Zero Warning

Wall Street Journal, 16 July 1998

You can tell the world is calm when the biggest summer scare that Hollywood can conjure is
an
asteroid beheading the Chrysler Building. Maybe that’s because our political leaders haven’t been
honest about the much more real, and immediate, threat of a ballistic missile attack on Manhattan.

Or Chicago. Or San Francisco. Or anywhere else in a continental U.S. whose citizens have
come
to believe they are sheltered from enemy attack. Yesterday a bipartisan panel of defense
strategists released a unanimous report that ought to jolt both politicians and the public.

America’s intelligence community has routinely judged the ballistic missile threat to be at least
10
to 15 years away–time enough to come up with a defense. But “this is not a distant threat,”
counters the report issued by “Team B,” a commission established by Congress to offer a second
opinion. Iran, North Korea and other hostile nations are now able to “acquire the means to strike
the U.S. within about five years of a decision” to build such a weapon.

Even more worrisome, assorted new “means of delivery can shorten the warning time of
deployment nearly to zero.” In other words, we may not know about an enemy missile armed with
a nuclear or biological warhead until it is already descending on city hall.

The commission says U.S. analysts have made the mistake of judging new missile threats by
Cold
War assumptions. The U.S. and Russia pursued their missile plans in fairly predictable
ways–development, flight tests, deployment. But your average Saddam Hussein doesn’t care
about the same standards. All he wants is a terror weapon to throw destruction at a target. Even
the threat of its use might deter American action against him. It’s no accident, the report says, that
a Chinese general remarked amid the 1996 Taiwan crisis that the Americans probably didn’t want
to trade Los Angeles for Taipei.

Emerging missile powers also have the benefit of technology that is quickly and easily spread.
Russian technicians are for sale. China has sold complete missile systems to Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan.

New missile powers also have access to technology–for example, the means to quickly dig
underground tunnels–that can disguise the speed of their weapons development. Sometimes this
is even our fault: It was the U.S. that let India in on the means we use to detect nuclear tests, so
India disguised its plans in ways that foiled those means.

And once a missile is built, U.S. enemies have new ways to deliver it. Americans tend to think
we’re only threatened by an ICBM launched from someone’s homeland. But even an enemy
without that capability could hide shorter-range missiles on a commercial ship, sail it to U.S.
waters, and start the first bombardment of American shores since Fort Sumter.

The report is all the more striking because it is the unanimous view of a politically diverse
commission. It’s led by former GOP defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But its members include
former Clinton CIA Director Jim Woolsey and veteran Democratic arms-controllers Barry
Blechman and Richard Garwin. As notable is the assent of retired Air Force General Lee Butler,
former head of the Strategic Air Command, who underwent a very public post-service revulsion
against America’s nuclear strategy. The commission worked for six months and had ready access
to U.S. intelligence.

With this kind of credibility, we’d like to think the report would awaken Team Clinton from
its
missile denial. But the early word is that it will instead quietly trash the report as alarmist and
politically motivated. This would fit the Clinton pattern of sacrificing long-run security for
short-run political convenience.

A more urgent missile threat, after all, could complicate U.S. diplomacy with proliferating
nations,
such as China and Russia. It would require rethinking the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty–which, among other problems, blocks Americans from using a theater-anti-missile system
to defend the U.S. homeland. (We can only use it to defend troops abroad.) And a more urgent
threat would require Mr. Clinton to spend money on defenses rather than other favored White
House causes. Until this odd Administration, we thought a President’s first duty was to the
common defense.

At least Congress is a co-equal branch of government. And armed with the substance of this
report, it has a stronger political case for the more urgent development of missile defenses. One
immediate action would be to throw more resources behind the Navy’s so-called “third-tier”
defense program based around Aegis cruisers. Another would be to scuttle Mr. Clinton’s
misguided ABM treaty revision with Russia.

A complacent public may not signal support for any of this in opinion polls. But someone has
to
tell them, with the Rumsfeld Commission, that a missile attack on America is much more likely
than they know.