The idea of a national missile defense capable of destroying nuclear-armed, long-range ballistic missiles in flight was a natural extension of the Cold War arms race. Once the superpowers could reach across the globe, traverse space and destroy each other (and the rest of the world in the process) in a matter of minutes, the urge to find a way out of that ghastly reality was sure to follow. It has now been nearly three decades since then-President Ronald Reagan asked whether civilization was destined to “perish in a hail of fiery atoms” and wondered what the world might look like if “free people could live secure in the knowledge...that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies,” a vision for which he was both applauded as a hero and dismissed as a dunce. The Reagan administration has long since passed into history, but in the intervening years, the notion of missile defense has lived on despite having been declared, at various times, either dead or revived, crucial or irrelevant, necessary or dangerous.

 More nations will head into space, much as they first took to the seas in an earlier era. And just as the seas became a source of great wealth, knowledge and cultural cooperation, their obvious value and strategic importance led them to become battlespaces as well. Comparisons between the seas and space are valuable but limited by the significant physical differences, and consequently challenges, regarding operating in the domains. Nevertheless, the central question remains: how and where—if at all—will nations draw the lines that might preserve space as a global commons,[1] making it a safe haven for objects in orbit around the earth, rather than fall to the temptation to create the largest arena of military competition in history? Nuclear strategies, and particularly missile defense efforts, are key components to answering that question and will have a significant impact on the future of global stability and security.

The allure of missile defense is obvious. After all, who could object to the idea of a defensive shield to protect the American people from missiles carrying nuclear warheads raining down from the skies? The horrific nature of nuclear weapons is most keenly felt and understood by those who remember the Cold War, the children of the 1950s and 1960s who hid under their desks at school, built back-yard fallout shelters and watched movies like Planet of the Apes (the climax of which features a horrified Charlton Heston, finding the melted remains of the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand and thus realizing that his newfound planet is actually Earth long after a nuclear war, howling for God Himself to “damn to hell” all the “maniacs” who “finally blew it up”).  Each day, from the supposed tranquility of Eisenhower’s 1950s right into the high anxiety of Reagan’s first term, was an onslaught of apocalyptic images in popular culture, with the “eve of destruction” inevitably leading to the “the day after”. The fear of the generations who lived through this period is real, it is justifiable, and it cannot and should not be dismissed lightly. These memories are the raw material from which many politicians have largely formed the philosophical juggernaut of the missile defense movement beginning in the early 1980s—and help to explain a 1998 poll by a pro-missile defense group that found that most Americans not only believed the United States already had a national missile defense, but were positively upset when told it does not.[2] 

For those who came of age after the Cold War, these terrifying images seem almost comical and have since often been played for laughs in the new popular culture. Home fallout shelters are less likely to evoke hair-raising memories of the Cuban Missile Crisis than they are to elicit comic images of Brendan Fraser’s clueless 1960s nerd emerging into the hip, cynical 1990s after climbing out of a bomb shelter in the comedy Blast from the Past. And nearly 20 years after Charton Heston’s anguished astronaut finds the world in ashes, Val Kilmer’s snarky teen scientist and his friends use a space laser not to destroy the USSR, but to fill their hated professor’s house with a giant popcorn explosion in Real Genius. Nuclear war, once the worst nightmare of a generation, by the 1990s had become a punch line to a joke no one remembered.

The rapid collapse of the Cold War, and with it the almost instant evaporation of the tangible sense of nuclear threat, created a binary and false set of choices about space and defenses. In one sense missile defense became even more attractive to both generations: for those who remembered the Cold War, still-jangled nerves clung to the hope of stopping nuclear war, while younger minds could afford to see such a program as cost-free without a dimly-remembered Soviet adversary trying to overcome it. When Americans in 2009 were asked (by another pro-missile defense group, this one with strong ties to the industry base that would benefit from increased funding) a simple, black-and-white question­—“Do you think the United States should or should not have a missile defense system with the ability to protect the United States from an attack by missiles that might contain weapons of mass destruction?”—88 percent answered affirmatively.[3] Given the wording of the question, the only surprise is that the number wasn’t higher (and again, many of the respondents likely thought such a system existed already in any case).  But even leaving aside partisan politics, who wouldn’t want such a system? Who would answer, “No, I prefer to be vulnerable to nuclear attack”? Arms control advocates have long failed to produce a bumper-sticker response to the pro-missile defense perspective. To pose a similar question: do people want to be vulnerable to the devastating effects of earthquakes, hurricanes and potentially apocalyptic asteroid strikes? Of course not, but they understand that there are limited defenses and resources to spend on those defenses, with money then spent in those areas most likely to mitigate both risk and damage. Regarding nuclear weapons, missile defense has become the de facto expectation of defense, minus consideration of risk, cost or even effectiveness.

Reagan’s program, once called “SDI” (Strategic Defense Initiative) and later reincarnated under various acronyms, remains with us in the 21^st century simply as BMD (Ballistic Missile Defense). It endures not just for bureaucratic reasons but because it promises either to vanquish the anxieties of the Cold War generation or to increase the already significant sense of security among their children.

For many advocates of a missile defense program, constructing a system to protect the United States and its allies (or at least some of them) from ballistic nuclear missile attack is more than a military necessity; it is an absolute moral imperative. Perhaps even more important than the damage that might be limited by destroying an incoming nuclear strike, missile defense proponents see the creation of such a system as a deterrent in itself. This nationalistic symbol of American power and resolve would warn any potential aggressor that the United States will not waiver, even in the face of a hostile nuclear arsenal, and thus avert a catastrophic attack by the mere fact of its existence. This is not, on its face, an unreasonable assumption. In the 1980s, especially given Soviet fears of American technological superiority, it may even have been a defensible argument. But since then the United States has spent several tens of billions of dollars on missile defense research—and yet China, Iran, North Korea and possibly others have continued to pursue increasingly effective long-range ballistic capabilities. If missile defenses are a deterrent, why do US competitors—to say nothing of outright enemies—seem undeterred?

