Ballistic Missiles

WASHINGTON -- Two military tests in widely separated deserts, one a chilling success and the other a persistent failure, have contributed the latest evidence to both sides of a recurring 15-year-old debate: Should the United States deploy a high-tech umbrella of killer satellites that will shield the states from incoming ballistic missiles?Ever since Ronald Reagan advanced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a proposal for a space-based national missile-defense program that was dubbed "star wars," the question has alternated between the political wings and center stage every few years, catching the imagination of lawmakers, think tanks and presidential hopefuls.

While many have persuasively argued that the fiscal cliff defense cuts would hurt innovation and slow our economic recovery, few offer concrete examples of how these catastrophic cuts would endanger our national security. Iran's drive to acquire nuclear weapons provides the perfect example. Intent on testing America's resolve to stop its nuclear program, Iran will accelerate its uranium enrichment if the U.S. cannot credibly threaten to use military force. Cutting warships, fighter jets, intelligence technologies, and other critical capabilities - as would happen if we go over the fiscal cliff - would encourage Iran to run out the diplomatic clock until it has built a nuclear ballistic missile.

The drawing shows an unmanned combat plane shooting at missiles, incoming fighters and planes on the ground -- not with missiles of its own, but with high-powered laser beams.This is not the cover of a science fiction thriller. It's an illustration in "New World Vistas," the Air Force's handbook for where it sees itself going in the 21st century.With this week's award of a $1.1 billion contract to build the airborne laser, the Air Force is putting dollars behind its sense of the future. Air Force Secretary Sheila E. Widnall has said that the airborne laser could be as revolutionary for warfare as gunpowder and the atomic bomb.

LOS ANGELES -- Twenty-five years ago, a Reagan administration official asked my opinion on whether America was facing a clear and present danger from Russia. I said no. Despite the heated rhetoric on both sides, the Russians never intended to initiate an attack on the West, their strategic objective being to split Europe from the U.S. On the other hand, their fear of being attacked was countered, even in the face of President Ronald Reagan's hostility, by their faith in America's common sense.

RONALD REAGAN had two dreams, not just one, involving ballistic missiles. An interlocked complex of industrial, military and congressional interests is keeping alive his dream of a "Star Wars" defense. But how many pursue his dream to replace "these God-awful missiles" through disarmament?President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin talk of their "alliance" as "partners." With circumstances so changed for the better, we must now revisit Reagan's visionary proposal at Reykjavik.Elimination of nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, on a worldwide basis, would certainly be a cheaper and more reliable solution than defense against them, not only for us but for a dozen other states.

WASHINGTON -- The United States has decided to sell an early warning radar system to Taiwan that would allow the Taiwanese to monitor the launch of Chinese ballistic missiles or manned bombers, Clinton administration officials said yesterday.The sale has drawn protests from Beijing and was opposed by a group of mid-level administration officials who believed that it would worsen recent tensions between Washington and Beijing.The administration approved the sale at the recommendation of senior policy-makers from the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon who believed that China's deployment of large numbers of short-range missiles along its coastline posed a serious military threat to Taiwan, officials said.

WASHINGTON -- Al Gore may be assuming that the country's complacency about peace in our (and our children's and grandchildren's) time, and the administration's charade concerning defense against ballistic missiles, will prevent this from becoming an important campaign issue. To understand why it should be a central issue, consider two hypotheticals: After Congress approves normalized trade relations with China, Beijing moves militarily against Taiwan. China invokes the possibility of a nuclear response if the United States interferes, and the U.S. president, governing a nation incapable of defending itself from even a single ballistic missile, is militarily paralyzed.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration in recent days has examined the military option of boarding two North Korean cargo ships heading for Iran loaded with Scud-C ballistic missiles for the arsenals of Syria and Iran, administration officials said yesterday.The option, which has been discussed in the Pentagon, State Department and White House, is under active consideration by President Bush and his senior national security aides, but no decisions have been made, the officials said.The military planning follows State Department criticism of North Korea last month for shipping these missiles, which are still on the high seas aboard two ships.

IN A race to disarm, the United States and the Soviet Union have promised to destroy practically all tactical nuclear weapons in their arsenals.NATO defense ministers have also agreed on nuclear-arms cuts to reduce the stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe by 80 percent.Even France, not a member of NATO's military command, announced in August that it would cut back production -- from 120 to 30 -- of its new short-range nuclear missile, the Hades.But all these countries have left anti-missile systems off their disarmament lists.

