It may not work. It's too expensive. And it certainly will not protect the United States against terrorism. These are the conclusions that two college professors and a former Pentagon official reached Tuesday, November 12, during a panel discussion at Providence College on President George W. Bush's proposed missile defense system.

The Washington, D.C.-based Committee for Responsible Defense (CRD) organized the event to promote debate about the missile defense system that one panelist, former assistant secretary of defense Philip Coyle, says may ultimately cost $1 trillion. CRD has targeted Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut, Louisiana, Oregon, and Missouri in its campaign because the US senators from these states play key roles in the arms control debate, says Matt Martin, assistant director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, CRD's parent organization.

Senator Jack Reed chairs the Senate Armed Forces' subcommittee on Strategic Forces, and Senator Lincoln Chafee frequently takes liberal positions on military issues. Both voted against war with Iraq. This year, Reed also convinced his committee to cut missile defense spending by about 10 percent, or $850 million, but the bill awaits final passage, and like Reed's chairmanship, it may be a casualty of the pending Republican takeover of the Senate.

Coyle, currently a senior advisor at the non-partisan Center of Defense Information, is not a dove. Instead, he emphasizes the technical difficulties and cost of Bush's missile defense proposal. Missile defense funding, he suggests, should be redirected to homeland security or protection against short-range missiles, like the Iraqi Scuds fired during the Persian Gulf War.

Bush's proposal, Coyle says, seeks to protect against both short-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) from land, the ocean, airplanes, and space. "That's what makes it so expensive," he says.

Although he supports continued missile defense research, Coyle describes intercepting an ICBM equipped with decoys as like "trying to hit a hole in one when the hole is going 15,000 miles an hour and the green is covered with a whole lot of things that look like the hole." Four of six military tests have been successful, Coyle notes, but only when the test missile's trajectory was known in advance and it contained a radar beacon to guide
the defending missile. If
a successful system is
engineered, adds Coyle, who was the Pentagon's
director of operational test and evaluation programs during the Clinton administration, it would be overwhelmed by an attack of many missiles.

Another panelist, Providence College political science professor Douglas Blum, agreed, adding that no rational leader would attack the United States with a nuclear missile. Far more likely, Blum argued, is a nuclear bomb or germ weapon attached to a train or a truck or buried inside one of the thousands of shipping cargo containers that enter the US every day. Bush's missile defense system "is designed to defend against the least likely threat," Blum concluded.

Brown political science professor Terrence Hopmann blasted missile defense as "dangerous" because it may trigger an offensive arms race and convince Americans that a nuclear war can be won. Hopmann also blames major defense contractors -- like Massachusetts-based Raytheon, which manufactures missile defense radar systems -- for exploiting post-9/11 fears to assure spending on a system that may divert Americans from addressing real security threats.

Issue Date: November 15 - 21, 2002