The belief in missile defense as a deterrent is based largely on the gamble that the international community will react to US efforts with awe, equanimity, prudence or some combination of the three that produces the magical condition of deterrence. So far, however, the reality—especially as the missile defense debate has played out in the domestic US political arena—is drastically different. Part of the international problem involves defining the role and limits of weapons in space and weapons directed at assets in space, which include missile defense technologies. Domestically, public opinion has been a strong consideration and justification for dogged US missile defense efforts. The synergy between international confusion and domestic demands has created a conundrum for US national security policy.

Domestically, missile defense has become a kind of totem or rabbit’s foot, clung to by supporters who all too often self-righteously invoke defenses as a political symbol of courage and resolve, with the clear implication that skeptics lack commitment to American security. Despite huge leaps in technology since the early 1980s, the promises of missile defense remain unfulfilled, though this has not stopped aerospace industries from creating a money pit which, we are assured, might—might—produce a system with a “better than zero”[4] chance of at least partially working with just a few more billion-dollar infusions.[5] Internationally, missile defense went from being, in its most generous interpretation, a symbol of US defiance against the relentless Soviet ICBM buildup of the 1970s, to later emerging as a chronic source of irritation and puzzlement to US friends and enemies alike.

In part, this is because the challenges, risks and costs of actually developing, deploying and successfully using a missile defense system—all of which have become clearer with the passage of time—are rarely raised to the public. Some of the technical challenges are potentially insurmountable without defying the laws of physics, and even without defying them, overcoming them demands a level of investment that would require a virtual blank check from the American people.[6] This is not well understood by the average voter; ironically, our anecdotal experience even with students in international security studies is that they seem to think that nuclear weapons are terribly expensive but that defenses would be cheap—the exact opposite of the true costs. Nevertheless, to put it bluntly, the debate regarding whether the United States should have a missile defense system is over; indeed, it could be argued that it never truly took place at all. 

Unsurprisingly, when asked, American citizens want missile defenses. When confronted with the complications, they yawn. But when confronted with the costs, they balk. The health care debate is an instructive analogy: the policymakers who are trying to reform the US health care system think the public is difficult to reason with on the issue of medical costs, and they are. But at least Americans of all political stripes care deeply about the issue and have some experience with the medical system in their daily lives. Trying to involve the public in a meaningful debate on either space policy or missile defense is exponentially more difficult, as neither are issues that arise on a daily basis in Louisiana or Ohio. Further, the more the issues are conveyed (often deliberately) in technical jargon that causes the public to roll their eyes, the more the public is willing to leave the debate to those who profess a better understanding. This often means that the most outspoken participants are not scientists and engineers, but pundits.

And so, for a host of reasons, missile defense in some form is here to stay. Therefore the question becomes whether there are choices that can be made to emphasize the positive aspects of missile defense—and there are some—while minimizing the obvious problems. In particular, the United States needs to avoid the political damage and international instability that result from technologies and systems that seem rational in an abstract military sense, but are inherently politically counterproductive, undeniably fiscally draining and technologically tenuous. As we argue below, changes to US nuclear strategy, space policies and consequently to missile defense programs can complement not only Western anti-proliferation efforts, but also increase both American and global security and stability.  

Challenges and risks associated with missile defense come in multiple varieties, but the technical aspects cannot be separated from either the domestic or international ramifications. The time and cost of the science and engineering trials needed to develop missile defense systems are considerable; worse, they are complicated by the existence of cheaper, technically easier countermeasures.  Even if the technical challenges could be overcome, missile defense offers very limited protection against weapons of mass destruction—no system will be completely leak-proof. It could also be argued that missile defense research assumes by default that a ballistic missile would be an enemy’s nuclear delivery system of choice rather than, for example, a cargo ship, even though a missile comes with a clear return address and would generate a ghastly response. Still, there is no denying that missile defense advocates have a point that the most recalcitrant proliferators—especially North Korea and Iran—are clearly as determined to develop ballistic delivery vehicles as they are to making the bombs they would carry. But even here, perhaps reflecting a case of the classic war gaming mistake of “defending against what we prefer rather than what the enemy can do,” missile defense advocates focus almost unrelentingly on stopping an incoming warhead aimed at an impact point and discount other missile-borne dangers, such as an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack, which would be far easier for a nascent missile-building state to achieve and virtually impossible to stop.

But the more vexing problem underlying the technological questions is the larger issue of intent. The technology of missile defense programs is inherently dual-use, having the capability of carrying out both offensive and defensive objectives.  Skeptics of ballistic missile defense efforts, both domestic and foreign, specifically fear that offense, and not defense, is the actual goal of prolonged US efforts, especially given recent American rhetoric about space “domination” and the evolving changes in the Pentagon’s Prompt Global Strike (PGS) initiative.

