The legal controversy over national missile defense (NMD) reminds us of the words of the great strategist Yogi Berra: “It’s d�j� vu all over again.” In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan proposed the construction of a space-based shield against nuclear missile attack, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Arms control advocates argued that even conducting research and development into SDI would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with the Soviet Union, international law, and the Constitution. Today, President George Bush has again placed NMD at the forefront of the country’s national security agenda. And once again, critics both at home and abroad claim that international and domestic law stand in the way of deployment of any meaningful NMD system. We disagree.
The 1972 ABM Treaty generally prohibits both the United States and the Soviet Union from deploying any defense against strategic nuclear missiles, aside from a single ground-based site. The treaty promoted the strategy of mutually assured destruction (appropriately referred to by its acronym, MAD) — the notion that neither side would ever launch a first strike against the other because, lacking any defense, neither could survive a retaliatory second strike.
