Keywords: “missile defense”, “star wars”, “military-industrial complex”,

It's a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.

The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don't possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.

They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile defence, according to the Pentagon, will "protect our homeland ... and our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack"; as long as the Russians wait until it's working before they nuke us. The good news is that, at the present rate of progress, reliable missile defence is only 50 years away. The bad news is that it has been 50 years away for the past six decades.

The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing. You wouldn't know it if you read the press releases published by the Pentagon's missile defence agency: the word "success" features more often than any other noun. It is true that the programme has managed to hit two out of the five missiles fired over the past five years during tests of its main component, the ground-based midcourse missile defence (GMD) system. But, sadly, these tests bear no relation to anything resembling a real nuclear strike.

All the trials run so far - successful or otherwise - have been rigged. The target, its type, trajectory and destination, are known before the test begins. Only one enemy missile is used, as the system doesn't have a hope in hell of knocking down two or more. If decoy missiles are deployed, they bear no resemblance to the target and they are identified as decoys in advance. In order to try to enhance the appearance of success, recent flight tests have become even less realistic: the agency has now stopped using decoys altogether when testing its GMD system.

This points to one of the intractable weaknesses of missile defence: it is hard to see how the interceptors could ever outwit enemy attempts to confuse them. As Philip Coyle - formerly a senior official at the Pentagon with responsibility for missile defence - points out, there are endless means by which another state could fool the system. For every real missile it launched, it could dispatch a host of dummies with the same radar and infra-red signatures. Even balloons or bits of metal foil would render anything resembling the current system inoperable. You can reduce a missile's susceptibility to laser penetration by 90% by painting it white. This sophisticated avoidance technology, available from your local hardware shop, makes another multibillion component of the programme obsolete. Or you could simply forget about ballistic missiles and attack using cruise missiles, against which the system is useless.

Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it so cheap that if the US government were serious about making the system work it would bankrupt the country, just as the arms race helped to bring the Soviet Union down. By spending a couple of billion dollars on decoy technologies, Russia would commit the US to trillions of dollars of countermeasures. The cost ratios are such that even Iran could outspend the US.

The US has spent between $120bn and $150bn on the programme since Ronald Reagan relaunched it in 1983. Under George Bush, the costs have accelerated. The Pentagon has requested $62bn for the next five-year tranche, which means that the total cost between 2003 and 2013 will be $110bn. Yet there are no clear criteria for success. As a recent paper in the journal Defense and Security Analysis shows, the Pentagon invented a new funding system in order to allow the missile defence programme to evade the government's usual accounting standards. It's called spiral development, which is quite appropriate, because it ensures that the costs spiral out of control.

Spiral development means, in the words of a Pentagon directive, that "the end-state requirements are not known at programme initiation". Instead, the system is allowed to develop in whatever way officials think fit. The result is that no one has the faintest idea what the programme is supposed to achieve, or whether it has achieved it. There are no fixed dates, no fixed costs for any component of the programme, no penalties for slippage or failure, no standards of any kind against which the system can be judged. And this monstrous scheme is still incapable of achieving what a few hundred dollars' worth of diplomacy could do in an afternoon.

So why commit endless billions to a programme that is bound to fail? I'll give you a clue: the answer is in the question. It persists because it doesn't work.

US politics, because of the failure by both Republicans and Democrats to deal with the problems of campaign finance, is rotten from head to toe. But under Bush, the corruption has acquired Nigerian qualities. Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.

To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it - and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets. Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strongarmed into becoming America's groundbait.

If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government's interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.

Missile Defense: Understanding the Issues

George Monbiot has a piece in the Guardian this week ("The US missile defense system is the magic pudding that will never run out") explaining the financial motivations behind the US policy of promoting missile defense systems. His observations are fine, so far as they go, although they are limited by his own prejudices.

But enhancing strategic missile defense is more than just an endless barrel of pork. It is also a profoundly destabilizing policy that is essentially strategically aggressive. To understand how enhancing a "defense" capability can be an aggressive strategy, it is necessary to comprehend the Cold War issue of mutually assured destruction that most people under the age of 30 have probably had little cause to consider.

The hard reality of mutually assured destruction was probably the reason the USSR and USA did not initiate a nuclear third world war that would have destroyed the world. After a certain point, it became clear that both sides had such substantial arsenals of nuclear weapons that both would certainly be destroyed utterly (probably along with human civilization in toto) by any full exchange. What is crucial here is that this was feared to be the case even if one side succeeded in getting a jump on the other, and launched its missiles before the other side was ready. In other words, each side was thought to have the capability to substantially destroy the other, even with whatever was left to it after a successful nuclear strike upon it by the other (this latter, reduced capability was termed "second strike").

Immense thought was given to ways to maintain stability in this situation, for obvious reasons – these were not neocon dilettantes, but men and women who really believed their lives and those of their families depended upon devising successful strategies to control the risk of nuclear destruction. Among the outcomes was an agreement known as the ABM Treaty, which was intended to tightly limit the development of missile defenses in order to promote stability. This counterintuitive approach was based upon two key publicly recognized insights, and one unmentioned reality.

