Dear Editor,
In an op-ed printed on Nov.19, Emily Rector defends the missile defense system that the Bush administration had advocated for Poland and the Czech Republic, but that the Obama administration is scaling back. Unfortunately, her defense and the film produced for the right-wing Heritage Foundation that she advertised are riddled with falsehoods.
To begin with, she says, "In U.S. missile defense testing history, every test but one was a complete success (and in the exception the rate of success was 90 percent)." That is completely untrue. Missile defense testing began in the 1980s and was riddled with failures over its long, wasteful and unfortunate history. There has never been a successful test of an interceptor missile against an incoming intercontinental ballistic missile that included the kind of inexpensive and realistic countermeasures that an attacker would be likely to employ. At $5 billion to $10 billion per year, the United States has spent roughly $200 billion on this non-functional system, without ever testing it realistically.
The last Bush administration actually scrapped the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, one that had many benefits for capping proliferation, to pursue this deceptive missile defense. It subsequently pressured the Polish and the Czech governments to accept U.S. emplacement of this unworkable system, in the face of their own public opposition. To claim that such a scheme would protect the United States or Europe from hypothetical Iranian long-range missiles is laughable. Neither the anti-missile defense nor the Iranian threat exists. Even if such a threat develops in the distant future, and an actual defense system comes into existence, the placement of that system in those countries would be ineffective. It is well known to the Europeans and the Russians that this so-called "defensive system" is actually an offensive threat to the Russians.
It is naive, if not deceptive, to imply that nuclear security lies in deploying such a system. What are needed for a nuclear-secure world are sensible negotiations toward limits to proliferation and a lowering of the nuclear threat by arms reductions and enforcement of the non-proliferation treaty.
Gary Goldstein
Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Tufts University