The US Air Force, for example, released a document in 2004 that raised eyebrows from Beijing to Brussels with its discussion of “offensive counterspace operations”.[7]Even before that, however, multiple documents, including the 2002 Joint Doctrine for Space Operations[8] (prepared under the direction of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and the 2003 Air Force Transformation Flight Plan,[9] had talked about the need to “deny” other countries the ability to use space in ways the United States deemed threatening. Especially clear in the 2004 document was the idea that to “deny” the use of space meant to “stop” other nations from using their own space assets by whatever means necessary—including, if need be, their actual physical destruction.[10] While these statements reflected military (especially Air Force) views rather than US policy, the 2006 US National Space Policy likewise took a distinctly militant turn in its disdain for international solutions to space security concerns.[11]

Prompt Global Strike, for its part, was originally supposed to be a response to the end of the Cold War and the consequent emergence of asymmetric threats represented by smaller, more unpredictable actors. It was conceived, in the words of analyst Hans Kristensen, “to provide prompt global strike options to the President with nuclear, conventional, space and information warfare capabilities.” Not only did PGS end up emphasizing the military role of space—as any plan that would allow almost instantaneous global action would—it also increased, rather than reduced, the importance of nuclear weapons. Kristensen noted in 2006 that, “one of the first acts of the Pentagon appears to have been to include nuclear weapons in the very plan that was supposed to reduce the nuclear role.”[12] Although Global Strike is still presented as largely a conventional program—to the point where it has been rechristened Conventional Prompt Global Strike (CPGS)—the melding of space, nuclear and conventional capabilities into the program means that an opponent (or, for that matter, a friend or even a disinterested bystander) will not be able to tell what form of attack has been launched until the payload hits the target.

On the one hand, the US development of midcourse intercept systems (those which destroy missiles as they transit space) could be presented by defense advocates as the best chance to stop a nuclear attack away from the homeland given current technologies. But it is unsurprising that other nations would logically view the same capability as a direct threat to the effectiveness of their own nuclear deterrent—which is, after all the point. Short of that, missile defense will likely be seen as an opportunity for the Pentagon to tacitly develop space weapons which will threaten other countries’ capacities in space—all the while Washington pursues policies and capabilities offering American leaders ever more options to use space and nuclear weapons against others. These scenarios leave many other countries understandably anxious. As other nations are not merely passive observers or consumers of US policies, these anxieties generate reactions—and not always in ways that are congenial to American interests.

In January 2010, for example, China’s Xinhua news agency ran a story stating that China had conducted a successful exercise with a missile defense system incorporating ground-based midcourse missile defense technology.[13]Perhaps the timing was coincidental, but at the least it was unfortunate, as the Chinese announcement came out just after the United States finalized plans to send more Patriot missile interceptors to Taiwan. In the United States it was reported that China had successfully intercepted a missile in mid-flight using a ground-based system,[14] though the Xinhua story had made no mention of an intercept. It did, however, state that the test was defensive in nature, much as the Soviets said about their own tests in their day, and echo the same assurances Washington now offers regarding its missile defense objectives. To no one’s surprise, mutual suspicions increased.

 This is where the space weapons issue becomes particularly relevant, since missile defenses, given current and even potential levels of technology, would clearly work better for the foreseeable future as offensive space weapons than as defensive shields. Whether the United States (or any country) could hit a bullet with a bullet, as missile defense purports to do, under non-scripted, operational conditions in which the opponent uses even basic countermeasures, is, to say the least, no sure bet. But the same technology is much better able to hit a highly visible satellite traveling in a predictable orbit around the Earth, as the Chinese demonstrated with a poorly conceived—even recklessly provocative—2007 anti-satellite test. That test, whatever the Chinese motivation, was globally viewed as an irresponsible show of bravado that created an unconscionable amount of dangerous space debris.[15] In the United States, however, the Chinese test was a godsend for missile defense supporters, who suddenly had more ammunition in one day for their arguments than they had previously been able to muster over several years.

Whether through serendipitous coincidence or conscious design, the United States then flexed its own space muscles in 2008 with Operation Burnt Frost. Using a modified version of the Navy’s Aegis missile defense system, the Americans destroyed a malfunctioning US satellite as it fell back to Earth carrying a half-ton of toxic hydrazine fuel. That carefully controlled operation, which successfully minimized the amount of space debris created, was heralded by The Washington Post as demonstrating that “the Pentagon has a new weapon in its arsenal—an anti-satellite missile adapted from the nation’s missile defense system.”[16] The timing of the shoot down and the skill with which it was done fueled speculation that the risk from the hydrazine (the official US justification) may not have been the only reason—particularly since the Department of Defense had declared it no danger to anyone only weeks earlier. The Los Angeles Times credited the hit with bolstering “the credibility of America’s long-troubled missile defense system,”[17] while abroad, fears and doubts about America’s intentions for missile defense heightened.

Advocates of missile defense have vested interests in maintaining the program for a variety of political, philosophical and monetary reasons, some of which have great resonance with the public and some of which mean nothing outside the Washington bubble. In the end, however, this means that major changes to the US missile defense program will only occur in conjunction with a wholesale change of attitudes and approaches both about the uses of space and the direction of US nuclear weapons strategy. The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is over, but the other Cold War—between arms controllers and space weaponization advocates (including missile defense supporters)—continues. One school rejects arms control agreements that in any way, shape or form restrict future US activities in space as not being in the interests of the United States; the other fails to deal realistically with the growing (and bipartisan) fears of policymakers who increasingly doubt the ability to deter countries or groups who seem to have no interest in a stable international system and are seeking to obtain nuclear weapons. As long as these two approaches are dominated by their most intractable partisans, the policy debate, and consequently the status quo—that is, drift and deadlock—will prevail. How, then, can change occur?

