December 20, 2001	Thursday	Shawwal 4, 1422

WASHINGTON: By formally moving last week to withdraw the United States from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, President Bush has opened the way to more aggressive testing of assorted technologies for defending the nation against long-range missile attack.

But he has not silenced arguments over whether such systems are feasible, affordable or necessary. Bush’s unilateral action is unsettling to critics at home and abroad who do not share his enthusiasm for jumping to a new strategic framework free of Cold War-style arms control accords. Bringing them along will be a challenge. The president and his team will have to come up with the answers to questions about how this new world order is supposed to function, and why other countries should feel reassured by America’s new direction.

With the removal of the ABM Treaty freeing the administration to invest billions of dollars - not to mention a major chunk of presidential political capital - in fresh experimentation the stakes are higher than ever: Either Bush and his fellow missile defence enthusiasts will win big, or they will fail spectacularly.

That the United States and the world should again be arguing over national missile defence ought to come as no surprise. Missile defence is one of the great phoenixes of US national security policy: It keeps rising from the ashes of Washington debates.

No sooner had the idea started to soar again under Bush this year than it seemed to falter after the attacks of Sept 11. Critics argued that the terrorists’ reliance on low-tech hijackings rather than high-tech missiles proved Bush had been concentrating on the wrong threat. But Bush last week invoked the September tragedy as all the more reason to proceed with missile defence. In a speech at The Citadel, the military college of South Carolina, Bush urged his audience to consider this: If terrorists could do the horrendous damage they did just by hijacking a few commercial airliners, imagine what might happen if they ever got their hands on long-range, nuclear-tipped missiles.

Such is the nature of the enduring controversy over missile defence. Each side will look at the same event and interpret it to its own ends. It is a dynamic that has been at work since the first major public debate on the issue in the 1960s, long before Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative.

The Bush administration’s ambitious testing programme includes a provision for realizing at least a rudimentary anti-missile system by the next presidential election in 2004. The successful test earlier this month of a prototype land-based interceptor, which hit a mock enemy warhead over the central Pacific, has only reinforced the administration’s drive.

But many scientists, arms control advocates and Democratic lawmakers remain either wary of or opposed to the project, questioning whether a national anti-missile system can ever work reliably and be built affordably - and whether enough of a threat exists to warrant such a weapon. Even if Russia and our NATO allies end up grudgingly accepting US abandonment of the ABM Treaty, critics fear other adverse consequences. It will, they warn, spur China to add to plans to build up its offensive weapons. It will undermine US attempts to persuade other nations to abide by their international commitments. And it will undercut the credibility of international nonproliferation policies by appearing to presuppose their failure.

For Bush himself, the idea of an anti-missile shield is tied less to the thought of ever needing to use it and more to allowing America to act abroad without fear of subjecting Americans at home to attack. “You can’t be an internationalist if you allow yourself to be blackmailed,” the president said in an interview last summer. “If you believe, like I believe, that our values are so good and we can spread those values in a way that hopefully is not arrogant - in a humble way - if you believe that’s important, which I do, then the corollary is: How do you make sure you’re able to do that without somebody saying, “If you move, if you act, if you decide to get involved, we’ll blow you up?”

What is it about missile defence that has made it so controversial for so long? That question often ran through my mind during a year and a half of researching and writing a book on why an issue - dismissed by many after the demise of the Soviet Union as a relic of the Cold War - came surging back in the final years of the Clinton administration and assumed its place as a high-priority objective of the Bush administration.

Part of the answer lies in the gravity of what is at stake - namely, survival in an age of nuclear weapons. Since the 1960s, the United States has observed a strategic doctrine that relies on a balance of mutual nuclear terror to forestall a first strike. Called “mutual assured destruction,” this doctrine is credited with having prevented nuclear war between Washington and Moscow for four decades. So understandably, there is a reluctance among many to tamper with success. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.