International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation

Bulletin 18 - Moving Beyond Missile Defense

Missile Proliferation and Missile Defenses in East Asia

Wade L. Huntley

Missile proliferation in East Asia, combined with US planned missile defense responses, has become one of the most pressing security issues facing the region. In the United States, principal concern is focused on the activities of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and China. For both states, the concern encompasses both vertical proliferation - indigenous deployment of more numerous, accurate, and lethal missile forces - and horizontal proliferation-dissemination of missile capabilities to other states.

This paper first examines how missile development fits into the current security outlooks of the DPRK and China, focusing on distinguishing the genuine security concerns these developments pose. The paper then assesses and critiques prospective US policy responses to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK, North Korea) and Chinese missile threats the United States perceives. The paper concludes that an excessively militarized US response focused primarily on missile defenses may be counterproductive to US security goals in the region and may undermine the long-term potential to build peace and security in the region.

The DPRK

DPRK missile development apparently has two functions. The first is to develop missile capabilities able to threaten not just South Korea, but US assets in Japan and elsewhere in the region, and ultimately US territory itself. While DPRK use of these capabilities would be irrational in all but the most desperate of circumstances, its ability to threaten these uses has enabled it to garner serious US attention and provided it with 'bargaining chips' in negotiations.

The second function of DPRK missile development is to generate technologies for export. Export of missile technologies not only generates hard currency desperately needed by the DPRK's collapsed economy, but also helps the DPRK create relationships helpful to it in other ways.

The far-reaching effects of this second function are exemplified by the DPRK's longstanding missile technology exchange relationship with Pakistan. India's nuclear test explosions in 1998 came just five weeks after Pakistan successfully test-fired its new Ghauri missile, now known to have been developed from DPRK Nodong missiles sold in complete form to Pakistan in 1997.^[1] This missile provides Pakistan with range and payload capabilities sufficient to enable it to deliver nuclear weapons against most major Indian cities. East Asian security analysts have paid too little attention to this DPRK role in facilitating the Pakistani missile development that became a key factor in India's decision to undertake its nuclear tests.

DPRK-Pakistan cooperation in development of the Ghauri missile is also believed to have directly benefited the DPRK's own cash-strapped missile programs, in part from data provided in the April 6, 1998, test firing of the Ghauri.^[2] US and South Korean officials speculate that this assistance may have contributed directly to preparations for the DPRK's August 31, 1998, first test firing of a Taepodong missile, which flew over 1300 kilometers and demonstrated the country's achievement of multiple-stage rocket technology.^[3]

The DPRK-Pakistan missile relationship signifies a US failure to restrain DPRK missile proliferation behavior. This failure is to some degree attributable to the Clinton administration's reluctance to fully implement the 'spirit' of the 1994 Agreed Framework that suspended the DPRK's nuclear weapons program.^[4] Instead, the United States sustained a highly militarized posture on the Korean peninsula, bolstered by missile defense deployments. Indeed, with all the debate over current US missile defense proposals, few recognize the extent to which the United States has already deployed missile defenses in the Korean context, emphasizing Patriot systems with range and effectiveness much improved over the Gulf War generation. Importantly, these systems are now embedded in a larger missile defense architecture that also includes complex detection and communication systems as well as capabilities to attack North Korean missile launch fcilities directly.^[5] The reason for this US emphasis on highly developed TMD (Theater or Tactical Missile Defense) systems is that the US goal is not simply to neutralize DPRK missiles themselves, but to neutralize their effectiveness in a broader military and political context. To quote a recent US Defense Department overview of TMD in Korea, "The goal is to minimize the enemy's capability to influence the outcome of any conflict in Korea."^[6]

1998's events, especially the Taepodong test-firing, were something of a wake-up call to US policymakers of the scope of the problems posed by DPRK missile development, and the failure of its TMD deployments to deter that development. Increased US attention to this issue in its direct dealings with the DPRK, supported by concurrent developments, eventually resulted in the DPRK's announcement of a moratorium on future missile testing. Increased US recognition of the role of the DPRK's export motivation for its missile program brought the United States and the DPRK, near the end of 2000, to the brink of a deal under which the DPRK would have forsaken its missile program in exchange for support in satellite launching and other development of peaceful uses of space. This agreement would have been christened with a visit by President Clinton to the DPRK prior to the end of his term of office.

However, this process of rapprochement proved far from unstoppable. The Clinton administration proved unable (or unwilling) to consummate the missile deal, and the new Bush administration came to power staffed at the highest levels with decision-makers openly hostile to accommodation with the DPRK and motivated to reverse Clinton policies across the board. In a highly visible rebuke of Nobel prize-winning Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) president Kim Dae-jung's successful 'Sunshine Policy,' Bush promptly shut down the US-DPRK dialog pending a "review" of US policy. Predictably, the DPRK responded with thinly veiled threats to resume its missile testing program - threats Bush advisors quickly highlighted to justify the rationale for the administration's position.

