That pact is the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, which forbids the signatories from building a defense against nuclear missiles. Now, with the Soviet Union in its richly deserved grave nearly a decade, the ghosts of that treaty still haunt U.S. policymakers.
Well, the time has come to bury this spectral anachronism of Cold-War strategic thinking once and for all.
The treaty has always been of dubious value to our national security. Not having a missile defense leaves the United States utterly exposed to atomic or even conventional, long-range missiles.
That, of course, was part of the treaty's logic. If both sides were unprotected, neither would risk a first — or any — nuclear strike because the other side would retaliate in kind. This theory is known as MAD, for mutual assured destruction, the point being that the Untied States and Soviet Union were two global scorpions in a bottle.
Over the years, a few voices who opposed the hideous logic of MAD spoke out. In the early 1980s, the late Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham opened the High Frontier initiative to build a space-based missile defense. President Reagan picked up the cause, but his opponents quickly and derisively dubbed the idea “Star Wars.”
They suggested it would “destabilize” the nuclear “balance” between the United States and Soviet Union and even trigger a war. They make the same argument now, vis-à-vis Russia.
The nut of their argument is this: Building a defense is an aggressive act.
It isn't, of course, and the only people who make such arguments have advanced degrees or toil for think thanks in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol. They bill themselves as “experts” and “policy analysts,” but they approach this subject with the ardor of blind religious fanatics.
Well, regular Americans know building a missile defense is no more “provocative” than buying a handgun to defend your home. Our adversaries only say it's provocative to stop us from building one. And why shouldn't they, if Americans are stupid enough to listen?
So scrapping the ABM treaty should be a top priority for the Bush Administration for a number of reasons, not least because this ill-conceived pact was signed with a country that no longer exists. It is meaningless.
That begs the question of whether the United States should keep the treaty anyway, as the degreed eggheads suggest, or sign a new one with Russia.
No. As it was misguided to begin with, the national interest will best be served by ignoring it. No nation should sign a treaty that says, in sum and substance, “we will not defend ourselves.”
To those who say some past tests have shown the missiles not to work, the answer is this: Practice makes perfect.
Last, Russia is neither the only nation with access to nuclear missiles nor our only potential aggressor. Enemies of America abound. China has nukes, as do other nations, and no one knows when a madman such as Saddam Hussein may procure or develop the technology to blow us to smithereens.
Building a missile shield, which begins with testing, isn't just a wise defense policy. It's the constitutional duty, sworn in an oath, of the president and congress. We must erect this aegis now, and if that sends a few appeasement zealots into cardiac arrest, so be it.
A great nation needs defending.
(This column courtesy of Agape Press.)
