Justice Requires an Attempt at Missile Defense

From 1977 to 1993, I analyzed strategic-nuclear warfare policies, helped launch the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and space-based ballistic missile defense (BMD), and played a modest role in shifting U.S. arms-control policy to BMD-enforced mutual missile reductions. I have come to the firm conviction that BMD is our "last best hope on earth" for a full recovery of the rich moral and diplomatic heritage of the Laws of Warfare (grounded in the Christian just-war tradition) on which regimes such as the 1977 Geneva Conventions were built. These laws of warfare are taught rigorously to all U.S. military personnel assigned to non-nuclear operations. Within this framework, why do I believe BMD is so morally important?

Classical Laws of Warfare

The Laws of Warfare explicitly discourage all weapons of mass destruction, all strategies of pure retaliation (reprisal or revenge), and any targeting of noncombatants and civilian areas, such as cities. These rules also encourage sanctuary and all possible protection of noncombatants. Altogether, the laws of warfare make the intentionality of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty (which entails the mandatory hostaging of opposing populations) a war crime.

For 40 years many well-intentioned Christians unfamiliar with these long-standing legal traditions have accepted the mess of pottage offered them by secular "arms controllers." The U.S. Catholic Bishops countered boldly in the early 1980s during the 'nuclear freeze' debate, but for the most part Christians remain ignorant of the terms of the just-war tradition. Consequently, what is accepted today as the moral wisdom of arms control actually represents a ludicrously mechanistic policy framework that sanctifies war crimes. Those who hold this view castigate BMD as destabilizing even though its aim is to stop missiles on their way to killing people, while they praise the ABM Treaty as stabilizing and thus moral even though it grants missiles free passage to their target. How did we arrive at this kind of moral reasoning about defense strategy?

History and Theory Leading to MAD

The framework of thought behind mutual assured destruction (MAD) and anti-ballistic missile defense began to emerge in 1963 with a hot new academic theory on nuclear arms control called Assured Destruction (AD). That theory combined "game theory" with an archaic view of nuclear weapons. The "best and brightest" proponents of AD at places like Harvard, MIT, and the Rand Corporation were invited to Washington by Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara (1961-68) in the early 1960s. The AD theory was immediately put to use in sizing and basing American nuclear forces—missiles, missile subs, bombers, and communication networks. With little debate, this theory was cast as the "new wisdom" of the nuclear age.

Yet this stylish theory was actually very old, having roots in the "first-wave" of "airpower ideology" of the 1920s, which promoted the idea of rapid victory through bombardment of an enemy's cities and industries with strategic offensive forces—bombers carrying firebombs and chemical weapons. The core assumption of the theory was, and is, that strategic offensive forces will be so powerful in perpetuity that even trying to counter them is destabilizing. Yet airpower ideology fared poorly in practice in World War II until the last six months of the war when unopposed U.S. firebombing of Japanese cities went nuclear. This last-minute success refurbished airpower ideology by reassuring its advocates it was true. A fur-ther boost for airpower thinking came 10 years later with the fielding of America's first intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

Warmed-over airpower ideology pushed aside earlier interest (and heavy investments) in strategic defenses, such as continental air defenses, which dominated the Eisenhower administration. In December, 1958, for example, the U.S. rushed into a crash program of space- and ground-based BMD, with considerable work on crude but practical non-nuclear interception. The Pentagon successfully intercepted a simulated missile warhead in 1964 with a crude interceptor launched from a fighter plane.

But by 1964, McNamara had shut down non-nuclear BMD efforts and the new MAD theorists took over at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, formed at the State Department in 1961. Having added game theory to the old victory-through-bombardment airpower model, these officials began calculating complicated guesses about the actions and reactions of two surging nuclear powers whose industries would produce ever more sophisticated offensive 'bombs' and delivery systems.