The gun lobby suffered a well-deserved defeat yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to recognize a constitutional right to own machine guns. The justices let stand without comment a lower court ruling that said Congress had prohibited individuals from possessing or transferring such weapons in 1986.The high court's action was the only reasonable response. The gun lobby has persistently claimed an absolute constitutional right to possess firearms. Yet in 200 years, the court has never interpreted the Second Amendment to mean that individuals have an unlimited right to "keep and bear arms."

WASHINGTON -- Russia surpassed the United States last year as the leader in weapons deals with the developing world, and its new agreements included selling $700 million in surface-to-air missiles to Iran and eight new aerial refueling tankers to China, according to a new congressional study. Those weapons deals were part of the highly competitive global arms bazaar in the developing world that grew to $30.2 billion last year, up from $26.4 billion in 2004. It is a market that the United States has regularly dominated.

NATIONAL Court unlikely to overturn Roe Despite the widespread speculation that a court battle looms over abortion rights, legal experts say they don't expect the Supreme Court - regardless of its makeup - to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling. The numbers simply aren't there, they say. [Page 1a House passes $388 billion budget Republicans pushed a sweeping $388 billion spending bill through the House of Representatives yesterday, but its progress was slowed in the Senate. Abortion-rights supporters there opposed a provision making it easier for health-care providers to decline to provide abortions or offer counseling and referrals.

While the White House was fixated on Saddam Hussein's interest in procuring biological and chemical weapons, evidence uncovered by American investigators suggests that the Iraqi president spent his final years in power more determined to develop and deploy conventional ballistic missiles, hoping to keep pace with his neighbors in the Middle East. And in that quest for weapons of more-modest destruction, the evidence shows that Iraq was not a major threat to its neighbors, much less to Europe or the United States.

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea threatened yesterday to resume ballistic missile tests, ratcheting up the crisis over its nuclear weapons programs. In another development, a North Korean diplomat suggested that the isolated Asian nation could soon start extracting plutonium from spent reactor fuel rods and restart a nuclear reactor to make even more material for nuclear weapons. Coupled with a new swell of angry rhetoric from Pyongyang, where 1 million people participated in a government-staged rally, the latest moves by North Korea appeared aimed at stepping up the pressure on President Bush to negotiate.

WASHINGTON - President Bush returned to Washington overnight with strong Russian backing for the U.S. airstrikes and ground assaults in Afghanistan, but Pacific Rim leaders failed to unite behind military action in the campaign against terror. "I fully agree with the position of President Bush, and I believe that his action was measured and adequate to the threat that the United States was confronted with," Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said at a joint news conference yesterday before Bush left the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, summit in Shanghai, China.

ONE OF THE MOST powerful tools for understanding the present and thinking about the future is the use of historical analogy. For instance, one might argue that today's relationship between the United States and China is similar in many important ways to the one that existed between Great Britain and Germany at the end of the 19th century. In the latter case, the British-dominated international order was challenged by the growth of Germany and its demand for Weltmacht, or world power. While China is not nearly as far along today vis a vis the United States as Germany was a century ago vis a vis Great Britain, China has signaled its intention to challenge United States dominance.

While the White House was fixated on Saddam Hussein's interest in procuring biological and chemical weapons, evidence uncovered by American investigators suggests that the Iraqi president spent his final years in power more determined to develop and deploy conventional ballistic missiles, hoping to keep pace with his neighbors in the Middle East. And in that quest for weapons of more-modest destruction, the evidence shows that Iraq was not a major threat to its neighbors, much less to Europe or the United States.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. intelligence community is writing a report warning the Clinton administration that construction of a national missile defense system could trigger a wave of destabilizing events around the world and possibly endanger relations with European allies, a U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. The National Intelligence Estimate will sketch an unsettling series of political and military ripple effects from the proposed U.S. deployment that would include a sharp buildup of strategic and medium-range nuclear-armed missiles by China, India and Pakistan and the further spread of missile technology in the Middle East.

WASHINGTON -- By the logic of some commentators hostile to President Bush's determination to deploy defenses against ballistic missiles, the government should stop trying to develop an AIDS vaccine. Attempts to produce a vaccine have encountered failures and have not yet produced a product that works "perfectly" or "fully." The day Mr. Bush announced -- reiterated, really -- his commitment to missile defense, ABC News said: "He wants to spend a vast amount of money, and it doesn't matter if the system doesn't work perfectly."

WASHINGTON - President Bush announced plans yesterday to begin building a missile defense system, starting with land-based and sea-based interceptors. He said he would move beyond a 1972 treaty that constrains such ballistic missile shields and work toward a "new framework" with U.S. allies and with Russia and China. "We need a new framework that allows us to build missile defenses to counter the different threats of today's world," said Bush, who maintained that the 3-decade-old U.S.-Soviet Antiballistic Missile Treaty does not recognize current realities but "enshrines the past."