by Peter R. Huessy
Summary
The US DoD has asked the aerospace industry for proposals to build a very robust, nationwide missile defense against missiles of all types and launched by multiple adversaries. Two Senators, Mr. Sullivan (R-AK) and Mr. Cramer (R-ND) have proposed an annual $16.9 billion fund for air and missile defense. This new “Iron Dome” for America would be the first such opportunity to build a national missile defense since the very beginning of the Clinton administration when proposals for a space-based missile defense—requested by the outgoing Bush 41 administration—were summarily rejected. The then Secretary of Defense, Mr. Les Aspin, announced that the administration had “Taken the Stars out of Star Wars.”
Well, it’s now time to put the “Stars” back! Past missile defense concepts were ridiculed as unworkable—unable to defend against thousands of incoming warheads. But the Iron Dome as now envisioned could have as one of its missions a much more technically achievable task. In particular, the defense could take off the table the threatened coercive limited nuclear strikes by Russia and China over Ukraine and Taiwan. Such a defense would, contrary to what critics are saying, strengthen nuclear deterrence, prevent escalation and enhance US and our allies security.
Undoing the Killing of SDI
In 1993 and just ten years after the Reagan administration had called for a major SDI research and development program to build missile defenses, the Clinton administration stopped a missile defense shield for the United States. Such a shield would have significantly protected the United States and its allies through what the Bush
administration described as GPALS or a “global protection against limited strikes” that could have been part of a world-wide protection system proposed in 1991 by President Yeltsin of Russia. Rogue state missile threats would also be stopped whether from North Korea or Iran.
In fact, the outgoing Bush administration had been proposing a system that could deal with as many as 200 warheads, or the equivalent of a Russian submarine load of warheads launched at the United Stated, as well as an accidental or unauthorized attack of similar dimensions. Overall deterrence was to be enhanced although the retaliatory deterrent capability of nuclear powers would not be stopped.
Despite the new technology available, the same missile defense critics are back, repeating the same arguments made four decades ago, trashing the idea of a national missile defense as highly destabilizing, technically unworkable, and vastly too expensive. One former government official claimed an “Iron Dome” missile defense would undermine the strategic nuclear balance unlike any policy change within the past four decades.
Armageddon is Inevitable
The history of the obstruction placed in the path of missile defense for the United States is instructive as it illustrates the illusions under which disarmament advocates remain even now in the 8th decade of the nuclear age. The opponents of missile defense have long assumed that if all nations having nuclear weapons were sure their weapons could reach the territory of their adversary unimpeded, that guarantee of mutual destruction would eliminate any chance nuclear weapons would be used. This was often described as “mutual assured destruction” or MAD.
But now the disarmament community, especially missile defense critics, have undercut the entire notion of nuclear deterrence. And that is the idea that any deterrent use of nuclear weapons—whether in response to a crisis like the Cuban missile crisis, or to prevent an escalation of a conventional conflict in Europe or Asia, for example– would automatically involve the wholesale use of nuclear weapons. Any use—even in retaliation and even very limited—is now considered untenable. With the only alternative abolition, which of course is not in the cards.
The assumption remains—as Annie Jacobson’s best-selling book Nuclear War: A Scenario asserts—that any initial limited use of nuclear weapons would automatically be followed by all out nuclear war. The very vulnerability long thought of as a virtue is now considered such a danger that the long held deterrent strategy itself is being rejected. With the notion of deterrence rejected, the US and its allies are stuck running away from deterrence and a feared “escalation” to where wholesale aggression by our adversaries will now be more and more common, as the example of Ukraine confirms. If anything, missile defense now becomes a critical anecdote to an assumed deterioration of deterrent credibility, but ironically to the disarmament community, missile defense remains anathema to strategic stability, the very notion that gave us he ABM Treaty in the first place.
The ABM Trap
How did this “ABM treaty” trap come about? How for nearly eight decades, did the mutual vulnerability of nations to nuclear attack be seen as a virtue, a vulnerability that would compel national leaders to avoid any use of nuclear weapons for fear any use would result in massive retaliatory use and the incineration of civilization. Missile defenses would upset that “balance” and thus had to be summarily rejected.
And so shortly after the election of President Nixon in 1968, the Soviet leadership demanded of the new American leader, that the United States and the USSR must sign an agreement banning all missile defenses. Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev was adamant that the 1966 Defense Secretary McNamara idea of a limited defensive shield to be deployed against the nascent Chinese nuclear force was really aimed at the USSR, to undermine and vitiate Moscow’s nuclear deterrent force.
