Ed Morrissey: Missile Defense is Too Complicated for Me to Understand
By There has always been an air of absurdity about the opposition to missile-defense systems. No one argues that missiles aren’t a threat, but somehow defending ourselves against it is illegitimate unless one stumbles on a complete, perfect defense immediately. That we have never found a perfect defense against any weapon on the first throw doesn’t appear to faze people at all….Is it cheap? Of course not — but it’s a lot less expensive than the alternative of having missiles hit cities in Europe or the US. If Minneapolis suddenly disappeared in a North Korean mushroom cloud, I’d bet that the costs, even outside of the human costs, would be exponentially larger than everything we’ve spent on missile defense for the last 25 years put together.
Ed, let me explain something to you, slowly and carefully. Missile defense, at least when conceived as a response to the threat of nuclear attack on the United States, needs to be “complete and perfect.” Otherwise it’s useless. There are virtually no foreign policy goals that a President will consider worthwhile if there’s a 5% risk that the destruction of American cities will result. 80% doesn’t cut it; 95% doesn’t, and probably not even 99%. This is not a new objection to missile defense; analysts have understood that defense against nuclear armed ballistic missiles needs to be 100% for quite some time, which is why so many intelligent people have rejected the possibility that a missile defense shield could provide useful protection for the United States. Now, it’s fair to say that the same logic does not apply to conventional ballistic missile attacks on either cities or military targets; in those cases, an 85% effective missile shield is useful. But for preventing Minneapolis from disappearing under a nuclear mushroom cloud, not so much.
Ed has two potential objections to this. The first is that North Korea or some other rogue state might send a flight of missiles at the United States just for the hell of it, and not in reaction to some US policy. This is too silly for words; North Korea can commit national suicide right now if it wants. The second is to emphasize the “immediate” portion; this is to say that missile defense may not be perfect now, but it will become so in the future. This is plausible only if you believe that potential enemies of the United States never innovate, and never react to developments in the US. If they do, then “perfection” is transitory, and we can never really be sure that our defense is 100%, which gets us back to square one.
In other words, it’s nonsense all the way down.