More recently, under the suasion of cooler heads, the Bush administration has reopened direct US-DPRK dialog.^[7] However, with the persistence of DPRK critics within the administration, Bush is unlikely to agree to any deal perceived to be too 'accommodating', or any deal at all too quickly. In the meantime, the United States will likely pursue other policies - especially development of missile defenses - that are anathema to the DPRK. Taken as a whole, this approach may evince the same flaws in the US approach to the DPRK through much of the 1990s: inattention in times of calm, inducing extravagant DPRK behavior to illicit greater US attention, resulting in tactical engagement only under crisis conditions. The failure to seize the opportunity presented by 2000's near-deal to shut down the DPRK missile program may loom as a tragic missed opportunity in years to come.

China

The issues of Chinese missile development, and US missile defense responses, lie at the center of current US-China security friction. Chinese modernization of its short, medium, and intercontinental range missile forces is of increasing US concern. At the same time, expanding US plans for theater and strategic missile defense deployments that could undermine the coercive or deterrent capabilities of Chinese missile forces is of increasing Chinese concern. Insofar as planning decisions signal intentions on a broader range of issues, such planning has immediate effects on near-term US-China security relations. Of these current issues, the most important is the future of Taiwan.

China's concerns over both National Missile Defense (NMD) and TMD, while differentiated and nuanced, fall generally into three categories. However, because the development of Chinese missile capabilities at all range levels is intimately driven by Taiwan Strait concerns, and because US proposals to deploy theater missile defenses in East Asia are similarly cognizant of possible applications to Taiwan Strait conflicts, these categories are closely linked.

Taiwan Strait Issues

Many in Beijing believe that only China's threat to use of force deters an overt declaration of independence by Taiwan. While many analysts doubt China could successfully invade Taiwan to suppress independence, Taiwan is clearly vulnerable to China's short-range missile force.^[8] Recent reports indicate that China may now have up to 300 improved-accuracy short-range missiles deployed against Taiwan,^[9] which would mark a significant improvement even since 1996. Beijing's distinction that its missile forces deployed against Taiwan are necessary to deter Taiwanese independence but not intended to compel reunification is not convincing to many US analysts.

Chinese leaders worry that deployment of TMD in or near Taiwan would reduce the likely destructiveness of a Chinese missile attack, undermining China's ability to use missile threats to politically intimidate Taiwan's leaders.^[10] Moreover, any US role in such deployment would signal (to both Taipei and Beijing) greater likelihood of US military support of Taiwan in the event of overt conflict.^[11] China worries that both these effects would also bolster Taiwanese independence sentiments.

Unfortunately, overly simplistic treatment of the Taiwan issue in Washington obscures to US policy-makers the Chinese domestic factors girding the Beijing government's commitment to preserving China's sovereign title to Taiwan. Perceptions in Beijing that trends in Taiwan are producing flagging desires for reunification and inducing growing sentiments for formal independence cause increasing concern that time is no longer the mainland's ally with respect to reunification. The Taiwanese national election on March 18, 2000, in which the victory of Chen Shui-bian cast the Kuomintang out of power for the first time since 1949, fueled Beijing's increasing concern.^[12] The Beijing leadership has made Chinese territorial integrity a core principle of its own legitimacy, and worries that irredentist ambitions among populations in regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang would be unleashed by actual Taiwanese independence.

The fate of Taiwan is therefore embedded in the Beijing leadership's perceptions of its prospects for sustaining its legitimacy to rule China at all. Hence, a decision in Beijing to use force to prevent Taiwanese independence might be based on the core prerequisite of regime survival, undeterred by the improbability of reclaiming Taiwan militarily or by the level of US support Beijing expects Taiwan to receive. In the event of such deterrence failure, US leaders would feel compulsion to make good on US commitments to support Taiwan. Thus, US deployment of a TMD system applicable to Taiwan would, counter-productively, dramatically heighten the risks of a war in the Taiwan Strait that would bring China and the United States into direct conflict.

