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Wolfgang Panofsky

The President's Decision to Withdraw from the ABM Treaty

by Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky, Professor and Director Emeritus, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
March 2002

On Thursday December 13, 2001, President Bush informed Congressional leaders that he had decided to abrogate the ABM Treaty under its Article XV, which states that the Treaty could be abrogated by one of the parties "if extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this treaty have jeopardized its supreme interests." The President failed to identify the 'extraordinarily events' which precipitated his decision. While he heavily criticized the ABM Treaty, as he has done throughout his campaign and while in office, he did not explain how the 'supreme interests' of the nation would be 'jeopardized'.

The Technical Significance of ABM Treaty Withdrawal

While indeed, as the President contends, the ABM Treaty was a product of the Cold War, its significance greatly extends beyond the specific situation that prevailed between the Soviet Union and the United States. The motivation for the Treaty derived from the fact that the advent of nuclear weapons had profoundly changed the role of 'offense' versus 'defense'. In particular, with respect to the delivery of nuclear weapons by ballistic missile between adversary nations, the balance of the offense/defense relationship, generally called the "exchange ratio", greatly favors the offense. Under the criterion formally promulgated by Paul Nitze describing the cost effectiveness of an offense versus a defensive strategy, the offense will win. The incremental cost required for offensive countermeasures to negate the effect of defensive measures, and leave the target country just as vulnerable as it was before, will always be much less than the cost of the defense. As a consequence, the deployment of an anti-ballistic missile defense will be escalatory in that it would stimulate the owners of ballistic missiles to increase their numbers and/or equip them with more effective means to penetrate the defense. To say it differently, with respect to nuclear weapons, we are living in an offense-dominated world--a conclusion that is further reinforced by the fact that nuclear weapons can be delivered by many means other than ballistic missiles. This technical situation remains true today, Cold War or not, and applies to all technical means of ballistic missile defense that have been explored.

The technical performance of ABM systems has always been subject to great uncertainty. Thus the gap between "best case" and "worst case" analysis will be large. In consequence each defended country will have little or no confidence in the protection an ABM system can offer; at the same time both countries will feel the need to augment their offensive forces, just in case the opponent's ABM system might diminish the impact of a retaliatory strike. The result will be increased but futile expenditures, greater potential destruction--and greater uncertainty.

During the Cold War the reality of Offense Dominance led directly to the need for Mutual Deterrence between the two adversarial superpowers to forestall a direct armed conflict between them. Both the Soviet Union and the United States became persuaded that Ballistic Missile Defenses would weaken their deterrent posture and thereby lead to undesirable consequences. Recognizing these dangers of ABM systems, the superpowers negotiated and signed the ABM Treaty in 1972 and agreed to further strictures in 1974.
Even after the end of the Cold War, the nuclear strategic relationship--no longer called a confrontation--between the U.S. and either Russia or China includes an element of mutual deterrence. Thus the undesirable effects of creating Ballistic Missile Defenses remain in respect to these countries.

Offense dominance requires that a country in possession of offensive nuclear forces will actually react to the defensive measures. It has therefore been argued that while the exchange ratio between nuclear offensive and defensive forces greatly favors the offense, this does not invalidate the utility of ground-based, air-based or space-based defenses against the so-called 'rogue' nations, now renamed 'states of concern'. Generally included in this category are "the axis of evil" states North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. Should these states deploy nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles and the U.S. deploy ABM defenses, the argument continues, those states could not "afford" to augment or modify their ballistic missiles to penetrate the defense, even if this could be done much more cheaply than the U.S. defensive deployment. It is further argued by some that such states might have 'irrational' leadership who are willing to risk national suicide in order to blackmail or actually damage the United States. These arguments lack merit. Inexpensive technologies to penetrate the only defensive technology (ground-based mid-course-interceptors) now under development are readily available. There is also no persuasive evidence that today's leaders of the countries listed are "non-deterrable" or "irrational" when their own survival and that of their entire country is at stake. Most importantly, "rogue" nations can--and are much more likely to--employ "low-tech" delivery technologies to deliver nuclear weapons. Examples are cruise missiles, detonation on board ships in U.S. harbors, delivery by aircraft of many kinds, or even smuggling a nuclear weapon across U.S. land boundaries. Note that in its most recent Estimate the Intelligence Community agrees with this assessment.

