12 January 2002
Star Wars offers no defense against terrorists
By Holger Jensen
International Editor, Denver Rocky Mountain News
Foreign Affairs Columnist, Scripps Howard News Service

http://homepage.mac.com/hjens/jan12.html

China, according to a National Intelligence Estimate by the CIA and other agencies, will have 75 to 100 nuclear missiles aimed at the United States within the next 15 years - enough to overwhelm any American missile shield.

The report on "Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat through 2015" confirms earlier predictions by those agencies that President Bush's decision to pull out of the ABM treaty and develop a missile defense system will accelerate China's missile program.

"Beijing is concerned about the survivability of its strategic deterrent against the United States and has a long-range modernization program to develop mobile, solid-propellant ICBMs," the report says. "By 2015, most of China's strategic missile force will be mobile" - and thus harder to detect.

China now has 20 CSS-4 silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. The CIA says it is developing three new missile systems, two truck-launched and one submarine-launched, to be deployed by 2010. It also plans to put multiple warheads on its older ICBMs, vastly increasing their destructive potential.

Twenty missiles could be taken out by any of the defense systems now envisioned by the Pentagon; 100 could not be, especially if some of them are armed with multiple independent re-entry vehicles, or MIRVs.

Russia has even more missiles to overwhelm any U.S. shield. "Unless Moscow significantly increases funding for its strategic forces, the Russian arsenal will decline to less than 2,000 warheads by 2015, with or without arms control," says the report, but adds that "Russia still maintains the most comprehensive ballistic missile force capable of reaching the United States."

Both China and Russia have protested Bush's decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty, saying it will spark a new arms race. But this has not stopped Russia from agreeing, largely out of economic necessity, to deep nuclear cuts.

When Bush pledged to cut operational U.S. warheads from 6,000 to between 1,700 and 2,200 over the next 10 years, Russian President Vladimir Putin went one better by committing himself to a lower figure of 1,500 to 2,200.

However, the Russians are dismayed that Washington's latest Nuclear Posture Review envisions most of the decomissioned warheads being put in storage rather than destroyed, meaning they could be recommissioned if needed.

Pentagon officials say no arms control agreement ever required the destruction of warheads. But Moscow thinks differently.

"Russian-American agreements on reductions in nuclear arsenals," said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, "must be irreversible, so that strategic offensive weapons aren't just reduced on paper."

So if Russia and China can get around any missile defense system our scientists invent, why is Bush so intent on building a trillion-dollar Star Wars?

To protect us from missile strikes by "rogue" nations, he says, such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. The rogues have nuclear capabilities but no long-range delivery systems yet, though the intelligence estimate believes they probably will have by 2015.

"Proliferation of ballistic missile-related technologies, materials and expertise - especially by Chinese, Russian and North Korean entities - has enabled emerging missile states to accelerate missile development, acquire new capabilities and potentially develop even more capable and longer range future systems," says the report.

After Sept. 11, Bush added the threat of missile attack by terrorists as another reason to develop a U.S. missile shield. Here the CIA disagrees, saying terrorists are unlikely to employ long-range missiles with a return address, preferring non-missile delivery systems such as suitcases, trucks or ships.

"Non-missile means for delivering weapons of mass destruction," says the report, "are less expensive, more reliable and accurate, more effective for disseminating biological warfare agents, can be used without attribution and would avoid missile defenses."