At the time of McNamara’s proposal, the USSR had 600 strategic nuclear weapons, the United States had at least 6000, while China may have had at most a few dozen warheads. However, even a robust missile defense given the technology of the day, could hardly cope even with the smaller USSR force, let alone a strategic nuclear force that under SALT I and SALT II would grow to more than 10,000 strategic nuclear weapons on each side by the mid-1980s.
Nixon and Kissinger combined discussions with the USSR of a ban on missile defenses with an agreement to allow the buildup of offensive forces but with some limits on nuclear delivery vehicles which was how the agreement was sold as “arms control.” Indeed, the 1972 SALT deal allowed a buildup to where both the US and the USSR could have between 10,000-12,000 deployed strategic nuclear warheads within the next two decades, with the US having roughly 1000 ICBMs and 710 SLBMs and the USSR some 1409 ICBMS and 950 SLBMs. Thus were the SALT I and ABM agreements born, with the ABM Treaty being submitted to the Senate for ratification and the SALT I Presidential agreement approved by a joint resolution of Congress.
Stability vs. Superiority: The Origins of SDI
Thus, mutual vulnerability was enshrined in the ABM treaty of 1972. The idea of mutual vulnerability was largely credited to former Secretary of Defense McNamara who assumed each side would be willing to limit their offensive weapons and not engage in an arms race but only if they did not have to overcome a potential defensive system. The ABM treaty then became known as the “cornerstone” of “strategic stability.” The Soviets started building a defense around Moscow in 1966 and the 1972 ABM treaty allowed 100 such interceptors to defend he Capitol of each party to the treaty as well as another 100 interceptors to defend a chosen ICBM missile field. A 1974 agreement reduced that number to 100.
Unfortunately, the stability envisioned by the USSR was as retired Admiral James Zumalt characterized it in a 1978 debate “Soviet strategic superiority” and what then candidate Ronald Reagan described as a “window of vulnerability.” As later became clear, the USSR SALT endorsed buildup of highly accurate, multiple warhead heavy missiles—such as the SS-18– gave Moscow huge leverage in international affairs that missile defenses combined with arms reductions could have sharply limited.
That is why the Senate rejected the SALT II agreement of 1979 as most Senators shared Senator Scoop Jackson’s (D-WA) opposition to the treaty as actually worsening the sharp but growing Soviet strategic superiority.
When President Reagan in 1983 proposed SDI or the strategic defense initiative it was immediately ridiculed by the Hartford Courant for example, which called the idea, “Star Wars”, which was repeated by Senator Ted Kennedy on the floor the United States Senate the very next day and became a moniker for missile defense for subsequent decades.
However, despite the critics, Reagan used the leverage provided by a possible national missile defense shield to help rebuild US conventional forces, modernize our nuclear deterrent, deploy the INF missiles in Europe, and win the Cold War by taking down the USSR and its empire while also triggering the eventual multiple decades long 90% reduction in strategic nuclear forces.
Missile Defense Can’t Work?
At the time, critics used a number of arguments against SDI. One, that it was impossible to shoot down an incoming warhead travelling at 15,000 miles an hour. Two, that even shooting down hundreds of weapons would leave other thousands of nuclear weapons to get through and render such a shield nearly useless. Three, critics also assumed any viable missile defense had to be nearly impenetrable and thus had to act as a substitute for deterrence, which would have required an ability to simultaneously shoot down multiple thousands of nuclear weapons.
The cost of putting satellites in orbit—or launch costs—was calculated based on a requirement to deploy thousands of individual interceptors in space to intercept missiles early in flight. Alternative systems intercepting warheads in the midcourse or after the deployment of multiple warheads were assumed not to be able to distinguish between real and dummy warheads and thus even a less expensive mid-course vs boost phase system would not work either. Either way the critics assumed they had the argument clinched—missile defense didn’t work and even if it did it was too expensive. To say nothing of undermining deterrence itself.
In 1984, then candidate Walter Mondale used such arguments in his campaign, using cartoonish depictions of failed missile defenses to illustrate then President Reagan’s assumed misguided national security strategy. Needless to say, Reagan won 49 states in one of the most lopsided landslides in American political history. And half a decade later, won the Cold War by taking down the Soviet empire.
America’s interest in missile defense was quite understandable. When asked, Americans wanted to be protected from nuclear armed ballistic missiles, and it did not matter whether the missiles were launched from Russia, China, Iran or North Korea.
