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By George Friedman
Russian President Vladmir Putin threw a classic Cold War curveball during his chat with U.S. President George W. Bush at the G-8 summit. Having totally opposed the creation of a U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Putin suddenly shifted his position, saying he might go along with a BMD system under certain conditions. The system, he said, would be acceptable if the United States used a Russian radar system placed in Azerbaijan and based its interceptor missiles anywhere else, such as on ships or in Turkey or Iraq -- anywhere but in Poland.
By rejecting the proposal, Washington would look hostile and uncompromising. Accepting it would mean basing the missiles near the Iranian border, possibly too close to intercept long-range missiles fired from there. Using Russian radar -- which currently is insufficient for U.S. needs -- would make the entire system dependent on Russian cooperation. And pulling the system from Poland would be a signal to Central Europe that military agreements with the United States are subject to negotiation with the Russians. That, of course, is exactly the signal Putin wants sent.
First, let's consider the BMD system itself. There are two criticisms of it, usually made by the same people. The first is that it won't work, and the second is that it is destabilizing. That the two statements are incompatible does not seem to faze most people. Therefore, it is necessary to begin by explaining the reason the BMD is such a passionate issue.
The foundation of stability during the Cold War was Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. MAD was based on the certainty that an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), once launched, could not be blocked. With enough ICBMs, land- and submarine-launched, both the United States and Soviet Union could assure the destruction of the other side in the event of a nuclear exchange. That deterred nuclear risk-taking and stabilized the situation.
The introduction of a missile defense system threatened to change this equation. If one side created such a system, its destruction would no longer be assured, and it might choose to launch a nuclear attack against another side. Even if the effectiveness of the BMD system were uncertain, its very uncertainty created an unknown factor. Neither side could be sure the system would work -- one's own or the other's. In the hall of mirrors that constituted nuclear strategic thinking, the possibility that the other side might calculate probabilities different than you might force you to strike pre-emptively. Since the other side wouldn't know what you were thinking, it might strike pre-emptively. Thus, the existence of a BMD system that might not work was seen as increasing the chance of war.
The Soviets, however, had two very real fears when then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed Star Wars. The first was that the United States might just create an effective BMD system. The Soviets had been burned too many times by underestimating U.S. technological capabilities to be as dismissive as Western critics. The second problem was that the Soviets could not match the system financially or technologically. If it failed to work, fine. But if the United States pulled it off, the Soviet Union would be wide open to attack without the ability to field its own system.
Therefore, the Soviets went ballistic because they were uncertain about the system's effectiveness. They carried out diplomatic attacks against the system and encouraged its Western critics -- and critics of the Reagan administration in general -- to do all they could to block the system. As it was, Star Wars couldn't be made to work at the time, but if you were to have listened to the Soviets on the subject in the mid-1980s, you would have thought the United States was on the verge of annihilating the Soviets with Star Wars. By then, the Soviets' nerves were pretty well shot. They were generally on the ropes, and knew it.
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