Contrary to public impression, the proposal by the President to withdraw from the ABM Treaty was not accompanied by a proposed reduction rate of strategic deployed nuclear warheads beyond that agreed to by previous Administrations. The recently concluded "handshake" agreement between Presidents Bush and Putin only restricted "operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads." Accordingly, the Russians could use their nuclear weapons stockpiles that are not in this category (their reserves and in particular their stockpiles of deployed tactical weapons are believed to be very large) to re-MIRV their land-based strategic missiles. When or whether they would do this remains an open question, but U.S. abrogation of the ABM Treaty will lower the barrier against doing so.

While only portions of the Nuclear Posture Review completed at the end of 2001 have been released to the general public, it is clear that the "reduce and hedge" policy inherited from the previous (Clinton) Review of 1994 will be continued. The "hedge" component means that while the number of U.S.-deployed strategic warheads will continue to shrink, a "hedge" in the form of an active and inactive reserve will still number in the many thousands. This means that the multiplicity of warheads on MIRV'd missiles can be increased on short notice. It also means that the much-touted decision to convert the B-1 bomber to non-nuclear missions can be reversed in less than a year.

Considering that "operationally deployed nuclear warheads" do not include strategic systems undergoing maintenance, the reduction targets are in fact no lower than those specified in the earlier START II and START III agreements. Moreover the reduction targets specified in the Bush Nuclear Posture Review are delayed by several years beyond the dates specified in the previous Treaties. Evidently the Administration still sees a need for a very large deterrent force.

The principal reason that the President's decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty has no short-range technical consequence rests on the highly tentative developmental status of the U.S. missile defense programs. The United States has pursued ballistic missile defense programs for several decades and has spent an aggregate sum of approximately $100 billion of today's dollars on various programs with nothing substantial to show for it.

The United States deployed several limited Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) systems in the past. Various versions of the Nike Zeus system were fielded in the late 1960s but disbanded some years later as ineffective. In 1974 the so-called Safeguard System was installed to provide point defense of U.S. missile silos against potential Soviet missile strikes, but after only a few months was abandoned as too costly and ineffective. Then came President Reagan's "Star Wars" initiative that resulted in numerous costly experimental activities but in no deployed defenses.

A vigorous research and development program began under President Clinton aimed at a defense based on intercepting incoming missiles during mid-course in the vacuum of outer space. The system was to undergo 20 developmental tests to be followed by a number of operational tests. The original plans for the R&D tests were to include multiple decoys, simulators for tumbling reentry vehicles, and small balloons. These complicating factors were dropped from the test program once it was recognized that the system is fundamentally vulnerable to rather simple decoys. The simplified tests that have been carried out (six in all) included targets consisting of only a single re-entry vehicle and a single large balloon; the speed of the intercepting rockets used were well below those needed for realistic engagements. Some of the targets carried beacons. In these developmental tests all parties involved--both those controlling the target launch, and those controlling the interceptor--have known the exact time of launch and the precise point of engagement near Kwajalein Island in the Pacific.

The record of these developmental tests has been mixed: there have been failures and successful intercepts; the failures have been a consequence of inadequate quality control, not of any fundamental physical defect. Causes of failures included non-functioning of inter-stage booster separation and the freeze-up of the cooling system for the infrared detector used in the interceptor--routine items in existing missile technology. But a realistic defense against nuclear-tipped missiles must be highly reliable, even under circumstances much more severe and unpredictable than those which prevailed in these tests. It is unfortunate that these tests, which cost about $100 million dollars each, are placed into the political limelight both by proponents and opponents of NMD alike. In reality, success or failure of these individual developmental tests provides little, if any, evidence whether NMD will, or can, "work." Tests that can evaluate effectiveness under realistic operational conditions are several years away.