The answer begins at the very top. Space and nuclear strategy have languished from a lack of executive-branch attention since the September 11 attacks. A good example is the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which presented missile defense as one leg of a new “triad” (although why nuclear strategy always has to be phrased in threes was unclear). Like its 1994 predecessor, it has to be considered a failure both as a policy and as a communication to the American public, and—again, like its predecessor—essentially sank with little trace soon after its release. At this point it remains an open question whether Barack Obama has become more engaged on these issues. The president cancelled a ground-based European missile defense system and committed the United States to the “getting to zero” concept of abolishing nuclear weapons in his first year in office, but the most recent iteration of the NPR is several months behind schedule and there are fears that the 2010 NPR (which was supposed to be the 2009 NPR) has fallen prey to the same bureaucratic snares that undermined the previous versions.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, among others, is optimistic: “Obama has shown a genuine sense of strategic direction,” he wrote in early 2010, “and a solid grasp of what today’s world is all about, and an understanding of what the United States ought to be doing in it.”[18] But Brzezinski acknowledges that knowing what to do and being able to do it are two different things, and that so far Obama has been stronger at the former than the latter. Nevertheless, comprehensively reconceptualizing US foreign policy in a way that recognizes the world as it is and not as the United States wants it to be (or as it was in the Cold War), is a step in the right direction. In cancelling the European defense program, for example, the Obama administration finally accepted what so many missile defense advocates cannot: that the immediate threat to Western security is more likely to come from medium-range missiles rather than their ICBM big brothers. This is not to say that rogue ICBMs will not be a threat—they are almost certain to be—but that US efforts were misdirected by focusing on the longer time horizon when other threats are coming to fruition much faster.

But broad statements of intent are one thing, actual policies are another. Below, we present three recommendations for moving forward with the missile defense debate. All are related to both space policy and nuclear strategy, and all aim for increased international cooperation on global and space security, based on the assumption that cooperative measures offer the best hope for increasing the possibility of reducing the perception of threat and transforming missile defense into a more stabilizing option. We acknowledge that these are controversial and potentially complicated to implement, and do not cover all the difficult issues (such as the potential use of small or micro satellites as space weapons) but we offer them in the hope of stimulating further debate and renewed consideration of these issues.

While the dual-use nature of much of space technology in general and missile defense in particular blurs the ability to discern political intent behind technological innovation, both the United States and China tend to assume the worst about the other regarding space ambitions. Realists might argue that given the geopolitical tensions between them it would be imprudent for the two sides to do otherwise; others might argue that increased engagement between them has narrowed what was once a huge and dangerous ideological gulf. In any case, in the long-term increased confidence building measures—such as increased space situational awareness and data sharing (regarding debris that could damage spacecraft, for example)—could help to abate a space race; in the near term, a solid step forward would be to draw a clearer line between TMD and NMD, and putting, at least for a time, the exo-atmospheric BMD genie back in the bottle.

 As both a deterrent and a protective shield against attacks, the deployment of missile defense systems in operational theaters is established and accepted. But whether defenses are “defensive” is often a matter of perception and so their location and purpose should be clear. Unfortunately, missile defense systems, due to the possibility of using them in both offensive roles and defensive roles, create the kind of uncertainties that generate security dilemmas, where fear of being exploited drives countries to act in ways that ultimately do not serve their best interests.[19] This is why making the distinction between theater and national defenses could be a crucial step in ratcheting down tensions while increasing global security.

Until the George W. Bush administration, missile defense was distinctly and deliberately categorized into different varieties, with theater missile defense (the ability to intercept missiles at short to medium range in a theater of combat) and national missile defense (the national “shield” against long-range missile attack) being the two clear variants. TMD involves intercepting missiles at ranges of only hundreds, or even tens, of kilometers to protect a localized region of military operations, and has thus been generally accepted by the international community for some time. Their acceptance is based on the assumption that their use would occur only when hostilities were already underway, and that they therefore do not have a disruptive influence on crisis stability or general deterrence.

The United States and Russia, for example, designated multiple, relatively low-altitude corridors for flight trajectories as acceptable for TMD programs even while the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty explicitly banning longer-range interception efforts was in place. The ABM Treaty itself (signed in 1972 and exited by Washington in 2001) showed that neither the United States nor the then-Soviet Union cared much about TMD. Indeed, the treaty itself, while voluminous with addenda about the characteristics of the interceptors it allowed, was essentially silent on this point because the larger issue was preventing World War III rather than stopping the theater missile technology of the day. Also, the theater nuclear weapons of the 1960s were to be delivered, at least theoretically, in large numbers by fighter-attack aircraft, and so there was little point in distinguishing a separate “TMD” from “theater air defense” in general.

Where TMD really comes into play is in regard to smaller powers. What missile defense should look like largely depends on what it is intended to do, and while “protecting the United States” is a good sound bite, it offers little in the way of direction for those who must develop, configure and operate the systems dedicated to that mission. Phrases like “protection against rogue missiles” play well in American politics, especially since September 11, but this kind of language blurs the distinction between missiles from unnamed rogue states, accidental launches from other states or some other, unforeseen circumstance (like a catastrophic loss of command and control in the Russian missile force).

The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) says that American efforts are targeted at rogue states such as North Korea and Iran. Russia and China, however, have their doubts, although there is a fair degree of disingenuousness involved on their part, especially among Russian policymakers who know perfectly well that the Russian nuclear force can overwhelm any possible US defenses for the foreseeable future. The more pressing question, and the one missile defense advocates cannot seem to answer, is under what scenario Russia or China (or anyone else, sane or otherwise) would launch just one or two nuclear warheads—which is what the United States launched at imaginary enemies and assumed was launched at US targets in a 2007 war game—since that is all a fully functional NMD system could intercept at best.[20] Even if a better a NMD system could intercept more missiles, the Russians and the Chinese have plenty of ICBMs, know how to make more, and can overwhelm any system the United States can field in our lifetimes. 

