By Brian Carnell

Thursday, June 29, 2000

In an otherwise boring debate between the American Prospect's Washington editor, Joshua Micah Marshall, and Micah Safrey over whether or not Ralph Nader should be running for president, Marshall drops these lovely words of wisdom:

Thirdly, saying that Gore is to the right of Bush on nuclear disarmament is deeply misleading. When Ronald Reagan first proposed the Star Wars program in 1983, he said his plan would allow us to rid the world of nuclear weapons entirely. That didn't make him a lefty; it made him a crank.

Now, to be sure, Reagan (and conservatives in general) overestimate the current state of technology -- the United States is not even close to having a system that could simply obviate the need for nuclear weapons. Not to mention the fact that the U.S. government is going about building such a system in completely the wrong way. The current SDI research is largely a welfare program for defense contractors whose progress at developing a working missile defense has been a spectacular failure.

On the other hand, Marshall appears to be the statist crank here. If a missile defense system is available in 20-30 years that would protect the United States from a nuclear attack, what would be the point in maintaining a nuclear arsenal? U.S. nuclear policy is based on the deterrence factor that having thousands of nuclear weapons creates, but if a reliable missile defense was available, why bother wasting all that money maintaining an unnecessary deterrent?

Whether or not such a system can be built is an open question, and to get there would require a lot of changes at the Pentagon and in Congress that aren't likely to happen soon. But though such a system is a long shot, the idea of a United States protected by an anti-missile defense rather than by the threat of a retaliatory nuclear strike seems like an eminently good idea.

Source:

The Narcissism of Small--And Sometimes Large--Differences. The American Prospect, Joshua Micah Marshall, 2000.

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