Official gives rational case for missile defense
With changing times come changing needs to defend the United States. A missile defense system is one of those needs, says one government official.
State Department Senior Adviser for Weapons of Mass Destruction Kerry Kartchner spoke Wednesday to a handful of Utah State University students in the Taggart Student Center Auditorium. Kartchner spoke on the rationale for a missile defense system in the United States.
“We’re dealing with a changed security environment,” Kartchner said. “We don’t always understand the dynamics of what is motivating rogue states.”
Kartchner said there are some countries like North Korea and Iran that have been developing technology that could be used for long-range ballistic missiles. Kartchner said these countries are also known to be developing weapons of mass destruction at the same time as rocket-launch technologies, which is where concerns are being raised.
“Our concern now is with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or ballistic missiles,” Kartchner said.
Kartchner said the United States is using diplomacy as its primary means to prevent possible attacks from rogue nations, but if a volatile situation were to develop, a missile defense system could be invaluable to the country.
After Sept. 11, Kartchner said, the United States learned some lessons. It became apparent there were people determined to harm the United States and do as much damage as possible.
The defense system the United States is building involves 16 missile silos at Fort Greeley, Alaska and four silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Twenty short-range missile interceptors would also be placed in Aegis-Class Cruisers that could be deployed anywhere on the ocean.
Criticism has come over the missile defense system concerning the difficulty of hitting an enemy missile with a United States missile.
“It’s actually a lot easier than hitting a bullet with a bullet,” he said.
Older missile defense systems, like one proposed in the 1980s, involved creating an explosion in the path of an enemy missile, but that method was not effective, Kartchner said.
“The reason we went to a hit-to-kill is because that is the only way to ensure that whether the warhead contains a biological or a nuclear weapon, you completely destroy that warhead,” he said.
Early tests with the missile defense system have produced mixed results, Kartchner said. Tests that have been fired from the boat-based missile launchers have resulted in 75 percent accuracy in four tests. Eleven tests from land-based silos have been less accurate, however, with only six of the tests destroying the target missile.
When considering the accuracy of the tests, consideration has to be given to different situations that were being tested on an individual trial, Kartchner said. There were some cases where officials were testing a particular part of the system that may have resulted in failed tests.
Following his presentation, Kartchner answered questions from students in attendance. Many of the questions he fielded were regarding the state of politics with other countries. One student asked Kartchner if creating the defense system would result in a new arms race with other countries.
“There’s no way that [other countries] can afford to engage in an arms race with us,” Kartchner said. “We would bury them in terms of the resources that we can devote to it.”
One country that does have the resources to compete with the United States in an arms race, Kartchner said, is China.
“We are concerned to avoid provoking China in an arms race,” he said. “We are aware that our missile defense system does have the potential to provoke China into building more nuclear weapons.”
Kartchner said the United States government has had discussions with China regarding the missile system and said China is taking a “wait and see” attitude toward the program.
The response in other countries has been positive toward missile defense. Kartchner said Canada, Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom have all made plans to implement defense systems similar to the United States.
The threat of an attack on America by ballistic missile may be small, Kartchner said, but the expense of implementing a defense system is far less than the expense of rebuilding a city hit by foreign missiles.
“The threat of ballistic missile attack is growing,” Kartchner said. “It’s something that we cannot wait until it materializes to begin doing something about it.”
-str@cc.usu.edu