First, missile defenses promote inflation of nuclear arsenals by causing the enemy to increase the size and sophistication of its nuclear weapons in order to overcome the defenses. One of the best ways to beat a missile defense system is to flood it with targets and thereby swamp its targeting mechanisms. Apart from the inherent undesirability of a nuclear arms race, such activity also destabilizes attempts to counter nuclear proliferation. Some might be surprised to learn (in the light of subsequent inaction on this count) that the key basis for the global agreement constraining nuclear proliferation (NPT) was a promise (dishonestly made and not surprisingly ignored subsequently) by the nuclear weapons states to work towards reduction of their own nuclear arsenals.
Second, missile defenses make nuclear war more likely, not less. They do so by undermining the iron reality of mutually assured destruction. Despite the practical ineffectiveness of missile defense systems so far (as highlighted by Monbiot in the above article), the existence of such systems gives politicians and military leaders the possibility of thinking they might survive a nuclear war. In particular, since missile defenses would be much more effective against a reduced second strike than against the full first strike capability of a superpower, the possession of a missile defense system encourages decision-makers to think that they could "win" by launching a surprise first strike. Nobody who has observed recent events or followed the paranoid and aggressive pronouncements of the US regime and elite should be in any doubt that the US is more than capable of launching such a first strike in the guise of "preemptive" defense.
The third, unmentioned reality that explains why mutually assured destruction kept the peace throughout the latter years of the Cold War is the unprecedented situation it created whereby the decision-makers on war and peace actually themselves, personally (and their families), had to face the consequences of the wrong decision. In this situation, suddenly the usual testosterone surges and jingoist urges that in previous eras had sufficed to cause national leaders to sacrifice other people in their millions doubtless seemed less overwhelming. Anything, therefore, that undermines mutually assured destruction strikes at one of the core reasons for the successful avoidance of global war.

All these realities remain as true as they ever were, but in the climate of the post-Soviet period, the worst consequences of US abrogation of the ABM treaty were not immediately felt. Russia was in no condition to compete with the US, and indeed was probably quite ready to concede broad US global leadership, if the US had chosen to treat Russia with respect in turn. In these circumstances, a nuclear arms race was not forthcoming, and there was no real threat of a war between the US and Russia. Although the Russians pointed out the well known problems of missile defenses (see for instance Foreign Affairs, September/October 2000: "The Missile-Defense Mistake: Undermining Strategic Stability and the ABM Treaty" by Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov), their objections were brushed aside.

Things have now changed, however. The US proved unable to simply be the most powerful state in the world without rubbing the rest of the world's collective noses in the situation at every opportunity. A universalist ideology of

globalist democratization, combined with
American exceptionalism and
Israeli nationalist domination of US politics,

produced endless interference in other countries' affairs and an open pursuit of "full spectrum dominance." In the case of Russia, the US seemed to go out of its way to humiliate and antagonize its former rival. On missile defense, Kosovo, NATO expansion and the flouting of the UN Security Council over Iraq, the Russians were insulted time and again, and US and allied military encroachment on Russia became ever more menacing. ("Menacing" is, of course, a matter of perspective. The fact that Americans and their apologists and allies don't see that their own actions could be construed as such merely reflects their own limited capacity to see from other perspectives).

With the Georgia fighting and the US response, we now see, for the first time since Gorbachev, the real possibility of a direct strategic confrontation between the US and Russia, over issues that are "red lines" for Russia. While the Georgia issue will rumble on and provide pretexts for US and allied action against Russia, it is over the Ukraine that a real dispute is likely to arise.

With this return to the Cold War situation of a direct confrontation between two states with substantial nuclear arsenals, the old unassailable logic of mutually assured destruction and missile defense reasserts itself. In this context, the introduction of US missile defenses to Poland and possibly even Ukraine can be seen for the foolishly provocative acts of aggression they really are. As outlined above, these developments create the potential for a US first strike that Russia simply cannot afford to ignore, in the hands of a state that has launched wars of aggression in Yugoslavia and Iraq, threatens one against Iran, has interfered in the politics of numerous countries through "color revolutions," and propagandizes against the Russian "threat." In order to deter a US preemptive strike, Russia will feel the need to reinvigorate its military generally, but in response to the installation of US missile defenses, technological enhancement and numerical increases to Russia's nuclear weapons manifest will be vital.

Given the nature of the US regime (and of the hierarchies of both US political parties of power), there is little prospect now of avoiding a drawn out (if we are lucky!) confrontation. Anyone who wishes to understand the underlying truths of the situation, though, must begin with a proper understanding of the strategic missile defense issue, and not the kind of superficial or even outright mendacious propaganda nonsense that passes for "analysis" in our complicit media.

First hashed out on the Boondocks.org forum.