The total cost of deploying the Clinton system was estimated to be about $60 billion dollars. Since then, some of the schedules of the components of that system have seriously slipped and costs have grown; specifically the cost of the near-earth space-based infrared (SBIR-low) sensor system has escalated to about $23 billion dollars. President Bush frequently criticized the design of the Clinton system during his campaign as inadequate and advocated instead a so-called 'multi-layer' defense. The architecture of such a system has not been defined, and therefore its total cost cannot be estimated.

The ground based, mid-course intercept approach to NMD initiated by President Clinton is by far the most advanced among the technologies now under consideration--but even that part of the program is in its early development phase. This system is receiving the lion's share of President Bush's total Ballistic Missile Defense budget for fiscal year 2002. The ABM Treaty places no limits on the testing of the ground-based, mid-course interceptor program (other than on the number and location of interceptors eventually deployed) and on the land-based and space-based sensors supporting the program. These can be tested without violating the Treaty since they do not control the actual engagement. The remaining activities associated with such a system also need not confront the limits of the Treaty for many years unless they are specifically contrived to do so.

The planned test installations in Alaska containing interceptor silos would be technical violations of the ABM Treaty but have no significant technical utility; they could not be test fired and have no associated sensor needed to constitute part of a useable system. The second reason cited for an imminent conflict between a "required" program and the ABM Treaty was a tracking test of the radars aboard the Aegis ships. These were originally designed for ship defense against aircraft and subsequently against short-range missiles. These radars are well known to be inadequate to track high-flying ICBM's. Notwithstanding these restrictions which have been cited as reasons for withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, a few days after the President's announcement the Pentagon cancelled the Aegis-based Navy program citing its limited performance and high costs.

In summary, those test elements that would violate the ABM Treaty in the near future have no technical significance. Moreover, had the Administration solicited Russian agreement to allow specific elements of the test program that for whatever reasons were projected to conflict with the provisions of the Treaty, this should have been readily negotiable. But the Administration proposed removal of essentially all test restrictions imposed by the Treaty--a proposition predictably impossible to negotiate.

On January 2, 2002 the Secretary of Defense issued a Directive for the Missile Defense Program that unifies all missile defense programs under a single Missile Defense Agency. The Directive orders that all "layers" of defensive action (i.e. boost phase, midcourse and terminal intercepts) be developed as a single Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) against all ranges of threats. But no architecture, let alone specific design, for such a system has been identified nor has a total system cost target been set. However, authority has been granted for expedited acquisition methods to bypass usual DOD practice. The Secretary's Directive provides that planning for development and tests should not be constrained by the ABM Treaty, but that action which violates the Treaty should remain on hold--presumably until the six months' delay between notice and actual abrogation has expired.

Secretary Rumsfeld has also reinvigorated the military Space Command within the Department of Defense. This renewed strengthening of military space activities is only partially linked to missile defense activities. Currently, military use of space is a reality--such as the use of space assets for reconnaissance, communication, Treaty monitoring, and even real-time battle management. But active weapons in space are another matter. One should also note that our civilian economy is heavily dependent on space assets but even today the vulnerability of both civilian and military space vehicles and their sensors is significant. Relatively primitive missiles launched from the ground can attack satellites, satellites can be steered into collision, and certain sensors could be blinded by laser beams from other satellites. However, those existing risks would be greatly increased if active weapons were introduced into space vehicles. This issue is worthy of a separate analysis on its own. What is of interest here is that weapons in space have been proposed as components for ballistic missile defense systems. For instance, optical lasers "Brilliant Pebbles" (miniaturized hit-to-kill interceptors), and the now cancelled nuclear explosion pumped x-ray lasers, are or have been candidates for such a role. But at this time funds supporting such programs are very small relative to the expenditures on ground based missile defense. But various plans are under consideration to increase such space based activities in the future.

