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Secrecy in Iran and deciphering Obama's Missile Defense policy

By Marko Beljac - posted Tuesday, 29 September 2009


In a welcome move US President Barack Obama has decided to shelve the previous administration's specific plans for a European Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system. In scrapping the Bush plan Obama seeks to put an alternative system in its place. Some have argued that Obama has scrapped Bush era European Ballistic Missile Defense entirely as a concession to Russia.

In response a bevy of high ranking administration officials and former Clinton administration policy makers, such as Bob Gates, Hillary Clinton and Strobe Talbott have argued that Obama has not so much scrapped European Ballistic Missile Defense as he has rationalised it. Furthermore, this decision was not made as a gesture towards Russia's unwarranted concerns, but was purely technical and based on new intelligence assessments.

Just how radical is Obama's decision, and what might we say about its underlying rationale?

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The first thing we should point out is that Russia's concerns about the previous system, although over the top, did have some merit. For instance the X-Band radar that was to be placed in Europe would have had the ability to provide useful information on the telemetry of Russian ballistic missile tests. This is especially the case at that period of flight when the test missile's dummy warhead separates from the bus. The Pentagon could use this information to try and develop a system to beat Russian countermeasures, to which we return.

Ted Postol, a highly regarded physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has also shown that the GMD interceptors that were to be placed in Poland under the Bush plan would have had the ability to catch and intercept Russian long-range missiles headed for the east coast of the United States. Postol's analysis is based on a crucial operating assumption (which he does not accept), namely that the system would work as the US Missile Defense Agency claims it would work.

To be sure the Bush plan envisaged that these interceptors would be capped at 10, nowhere near enough to prevent a Russian first strike. However, the problem with BMD is not its effects on first strike dynamics, but its potential (again if it works as advertised) to blunt a second strike and thereby possibly deny Russia a second strike deterrent capability. Under Bush's Ballistic Missile Defense policy, NSPD-23, 10 need not be seen as a limit.

Any Russian strategic planner, no matter what his scientists might tell him about the system's true capability, would need to take its advertised capabilities seriously and plan accordingly. It is for this reason that the Bush BMD plan partly acted as a break on further strategic arms control even though the Russian reaction went overboard. Scrapping this specific plan opens up the prospect for a successful US-Russia arms control accord, which is to be welcomed.

The Obama alternative is built around the SM-3 interceptor. It actually trades the Bush GMD plan for a SM-3 based plan directed southwards, which includes a less troublesome radar component from the Russian perspective. It has been argued that contrary to the GMD interceptor the SM-3 is a well tested capability and would be able to intercept Iranian missiles headed for Europe with much higher confidence. This is the technical argument used to support the Obama decision. This claim is not accurate. Like the GMD the SM-3 system is an exo-atmospheric based BMD capability. Although the SM-3 has been put through its paces in tests we should note that these tests were not based on combat conditions.

It has not been demonstrated that any exo-atmospheric based interception system would be able to defeat countermeasures, such as decoys. Many analysts have argued that BMD tests are designed such that this challenging task is avoided in order to prevent Congressional defunding. The technical argument is not as water tight as administration officials would have us believe. If the system cannot defeat countermeasures then nuclear strikes remain a possibility. Only one such strike need be successful in order to defeat the entire system.

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European BMD has always been justified with respect to the Iranian missile threat. The Bush system was to provide protection for Europe, but more so for the east coast of the United States, from Iranian long-range missiles. Upon review the Obama administration argues that this specific threat has been slow to emerge and that Iranian medium-range missiles, such as the Shahab-3, are much more serious at this time and over the medium term.

The first thing that we might say here is that this demonstrates the overly pessimistic intelligence analysis used to support the previous plan. It really is a stunning repudiation of one of the most important justificatory studies behind BMD, namely the 1998 Rumsfeld Commission report. The Rumsfeld report clearly was based on a far too pessimistic analysis of what states like Iran and North Korea could do with Scud missile based technology, as has been pointed out from the get go by critics.

Second, usage of the phrase "missile threat" is highly misleading. The threat should be seen as a "warhead threat". Even more to the point the threat is supposed to be a nuclear warhead based threat. According to the latest US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear program (2007) Iran halted a nuclear warhead program in the fall of 2003 (a high confidence conclusion).

The noted US analyst Paul Kerr has argued that this occurred when Iran consolidated all of its nuclear programs under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran. Certain aspects of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program come across as a parallel fuel cycle (especially "project green salt") and weaponisation effort under the leadership of hardline elements such as the Republican Guards. (This was written prior to the breaking news of a secret enrichment plant, I can’t resist now adding.)

The recent revelations of a secret smaller scale Iranian uranium enrichment plant under construction near Qom are of great concern. In itself the Qom facility does not suggest that Iran has a parallel military fuel cycle currently under development. Iran may be interested, for instance, in developing a hedge against the possible bombing of the known Natanz plant. Iran would not be able to divert enough UF6 gas from its declared conversion plant to the Qom facility for a bomb without being caught.

I have been saying for years at my blog that the possibility of harsh sanctions and bombing encourages Iran to be secretive. I had argued that the top priority for the international community should be not suspension of enrichment but rather ensuring wider inspections through the Additional Protocol are put in place. This has now become fashionable. However, the previous hardline policy acted as a serious disincentive for Iran to do this.

