Good Grief! the Politics of Debating NMD

ON AN EPISODE OF EVERY POLITICAL JUNKIE'S favourite television programme, The West Wing, Leo McGarry, the chief of staff, wants to convince President Bartlett to support a national missile defence. In an attempt to make his point, he invites Bartlett to the Situation Room to watch the results of a missile interceptor test. On the way, Bartlett explains to McGarry that the Pentagon is treating him in the same way that Lucy treats Charlie Brown in the recurring Peanuts strips in which Lucy promises to hold the football for Charlie Brown to kick but always pulls it away at the last moment. In the Situation Room the two watch as telemetry reports from the test come in. The moment of truth arrives, but nothing appears to happen. McGarry looks worried and asks a Pentagon official to report. When he is told that the interceptor missed, he asks by how much. The reply is '137'; '137 miles.' As McGarry sputters, unsure of how to respond to so spectacular a miss, the president supplies the words he is looking for: 'Good grief!'The West Wing episode attempts to do, in its own way, what Frank Harvey attempted to do in his recent article in this Journal, 'The international politics of national missile defence: A response to the critics,' namely, 'to encourage more informed discussion of national missile defence.'(f.1) Of course, the writers of West Wing are pretty clearly among the critics to whom Harvey addresses his arguments. I, too, count myself a critic of NMD, and applaud both the American scriptwriters and my Canadian colleague for their calls for dialogue. I offer the following thoughts as my contribution to this important discussion in Canada.I take up a number of the challenges Harvey laid out for the critics, although not, perhaps, in the form and manner he would have expected. In the first section I consider the politics of Harvey's 'International politics of national missile defence.' The form in which he presents his arguments has particular, and powerful, effects. I examine some of them, and, in the process, address a number of the substantive objections Harvey raises to 'the critics.' In the second section, I pursue two of the principal themes of much of the opposition to NMD - the likely response from the nuclear weapon states not allied to the United States and the impact on arms control in general and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in particular. I then step away from the terms in which Harvey has set the debate in order to examine in some detail a crucial assumption that underlies his arguments and most of the arguments advanced in support of NMD: the nature of the threat. National missile defence is touted as a response to the growing threat of 'rogue' states, and so, in the final section, I consider how the rogue state came to be and the consequences of that genesis.(f.2)THE POLITICS OF 'THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICS OF NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENCE'On the surface, Harvey's article appears to be a useful entry into the debate on NMD. He proposes to take up a series of arguments against national missile defence and reveal their 'logical and factual errors' (p 545). Because a debate is constituted by the give and take of argument, counter-argument, and refutation, a critique of the arguments advanced by the opponents of NMD makes an important contribution. However, two features of the way in which this contribution is structured, when taken together, bias the 'debate' in favour of NMD.The first and most important is that Harvey's argument reverses the 'burden of proof,' to borrow a phrase from another forum of debate. National missile defence is a major, costly, and quite dramatic change in the strategic status quo. Just how costly it will be is at the heart of the debate about its future, but the cost is certain to include billions of dollars and political disruption with America's allies and others. Under the terms of almost any form of debate - logical, formal, or political - the responsibility for making the case rests with those who propose it. …

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