Why did this pseudo-academic model of the Soviet-American arms race gain such a grip on American politicians and defense thinkers? I believe the answer lies in elite intellectual fashions—in particular, explanatory meta-models. Just as Freud took the Victorian steam engine as a meta-model of human behavior (a steam boiler—the id—drives the power-output shaft—the ego—which is controlled by a safety valve—the super ego), so American mainstream arms controllers adopted a mechanistic behavioral model for their approach to controlling what they saw as the U.S.-Soviet arms race. Visually gripping images quickly emerged: "spiraling" arms racing and "action-reaction" moves that push both sides to treacherous, temporary plateaus of "stability." The mechanistic assumption was that both sides needed to be able to target certain percentages of the other side's population and industry (MAD) in order to avoid first-strike temptations.

This was "stability" through MAD. Within this model, defenses by definition were "destabilizing." The game theorists argued that even a little bit of BMD could be dangerous because one side's move toward BMD could lead the opponent to assume the worst and to react with a countervailing buildup. This is precisely the mode of thinking U.S. negotiators carried in to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in 1969: MAD is good, BMD is destabilizing. This is what they successfully wrote into the 1972 SALT I agreements, including the ABM Treaty.

Returning to the Morality of Defense

The moral costs of this excursion into MAD have been horrific. The ABM Treaty utterly repudiates the laws of just warfare, which regard the deliberate targeting and taking hostage of entire populations as crimes of the first rank. Yet the conviction that MAD is moral and BMD is immoral is now deeply ingrained in mainstream arms controllers. They now appear more eager to grant sanctuary to 20-megaton missile warheads traveling through space than to hundreds of millions of noncombatants who could be destroyed by such weapons.

In fact, mainstream arms controllers are intellectually far more committed to nuclear weapons than are any groups in the Department of Defense. In my experience, I have been amazed at how rarely I find military officials or Pentagon planners who advocate nuclear weapons. They very much prefer non-nuclear precision, extremely controlled weapons effects and information warfare, while the arms controllers continue advocating high-yield "city busters" as the core of stability. This is a sharp reversal from the early 1960s, when arms controllers postured heroically as the only group that could stop the military's "mad momentum of technology" in its tracks. Thus, the paradox: as the military services have gotten rid of tactical nuclear weapons and adopted non-nuclear precision weapons as fast as possible, mainstream arms controllers have moved resolutely in the opposite direction, going so far as to apply the ABM Treaty's prohibition of BMD to any non-nuclear defenses against any missiles.

It is long past time to return to a consideration of war and defense from the viewpoint of the classical laws of just warfare. What most Christians may not realize is that technologies have long been available for implementing an arms control regime that conforms to what I call "technologically updated laws-of-warfare" (TULOW). These technologies include the following:

1. Ballistic missile defense by entirely non-nuclear methods.

2. Precision conventional munitions

3. "Soft" targeting (electronic/cyber warfare) in contrast to "hard" targeting with munitions.

4. Military strategies that cut off and isolate an enemy or enemy regime (vs. physical destruction or damage).

5. Reconnaissance and target surveillance networks for very precise knowledge of enemy conduct and potential targets.

6. Active and passive defenses (not yet as far along technologically) against chemical and biological attacks (for example, identifying and destroying chemical/biological plumes before they hit).

Finally, TULOW arms-control regimes are far more readily achieved by unilateral effort than by bilateral or multilateral negotiation. In fact, nations that signed the various Geneva Conventions and its predecessors are required to implement them unilaterally. The implication is that the SALT/START/ABM treaty model is obsolete. How should the U.S. implement BMD deployments under a TULOW arrangement? Working closely with Russia, but going it alone if necessary, the U.S. should invite as many nations as possible (including Russia) to implement a totally transparent arms-control regime in which space-based defenses "run free" (are not restricted in any way). The goal of this arrangement is to eliminate the threat of ballistic missiles. Those peaceful nations without aggressive missile designs on their neighbors would be free to join it. By implication, those nations that have aggressive designs on their neighbors—Iraq, China, Iran, Libya, Syria, and North Korea—would be motivated to launch only peaceful space launches, not weapon-carrying missiles.

Could this be negotiated? Yes. Is it technically realistic? Yes. Is it something Christians should support? Yes.

[John Bosma is a technology scout for Synthesis Partners LLC, in Reston, Virginia. His views expressed here are his own.]