"The probability that a missile armed with weapons of mass destruction would be used against US forces or interests," a CIA-sponsored study asserted last year, "is higher today than during most of the Cold War and will continue to grow."
Yes, but how probable? And, if politics is about assigning priorities between competing needs, is a $60 billion insurance bill really justifiable against other priorities? Particularly when it could potentially reignite a global arms race? And tear up treaties that have stood us in good stead?
President Bush believes it is. He campaigned on the policy and is now implementing it despite the concerns expressed to him by nearly all his NATO allies, and Russia and China.
Central to the Bush case is a post-Cold War threat assessment that is not shared by European partners. They worry that the Americans' belief in absolute security, and in technical solutions to political problems, blinds them to any willingness to consider the political reality that the missiles of "rogue" states, like Iraq, Iran or North Korea, largely developed for reasons of regional prestige, would never be used to threaten the US.
Such political calculations were largely omitted by the Secretary of Defence, Mr Don Rumsfeld, in his personal "manifesto", a hawkish 1998 report on the missile threat to the US by such countries.
Yet, because of the inevitability of swift and annihilating retaliation, even US strategists do not believe that such regimes would launch a nuclear missile attack on the US except as the final, mad throw of the dice in a war they were about to lose. That remote possibility, and the equally remote chance of an accidental launch, are the shaky foundations of the NMD rationale.
And while willing to acknowledge that the proliferation of missile and nuclear technology does create an alarming potential, Europeans tend to view the prospect as considerably more distant than the US.
They point to the reality that none of the rogue states has currently got the technical missile or warhead capacity to hit the US, and that the technological gap between missiles capable of travelling 1,000 km and 10,000 km is huge.
Within the US defence establishment there are also arguments about the advisability of putting research and development cash in the one basket at the possible expense of what they see as a more real threat to US interests.
Philip Coyle, until recently the director of operational testing and evaluation of missiles in the Defence Department, argues that the conventional, short-range missile threat to US troops deployed abroad, such as the Scud attacks that cost the US 28 lives in the Gulf War, is much more real and imminent and should be addressed as the priority.
Abroad there is also serious concern that the US sees its plans in not purely defensive terms, but really as a means of guaranteeing its own freedom to act on the world stage.
As Lawrence Kaplan has argued in the New Republic, "The real rationale for missile defence is that without it an adversary armed with long-range missiles can - as Robert Joseph, President Bush's counter-proliferation specialist at the National Security Council, argues - hold American and allied cities hostage and thereby deter us from intervention."
"Or", Kaplan continues, "as a recent Rand study on missile defence puts it, `ballistic missile defence is not simply a shield but an enabler of US action'. In other words, missile defence is about preserving America's ability to wield power abroad. It's not about defence. It's about offence. And that's exactly why we need it."
Indeed US officials argue that the Europeans might have been a lot less keen to participate in the war against Saddam Hussein had the Iraqis then possessed the means to strike at European cities.
Not so, say the French. Iraq would have been constrained from escalating to such attacks, just as it was constrained from the use of biological weapons against the NATO powers, by the conventional threat of an overwhelming, no-holds-barred response.
And the US obsession with eliminating all possibility of a threat still leaves a gaping hole in its defences. If a Saddam wants to deliver a nuclear attack against the US, by far the easiest way would be to deliver it in a bomb in one of the thousands of containers that are unloaded in US ports every day and against which there is virtually no defence.
That scenario is all the more terrifying for the fact that such a regime might feel unconstrained by the threat of nuclear retaliation because such an initial attack could in effect be anonymous. Could the US retaliate with nuclear missiles on the basis of a suspicion?
In the end the real hope that such eventualities will not come to pass, Mr Bush's European critics argue, lies in the painstaking work of building "soft" security structures in volatile regions, in the political undermining of dictatorships from within, and the extension of multilateral arms control and non-proliferation agreements and controls. Not in dismantling them.
psmyth@irish-times.ie