 And even if there is a certain cynicism in Russian and Chinese complaints, it is still fair to ask why the United States is not concentrating specifically on the more likely problem of missiles fired by countries such as Iran and North Korea. The Russian argument in particular was undercut by President Obama’s cancellation of the Polish and Czech interceptor sites. A return to a clearer delineation between TMD and NMD can only improve both American defense and US standing in the world—which in turn would help Washington seize the high ground against proliferators.

 Unfortunately, Obama’s decision about the proposed European system sparked an outpouring of hypocrisy remarkable even by the low standards of international politics. Critics pointed to the “symbolic aspects”[21] of a fixed missile defense deployment, since American troops would be there to operate those missiles and hence serve as some sort of trip-wire against, apparently, a Russian attack of some kind. The Russians, of course, claimed the interceptors were more suited to targeting Russian strategic missiles than the Iranian missiles they were ostensibly there to defend against. Both sides knew that both circumstances were highly implausible or even ridiculous: no one asked how or why, for example, Russia—which barely won a war against tiny Georgia—was going to march across 52 million Ukrainians, attack NATO and precipitate a global conflict.[22] The Russians, for their part, blithely ignored their ability to overwhelm the system.

Indeed, if the Russians were so concerned, it is unlikely that they would have accepted the new follow-on START treaty, which they did in late March 2010. Second, however, is the more salient issue: the Russians know that any expansion of the system won’t seriously degrade their nuclear deterrent since the interceptors are simply too close to the Russian missiles to be of any danger to them—especially since the Russians in the past few years have unveiled a new mobile ICBM that solves even that potential threat. And although an all-out, dedicated American surprise attack might cripple the Russian arsenal, one can only wonder why such an attack would take place and imagine the terrible consequences for the United States (and the world) even if it is 99 percent effective. That last one percent is no small deterrent, and the Russians surely know it.

The more likely explanation for the whole fracas was the general irritation between Moscow and Washington since the 2003 Gulf War (and maybe even since the Cold War itself): the United States probably wanted to poke the Russians in the eye by putting high-technology systems in former Warsaw Pact nations, and the Russians likewise wanted to show that nothing could happen in their former empire without their concurrence.

For the most part, responses from European capitals to Obama’s decision were positive. Europe’s support for Bush’s missile defense plan was tenuous at best, a mistrust borne out of eight years of hard-edged American unilateralist moves. If a new missile defense program is multinational and integrated with NATO, as President Obama has stated it will be, that would be a solid step toward making missile defense a truly cooperative program.

Including Russia would be an ever greater step forward. The Russians, of course, are less generous. General Nikolai Makarov, chief of the Russian general staff, brushed aside Obama’s change of plan, saying Russia “had a negative attitude to everything that concerns missile defense,” probably because Russia has never been able to crack the technical problems either and has completely starved its military R&D sector for 15 years out of sheer financial scarcity.[23] But Makarov did add that the only form of missile defense acceptable to Russia would be joint missile defense with Russian involvement. Whether the Russians are serious is unclear, but an effort should be made to find out, and the West should dare the Russians to back up their rhetoric with real cooperation if offered sincerely. Reassuring Europe, reducing the threat from Iranian missiles and stabilizing relations with Russia through a cooperative missile defense system would be a political trifecta, a win all around for the United States, Russia and Europe—and would carry the added benefit of being a defeat of the first order for Iran’s divide-and-conquer strategy against Russia and the West. 

In Asia the situation is somewhat trickier—and more dire. Japan has generally been supportive of US missile defense plans, including SDI, since the 1980s.  In the early days Japan’s participation was mostly symbolic of its linked-arms security cooperation arrangements with the Unite States, useful to both countries for reaffirming commitments to regional security and mitigating the political damage done by occasional economic and trade disputes.

But things changed—and the Japanese started to concentrate on the whole missile defense issue in a more serious way—when North Korea in the late 1990s started testing more robust missiles, as they did in 1998 when they launched the Taepodong-1, a two-stage missile theoretically capable of reaching across much of East Asia.. That test, though a technological failure for North Korea, spurred even Japanese pacifists into action, with Japan approving plans for a previously controversial Information Gathering Satellite (IGS) System[24] and joining Washington in a cooperative ballistic missile defense R&D program shortly thereafter. When the Bush administration affirmed in 2002 its decision (ostensibly in the wake of successful tests) to deploy a national missile defense system, Japanese officials likewise began to defend the idea that NMD was technologically feasible.

But the Japanese, unlike NATO members, have a geopolitical ability to hedge the whole TMD/NMD divide: as an island nation, Japan can use theater missile defense systems to build a national missile defense. In December 2003 the Japanese cabinet issued a decision entitled “On the Introduction of a Ballistic Missile Defense System and Other Measures”[25] which made the establishment of a serious missile defense system a national priority. Additional North Korean launches have accelerated Japan’s development and deployment of improved interceptors, with the intent that their TMD be more like an NMD: a sea-based, exo-atmospheric midcourse missile defense (Aegis) and ground-based terminal phase missile defense (Patriot Advanced Capabilities-3, or PAC-3).  By 2011, PAC-3 missiles are planned for deployment at 16 sites around major Japanese cities. Japan has also changed its policy regarding the use of space from “non-military” to “non-aggressive”, largely to protect its own possible investment in missile defenses in the wake of Pyongyang’s relentless pursuit both of nuclear bombs and missile delivery systems.

