Copyright 2002 The San Diego Union-Tribune The San
Diego Union-Tribune
April 1, 2002, Monday
SECTION: OPINION;Pg. B-7
LENGTH:
853 words
HEADLINE: The real costs of missile
defense
BYLINE: James O. Goldsborough; THE SAN
DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
BODY: Add up
Congressional Budget Office numbers on missile defense and you find that, at
$238 billion, it is now the Pentagon's largest program.
If cost projections for previous major weapons systems are an example,
you can double that $238 billion. The Bush administration's plans for a
"layered," three-tiered system will make it easily the most expensive project
ever.
So what, you say, security has no price. But the
trouble with national missile defense (NMD), as people like Nobel Prize-winning
physicist Steven Weinberg point out, is that it's likely to be money down the
drain, and particularly useless against terrorists.
Governments make choices. In a democracy, those choices presumably
reflect what the people want. But popular support for NMD is based on what
government is not saying, not what it is saying.
Little
by little we are learning about NMD's real costs. A few days ago, we learned
that doctors are turning away Medicare patients, who represent a rising segment
of our population, because government has cut Medicare payments to doctors.
Choices. Five years before the baby boomer population hits
Medicare, government is undermining the program, cutting payments to doctors by
5.4 percent this year, a planned 17 percent over three years.
Doctors' groups point out that the number of family practitioners who
refuse Medicare patients today stands at 17 percent, rising each year.
Choices. Not only have plans for Medicare
prescription drug coverage been dropped, but Medicare patients soon won't
even have doctor coverage.
And there is Social
Security. Under current Bush plans, Social Security surpluses will be spent on
the defense buildup, instead of being used for paying down the debt, meaning
less money will be available for paying for the boomers' retirement.
No way to avoid it, says the administration: The costs of
Sept. 11.
Wrong. National missile defenses would not
have prevented Sept. 11.
Governments are bad -- not
just this government but all of them -- at linking things up. They don't like to
talk about trade-offs and opportunity costs, the things we forfeit to get what
government wants to give us.
How many people, for
example, make a connection between NMD and immigration?
Yet there is a link. If we must dip into Social Security to pay for
NMD, then we will need more young workers to pay for the retired boomers. Since
Americans aren't making babies, we must import them.
To
argue for NMD is really to argue for increased immigration, and vice versa.
Choices.
We accuse our European friends of spending too
much on welfare and not enough on defense. America spends nearly twice as much
on defense annually as all the European NATO members together. Surely that
indicates Europe's misguided priorities.
Or does it
point to our own? To be developing at enormous cost a marginal program like NMD
while undermining Medicare says something about our own priorities. There are
serious doubts NMD ever will save a life.
Doctors
turning away Medicare patients cost lives every day.
Weinberg has real doubts about NMD. Unlike politicians, physicists deal
in science, not campaign contributions and local subcontractors. Weinberg has
consistently pointed out the problems with NMD promises over the years, and
Sept. 11 has only reinforced his views.
In a long
article in the New York Review of Books, he lays out the weaknesses of the NMD
concept.
Missile defenses are easy to defeat, he
writes. The attacker, surrounding his warhead with decoys, "always has the last
move." NMD also hurts security in another way, "by taking money away from other
forms of defense.
But the decoy problem, say NMD
defenders, is solved by a "boost phase" intercept -- attacking missiles near the
source of launch -- the lowest of Bush's three-tiered system.
The problem with that, says Weinberg, is threefold: Having the right
information about the launch, getting close enough to hit it at liftoff, and
avoiding horrible mistakes.
The new twist to the
problem comes from Sept. 11. Bush says NMD will help protect against
terrorism.
But Sept. 11 shows terrorists don't need
missiles. The ballistic missile, says Weinberg, "is not just one among the many
vehicles that might be used by terrorists or a rogue state to attack us with
nuclear weapons -- it is the least likely vehicle (his italics). Why use a
missile, he asks, "when they could use many other means to deliver nuclear
weapons anonymously?"
The real danger we face, Weinberg
writes, is the spread of nuclear material that can be set off without missiles,
a danger the Bush administration, by undermining the Non-Proliferation Treaty,
has increased.
Few politicians are willing to face the
scientific truth. As Weinberg puts it, Bush is pursuing "a missile defense
undertaken for its own sake, rather than for any application it may have in
defending our country."
Let's not forget the cost of
pursuing NMD for its own sake -- little things like Medicare, Social Security
and increased immigration.
Goldsborough can be reached
via e-mail at jim.goldsborough@uniontrib.com.
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