Dealing With China (Part 3 of 3)

[This article is part three of a three-part series called Dealing With China. Part one tackles the question of Chinese money in American politics. Part two deals with sales of military technology to China, from missile guidance systems to missiles to rental of US territory. This article deals with the question of Clinton's proposed anti-ballistic missile system, and what effect it will have on US-China relations, as well as providing a synthesis for dealing with China in the future.]

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The world may have become more dangerous since the end of the Cold War. Even though the Soviet Union (and its tension with the United States) no longer poses a nuclear threat to the world, the nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union are, for the most part, still in existence, and under far less stringent protection then prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even though Kazakhstan and Ukraine claim that they surrendered their nuclear arsenals to Russia, the arsenal of the Soviet Union still exists, spread out among several countries and areas in dire economic straits. India and Pakistan have also joined the club of declared nuclear powers, and these countries are also less than reliable guardians of their technology. Saddam Hussein and other leaders hostile to American interests continue their attempts to obtain nuclear technology. And, most importantly to this essay, China maintains a sizeable nuclear arsenal, and has the means of delivery (planes and ballistic missiles) to place a nuclear bomb anywhere in the world.

Congress is worried about the Chinese threat, but far more worried about a terrorist threat. The arsenals of the former Soviet Union are poorly guarded, and India and Pakistan have questionable control facilities. The subject of a hundred works of fiction, both thriller movies and spy novels, the theft and attempted use of a nuclear device by a terrorist organization, is a scary and coldly possible reality. The best reasons for a defense against such weapons may be the reasons we cannot anticipate: an accidental launch, for example, by either a foreign country, or even an accidental and mistargeted American launch.

Right now, the United States has no defense. Once again, the President has proposed a system of defense against ballistic missiles, and once again, Congressional Republicans have rallied around the idea. Ever since Reagan's "Star Wars" proposals of the 1980s, which fancied a space-based network of satellites equipped with lasers that could shoot nuclear missiles out of the sky, a ballistic missile defense system has been a crucial plank of Republican policy prescriptions. Yet several attempts at building the "Star Wars" system demonstrated the extreme technical difficulty, and concomitant exorbitant cost, associated with such a system.

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