This history and the associated circumstances persuasively show that the President's announced decision was a political act, not supported by "extraordinary events" or technical justification. In fact, the Secretary's Directive specifies that a "capability-based requirements process for missile defense" be put in place. In non-Pentagonese this means that once some anti-ballistic missile defense performance, however limited, has been demonstrated during development tests, this performance could be converted into a 'requirement' and procurement. No threat analysis or evaluation of effectiveness in relation to cost is implied!

The Political and Military Significance of ABM Treaty Withdrawal

Let me now turn to the risky business of predicting the longer-range political and military impact of the President's decision. Notwithstanding the priority being given to missile defense, it appears extremely unlikely that the United States will ever deploy a significant National Missile Defense against even a limited attack--let alone against the kind of massive assault Russia could mount. The Congress is not apt to tolerate the budgetary outlays over the many years that would be required to achieve a meaningful defense. Note that appropriations for Ballistic Missile Defense corrected for inflation over the last twenty years or so have in fact been remarkably constant, almost independent of policy. Annual expenditures have been around $6 billion dollars, varying by roughly $3 billion. These numbers have changed little, despite such dramatic events as President Reagan's declarations in 1983 of his intention to deploy a missile defense designed to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete."

It is unlikely that future expenditures will be expanded to the extent that actual development, deployment, and operation of the "layered system" would require. There is little enthusiasm for the technical program within the military services. The Joint Chiefs have shown little support for National Missile Defense since the expenditures for that purpose compete with missions that they value more highly. There is no connection between Ballistic Missile Defense and the war against terrorism by non-state actors. There is also the dismal history of the value versus the cost of the past deployments mentioned above. Therefore, realistic long-range prospects for a meaningful National Missile Defense are poor. There is no technical silver bullet on the horizon that is apt to change this situation.

The story is different concerning the political consequences of the Presidential decision. Almost all other nations have objected to the President's decision when it was announced, but this negative response has been relatively subdued. President Putin proclaimed the decision to be "a mistake", but he clearly was in no position to let the decision interfere with the current warming of Russian-U.S. relations, precipitated by their joint interest in fighting terrorism. Specifically, he stated,

"in our view, unilateral withdrawal from the treaty would be a mistake. But I also said, should that happen, we would have no intention of raising any anti-American hysteria. Nor do we think this step could result in the emergence of new threats to Russia's security - for several reasons. First of all, a nationwide missile defense system is not in existence. Second, it is not known whether it could be created. And third, if the attempt to establish it is successful, it is not clear when that could happen."

Other members of the Russian political leadership have been less restrained, in particular spokesmen of the Duma have attacked the decision more vehemently. Aleksei Arbatov, the Chair of the Duma Defense Committee said,

"President Putin couldn't say that [the U.S. decision] was unexpected. [He also couldn't say] that America's behavior was wrong and that it may have bad consequences for [Russian-U.S.] relations in other fields. If he said so, it would have [meant] that he was retreating from his [pro-Western] position." Arbatov said further: "This is the reason why he reacted with moderation. He had to choose the right words to express his position in the matter. Even if--I'm sure--inside he was boiling."

Whatever the "true" Russian reaction may be; the level of Russian missile deployments will be set primarily by economic considerations. This does not mean, however, that the mixture of defensive deployments and reduced operationally deployed offensive missiles underlying the Nuclear Posture Review of the Bush Administration will ever materialize. Although that Review emphasizes a "new strategic relationship" based on such a mixture, no spokesman of the Administration--and to the best of my knowledge no member of the analytical community--has presented a persuasive, internally consistent model in which such a mixture of a National Missile Defense with only a small ballistic missile deployment can be stable. Thus the vaunted new strategic relationship lacks reality.