China’s strategic concerns have always been more along the lines of those of Russia: that national missile defense threatens its nuclear deterrent—in China’s case, a very limited nuclear deterrent—thereby giving the United States not just a shield, but a shield from under which it can threaten the use of a sword. These concerns were heightened during the Bush administration, whose adamant support for missile defense was complimented by unilateralist policies and an open characterization of China as the next peer competitor of the United States in all but perfunctory rhetoric at the highest levels of government. To be fair, some of this hardening of American attitudes was to be expected in the wake of repeated Chinese provocations, including the reckless downing of a US military aircraft in international airspace in the early months of the Bush administration in 2001. But in the end, the fact remains that the Chinese must contend with massive American nuclear superiority and little is to be gained by pressing the point. Nothing will alter China’s ability to destroy several American cities and kill millions of American citizens. But neither can anything alter the reality that the Chinese, unlike the Russians and their large ICBM force, cannot completely turn the United States into a desert. A major Sino-American war would be a severe but likely not an ultimately existential blow to the United States. To the contrary, the only certain outcome is that China itself would physically cease to exist. What NMD contributes to this standoff, other than unrealistic military scenarios, consequent tensions and needless diplomatic friction, is unclear.

Perhaps the more important near-term concern in Beijing is that an emboldened Taiwan could move toward independence under a US missile shield. The Americans, for their part, have every reason to distrust Chinese motives. As a Chinese general warned the Clinton administration, the United States would not interfere in a war with Taiwan because “you care more about Los Angeles.” The result of this kind of Sino-American chest-thumping has been  predictable: the Americans want missile defenses and the Chinese want more and better missiles.[26]

Even the new Obama plan, however, presents the potential for a future nightmare. Over the next decade the intent is to equip Aegis ships with the much larger, faster exo-atmospheric interceptors currently being developed with Japan. According to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and General James Cartwright, the former head of Strategic Command, the long-range goal is to deploy a global network of mobile interceptors and sensors. General Cartwright stated in late 2009 that the United States intends to build “a sufficient number of ships to allow us to have a global deployment of this capability on a constant basis, with a surge capacity to any one theater at a time.”[27] If the Chinese were the Russians, they would be able to brush off Cartwright’s statement, because Russian missiles are so numerous (and so far deeply buried in Eurasia) that no US naval component could even begin to stop them. But the small size and location of the Chinese arsenal means that a mobile, sea-based missile defense could create the same kind of concerns about the Chinese deterrent that Moscow has about the threat to the Russian deterrent posed by space-based weapons. None of this is to argue that the United States should spend undue effort reassuring Russia (which claims to be a friendly democracy) and China (which is still technically a revolutionary, anti-liberal power) about the security of their nuclear forces. Rather, the point is that the pursuit of national missile defenses will serve only to wreak diplomatic and political havoc for the sake of a technology unable to provide real security.

A reasonable question here is why NMD threatens the Chinese deterrent in a way that TMD does not. Without doubt, TMD efforts complicate the Chinese ability to act in their own region—viewed by the United States and many other countries as good—since that would be the point of deploying a system in that theater. But rejecting a larger NMD system designed to protect the United States is a signal, however tenuous, that Washington is not trying to steal a march on the Chinese by suppressing its strategic deterrent. In a sense, a TMD deployment in the Pacific could replicate the US-Soviet dynamic, with a great deal of stability at the strategic level, even if that means somewhat less stability at lower levels of conflict. The object is to avoid a central nuclear exchange and NMD threatens (or implies that the Americans want to threaten) China's small deterrent. TMD by contrast tries to maintain peace by telling the Chinese that the Americans are seeking not a perfect defense, but an updated version of escalation dominance: neither side can prevail at the level of regional conflict and neither side can escalate because the consequences at that level will be ghastly—and thus even a small conflict is pointless. This is not a threat to China’s existence, but it is unquestionably a warning that strategic deterrence does not then create a situation where the PRC can run roughshod over it neighbors.

Even if we accept that NMD would seem to be a threat on a global level, this does not then logically mean we must accept that any protection from missiles at any level is likewise a bellicose attempt to establish a “peace shield”. This was the rationale for scaling back the European program and it is a perfectly logical approach to apply to Pacific security as well. Chinese objections to any defenses at all in this context have to seem equally as disingenuous as those heard last year from Moscow. Theater missile defense is a threat to no one—except, of course, powers interested in launching theater-range ballistic missiles.

Supporters of missile defense quite sensibly point out that missiles carrying nuclear warheads are exponentially more threatening than those armed with conventional warheads and that the real issue is therefore not missiles, but nuclear missiles. That premise is as valid today as it was during the Cold War and concern about how to defeat that threat does not belong solely to missile defense advocates. The question is how best to stop the warhead. To this end the debate over missile defense should be reconceptualized as a debate over ballistic nuclear missile proliferation: the problem is not missiles and it is not warheads. It is warheads coupled to missiles.

What is our ultimate security goal? If the answer is to protect Americans and others from nuclear weapons, then, except in a very narrow range of situations, missile defense is not the answer. The more secure (if less palatable) answer is to deal with missiles before they leave the launch pad and extinguish nuclear weapon programs before they come to fruition. President Obama has stated that his goal, like that of President Reagan (and even earlier, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev), is “getting to zero”, a world without nuclear weapons.  Getting there will be difficult in the best of circumstances, but there is great promise when Gorbachev, Henry Kissinger, Lord George Robertson, Sam Nunn and others all end up on the same side of such a momentous issue, as they recently have. 

