LONDON: Even though Russia is no longer a remotely conceivable enemy, missile defence is still what a US president wants to do. Vladimir Putin described President Bush’s decision to withdraw from the anti-ballistic missile treaty as a mistake, but one that need not affect “the spirit of partnership and indeed alliance” between the US and Russia.

With hardly any exceptions, the experts in America, Russia, and other countries agreed that missile defences could neither provide an umbrella for the whole population nor constitute an insurmountable obstacle to a major adversary.

From the beginning the Star Wars concept, ambiguously embracing both defensive and offensive ambitions, based on weapons that did not exist and on possibilities that were almost certainly not fully realisable, has had this elusive, fictional quality.

The way in which missile defence survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war can only be fully explained by its talismanic importance to American conservatives. The USSR was gone, defence spending was falling, public interest had almost completely disappeared and the technological breakthroughs which had been promised had stubbornly failed to materialise.

Yet missile defence lived on, sustained by the initially less than enthusiastic administration of George Bush Snr and then by a reluctant Clinton, finally to be reinstated as a key policy by the younger Bush and his people.

Events wrote US missile defence a fresh script with new practical, popular and political plot lines. Missile defence made somewhat more sense, technically, if the problem was accidental launch, a single weapon in the hands of terrorists or if the adversary envisaged was not a big nuclear power like Russia or even China but a small state with only a handful of unsophisticated weapons.

A system that could bring down one, two or a few missiles could just about be envisaged, even if complete success could hardly be guaranteed. The popular perception of the programme combined an understanding that this lesser task was more feasible with an exaggerated belief in American military science.

The apparent success of Patriot missiles in bringing down Scuds aimed at Israel and Saudi Arabia during the Gulf war was followed by a spurt in public interest and faith in missile defence. The Patriots were in fact a failure, as studies after the war showed, and in any case represented old technology not relevant to Star Wars tasks.

Even so, the impact of smart weapons of various kinds on American popular consciousness through the 1990s was probably to reinforce the argument that the missile defence programme’s objectives could be reached, if enough money and scientific talent were invested.

But the most important development was political. The record shows that American conservatives had in fact diverse opinions on missile defence, both during the Reagan years and afterward. There were those who thought it technically impossible, foolish or at least a diversion from more pressing defence needs.

In Reagan’s final period, when he combined his faith in Star Wars with an apparent readiness to bargain away American strategic weapons and an affectionate public attitude to Gorbachev, some on the right thought that combination damaging to the national interest.

George Bush Snr’s administration included a number of sceptics, and there are members of the present Bush administration, other than Colin Powell, who had their doubts.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.