The worst feature of the President's decision is that it debases the Treaty process even further and diminishes the confidence of foreign powers that the United States is willing to take its treaty obligations seriously. The announced abrogation of the ABM Treaty, lacking a clear and sound technical justification, comes on the heels of the Administration's record of not pursuing ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, of having torpedoed the conference on improving the verification of the Biological Weapons Convention, of not joining the Convention to ban land mines, of having refused to join the Small Arms Convention (based on the specious argument that such a convention would interfere with the Americans' rights to bear arms), of objecting to the International Court of Justice, and of refusing to cooperate with the Kyoto Treaty on Global Warming. If we add to this the expressed unwillingness of the President to solemnify the proclaimed reductions in nuclear weapons summit by formal treaty, or even by written executive agreement, a dismal picture emerges.

Thus the main impact of the ABM Treaty abrogation will be to reinforce the impression of a unilateralist policy of this Administration. An important result of this situation will be its impact on the continued viability of the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Although the Administration has proclaimed that it will continue to support the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the abrogation of the ABM Treaty directly contradicts the obligation of the United States under Article VI of the NPT. This article commits the signatories to pursue nuclear arms control in good faith and maintenance of the ABM Treaty was explicitly referenced in the 1998 review conference of the NPT, which extended that treaty indefinitely.

Attainment of both non-proliferation and anti-terrorist objectives depends strongly on Russian cooperation in safeguarding weapons-useable nuclear materials and in reducing its enormous stockpiles--both of highly enriched uranium and separated military and civilian plutonium. After initial cutbacks of these joint programs, the Administration and Congress have recently announced restoration of these cuts resulting in support levels of cooperative safeguarding programs somewhat above those of the preceding Administration. Funding for the U.S. stockpile disposal program has been reduced and U.S. assistance to the Russian nuclear materials disposition program is "on hold". But the proposed withdrawal from the ABM Treaty having been taken over the objections of the Russian leadership will clearly undermine Russian confidence in the durability of U.S. commitments in pursuing these or other non-proliferation programs.

Very few domestic or foreign authorities or analysts have been persuaded by the 'anti-rogue-state' rationale for a U.S. ABM deployment, and an anti-terrorist justification is clearly lacking. Deployment of a ballistic missile threat demands expensive and advanced technology, and any ballistic missile attack carries the "return address" of the originator. Other low-tech methods of delivery of nuclear weapons by rogue states or sub-national groups are much more plausible. Technically, the only remotely credible rationale for a U.S. NMD deployment is to negate China's limited deterrent missile potential. Although the Administration has sent a delegation to China instructed to deny the anti-Chinese potential of the NMD system and the President has affirmed that argument, it is dubious that such assurance can be persuasive. Elements within the Chinese military tend to greatly overestimate American technical prowess. The question as to how China will react to the ABM Treaty abrogation therefore remains of great concern. Most Chinese oppose both defense against their long-range nuclear ballistic missiles and defense against their short-range conventional ballistic missiles deployed against Taiwan or other Asian targets. The latter is part of their opposition to all U.S. moves to supply military tools to Taiwan or other Asian countries, but they consider providing ballistic missile defenses particularly intrusive.

The official Chinese response to the President's announcement has been negative but restrained. Similar to the Russian situation, China can ill afford at this time to let the NMD issue derail progress in U.S.-PRC relations or anti-terrorism efforts and normalized trade practices. Also with the expected change in China's leadership this fall, China is clearly not prepared to engage now in a major policy confrontation with the United States. As Chinese leaders have emphasized, China has no intention, nor could it afford economically, to consider matching U. S. strategic forces.

China is known to be pursuing modernization of its nuclear forces, but thus far visible changes have been few. The present land-based missile force contains only about twenty single-warhead missiles using liquid fuel boosters capable of reaching the United States, and their basing may not survive preemptive strikes. China has only one strategic submarine of dubious performance and Chinese strategic bombers are antiquated. Technically this force could be both modernized and augmented. China has the technical capability to add penetration-aid packages to its missile warheads, to deploy multiple warheads using more compact designs, and to make significant improvements in silo survivability. Land-mobile ICBM's using solid fuel boosters have been under development since the 1980s. China could increase the number of long-range strategic missiles and restart production facilities to produce more weapons-useable fissile materials.

