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Proposed shield would not have helped, critics say

Both sides in missile debate say attacks prove their point

By SCOTT CANON

The critics had said this could happen. The horror would come not from an ocean-crossing missile with an implicit return address, but from the place we least suspected, or at least suspected too little.

The boosters said this could happen, too. The means of attack that we considered just too outrageous, too bizarre to be realistic, would hit us hardest. And so the opponents and supporters of President Bush's proposed national missile defense could find in Tuesday's attacks - even as cinders still settled on Manhattan and the Pentagon - strong reasons to support their convictions.

"It does point out that there are a lot of things missile defense won't protect you from," said Owen Cote, associate director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Of course, the other side will note that missile defense was never supposed to protect against everything."

Bush has put his proposal to develop a national missile defense center stage in his drive to reform the military, to adapt the country's security to life after the Cold War, and to employ America's high-technology edge to fend off the attacks of America's more unpredictable enemies.

Many observers said Tuesday's attacks would give him political capital to push even harder. Congress is less likely to resist Bush's appeal for an $18 billion increase in the defense budget at a time when Americans are prone to want more backing for the military.

"Missile defense may not be directly relevant to the attack, but it's about safety at home," said Steve Fetter, a nuclear arms analyst during the Clinton administration. "It'll be hard for politicians to stand up and vote against that." In emotionally charged times, he said, the security promised by missile defense is bound to have added appeal.

Military analyst Barry Blechman said missile defenses were a fairly popular idea to begin with. "Most people don't realize we don't have missile defenses," said Blechman, of the DFI International defense research and consulting firm. "I don't think the terrorist example hurts the missile defense argument. Just because you have windows doesn't mean you shouldn't have doors."

Early tests have left the work-in-progress system wanting, generally unable to tell a real missile from a dummy and often unable to hit either.

Supporters say that a program as challenging as missile defense will have failures to overcome. But the danger of nuclear attack from, say, North Korea is serious enough to make the effort worthwhile, they say.

Costs estimates are fuzzy - usually between $35 billion and $100 billion. On Monday, Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, put the price at $500 billion - money he said could be put to better use elsewhere to protect the country.

"We will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship, or the belly of a plane, or are smuggled into the city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack," Biden told the National Press Club. Missile defense critics on Tuesday found him prophetic.

"In this case, our weak link is a commercial airplane," said Tim Brown, a senior analyst with Globalsecurity.org, which opposes a missile defense system. "Missile defense wouldn't have helped stop this."

For a cost that would painfully bleed the rest of the Pentagon budget, said Weapons in Space author Karl Grossman, "we could spend all this money and still be vulnerable" to terrorists.

Bush has said, however, that missile defense promises the best chance to protect the United States from a "rogue" country willing to direct a small-scale nuclear attack at an American target. His supporters note that national missile defense isn't promoted as a defense against all attacks. Rather, they describe it as a recognition that the fantastic is possible.

"I understand the point that national missile defense doesn't protect against a variety of terrorist threats - that's not news," said Keith Payne, director of research for the National Institute for Public Policy. "It demonstrates yet again that threats we consider out of the box actually do occur. Missile use is that type of danger."