The approach to the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Heiligendamm, Germany from 6-8 June 2007 has been characterised by a forceful rhetoric exchange between the United States and Russia over the former's plans to establish a new military capacity in east-central Europe. The plan to defend against incoming missiles, first announced in 2006, was and is justified by the US with reference to a possible threat from Iran and even North Korea.
Russia has scorned this explanation from the start, seeing the plan as clearly targeted against its own interests in the region. More recently, its vehement criticism of the proposal has been matched by the Kremlin's announcement of its intention to take military counter-measures. All this is serious enough in the present febrile geopolitical climate, but public discussion of the issue has focused too much on Vladimir Putin's political bite and too little on deeper Russian strategic concerns. To understand what is at stake in this argument it is necessary to put the current dispute in the context of the history of missile-defence during the cold war.
Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001
A fork in the road
Russia's immediate motives in opposing the American plan are reasonably straightforward, mixing military considerations (a deep-seated annoyance at Nato's penetration close to Russia's western borders, after a comparable growth of US influence in several central Asian republics) with political ones (resisting perceived US expansion may improve the chances of the Duma [parliament] agreeing to extend Putin's second-term presidency, which expires in March 2008, from four to seven years).
A wider element in Russia's robust response is the increased confidence of its political elite, certainly compared to the 1990s when the economic situation was chaotic, the conventional armed forces in utter disarray and most of the nuclear forces moribund. The change in mood is very largely owed to the surge in Russian oil and gas exports since 2002, and the Kremlin's taking direct control of significant parts of the energy industry; internationally, it has been reinforced by the passing of the US's "imperial moment", that brief period in 2001-03 when the "new American century" seemed to be becoming a reality.
But behind Putin's flexing of political muscles is real underlying unease in Moscow that the United States remains determined to relegate Russia to the status of a military has-been, using prowess in missile defence as an instrument. This unease is rooted in the experience and memories of tensions over missile defence during the cold war.
In the 1960s, as the United States and its then adversary the Soviet Union were building massive offensive nuclear-missile arsenals, a widespread view arose that a kind of balance of terror was developing which might be functional to the maintenance of overall stability. Many people argued at the time that the very enormity of the threat of "mutually assured destruction" precluded accidents, misjudgments and untoward crisis-escalation. As the standoff continued, so the notion of "stable deterrence", in which each side's awareness of the destructive power of the other inhibited it from any rash action, steadily gained ground.
Then came the early work on missile defence, where the two superpowers tried to develop anti-missile systems designed to destroy incoming missiles. The extraordinary thinking behind these protective systems was that the "defender" would detonate small nuclear weapons in the paths of incoming missile-warheads; both the US and the Soviet Union went as far as deploying primitive such systems, even though many independent analysts at the time thought them too dangerous ever to use.
Moreover, members of the arms-control community in this period were quick to identify the destabilising logic of missile defence: if either side were to acquire a real advantage in this area while maintaining a large armoury of offensive missiles, the potential for military escalation - especially in a crisis - would be greatly enhanced. The cautious agreement about this danger resulted in the 1972 anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty, which limited each side to protecting either their capital city or a long-range missile base.
By the early 1980s, technological developments indicated that workable missile defences might be feasible, and the Ronald Reagan administration invested billions of dollars in research and development. All this was sidelined by the end of the cold war, and the so-called "star wars" programme was scaled right back.
That might have been the end of the story, had it not been for the 1991 Gulf war. The US military had to invest huge resources in trying to counter the impact of Iraq's Scud missiles, even though they were based on obsolete 1950s-era Soviet technology. The Scud attacks on Israel threatened to bring that country into the war; one Scud strike on a US barracks in Dhahran caused the worst single loss of life to American forces in the whole war (twenty-eight military personnel killed) and another missile narrowly missed a huge munitions and fuel-storage depot at Jubayl on the eastern Saudi coast.
After the war there was real concern in the Pentagon that quite crude missiles could significantly limit United States security operations against rogue states, especially if even a handful of missiles could be aimed at the continental US itself rather than forward-based military units. The result of all of this has been more than a decade of intensive work, using all the technological advances achieved since the 1980s.
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here
Paul Rogers's most recent book is Into the Long War: Oxford Research Group, International Security Report 2006 (Pluto Press, 2006)
The next freeze
Among the programmes now underway is the crude national missile-defence system already installed in Alaska, and the much more advanced directed-energy weapons such as the airborne laser now under development (see "Directed energy: a new kind of weapon", 31 July 2002). In the future there could well be a powerful space-based laser. None of these are allowed under the ABM treaty; as a result, the Bush administration announced in December 2001 that it was simply withdrawing from the treaty, much to the annoyance of Moscow.
In one sense George W Bush is right to say to Putin that the current plans are based on a supposed threat from Iran or North Korea. But what is key in all this is the process. From a Russian perspective the United States is using its undoubted technological superiority to develop new missile-defence systems which could, one day, counter Russia's offensive missiles while protecting America's own offensive forces. This might be ten or fifteen years away; it might not happen if the technology fails; but if it does work, it will mean that Russia is indeed consigned to being a secondary power in those areas of military force that it still holds dear.
That is not a risk the Russians are prepared to take. If the United States does persist in its plans to expand its missile-defence programme the result will be a lot more Russian antagonism, whose manifestations will be felt across the board - including in the US's relations with Russia's neighbour, Iran.
Furthermore neither the Russians (nor, for that matter, the Chinese) will allow the United States to develop a unique strategic offence/defence combination. In the last resort they will both expand their own strategic nuclear arsenals to give them the potential to swamp any future US missile-defence installation. That is the way that arms races start. This may well be no exception.
