missile defence were transformed. If North Korea-bankrupt, primitive, starving, isolated North Korea-could develop something close to an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the world really was a more threatening place. America's 35-year debate about missile defences was suddenly over.
So when President George W Bush and his new defence secretary, the same Donald Rumsfeld, reiterate-as both have in the past few weeks-that the US is going to deploy missile defences, listen up. They mean it.
What remains to be decided are the second-order questions: timeframe, technology, cost. These are questions America will settle largely for itself. But what also has to be thrashed out-and here the rest of the world can and will have a voice-is the strategic context within which those defences are deployed. And that is why the new administration is banging the drum so loudly so early. Behind the braggadocio is a gameplan. Bush's advisers have persuaded him that Russia, China and Europe will not start to negotiate seriously about a new strategic nuclear order unless and until the world accepts that the US is going ahead with missile defences no matter what.
This judgement draws heavily on the national security team's personal experiences. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was a mid-level bureaucrat under the first President Bush in the outfit she now runs, and worked in 1990 on the thorny issue of German reunification. Bush pushed from the outset for a Germany whole, free and integrated into Nato. He got it. Rice has since written that she took this as a lesson to "choose goals that are optimal, even if they seem at the time politically infeasible." Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell have both negotiated strategic arms agreements. Both have concluded, as have many others over the years, that the Russians will make a deal only when they are convinced that the US is ready to walk away from the table.
The frustrations of the Clinton administration have only reinforced these views. By 1996, President Clinton had come-grudgingly and under Republican pressure-to accept the case for defences. But Clinton wanted to negotiate a deal with Moscow that, through minimal amendments to the ABM treaty, would allow a minimal defensive system to protect against a minimal threat. Years of intensive discussions with Moscow to this end got nowhere, even though Russian generals were privately telling their US counterparts that Russia herself was worried by the prospect of missile proliferation around its southern rim.
The incoming Bush administration does not intend to walk the same path. Instead, the new administration's strategy is to go ahead with the development of missile defences and invite the Russians and the Europeans to make constructive proposals on how best to integrate these into a new strategic framework. They have, of course, their own ideas what that could be. The Bush administration is willing to think about moving from strategic arms agreements that limit offensive weapons, and ban defensive ones to a new set of mix-and-match totals where offensive and defensive capabilities are somehow reckoned together. They are more willing to think about taking US missile forces off hair-trigger alert status than Clinton was, and they are open to other suggestions for reducing nuclear risk. They would contemplate sharing intelligence, and welcome joint efforts to counter proliferation. They will likely reduce the size of the US strategic arsenal unilaterally and by a substantial amount, urging Russia to follow suit but not insisting on it.
The message will be: If Moscow wants to join with the US in these endeavours, fine. If not, that's Moscow's choice. Underlying this approach are two judgements. The first is that, at this point in history, the US holds all the high cards. The second is that there is no need for haste.
Take Russia. The Russian nuclear submarine fleet rusts at its moorings. By US calculations, Russia's strategic missiles are so antique that by 2010 it will deploy only 500-800 warheads. So Putin can spend billions of rubles he cannot afford on a new generation of strategic missiles. Or he can do a deal.
Take Beijing. China's leaders threaten "a spiralling arms race" if the US deploys missile defences. But to what end? Traditional state-to-state deterrence theory argues that such a build-up would cost a lot while buying nothing of strategic value. China would not lose a deterrent if the US installed a missile defence because China does not have a deterrent against the US today, presumably because it doesn't really think it needs one. The fact that China's nuclear arsenal consists of ageing, static, liquid-fuelled, highly vulnerable ICBMs is proof of that. Why then, Bush's advisers ask, should Beijing choose to waste resources on a fruitless enterprise?
Take rogue states. The virtue of missile defence-or so the Bush team argues-is that it increases the price of admission to the strategic club. As the sanctions on Iraq erode, Saddam Hussein will almost certainly be able to afford to develop a handful of missiles with ranges sufficient to hit European capitals. If he can also develop even one with a range to hit the US, he can use a blackmail strategy. Defences, even limited ones, thwart that scenario-but only if both sides have faith in the US ability to stop the incoming missile.
Bush and his advisers are in no hurry to lay all this out in public. They believe they have time. The earliest plausible date when the US could deploy even minimal missile defences has now retreated from 2005 to about 2007. Nobody in the defence department has publicly acknowledged that yet, but it's clear from the fine print of the report on the programme that the Pentagon's director of testing and evaluation gave to Congress last fall. Deployment will slip further still, in fact. According to the same report, the testing schedule is "slipping at a rate of 20 months every three years."
Why so long? Because the task of knocking down a missile in flight is very hard, whichever way you go about it. Some of the keenest advocates of missile defences assert that a seaborne interceptor system could be deployed almost immediately aboard the US's Aegis-class warships. That's nonsense, as the Navy is the first to admit. Those ships are simply not designed to launch missiles of the size and performance required. Other zealots propose the US should deploy an armada of Boeing 747 jumbo jets equipped with the airborne laser that the Air Force has been developing. The idea is that these 747s would cruise off North Korean airspace, their lasers ready to zap any missile as it takes off. The problem with that, as with all schemes for what the trade calls "boost phase intercept"-meaning devices to destroy missiles on the way up rather than down-is that you would have to destroy the missile within about two minutes of its launch. The US does have satellite surveillance systems which give warning of missile launches that swiftly. But developing the command-and-control networks to translate those warnings into engagement orders will take even longer than a missile defence system.
A national missile defence does not exist and will not exist even in rudimentary form for perhaps ten years. It is "a threat in being" like the British and German fleets before the first world war. A threat which may be enough to spark fresh thinking about the strategic shape of the world to come. That, at least, is the hope of the new US administration.
