News Abroad

Bush's Maginot Line in the Sky

by Lawrence S. Wittner

Mr. Wittner is Professor of History at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is TOWARD NUCLEAR ABOLITION: A HISTORY OF THE WORLD NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT MOVEMENT, 1971 TO THE PRESENT(Stanford University Press).

Forty years ago, when a U.S. participant in an international nuclear arms control conference proposed a treaty to ban anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems, the head of the Soviet delegation said that there must have been a problem with the translation. He had heard the interpreter say that the objective was to ban defensive weapons systems, he remarked, when it was obvious that the danger lay in offensive weapons. But, in fact, the U.S. delegate had indeed proposed banning defensive weapons. The 1964 conference was part of a series of unofficial Pugwash meetings that brought together U.S. and Soviet scientists for serious discussions of how to halt the nuclear arms race between their two nations. The U.S. speaker was the physicist Jack Ruina, who--along with other members of the U.S. delegation--proceeded to explain that, in the context of preparations for war, when one nation added a defensive military system, this encouraged rival nations to build up their offensive military systems. Additional shields led to additional swords.

Pentagon officials were also growing worried about the development of anti-ballistic missile systems. After the Soviet Union began building an ABM system outside of Moscow, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara went to President Lyndon Johnson and argued that the deployment of Soviet and American ABM systems would not only lead to the building of additional offensive missiles, but would be costly and ineffective. In this context, the Johnson administration began to press its Soviet counterpart for a treaty to freeze the construction of offensive missiles and to ban ABM systems. At first, Kremlin officials were reluctant to move forward along these lines. But, advised by Soviet participants in the Pugwash conferences, they, too, began to see the drawbacks in missile defense and the advantages in bringing the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race under control.

Consequently, in 1972 they signed the ABM treaty with the Nixon administration. Although the treaty did not entirely ban ABM systems, it severely restricted the development of missile defense. Eventually, both the United States and the Soviet Union simply shut down the very limited ABM systems that the treaty left in place. Meanwhile, they agreed to curbs on their arsenals of long range ballistic missiles.

These actions probably would have brought an end to this dangerous and costly variant of the nuclear arms race had it not been for President Ronald Reagan. In 1983, with great fanfare, he announced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which became better known as "Star Wars." SDI, Reagan argued, would destroy all nuclear missiles fired at the United States, thus sparing the American people the consequences of nuclear war.

Organizations of scientists and members of Congress immediately denounced SDI, arguing--like their predecessors--that there was no evidence that this fantastic plan would work, that it was exceptionally costly, and that it would encourage other nations to build up their missile forces. They also pointed out that other nations could frustrate it easily by deploying decoy missiles that would confuse the defenders. Much of the public viewed SDI, at best, as a crackpot scheme; at worst, as dangerous.

In these circumstances, the Democratic Congress failed to appropriate the large amounts of money requested for SDI research and development by the Reagan administration and by the successor administration, that of George Bush. Even so, the program went forward on a limited basis. And after the Republican capture of Congress in 1994, missile defense funding grew appreciably.

However, by 1999, despite the spending of more than $100 billion on missile defense, the U.S. government still did not have a workable system. Indeed, U.S. anti-missile systems had failed fourteen of their last eighteen tests. Nor did these tests take into account the enormous difficulties that would emerge in knocking down a missile, moving at supersonic speed, that would be fired at an unknown time from an unknown place. Against that discouraging backdrop, President Clinton announced that he would not authorize the deployment of national missile defense, but would leave that decision to his successor.

George W. Bush, campaigning for the presidency in 2000, was considerably more enthusiastic about deployment. As a result, after he reached the White House, he moved forward with it. In December 2001, to facilitate the building of a national missile defense system, he gave Russia notice that he was withdrawing the United States from the ABM treaty. This U.S. action dismayed governments around the world. It not only demolished one of the pillars of the worldwide nuclear arms control regime, but effectively scrapped the START II nuclear disarmament treaty, for the Russian Duma had ratified START II contingent on the U.S. government's compliance with the ABM treaty.

These setbacks to nuclear arms control and disarmament, however, have done nothing to diminish the Republican infatuation with national missile defense. At present, Congress is considering the Bush administration's request for yet another $10.2 billion to continue developing and deploying a ballistic missile shield. The deployment of a limited shield is officially scheduled to begin in September 2004.

Thus, despite the fact that such a system has yet to be proven effective, that its future development will cost vast sums of money (current estimates run as high as $1.2 trillion), and that it seems likely to spur other nations to build more nuclear weapons to counter it, the Bush administration and Republican leaders in Congress seem determined to deploy it.

They would do well to remember the Maginot Line, a supposedly impregnable military barrier that the French government erected on France's eastern border in the 1930s to block a German invasion. By building it, the French lulled themselves into a false sense of security. Ultimately, when war came, German forces simply swept around the Maginot Line and easily conquered France. Both nations would have been far better served if they had focused less on preparing for a future war and more on how to secure a peaceful world.

Today, the Bush administration does not even have the excuse of French officials in the 1930s. After all, the United States does not face any nation that comes anywhere near effectively challenging its military power. And yet the administration seems to have abandoned all common sense by pursuing a costly, provocative, and dangerous will o' the wisp: a Maginot Line in the sky.