A LIMITED BALLISTIC MISSILE SYSTEM WITH UNLIMITED CAPABILITIES

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Kislyakov) - By making its choice at the November 2 elections, the US has confirmed its military and political priorities, at least for the next four years. The main one of them, from the viewpoint of military, political and economic consequences, is the NMD program. Bush will continue its implementation.

The program ideology has changed since its revival at the turn of the 21st century, when George W. Bush became US president. After the US withdrew from the 1972 ABM treaty in 2001, the new US administration presented the NMD program as a global national system of ballistic defense, but the word "national" disappeared from the name in late 2002. Since then, it has been called a limited system designed to protect territories in the zone of interests of the US and its allies.

This provision was officially voiced in a special White House memorandum, titled National Policy on Ballistic Missile Defense, which was made public in May 2003. In addition to the US territory proper, the missile defense system should also cover Europe per se, the Middle East as a source of terrorist threat with possible WMD use, and East Asia with the potential threat coming from North Korean (and many other countries, in fact).

These plans are becoming practice now. In summer 2004, the US started deploying killer missiles in Alaska, and on October 4 AP announced that USS Curtis Wilbur of the US 7th Fleet became the first Aegis destroyer to be put on combat duty in the Sea of Japan.

The above can be viewed as the beginning of American offshore measures within the NMD framework, which is turning from a national system on paper to a global system in essence. A signal to action was the 1998 test of a North Korean ballistic missile in the Pacific over the territory of Japan. The military-technical threat of North Korean missiles to Japan and the US is a vague possibility, while the deterioration of the regional situationis a fact.

The US warships will not be alone in the Sea of Japan for long. In December last year, the Japanese government, reacting to "the growing threat of North Korea," decided to move from research to the creation of components for missiles intercepting ballistic targets jointly with the US. Partner relations have spread to the production of infrared target identification and tracking systems, heat-resistant fairing for anti-missile warheads, booster engines, and kinetic warheads.

"We are not especially worried," Russia's Ambassador to Japan Alexander Panov said in late December 2003. "The system they are creating is rather simple and not very significant strategically. However, it would be better if the system were transparent, so that other states would be able to take part in it." He apparently meant Russia, which has done a great deal to normalize the situation in the region.

But the process is moving backwards now. China, whose missile and space potential is not questioned any more, is closely watching the Japanese-American plan. In view of the unresolved China-Taiwan problem, Japanese experience and the recent Chinese promise to resolve the problem of Taiwan by 2020 (by using force, if necessary), it would be naive to think that Taiwan would meekly wait for the future. In June 2004, Taiwanese MPs officially asked the Pentagon about the possibility of acquiring a Patriot-3 air and missile defense system.

In other words, the extension of the US ballistic missile system to East Asia concerns a territory that has seen a high level of conflict for decades. This also effectively rules out transparency. The interceptors in Alaska and California, American ships patrolling the Sea of Japan, and the future appearance of air and missile defense systems in Japan and possibly in Taiwan constitute a comprehensive system of defense stipulated in the May memorandum. It is unthinkable without a ramified ground-based infrastructure and powerful satellite groups that can cover the entire planet.

The scale of the task presupposes the scale of spending. The US plans to spend about $115 billion on silo-based anti-missiles by 2015. In all, the ballistic missile system, with all its mind-boggling components, will cost more than $1 trillion.

But even a gradual build-up of elements of this system will provoke an unpredictable reaction from America's enemies, the improvement of Russia's strategic nuclear defense capabilities, and many other consequences. After that will come space militarization through the deployment of orbital anti-satellite weapons. In short, this may be the beginning of a new arms race.