Originally published on the CGS blog on February 19, 2014.
It’s not an intuitive argument that a stronger defense can lead to greater insecurity. In fact, if you were to tell an individual that their government had the ability to create a system that could shoot down an incoming nuclear-armed ballistic missile, they would almost certainly support its development.
This is precisely the mentality of the Indian government as it works to deploy its own national missile shield; it wants assured protection from Pakistan and China. Yet as you may have probably guessed, I believe that this “conventional wisdom” will lead to unintended consequences.
No state ever wants to be placed into a world order that puts it at a significant security disadvantage to its rivals. It’s important to remember that it would be a rare situation in which a competing state would accept this shift in the balance of power. When one state develops defense against a nuclear strike, it effectively nullifies the unspoken contract of mutually assured destruction, causing a paranoia that it can use nuclear weapons offensively or at least can use its uneven power to leverage its exposed adversaries. For this reason, the development of an Indian ballistic missile defense (BMD) system has a high likelihood of catalyzing one of two scenarios, both of which will neither provide any benefit to India nor will it lead to greater regional stability.
The first scenario is that its competitors attempt to develop more sophisticated weapons designed to outmaneuver its BMD, such as multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVS). These weapons consist of ballistic missiles armed with several warheads in the bus, which can spread to hit multiple targets, eliminating the effectiveness of BMD. This was at one time successfully employed by the Soviet Union to force the United States to spend exorbitant amounts of research funding into (unsuccessfully) improving its systems.
The second scenario is that its competitors develop large numbers of new nuclear weapons in order to overwhelm its BMD. This provides a massive security threat as the greater the quantities of nuclear weapons a state possesses, the harder it is to prevent accidental launches, unauthorized launches caused by heavily dispersed command and control schemes, or theft. Technically speaking, the developments needed in the equipment to handle these threats neither exist nor could be constructed without tremendous spending. Ultimately, arms races rarely end safely; they generally lead to either destruction or bankruptcy, two options that no country would ever see as ideal.
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union eventually understood the dangers posed by the deployment of national BMDs and in 1972 they together banned the deployment of the unobtainable and insecure technology, crafting one of the most successful treaties of the era. However, in 2002 the Bush administration, fearing what I believe were nonexistent “irrational actors,” abrogated the treaty. Contrary to some, I think that the United States does in fact set international precedent, especially on this matter. Despite the fact that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was only signed between the two Cold War superpowers, it was observed by all nuclear states.
The United States government must once again act as a global leader by reintroducing and expanding the treaty in an act that would certainly be less selfish and more selfless, looking out for the fate of not just itself, but all people who live in fear of nuclear war. It is definitely not an unchallenging argument, but when made in a genuine fashion, it’s easy to see that sometimes being a little vulnerable can lead to trust and security.
