Molly Ivins writes:
Last week, Bush visited Yuma, Ariz., to tour a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border by Border Patrol buggy. Maybe Jorge was doing a little measuring for the $3.2-million-a-mile fence the Senate recently approved, which I guarantee will be really helpful.
Are they insane? As Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano observes, “Show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder.”
Ah, yes: countermeasures. You’d think smart people would try to imagine them before throwing gobs of money at simple yet strangely expensive solutions to problems real and imagined.
Take the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Recently we noted Putin’s remarks in his state-of-the-nation address about “high-precision” Russian missiles under development that would zigzag, thus defeating any antimissile defense. And this week the New York Times reported on the Pentagon’s plans to deploy new “interceptors” in Europe (possibly Poland or the Czech Republic), supposedly to defend against Iranian nuclear missiles (of which there are none), not Russian nukes (of which there are lots).
Fred Kaplan exposes the folly of continuing to pour money into this complex but enticingly reasonable yet relentlessly expensive program (according to Kaplan, the US spends more than $10 billion a year on this crap). To wit:
If the United States ever does deploy a system, a not terribly clever foe—the leaders of North Korea, Iran, or wherever—could evade it in two easy ways. They could fire two missiles at each target (no missile-defense test has ever been conducted against multiple targets, nor are any such tests scheduled). Or instead of firing a missile from a launch site whose location is known (thus making it easy for us to track the missile’s flight path to the target), they could load a missile on a barge, take it much closer to the target’s coastline, and fire it at such a short range that it doesn’t have to arc high into outer space; it could fly underneath the missile-defense system’s radar. (These techniques, by the way, are well-known and have been much discussed; the bad guys don’t need me to tell them how to do it.)
A good way to win an arms race is to exhaust the enemy—to field weapons systems that are very difficult and costly for the enemy to counter. Even if we managed to perfect a defense against long-range ballistic missiles, an enemy could counter it by delivering a nuclear bomb in a way that’s easier and cheaper.
I wonder who really benefits from SDI? It’s not putting my kid through college.