Missile Defense Born Again
With the end of the USSR and the successful completion of the 1991 START I and the 1993 START II dramatic reductions in strategic nuclear weapons, national missile defenses were still largely considered unnecessary. However, despite the 1993 major cuts to both national and regional missile defenses, rogue states such as North Korea and Iran were beginning to test ballistic missiles of increasing range but also secretly developing nuclear weapons. Both factors could not be totally hidden. And thus, interest grew—again– in the United States to develop and build missile defenses.
Critics of missile defense cleverly argued “What’s the rush?” While conceding that North Korea missile developments were ongoing, the intelligence community strangely concluded Pyongyang wouldn’t be able to target the United States with a long range missile for “at least 15 years” even after their 1998 test of a long range Tae Po Dong missile.
The Clinton administration went with delay, dismissed the Rumsfeld Commission report warning of looming missile threats, opposed building a national missile defense and even went so far as to refuse to test a mid-course missile defense technology. Nonetheless, Congress did pass and the President signed the Missile Defense Act in July 1999, calling for the possible deployment of a “limited” missile defense, “when technically possible” and when “effective”—which critics would uniformly interpret to be continually over the horizon but at least the basis was set for some missile defense, however limited.
The New Coercive Nuclear Strategy
Now at the end of the 1990s a number of developments occurred that went directly to the status of the strategic balance between the US and Russia, despite the end of the USSR. And there was solid evidence of why the US should seek a missile defense. First, the Russian Duma rejected the START II agreement largely because of the treaty ban on multiwarhead ICBMS. The ban would have required Russia to deploy only single warhead land based missiles, which are not good first-strike weapons. This would push the Russians toward deploying much of their strategic forces to sea, an expensive but stabilizing proposition that would have Russian nuclear forces mirroring those of the United States. But Moscow likes its heavy missiles—they are the coercive, blackmail “coin of the realm” missiles and they dominate Russian nuclear forces.
In addition, in April 1999, President Yeltsin ordered the development of highly accurate, low-yield, battle-field nuclear weapons, programs that Mr. Putin has subsequently fully adopted, the acquisition of which are now over 90% complete. These weapons are precisely for coercion and blackmail, just as were the Russian heavy ICBMs the START II treaty sought to eliminate.
Building Missile Defenses
Thus in 2001, President George W. Bush had to take such threats seriously and this is where missile defense could help. In 2001-2 the President removed the United States from the ABM treaty that banned most defenses and announced that the United States would go forward with a limited missile defense to defend against rogue states such as North Korea and Iran.
In 2003-4 the United States deployed nearly four dozen missile defense interceptors in California and Alaska. Tests demonstrate the system’s ability to intercept a bullet with a bullet. The deployment gave the US at least some limited capability against long-range ballistic missiles, armed with nuclear warheads. Over time, the missile defense system could also be improved. At the same time, the United States has deployed thousands of highly capable interceptors to deal with short range or medium range regional ballistic missiles that threatened American forces or bases overseas, as well as a cruise missile system protecting the US Capitol region.
The Iron Dome Solution: The Missile Defense Shortfall Corrected
Unfortunately, the ground based interceptors deployed by the United States in Alaska and California needed improvement. For more than a decade, the US has devoted considerable effort to developing the NGI or next generation interceptor, but did not work simultaneously to move toward a space-based national missile defense that was envisioned by the Reagan administration in 1983 and the Bush 43 administration in 1992.
Now the next generation interceptor or NGI would indeed fix the Alaskan and California missile systems and possibly lead to a planned 65-100 missile interceptors. But the system now deployed is limited in its coverage of missile threats, particularly with respect to boost phase intercept and defenses against cruise missiles. “Iron Dome” capability is a new missile defense and could be designed to deal with threats across the board. Even critics now acknowledge “upgrading homeland missile defense to intercept a limited attack from a rogue state such as North Korea, or to discourage a first strike from China or Russia” is worth doing—“If that’s what the Trump plan winds up doing, it could be a worthwhile investment.”
Meeting the Challenge of Escalate to Win
General Trey Obering, the former head of missile defense programs in the United States, explains the US can now technically deploy effective missile defenses in space and to intercept offensive missiles early in flight. That he says has markedly changed the technical aspects of missile defense.
What has not yet kept pace has been the intellectual argument in favor of missile defense being strategically critical, much as the October 2023 Strategic Posture Commission unanimously recommended should be the case.
It is now better understood that Russia and China are themselves rogue states willing to use the threat of nuclear weapons use for coercion and blackmail. Nuclear weapons for these nations are not a deterrent to keep the peace but an adjunct of aggression itself. Now the United States is not primarily facing the threat of an all-out nuclear attack.
