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19 December 2002 |
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,862403,00.html |
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The formal US request to upgrade the Fylingdales early warning radar station in North Yorkshire for "missile defence purposes" marks the beginning of a long road down which Britain should not travel. The upgrade, if approved by the government, would facilitate Bush administration efforts to ring the US with state-of-the-art interceptor missiles, a project dubbed "son of star wars". This week the US announced that it would install 10 ground-based interceptor rockets in Alaska, reinforced by roving, sea-based missile systems, satellite and radar sensor networks, and possibly also airborne lasers. President Bush justified his decision by citing "unprecedented threats" to US security and "the catastrophic harm to US citizens that may result from hostile states or terrorist groups armed with weapons of mass destruction and means to deliver them". Mr Bush's judgment on this issue is open to question. The more dramatic US assessments of the scale and imminence of the threat posed by ballistic missiles possessed by "rogue states" are not shared by the Ministry of Defence, although it accepts that a potential threat exists. Mr Bush's claim that terrorist groups could launch ballistic missiles at the US has no basis in known fact. US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that research and development of effective defences against long-range missiles is in its infancy. Mr Bush's decision to deploy by 2004 ignores recent test failures and looks, overall, more like a premature political gesture than a useful military measure. Billions of dollars are about to be spent on machinery that may not work, to deter a threat that may not materialise. This is a high price to pay for a false sense of security. In the end, that is a matter for the US government and US voters. Britain can not stop Mr Bush pursuing such schemes. But it does not have to help him. In terms of purely national defence, a Fylingdales upgrade could make this country a target for a state with which the US is engaged in hostilities, at a time when Britain would not itself have additional protection. More broadly, missile defence is irrelevant to, and cannot deter, the principal security threat facing Britain - that posed by terrorists. In international terms, cooperation with the US would mean that Britain was colluding in an epic act of weapons proliferation at a time when it is committed to achieving exactly the opposite. Mr Bush's provocative plans invite potential foes to build more and better weapons to overwhelm or evade US defences. The history of warfare suggests that is exactly what will happen. That is one reason why Washington's unilateral decision to abrogate its anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia was so ill-advised. As the Ministry of Defence's discussion paper on missile defence make plain, Fylingdales could just be the beginning of Britain's involvement. The first US interceptor deployment is designed to deter threats emanating from the Asia-Pacific region. The second stage (and Mr Bush has already ordered a further 10 rockets) will focus on neutralising missile attacks originating in the Middle East, in theory from Iraq, Iran or Libya. This will require the US to open up an eastern "front", in part by basing interceptors on British soil or elsewhere in north-west Europe. Thus it is not just a question of a few extra aerials at Fylingdales. It is a question of whether Britain, in return for commercial and technological inducements, and in the name of US-Nato solidarity, is prepared once again, as in the 1980s, to become a US missile base. The answer must be no.
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