It is rocket science

President Bush gave notice last Thursday that the United States will withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty; scrapping the Cold War relic is necessary to move testing of the National Missile Defense program to a more rigorous level. As if scripted by those critical of the treaty withdrawal and skeptical of the missile-shield project, the next 24 hours saw the failure of a crucial test of a land-based system and the abandonment by the Pentagon of a sea-based system due to poor performance and huge cost overruns.

To the president’s credit, the announcement that the United States would exercise its right to withdraw from the treaty with six months’ notice came as no surprise and was made after some very productive negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin to reduce nuclear stockpiles, nuclear anxiety and the threat of a renewed arms race. No such progress has been made, however, with China, India and Pakistan, nations whose small nuclear arsenals could be neutralized by a working anti-missile shield

Now, worries about an Asian arms race are compounded by the fact it may occur in the absence of such a shield. The land- and sea-based systems that have fizzled so miserably were supposed to be the easy part – small-scale theater defense, designed to protect not an entire continent, but localized areas, such as military bases, battlefields and naval fleets. The failures were not in overcoming the highly daunting of challenge of “hitting a bullet with a bullet” amid a swarm of decoy bullets, but in

simply getting missiles aloft that are capable of making sudden and sharp mid-air course corrections. That is, in the rocket science that is basic to the entire enterprise.

As expected, the president’s announcement of the treaty withdrawal was met with criticism from Democrats in Congress and arms-control experts, some of whom negotiated the ABM treaty under President Nixon, that the unilateral move increases nuclear instability and sours relations with Russia. The administration always has countered such criticism with the assertion that the treaty stood in the way of advanced tests necessary to create this nuclear umbrella and to protect Americans from terrorists and rogue states.

The failed land-based test and a canceled sea program that supposedly was the farthest along but that seemed to have accomplished little other than wasting $2.8 billion were followed by admissions from some of the top scientists involved that they are several years away from being ready to conduct the type of tests that would violate the treaty. With the ABM treaty as framework, the president made remarkable progress with Russia on building a new post-Cold War security agreement. Now, the smaller nuclear powers must be brought into that agreement and the treaty’s restrictions on proliferation can be of value there as well. It is premature to toss it aside for the sake of unproven technology. Until the rocket science catches up, a 29-year-old Cold War relic remains the best nuclear shield the world has.