| October 11, 2006 |  |
North Korean Nuclear Test: U.S. Missile Defense Isn’t the Answer
Statement by Dr. David Wright, Co-Director, Global Security Program, Union of Concerned Scientists
"U.S. missile defense is not an answer to North Korea's recent nuclear test. The development of a long range anti-missile system—which continues to consume billions of dollars per year—cannot provide an effective defense of the United States and amounts to a reckless squandering of defense dollars.
"Despite claims about its presumed effectiveness against a North Korean missile, the U.S. system has never been tested under anything approaching realistic conditions. Announced 'successes' of the system have been in highly staged, artificial tests. Such tests may be appropriate to the early stage of development the system is in, but they say essentially nothing about its effectiveness against a real attack.
"Guiding an interceptor to hit a particular object in space—while technically challenging—is nonetheless the easy part of missile defense. The unsolved, and likely unsolvable, problem in a real attack is identifying the warhead amid a cloud of decoys and other countermeasures. UCS's technical analysis, buttressed by that of the U.S. intelligence community, shows that effective countermeasures could be built by any country with the ability to develop a long-range missile or nuclear warhead. Moreover, any country investing in long-range missiles would certainly design countermeasures into them from the beginning.
"Despite its huge investment in the program, the Pentagon has no idea how to solve the countermeasure problem. The most recent missile defense test—the first successful test in nearly four years—did not include a single decoy.
"Unfortunately, the Bush administration has put its faith in a flawed anti-missile system rather than focusing on measures to stop the threat from developing in the first place. When the Bush administration took office, North Korea had separated only a fraction of the plutonium it is now estimated to have and diplomatic efforts had capped that amount: North Korea had verifiably shut down its reactor capable of producing more plutonium and locked up the fuel rods from that reactor and placed them under the watch of on-site international inspectors. It was also observing a moratorium on missile flight tests that verifiably capped its missile capability. While important questions arose about a North Korean uranium enrichment program, resolving that issue should not have been allowed to undermine these constraints. The United States was unquestionably more secure with those caps on North Korea's plutonium stockpile and missile program in place.
"Yet apparent deadlock within the Bush administration over its North Korea strategy has led to a failed approach that has let all those caps disappear. The United States cannot rely for its security on the dream of a technical fix in the form of missile defense. The Bush administration must develop an effective strategy to engage North Korea and keep the potential threat from getting worse. The fact that such engagement led to important constraints on North Korea's military programs in the past suggests it should be taken seriously now."
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