Tortured Ideas on Missile Defense
(New York Times)

linton administration lawyers have proposed a strained new interpretation of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty to allow Washington to begin building missile defenses this year without violating the treaty. The White House should reject their advice in favor of a more straightforward approach, postponing any construction decision until the serious technological and diplomatic questions surrounding the current missile defense program have been satisfactorily resolved.

That approach was recommended to the White House last week by a panel of national security experts, including a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn. It would allow the United States to make sure it was using the most reliable defensive technology while doing minimal harm to arms control.

America and Russia have long agreed that it would violate the ABM treaty to pour concrete for missile-tracking radars the treaty prohibits. But administration lawyers now claim that construction could proceed well beyond this agreed threshold without violating the agreement. Moscow would surely reject this interpretation, just as Washington rightly rejected Russian attempts to create similar loopholes for building prohibited radars in the 1980's.

Besides the ABM treaty, there is another compelling reason to defer a decision about building a missile shield until at least next year. Several leading missile scientists contend that the defensive system now being tested by the Pentagon may not be able to distinguish between decoys and an actual incoming nuclear warhead. That is a disabling flaw, for an antimissile system is useless if it hunts decoys instead of warheads after both kinds of devices are released by a missile in mid-flight. At the least, a series of further tests must be conducted against the kind of sophisticated decoys a rogue attacker could easily employ. Instead, the Pentagon plans just one more test, using unrealistically simple decoys.

Washington should step back and consider other possible designs for defensive systems that might avoid such decoy problems. One alternative would build on the proposal made earlier this month by Russia's president, Vladimir Putin. The Putin plan, still more of a concept than a set of specific proposals, would be designed to intercept enemy missiles soon after launching in the so-called "boost phase."

An ascending missile is a larger, slower and hotter target than warheads tumbling through space, and cannot easily be protected with decoys. A system based on the Putin approach would also have the advantage of being already acceptable to Moscow and hence easily accommodated within arms control treaties.

A number of practical problems would have to be resolved. No system like Mr. Putin's has yet been developed or tested. Even if the technology worked, Washington would not want to rely on a system of interceptors based mainly on Russian territory, as the Putin plan envisions. Additional interceptors could be based on American ships off North Korea and in the Persian Gulf. But these might be vulnerable to air or submarine attack.

Still, a boost-phase system may do more to enhance American security than the Pentagon's seriously troubled program. The administration should not prematurely foreclose that option or the possibility of working out amendments to the ABM treaty with Moscow. Instead of trying to finesse missile defense choices with lawyerly language, Mr. Clinton should find the political courage to postpone the decision until it can be more wisely made.