American opinion is divided on to what extent abrogating the ABM Treaty (to which China is not a party) will spur China's nuclear modernization program. Conservative opinion maintains that China will modernize inexorably, ABM Treaty or not, although the present pace is clearly slow. Others believe that China, in the absence of U.S. ballistic missile defenses and under its proclaimed "no first use" policy, would not need to augment its strategic forces, but would modernize by improving the survivability of its missile basing and probably eventually move to multiple-warhead delivery vehicles, but would not significantly increase the number of missile launchers. But all agree that China would not--and need not--tolerate denial of the deterrent potential of its strategic missiles by U.S. NMD deployment.

Some Chinese representatives have charged that U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty is signaling U.S. intent to deploy interceptors or other weapons in outer space. These fears have been fueled by the invigoration of the U.S. Space Command, by statements by Secretary Rumsfeld and by the U.S. objections at the Geneva Conference on Disarmament to Chinese initiatives to place restraints on the "Weaponization of Space" on the agenda. Indeed, placing offensive weapons in space has highly vocal U.S. advocates. But, as discussed previously, aside from the high costs of these systems the subject of active weapons in space is contentious. Important elements of that issue are the extensive dependence of our civilian economy, as well as of military communication and Intelligence collection on space assets, combined with the vulnerability of these assets. I conclude that inclusion of space weapons for missile defense purposes would be very much against U.S. security interests.

At various times Administration spokesmen have indicated that they expect China to do what has to be done to maintain its deterrent forces and they would not consider the maintenance of such a deterrent posture as a hostile act. Thus, even in the unlikely event that the U.S. deployed an effective NMD, this action will not result in U.S. "freedom of action"--meaning the ability to coerce China without facing a nuclear response. But the U.S. action could well result in increased deployment of Chinese strategic nuclear forces.

Should China's response to the ABM Treaty abrogation by the United States result in a substantial augmentation of deployed strategic forces, the problem remains of course how third parties--in particular India--will react. Note that the Indian Minister of Defense when announcing the recent nuclear tests identified Chinese nuclear weapons as a primary reason for India's need to joint the nuclear club. In turn Pakistan is likely to react to a further Indian nuclear weapons buildup.

It is difficult to predict whether or when a Chinese-Indian-Pakistani nuclear arms race will be triggered by the U.S. abrogation of the ABM Treaty. The future configuration of the U.S. system is not determined and physical deployment is far in the future. But the potential for such a race illustrates that in the still offense-dominated nuclear weapons world of today the prospect of deploying anti-ballistic missile defenses can lead to highly undesirable escalatory consequences.

The ABM Treaty is not a relic of the Cold War but remains a codification of today's realities, still needed to dampen the escalation of nuclear armaments. While the ABM Treaty has been a long-standing political target of members of this Administration and their conservative supporters, technical-military realities cannot be coerced by policy. As long as nuclear weapons are contained in the arsenals of nations (let alone sub-national groups!), the world is condemned to live in a condition dominated by the potential destructive power of offensive deployments. Protection must be sought through a combination of political dissuasion, deterrence, denial of weapons-useable fissile materials, and agreed or unilateral reductions of offensive nuclear weapons--not by the futile pursuit of comprehensive and costly technical defenses.

1 "the Intelligence Community judges that US territory is more likely to be attacked with WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) using non-missile means, primarily because such means:

Are less expensive than developing and producing ICBMs.
Can be covertly developed and employed; the source of the weapon could be masked in an attempt to evade retaliation.
Probably would be more reliable than ICBMs that have not completed rigorous testing and validation programs.
Probably would be much more accurate than emerging ICBMs over the next 15 years.
Probably would be more effective for disseminating biological warfare agent than a ballistic missile.
Would avoid missile defenses."

Unclassified Summary of a National Intelligence Estimate: Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat Through 2015, National Intelligence Council, CIA, Jan. 11, 2002.

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