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But outsiders have doubts. Last fall a blue-ribbon panel concluded there is "unusual fragmentation and confusion" about who is running the program. After January's miss, the Pentagon's top weapons tester said the Administration has put "undue pressure" on the Pentagon to "meet an artificial decision point." Even the Pentagon's documents show that a decision to build the defense system will be made only when 45% of the proposed hardware has been shown to work. In fact, there is concern that the new, more powerful booster--which will shake the kill vehicle 10 times as hard as the test booster now being used--could damage its own optics or electronics and render "the interceptor impotent," the CBO said last week. Critics say foes could overwhelm the system with cheap decoys. They note that it will do nothing to keep terrorists from smuggling a weapon into the U.S. Clinton has said he will decide by fall whether or not to build such a system, based on the threat, the cost and effectiveness of such a shield and finally the system's impact on arms control.
The political third criterion makes the technical problems of the shield pale. When Clinton visits Moscow on June 4 for his first summit with President-elect Vladimir Putin, he wants to make headway on an accord both to slash U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons to between 1,500 and 2,000 and to amend the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 to allow the U.S. to begin building a national missile defense. Instead he may be staring at the collapse of practically every major arms-control treaty.
The cold war ended a decade ago, but Russia and the U.S. still have double the number of nuclear weapons that even their militaries say they now need. Last month Putin got his parliament to ratify the 1993 START II treaty, which would bring down each side's warhead count to between 3,000 and 3,500. But Moscow will not begin cutting under START II until the Senate ratifies side agreements Clinton negotiated in 1997 that strengthen the ABM treaty.
To complicate matters, Senate Republican hawks want to kill the ABM treaty and vow to block ratification of the side agreements--even if it means bringing START to a full stop. That kind of logic--abandoning an accord that eliminates thousands of Russian ICBMs aimed at the U.S. to build a defense against rogue-state missiles that may not exist--mystifies arms-control proponents. Says Spurgeon Keeny Jr., president of the Arms Control Association: "Russia is still the only country that threatens the existence of the U.S."
At this point Putin wants no part of any tinkering with the ABM treaty, fearing that it would open the door to a larger U.S. shield than Clinton says he wants to deploy, which Moscow cannot afford to match and which would threaten its nuclear deterrence. He has warned Clinton that Russia will abandon all arms-control treaties if the U.S. builds a national missile defense.