According to the administration, the global warming treaty endorsed by 178 other countries is flawed, the small arms pact is not perfect, and all the science is not yet in on stem cell research. Yet, the Missile Defense Shield, which by all the evidence so far has a fifty percent chance of hitting an incoming ballistic missile provided that we are apprised of the precise time and place of launch and given its exact trajectory, is worth this enormous investment. Other conditions for the missile defense’s success include good weather (the last test was postponed because of the threat of rain), and, oh yes, the incoming missile would have to be accompanied by no more than one decoy.

The administration admits that the tests so far have not been realistic, but they feel good enough about them to want to proceed, even though it means abandoning the ABM Treaty which has served the world well for over thirty years. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has said it is not necessary for the system to work perfectly. Apparently, anyone crazy enough to launch such a missile at us will be deterred by knowing that his chances of success are only fifty-fifty. Why that would be more of a deterrence than nuclear retaliation is not explained.

President Bush says the system is not directed against Russia or China, the only two likely adversaries with ICBM capability. Those countries don’t believe him, and besides threatening a new arms race in response, have signed a pact that harkens back to the early days of the Cold War. Reuniting Russia and China is so far the only solid achievement of the program. President Putin, while proclaiming Bush’s abandoning of the ABM Treaty a mistake, says that he doesn’t feel threatened by the tests, perhaps because he doesn’t think they will succeed.

The object of the president’s missile defense desire is supposed to be “rogue nations.” That, at the present time, would be Iraq, Libya, and North Korea, none of whom yet have a missile we need to defend against. Try to envisage circumstances in which a Saddam Hussein or a Kim Jong Il would launch a missile against the United States and you quickly see why Russia and China suspect that they are the real targets of this strategy.

Many scientists doubt that the proposed system will ever be effective in a realistic situation. President Carter, an engineer by training, called the idea “technologically ridiculous.” But suppose they are wrong. Imagine that you are the leader of a country and have been contemplating a missile attack against the United States only to learn that we have nearly perfected a missile defense shield. (It would be useless as a deterrent if we kept it a secret.) Would you go ahead anyway? There is more than one way to deliver a bomb. Even without a missile defense shield, a submarine, car, or package would make a cheaper and more reliable carrier. Or even a hijacked airplane, as the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon tragically demonstrate. And why even think about missiles when germs can be put in the mail? Even a clever computer hacker can wreak widespread damage to our economy.

In fact, the more feasible the missile defense shield becomes, the less likely it is that any country would rely on a weapon susceptible to it.

Surely, the administration is aware of all this, so why press ahead with such an expensive, probably unworkable, and futile program? Precisely because it so expensive. Not only does it feed money to defense contractors that are major Republican Party contributors, but it drains money from the federal government. That’s why Bush recently called the disappearance of the non-Social Security surplus, “incredibly positive news.” He gloated that it would halt the growth of the federal government.

What separates the Republican Party from the Democratic Party more than anything else is the Republican belief that the federal government should do as little as necessary vs. the Democrats’ conviction that government should do as much as possible. This is true even after Clinton announced that the era of big government was over. That moved the Democrats closer to the middle of the public opinion spectrum, but still left it on the other side of the divide. It was the deficits left by the Reagan administration that siphoned away available money for new social programs. (It was also the defense industry that got much of the money.)

Republicans have always believed in small government. The preamble to their 2000 party platform says: “Since the election of 1860, the Republican Party has had a special calling to advance the founding principles of freedom and limited government and the dignity and worth of every individual.”

For Republicans, the best way to limit government is to starve it of funds. One way to do that is to cut taxes. The current proposal to refund the Alternative Minimum Tax to large and mainly profitable companies is to do so with shovels. The other way is to spend funds on expensive projects that don’t establish ongoing entitlements. It doesn’t matter if the missile defense shield never works. It wouldn’t matter if the money was spent on producing widgets that were then rocketed into space. It does matter that expenditures not be so large that they trigger a tax increase. That’s what happened with the Reagan deficits.

Republican aversion to government programs is not, as many people believe, because they are mean-spirited. Rather, it stems from a blind faith in the private sector. The administration would turn welfare and social security over to the private sector if it could. And if there aren’t enough funds in government to provide for welfare and social security, then that might happen.

The real target of the missile defense program is the U.S. Treasury.

Jerome Richard lives in Seattle. He has written for The Humanist, Pacific Discovery, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Seattle Weekly, TomPaine.com and Social Action.com.

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