Abstract
A British Web Site, the “Notional Missile Defence Initiative” asks visitors for their (tongue-in-cheek) suggestions on how to devise a missile defense that might actually work. According to the February 10 New Scientist, anyone who writes in receives a notice explaining that a response will be delayed because “a one-character error in a one-line computer script at an Internet service provider” has sent all messages to the wrong place. The notice adds: “Of course, the hundred-million-line computer programs on which the [U.S.] National Missile Defence [nmd] scheme would rely will contain no errors at all.”
Jokes like these are not so funny any more, are they? Not since the new administration somehow transformed the sci-fi-inspired idea of national missile defense into an inevitable, almost respectable, way to spend 80, 90, or 100 billion dollars.
How did they do that?
First, they beat out the It-Won't-Work crowd, even though those folks had pretty much won the argument. The technicians were laughed at all the way to the Pyrrhic Victory Awards.
Missile defense proponents have now explained that nmd doesn't need to work, thank you very much. It turns out that just by spending all that money, the United States will be protected. Rogue states won't know whether or not their missiles can be shot down, and that'll paralyze ‘em. Case closed.
And if the technical argument has fallen, the anti-NMD moral argument has evaporated. Star Wars, Ronald Reagan's B-movie dream, led scientists to organize a pledge drive against participation. By June 1986, 3,700 professional physicists and engineers and 2,800 science graduate students had signed the anti-Star Wars pledge. This year, even as the nmd battle was being lost, activist groups organized another scientists' pledge drive—this time for promises not to work on nuclear weapons. (By March 26, the no-weapons-work drive had collected about a hundred signatures.)
Then there was the battle of terminology, which was an easy administration win. “Rogue states,” only last year re-dubbed “states of concern,” became rogues once more. Where would nmd be without a missile threat from at least one of these fierce little fellas?
During South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's visit to Washington in early March, George W. Bush made it clear that until he had auditioned China for the part, North Korea would continue to be cast as villain number one—no matter how desperately poor its people are or how famously wobbly and unguided its missiles may be.
And as for friends—well, friends are expected to prove their loyalty by endorsing nmd while being humiliated. Even as the president put the kibosh on Kim Dae Jung's dream of a North-South Korean agreement, Kim was offered the opportunity to eat any words of doubt he might have expressed about the missile defense system. Apparently it was an offer he couldn't refuse, and he dutifully announced that he had been misquoted.