In recent comments, not highly publicised, US officials have indicated that the conclusions of the 2007 NIE still stand. The International Atomic Energy Agency is attempting to clarify the nature of Iran's past activities based on western intelligence, but Iran is not co-operating. The IAEA has also complained that western states refuse to provide further information.

Israel has alleged that the IAEA has drawn up a "secret annex" to its Iran safeguards report which the IAEA chief has censored. The real meat in this story, first leaked by the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, was that Iran has now resumed nuclear warhead work. This "annex" has been seen by Associated Press and it contains no such claim, based on AP's reports on the matter. As noted the 2007 NIE still stands; there might be a "missile threat" but there currently exists no "warhead threat".

Iran and the US are to begin talks in due course. It would seem, judging by snippets provided by The New York Times and The Washington Post, that Obama's objective going into these talks is to demonstrate that he is not intransigent and thus helping to develop a case for much tougher multilateral sanctions against Iran. If, however, the US were to seriously pursue the thinking behind the Baker-Hamilton report then serious talks with Iran might instead lead to a durable comprehensive regional peace. Under such an arrangement there need be no warhead threat to Europe at all. President Bush rejected Baker-Hamilton and it seems that Obama's Iran policy is also founded upon rejection of Baker-Hamilton.

Notice that is not what Obama seemed to be promising during his campaign. In fact this conclusion should be seen as trivial because the administration has openly stated it just seeks to discuss the nuclear issue with Iran.

One aspect of the Obama BMD policy review is not well clarified. The Bush plan was a trilateral US, Poland and Czech Republic system. It was not a NATO system. NATO did have its own plan, which was meant to deal with short-range and medium-range missiles. France, in turn, also has its own BMD plans. Under the old approach Europe would have had three BMD systems. That was irrational and clearly not truly threat based. It might well be the case that Europe, following Obama's decision, would still have three BMD plans, which remains irrational. We need further clarification on this. If this be true we then have rationalisation within a broader irrational framework.

There are two more important aspects behind the Obama decision that have not been well amplified in commentary. The first is that the decision captures a very important component of Bush era policy. In his press briefing following the decision the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Cartwright, stated that, "I mean, if this system emerges the way we think it is, if the testing bears out, what you really are doing here is providing another form of deterrence, credible deterrence, that is an alternative to an offensive-only capability".

Those remarks are very important. This position is based on a repudiation of the rationality criterion of classical deterrence theory. This position was articulated in Bush's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, "We have concluded that a strategic posture that relies solely on offensive nuclear forces is inappropriate for deterring the potential adversaries we will face in the 21st century. Terrorists or rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction will likely test America’s security commitments to its allies and friends."

The argument rests on the idea that "rogue states" are irrational and fall outside of the ambit of traditional deterrence. This formed the intellectual underpinning of many of the Bush administration's strategic policies. For instance it formed an important conceptual role in the doctrine of preventive war.

Clearly Obama accepts the underlying intellectual rationale behind the set of Bush era strategic policy. This does not mean that Obama will adhere to the entire set of Bush policies, he's BMD policy is a little bit different, but it does mean that his administration will not present a radical break with the strategic approach of his predecessor as is widely supposed.

There exists no reason to conclude that Iran cannot be deterred even if it did have nuclear warheads. The problem that Iranian strategic capabilities would represent is that they would be a powerful "anti-access/area denial" capability. The issue is not that Iranian nuclear warheads could be used for a first strike against Europe or the US, but rather that they could deter the US from engaging in military intervention in the critical Middle East region.

That's a big difference.

The present BMD system first emerged during the Clinton administration. Clinton grudgingly accepted BMD following the GOP's capture of Congress during his period in office. He was not a warm supporter of the idea and largely left the final decision on BMD to his successor. However, the Clinton plan was a capped plan. The idea was to have a system built under a limited and sealed capability. Clinton did this in order to try and mollify domestic BMD supporters without scrapping the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, the cornerstone of strategic arms control.

Under Bush this policy was changed to an "open architecture policy." As NSPD-23 states, "the Defense Department plans to employ an evolutionary approach to the development and deployment of missile defenses to improve our defenses over time. The United States will not have a final, fixed missile defense architecture. Rather, we will deploy an initial set of capabilities that will evolve to meet the changing threat and to take advantage of technological developments."

The Obama decision, and comments accompanying it, demonstrate that the open architecture provision of NSPD-23 will remain. Although the nature of Obama's approach to European BMD might not preclude a nuclear arms control agreement with Russia based on the agreed Obama-Medvedev parameters, open architecture BMD will remain a barrier for strategic arms control directed towards deep cuts let alone disarmament.

In so far as strategic concepts go it thereby follows that the Obama approach is consistent with the Bush approach. When Gates and Co inform us that the Obama decision rationalises rather than scraps the Bush era policy they are correct.

However, when they tell us that their system is based on an existing threat to Europe and, what's more, is purely based on technical considerations they are taking us for a ride.

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About the Author

Mark Beljac teaches at Swinburne University of Technology, is a board member of the New International Bookshop, and is involved with the Industrial Workers of the World, National Tertiary Education Union, National Union of Workers (community) and Friends of the Earth.

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