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Tuesday, July 28, 1998
Missile threat looms
Test confirms pessimists' views.
Just weeks ago, the Clinton administration was insisting its intelligence apparatus had determined that no "rogue state" such as Iran or Libya would have the capability of deploying a missile that could land a nuclear, chemical or germ warhead on American soil before 2010.
Then came the report by a special bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel of defense experts, headed by Donald Rumsfeld, former defense secretary under Gerald Ford, asserting North Korea and Iran will probably have the know-how to build a long-range nuclear missile around the turn of the century.
Last Wednesday, Iran helped confirm the panel's findings when the huge, hostile theocracy successfully tested an intermediate-range ballistic missile. Such a weapon, launched from Iran, could not reach the United States (it does not fly in space as do Russian and American intercontinental re-entry vehicles). But Teheran demonstrated its ability to strike just about anywhere in the Middle East -- including Israel.
Equally disturbing was the State Department report that the Iranian missile was built using technology from North Korea, which means that strange, paranoid Stalinist dictatorship has possessed intermediate-range missile technology for some years and leads to serious speculation about what else Kim Jong Il may have in his arsenal.
The Iranian missile test has energized calls from the congressional leadership for immediate attention to building and deploying an anti-missile defense system to protect the United States from incoming warheads. Under the Soviet-U.S. Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, the U.S. is barred from deploying an anti-missile system. That treaty, signed by a Soviet Union that has ceased to be hostile -- a nation which has now devolved into a loose confederation of several distinct countries, and may be said not even to exist -- is obsolete and perhaps not even technically valid.
President Clinton should heed the calls to develop an ABM system.
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