In the meantime, however, dangers abound. Graham Allison recently described the global nuclear order as “as fragile as the global financial order was two years ago, when conventional wisdom declared it to be sound, stable and resilient”.[28] He cites numerous threats undermining the existing nuclear order, including North Korea’s expanding nuclear weapons program, Iran’s continuing nuclear ambitions, Pakistan’s increasing instability, growing cynicism about the nonproliferation regime and others.[29] Allison points out that countries or groups hostile to the United States have, or might acquire, nuclear weapons, that nuclear technology is spreading and that acquiring nuclear weapons apparently gives an opponent of the United States a “get out of jail free” card for bad behavior—all in an environment of increased skepticism regarding the ability of the international system to exert any control.

Arms control agreements, preventive diplomacy, international law, lengthening the reaction time of missile systems, exchange of surveillance data, more transparency and the like are all sensible confidence-building measures to abate the threat of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, because they are long-term they are something like a sanctions regime: it takes time for them to work and so they are unlikely to be enough to assuage the legitimate concerns of missile defense supporters. And whether arms control advocates like it or not, there must be a plan “if all else fails”. Sadly, there are countries, leaders and organizations which cannot be counted to act reasonably, in support of the international system or even rationally, and they cannot be allowed to threaten or launch nuclear tipped missiles at the United States or any other country.

Liberals may quail at the solution, but there may be no alternative to preventive strikes—and not just the quiet prevention enforced by spies and special forces, but the outright destruction of incipient threats by major military action. Although Americans often choose to ignore the difference, preventive strikes against enemies or on the soil of complicit third parties are in effect acts of war, whether executed by a single unmanned drone or an entire armada of aircraft carriers, and the United States will face hard choices in the coming decade. But it is important to note that the notion of preventive strikes is not some right-wing fantasy. Clinton administration defense officials Ashton Carter and William Perry (the former now a senior member of Obama’s Defense Department, the latter once Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, and both Democrats) bit the bullet of preventive action in a 2006 Washington Post editorial discussing North Korean missiles:

Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to US soil? We believe not. The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of "preemption," which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma...But intervening before mortal threats to US security can develop is surely a prudent policy. Therefore, if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched. [emphasis added][30]

More recently, former legal advisor to the US State Department Abraham Sofaer has suggested that preventive force may be America’s best defense against future threats. The idea of taking out a missile on its launch pad will surely raise the specter of American unilateralism in some countries. One objection might be that such a strike, at least in the case of North Korea, could provoke Pyongyang’s mercurial leader to war. But what will not provoke North Korea, short of accepting all of its demands? And what, one must ask, is the purpose of a three-stage North Korea missile if not to be able to conduct a war in Asia while holding the United States at bay with nuclear blackmail?

A desperate, one-time strike is an unnerving thing to contemplate. But it should be less abhorrent to both advocates and opponents of missile defenses than the genuinely destabilizing alternatives of ongoing deployments of space weapons, increased numbers of nuclear delivery vehicles (in the name of robust deterrence, perhaps?) or the permanent acceptance by the United States or its allies that any country or group, no matter how hostile or crazy, should be able to launch a long-range nuclear weapon at will.[31]

 Ideally, if the international will could be mustered, the decision to take such action should be a multinational one.[32] Unfortunately, the only currently existing body with even the potential authority to do so is the United Nations, which has repeatedly proved itself unable to function in the areas of high politics where it is needed the most. One possibility is to refer such decisions to a modified version of the U.N. Security Council consisting of liberal democracies, which might be responsible because they represent legitimately elected governments, but the reform of the Security Council is beyond the scope of this paper.[33]  Though that clearly raises issues for countries like China, a multilateral approach (at least as a first resort) would force critics of American unilateralism to either step up and take action when threats from weapons of mass destruction clearly present themselves, or step aside so the United States and other concerned powers can do so. Moreover, no matter what the international community thinks or wants, it is highly unlikely that Americans will abandon exo-atmospheric missile defense systems without some kind of quid pro quo from the rest of the developed world—nor should they. It is hard to imagine the Russians or the French agreeing to such magnanimity and there is no reason that the citizens of New York or Seattle should feel any more vulnerable than those of Paris or Moscow.

In 2001 John Newhouse (who years earlier had written one of the best histories of the nuclear arms race) presciently looked ahead and predicted the troubled future of national missile defense.

Missile defense...will become the poster child for multiple complaints about American unilateralism and indifference to the concerns of others…A credible NMD—one that could overcome the simpler and cheaper gadgets designed to spoof it—might in the end be out of reach. But the necessarily huge effort in resources, time and energy would not have been much ado about nothing. The political damage would have been done. Along the way, national missile defense may breach some of technology’s frontiers, but it is unlikely to remove or contain the serious threats to stability and security. Instead, it could make the world less stable and the United States a more insular and vulnerable place.[34] 

President Obama’s decision not to place silo-based interceptors in Eastern Europe is clearly an attempt to undo some of the damage that Newhouse so accurately predicted. Without additional steps, however, it will soon be forgotten as an impulsive decision of a new president, especially if the Russians refuse to reciprocate (as they so far have not) with better cooperation on issues like the Iranian program. As David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund pointed out, “the announcement demonstrates that US missile defense policy continues to be based on domestic politics rather than technical reality.” Obama’s decision could thus prove to be only as lasting or important as his own political capital allows it to be.[35]

While Obama’s decision was generally received positively, the fact remains that there are no incentives for other countries to consider deep cuts in their strategic forces without the assurances granted by some sort of multilateral follow-on arrangement to protect the space global commons as well as earthly security. US actions have not helped ease these concerns: when the United States withdrew from the ABM Treaty in December 2001, it didn’t just exit a diplomatic agreement, it ripped it up and threw it in Russia’s face (one of many inexplicable moments in America’s strangely uneven Russian policy since 1993). Other than the unavoidable damage to the US image abroad as the global strategic leader, the US repudiation of the ABM Treaty carried few repercussions. Even the Russians, in essence, shrugged.

