Pugwash Occasional Papers, II:ii,
© March 2001. All rights reserved.

At the annual Wehrkunde Conference held in Munich in February 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made abundantly clear that the Bush administration intends to "develop and deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and forces against a limited ballistic missile attack."

No longer is the US government talking of whether missile defenses can meet the four criteria established by the previous administration for evaluating the wisdom of moving to deploy missile defenses: technological feasibility, cost-effectiveness, seriousness of the threat, and over-all enhancement to US security. The only question now seems to be, when?

European and Russian reaction to Rumseld’s speech ranged from qualified support to muted criticism to outright hostility. Despite a US promise to share the purported benefits of missile defense with its allies, most Europeans remain profoundly skeptical that a unilateral US deployment of a national missile defense (NMD) system will either enhance strategic stability or reduce the nuclear threat.

Meeting in Sigtuna, Sweden in October 2000, the Pugwash Workshop on Nuclear Stability and Missile Defense brought together a wide range of participants to discuss the implications of both national and theater missile defenses for international security. The essays in this Pugwash Occasional Paper focus not so much on the technical prospects of missile defense as they do on the need for the US to work cooperatively with its allies, as well as with Russia and China, to manage two separate but inter-related problems that often get muddied in the debate over missile defenses.

The first is nuclear stability among the major nuclear weapons powers. Thus far in the NMD debate, there’s been far more rhetoric than analysis on how missile defenses will affect deterrence, nuclear force structures and arms control among the nuclear powers. Major questions loom about the continued viability of mutually-assured destruction, the relevance of the ABM Treaty and other nuclear weapons agreements, and the prospects for continuing the progress made in the 1990s toward deep cuts in offensive nuclear forces. While legitimate questions do exist about all these issues, the answers are unlikely to be found in the unilateral actions of any one of the nuclear powers, including the US.

The second issue is that of whether NMD is indeed the right answer, or part of the right answer, to the problem of more countries acquiring long-range ballistic missiles and being able to threaten their use with nuclear or biological warheads. Here again, there are more than legitimate concerns about such proliferation and the future threat it could pose, not just to the US, but to its allies and to powers like Russia and China. But in like fashion to the issue of managing nuclear stability, there are other strategies for dealing with the threat, and these deserve the same scrutiny and resources that are currently being devoted to US NMD plans.

It is these types of questions that are addressed in this Occasional Paper, with the aim of finding cooperative strategies acceptable to the US, its European allies, and the other major nuclear weapons states in the urgently needed task of reducing the possibility of any nuclear weapon ever being used, of continuing the process of dismantling and destroying nuclear weapons, and of reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs.

The Pugwash Conferences would like to thank our hosts for the Sigtuna meeting, most especially Bengt Gustafsson and Jan Prawitz of the Swedish Pugwash Group and the Sigtuna Stiftelsen. Support for the meeting and for this Occasional Paper was provided by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swedish Defense Research establishment, the Swedish Agency for Civil Emergency Planning, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

- Jeffrey Boutwell, Editor

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