"National Missile Defense: An Indefensible System" by George Lewis, Lisbeth Gronlund, and David Wright, in Foreign Policy (Winter 1999–2000), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; "Star Wars Strikes Back" by Michael O’Hanlon, in Foreign Affairs (Nov.–Dec. 1999), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.

Should the United States build a limited national missile defense system to protect itself against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) launched by "rogue" states such as North Korea? With a decision due this year from the Clinton administration, critics such as Lewis and his colleagues, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program, warn that such a system could put U.S. security at greater risk. They have valid concerns, argues O’Hanlon, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, but, on balance, deployment makes sense.

In contrast with former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which would have created a spacebased shield against a massive Soviet nuclear attack, a new system would defend the nation against direct attack by using groundbased interceptors to destroy incoming warheads. While such a system is "technically feasible" in theory, say Lewis, Gronlund, and Wright, associate director and research fellows, respectively, at the MIT program, "adversaries would be able to take straightforward steps to defeat" it by using decoy or disguised warheads.

"Worse still," they claim, deployment— which would be at odds with the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—would unravel "decades of efforts to reduce U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles and to limit proliferation of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles worldwide." Alarming both Russia and China, deployment could lead to "a world with more ICBMs and weapons of mass destruction."

Yet the threat to the United States is real, O’Hanlon notes. The bipartisan Rumsfeld Commission reported in 1998 that North Korea, Iran, or Iraq might soon develop a missile that could threaten U.S. territory. Later that year, North Korea launched a test multistage missile over Japan, and Pyongyang is reportedly working on another missile which might be able to strike the United States with a nuclear-weapon-size payload.

Potential enemy countermeasures need not be decisive, O’Hanlon says. The United States also "could develop interceptors to hit long-range enemy missiles right after they are launched," destroying them "before they ever left the atmosphere and got a chance to dispense warheads and decoys. The interceptors could be deployed near the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, or other trouble spots"—and probably wouldn’t bother Moscow much, "since the defense would not work against missiles launched at North America from the interior of Asia." Even so, this "light" defense itself could provide some protection against "rogue" states.

But the critics are right to worry about Moscow’s reaction to national missile defense, O’Hanlon says. "Only with a broader arms control and Russia policy in place," he concludes, "can the United States get serious about [it] without jeopardizing nuclear security."