What the United States faces is a strategy of what retired General John Hyten and former defensive official Brad Roberts alternatively describe as “escalate to win” or “escalate to de-escalate,” which is simply the coercive or blackmail threat to use limited numbers of nuclear weapons to cause an adversary to stand down in a crisis or conflict. Given the technical capability of missile defense today, defending against limited strikes now becomes highly doable and can overcome previous economic and technical objections, which now no longer apply.
There are, however, other nuclear ballistic missile threats that call for missile defenses which the US must keep in mind. The threats we face are not just threats to escalate to win. Remember that the Ayatollah Khomeini was asked that certainly Iran would suffer huge harm from an Israeli retaliatory strike if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.
But Khomeini argued he did not care if Iran was even destroyed by Israeli retaliatory nuclear weapons, just as long as “all the Jews were killed” in the original Iranian strike. As former Iran President Rafsanjani explained, Israel was in his mind “a one bomb” country. Here classical deterrence doesn’t work. “MAD” is irrelevant. But missile defense now becomes critical to the defense of one’s homeland, borne out by the successful Israeli interception of literally thousands of Hamas and Hezbollah and Houthis rockets and missiles over the past decade.
During the Cuban missile crisis Cuban leader Fidel Castro urged Soviet leader Khrushchev to launch missiles onto the United States. Khrushchev replied that that would result in the incineration not only of Cuba, but probably the USSR as well. To which Castro said that it would be a “Glorious Day” for socialism because we would have forced the evil capitalists to use nuclear weapons against a small relatively weak nation, proving the moral superiority of the communists.
Seeking Victory
Opponents of missile offense still reject even these new very logical arguments because they see missile defense as an adjunct of the United States and its allies seeking victory. And victory is considered as unattainable in the nuclear age. Such critics have even accused Israel of seeking victory through genocide by using nuclear weapons in Gaza!
As Victor Hanson has wisely pointed out in a new essay on the subject, the assumption in the nuclear age is that any pursuit of victory risks escalating any crisis or conventional conflict to the nuclear level. Retired former commander of the US strategic command Admiral Charles Richard said in September 2024 at the Minot Task Force 21 Triad symposium, that it was time for the United States to jettison such an assumption and add the word “victory” to its security lexicon, as an alternative to the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Israel has shown the way toward victory in their dismantling of both Hamas and Hezbollah.
The US avoided the use of too much military power during the previous administration for fear of escalation, as opposed to having strong faith in our own deterrent strength to prevent our adversaries from escalating in the first place, either making war against Ukraine or war against Israel. Given Putin’s dozens of threats to use limited nuclear strikes against Ukraine and its allies, the deployment of a robust missile defense able to blunt such threats becomes a significant deterrent capability. Defending against thousands of such warheads is not necessarily the goal. But defending against limited Russian strikes in the Ukraine theater or such Chinese strikes in the Taiwan theater, does change the nuclear calculus of would-be aggressors, enhances deterrence and raises the barrier to the use of nuclear weapons.
What’s not to like?
The US fear of escalation was a handicap, as we took US military power off the table, just at a time when such military power gave us the diplomatic leverage to seek an end of the war in Ukraine. Or to back up our Israeli allies in literally destroying not just Hamas and Hezbollah but taking down the Iranian “circle of fire” around Israel and the Iranian nuclear programs. Or support Taiwan in its struggle with a bullying China.
Klaus Fuchs, one of the scientists in the Manhattan project gave the nuclear secrets to the Soviets and justified the treason by claiming the United States should not have been the only country with nuclear weapons. In Klaus Fuchs mind, that was too much power for the United States to have.
Even today, some 8 decades later, there remain critics who are afraid of US military power and US victory. They want the US to be constrained and adopt a minimal deterrent posture. The United States would be forced to cut its defense budget, stop most of the modernization of its nuclear forces and missile defenses; and be continually dependent upon serial “peace processes,” which too often gives power to our enemies and their terrorist proxies as they hold out false promises of peace. One critic complained years ago that missile defense was all about “first the shield, then the sword,” with the United States attacking other nations first and subsequently hiding behind a missile defense shield. It is as if they want to let the bad guys win.
In fact, just the opposite is the case.
The Iron Dome missile defense for the United States would take away our enemies bullying character of limited nuclear strike threats. The US would re-establish nuclear deterrence and allow a stronger US conventional capability to take down or deter our hostile adversaries. Israel has shown the way in their taking down of Hamas and Hezbollah. As Israel has demonstrated, Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow, are all missile defense trump cards with which the US and its allies can also use to achieve victory over the “bad hombres.”
Like World War II, Desert Storm and Grenada.
