New arms race?

The back door to a new arms race

The military hailed a successful missile defense test in May. Here's why it could make us less safe.

By THOMAS GRAHAM JR. and BERNADETTE STADLER

On May 30, after years of planning, the Department of Defense intercepted a mock intercontinental ballistic missile, the first successful test of its ground-based program against an ICBM-range target. Top Pentagon officials hailed the test, with Vice Adm. Jim Syring, the director of the Missile Defense Agency, calling it “an incredible accomplishment for the [Ground-based Midcourse Defense] system and a critical milestone for this program.”

An effective missile defense system could, in the short term, offer an extra layer of protection against North Korea. But the gradual buildup of the United States’ missile defense program could lead to something much more dangerous: a new arms race with Russia.

The truth is that successful arms control was built not just on controlling offensive weapons, but on restraining defense systems, as well. However, over the past 30 years we’ve seen the U.S.-Russian consensus on the importance of limiting missile defense dissolve — and though it gets less attention than nuclear weapons, this represents a destabilizing development that could hinder cooperation on arms reductions.

Ground-based missile defense is an attractive technology because, in theory, it could protect America from limited missile attacks. It uses radar to detect an incoming missile and then launches an interceptor to collide with the missile and destroy it on impact. Although this method, known as hit-to-kill, seems simple, it is extremely challenging to execute, as both the missile and interceptor move more than 20 times faster than the speed of sound. Experts have likened successfully intercepting an incoming ICBM to hitting a bullet with another bullet.

For that reason, it’s very hard to successfully intercept an ICBM, even after lots of testing. Instead of protecting the homeland, missile defense systems provide a false sense of security and undermine crisis stability by giving each side an incentive to strike first and encouraging adversaries to deploy additional offensive weapons to offset each other’s defenses.

During the Cold War, Russia and the United States understood the counterintuitive risks posed by missile defense systems. In 1972, President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which limited the number of missile defense systems that each country could deploy initially to two sites per side and subsequently to one. And it worked: Over the next 30 years, the ABM Treaty helped create the conditions for nuclear stability and thereby enabled the negotiation of a number of important arms control agreements. Those agreements led to reductions of 50 percent in the American and Soviet strategic arsenals.

In 2002, however, President George W. Bush announced that the United States would withdraw from the ABM Treaty in order to develop a Ground-based Midcourse Defense. At the time, the Pentagon wanted a homeland missile defense capable of defeating a “limited ballistic missile attack,” likely from a rogue state like North Korea or Iran. When the U.S. withdrew from the ABM Treaty, the Russian response was muted: President Vladimir Putin called the move “a mistake” but said it “does not pose a threat to the national security of the Russian Federation.”

Since then, both the number of interceptors the United States deploys and the projected role of missile defense have expanded. Last December, Congress broadened the role of national missile defense to “maintain and improve an effective, robust layered missile defense system” that can defend the United States, allies and other assets abroad. This was a marked contrast to the previous “limited” mission of ground-based missile defense and raised the possibility that the United States would try to defend itself against an attack from a country like Russia.

In March, a group of senators introduced a bill that would increase the number of interceptors the United States deploys from the 44 scheduled to be deployed by the end of 2017 to 72 and potentially up to 100. The bill also requires the Missile Defense Agency to accelerate the completion of a third interceptor site to defend against increased North Korean missile and nuclear capabilities. Although the authors of the bill have not gone so far as calling for the use of missile defense against small-scale attacks from Russia, other proponents of missile defense have.

Not only are these ideas dangerous, but they are also unproven at best. Despite the successful test in May, it’s not clear that our missile defense system could successfully intercept a North Korean missile, much less neutralize the entire Russian arsenal. According to current and former government officials, it would likely take four or five interceptors to destroy one incoming ICBM even in the best-case scenario. Currently, Russia has more than 1,700 deployed strategic nuclear weapons. We will have 44 interceptors by the end of 2017. Simply put, our present ground-based missile defense system poses virtually no threat to Russia.

Yet, if Congress expands the system, it will increase the odds of an arms race and decrease the chances of future nuclear arms reductions. High-level Russian officials have stated on numerous occasions that they may respond to any major expansion of American ballistic missile defense capabilities by building more offensive weapons. In a 2015 interview, for example, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty “a destabilizing factor of global significance” that “provokes an arms build-up.” After the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed in 2010, Russia claimed that the treaty would be “effective and viable only in conditions where there is no qualitative or quantitative build-up in the missile defense system capabilities of the United States of America.” It is unclear whether Russia’s concerns about ground-based missile defense represent a legitimate fear or political posturing; regardless, these concerns have hindered cooperation on arms control.

Of course, North Korea has been rapidly developing the capability to strike the United States. But the truth is that our anti-missile defense system won’t be able to stop a North Korean missile attack. Should North Korea attain the ability to mass produce ICBMs, it would be easier and cheaper for Pyongyang to deploy more missiles than we have interceptors, despite our financial and military advantages.

Even if we could somehow keep up with Pyongyang, it would be a mistake. The goal of our missile defense system isn’t simply to protect against North Korea. It’s to keep Americans safer overall, and a huge increase in our missile defense capabilities will only create additional tension with Russia, which would increasingly believe that the build-up threatened its strategic stability with the U.S. Thus, if the U.S. actually builds an “effective, robust layered missile defense system,” as some in Congress hope, there is only one logical conclusion: an arms race.