In an increasingly globalized world, however, image does matter. The domestic and international political support given to the Bush administration in the days post September 11 practically gave the Americans carte blanche in international affairs. Both the NATO and ANZUS treaties were activated for the first time in history, and US actions were essentially blessed by the international community as self-defense. While Al Qaeda did not possess missiles, the Bush administration had a window of opportunity to accomplish a number of foreign affairs agenda items not necessarily related to fighting terrorism (invading Iraq, for example) and Washington took full advantage—wisely or not—of the situation. While many governments supported President Bush’s actions on some issues, their publics did not. The Obama administration has now, at least temporarily, improved the global image of the United States by being open to multilateralism and international cooperation, and this has opened diplomatic opportunities.

Support has been building, for example, for “Rules of the Road” for space. [36] These rules would work much as they have on the open seas, establishing practices among the community of nations navigating an open commons. The United States should take the lead in developing and accepting these rules, including a pledge, at least for now, not to test or operate exo-atmospheric missile defense systems. Of course, even this pledge might not be necessary: both the United States and China seem to have had enough for now, and exo-atmospheric testing might become something like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on nuclear testing, where the piece of paper itself pales next to a more general norm coalescing against nuclear testing itself. The next few months will be telling in this regard, as the Pentagon’s space policy review—like the overdue Nuclear Posture Review—has been delayed for another look by the administration.[37]

After a decade of abstaining or voting against United Nations’ space arms control efforts, this would not only demonstrate Washington’s willingness to practice what it preaches (and thus alleviate liberal concerns about American imperiousness) but it would also force a choice on other nations that conservatives should appreciate: states that are truly interested in peaceful space development will either have to put up or shut up. Nothing could force the issue more clearly than an American challenge to other nations to join in a moratorium. Such a challenge would indeed separate the wolves from the lambs.

Moreover, rules should be established to deal with emerging theater threats. While the overall goal might be to hold the line on the exo-atmospheric systems and establish best practices for space-faring nations, only the most credulous arms controller would ignore the obvious dangers of Iranian and North Korean programs. But the trick for the United States is to use an agreement to solve more problems than it ultimately creates. The way to do this would be to take yet another step toward declaring space to be a non-weaponized global commons, and threaten to take the lead in the technological race should other nations refuse to agree. Americans are a creative and innovative people, and left to their own devices they will develop everything from GPS-driven rental cars to hand-held phones that can also play Scrabble. But as any now-dejected Soviet scientist can confirm, when angered the Americans can pour almost limitless resources into military research that can produce smart bombs, stealth aircraft, floating cities that can take over entire nations on their own and even put dune buggies on the moon while earth-bound scientists were still trying to figure out how to make intermittent windshield wipers. A US promise to redirect this massive national potential to the international common interest would serve two ultimately related purposes:  it would be a concrete example of American willingness to work multilaterally within the international system toward global security in general and space security more specifically, and if rejected by other nations it would also serve as the warning that the United States is fully willing to unleash its technological prowess if its multilateral advances are rebuffed. The Americans could put forward a new agenda much like the eagle in the Great Seal of the United States, with olive branches in one hand and arrows in the other: join us in making space an arena of peace or suffer the consequences of goading the Americans into excelling at a new, unprecedented military competition in the heavens.

One of the other difficulties to contend with is how to hold the line on exo-atmospheric missile defense systems while not inhibiting the right of other countries to develop indigenous space capabilities. There is of course a model for allowing countries to develop a technology for civil use while controlling its potential military use—the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Just as we can offer to help other nations harness nuclear power without trespassing into the development of nuclear weapons, so too can the space-faring nations offer to help other countries into the heavens. But the carrot must go with the stick: the same nations who can help others reach into space are the same nations—the United States, the EU, Russia and China chief among them—who can turn space into an arena of chaos and violence that can almost effortlessly keep lesser powers earthbound if they have a mind to do so. Space, like the limitless potential of nuclear energy, may be the common right of all mankind but the nations that have escaped Earth’s bounds, like the nations that have split the atom, can make clear that they did not grasp these great achievements only to see them used as shortcuts to power and blackmail by ill-tempered dictatorships.

When it comes to space, nuclear weapons and missile defense, the technology of the 21st century still raises the question that prevailed in the dusty streets of American frontier towns in the 19th: will the fastest and most violent guns prevail, or will a lawman come to town? If the United States concentrates on non exo-atmospheric theater defenses, takes the lead in negotiation of multilateral Rules of the (high) Road, and makes clear that rogue nuclear missiles will not be tolerated under any circumstances, then the metaphor might shift from a lawless space frontier to a posse of like-minded citizens determined to keep the peace. The policies we propose could, we hope, open a window of opportunity for follow-on multilateral discussions about both space and deterrence, to move closer to a treaty to ban space weapons (one clearly favored by many nations), and to take actions—some of which might require great fortitude and even great violence—to strengthen the nonproliferation regime. The end result would be major cuts in nuclear arsenals and, in the best of all worlds, the extinguishing of nuclear delusions among mullahs and madmen.

But none of this will happen without bold political leadership. The United States needs to reestablish itself as the global leader it is by right and reason rather than by force—and also to reestablish that the use of force, when necessary, is justified as a last resort rather than the first. It is now a cliché to say that the Cold War is over, but until Cold War thinking about nuclear weapons, space and deterrence are extinguished the threat of annihilation still hangs over us.