Regional Relations

The most often stated US justification for deploying expanded missile defenses in East Asia is not the protection of Taiwan from China, but to protect Japan, and US forces in Japan, against missile threats from the DPRK. The DPRK's missile firing over Japan in August 1998 solidified Japanese thinking on the issue, facilitating Japan's decision to reach agreement with the United States the following August on joint technological research and design of four key components of a sea-based, 'upper-tier' TMD system.^[13]

Chinese analysts frequently charge that the United States exaggerates the current DPRK missile threat to justify TMD plans really meant to confront China. Elements of the Japanese and US positions lend credibility to Beijing's view. Many TMD supporters acknowledge that Japan and the United States should and/or would proceed with TMD development in East Asia even in the absence of a DPRK missile threat. Some of these supporters openly assert a US interest in supporting Taiwan, confirming China's suspicions that US-Japan TMD collaboration will free these countries from constraints to act against China. The ability of the sea-based option for Japanese TMD to be redeployed to Taiwan, along with the conspicuous failure of the 1997 revision of the US-Japan Defense Guidelines to define the region in which events could lead to joint US-Japan military operations,^[14] underscore this Chinese perception.

Finally, China perceives deployment of TMD in East Asia as a challenge to its capabilities to pursue its legitimate interests in its immediate geographic region. This concern applies by no means exclusively with respect to Taiwan; if that issue were in some way resolved, China would still look upon TMD development as a signal that US and Japanese long-term intentions in East Asia are confrontational rather than collaborative, and as the portent of a US 'containment' policy aimed at China.

Strategic Relations

China currently possesses a small arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of carrying nuclear weapons to targets in the continental United States.^[15] China is undertaking long-term modernization and expansion of its strategic nuclear forces, and the United States now estimates that by 2015, "China is likely to have tens of missiles capable of targeting the United States, including a few tens of more survivable, landand sea-based mobile missiles with smaller nuclear warheads," and that its nuclear doctrine calls for a "survivable long-range missile force that can hold a significant portion of the US population at risk in a retaliatory strike."^[16]

The United States would retain massive nuclear superiority and so sustain its retaliation deterrent. In the event of direct US-China military conflict, the prospects of China launching nuclear missiles against the US will remain slim and unthreatening.^[17] However, China's nuclear capabilities pose to US analysts a meaningful coercive instrument politically - however remote the prospect, US war planners must still reckon with China's possible use of nuclear weapons directly against the US.

US NMD deployment is intended to counteract this threat. NMD capability would probably add little to current US deterrence of a Chinese launch of nuclear weapons against the United States, not least because of the options available to China to defeat such a system.^[18] However, just as with TMD, technical calculations of NMD effectiveness are only loosely related to the political impacts of the prospects of its effectiveness. To the extent that NMD deployment will inhibit Chinese psychological confidence in the deterrent value of its ICBM forces, even the prospect of its deployment works to moderate concerns among US defense planners considering Taiwan intervention scenarios.

Hence, just promulgating proposals to develop NMD adds to US perceptions of its policy flexibility with respect to ongoing diplomacy over the Taiwan issue. As NMD comes closer to reality, China perceives its coercive influence over the United States to diminish, and the United States accordingly perceives an expanding freedom of maneuver.^[19] Thus, China fears that NMD deployment would give the United States unfettered confidence to intervene in Taiwan, and - perhaps more importantly - more confidence to behave on an ongoing basis as though it felt free to intervene.

Potential Chinese reactions to such prospects should be of concern to US policymakers because China's strategic global role in the post-Cold War world is growing, and hence China's reactions to US actions will powerfully affect US success in achieving the goals it intends by its actions. The United States has not taken these reactions sufficiently into account in its policy-making, mainly because of a strong reluctance in some quarters to treat China as a global strategic actor.

For example, some US defense planners assert that Chinese nuclear force modernization will proceed regardless of US decisions on NMD. However, China has long had the capability to expand its nuclear forces far above their current levels, demonstrating that its nuclear weapons decision-making is guided less by material limitations than by security perceptions. Among the strongest factors shaping China's perceived security environment is the signals of US intentions and capabilities it receives. Indeed, China's perceptions of US intentions are likely at least as important in Beijing as perceptions of China's intentions are in Washington. In addition, China's strategic policy choices are likely to have a large influence on the outcomes the United States seeks to affect by its actions - perhaps more influence than will Russia's choices. To base US strategic policy on the weak assumption that China is not sensitive to US actions and that Chinese actions are only incidental to core US concern risks both rendering US actions counterproductive and missing opportunities for mutually beneficial accommodation.

In this context, the fate of the ABM Treaty looms largely. If the United States abandons the treaty explicitly and proceeds to develop an ambitious NMD system, incentives for Russia-China cooperation on a host of strategic issues would be high. Such cooperation would likely help China greatly to develop countermeasures to missile defense, some of which China might also be able to apply to defeat regional TMD systems. Conversely, if the United States and Russia renegotiate the ABM treaty to allow limited US NMD deployment, such an agreement would likely preserve the credibility of Russia's nuclear deterrent while continuing to undermine the deterrent credibility of China's much smaller forces. This specter of a US-Russia condominium of power would likely induce China to seek support wherever else it could. Under these circumstances, the United States would find it very difficult to secure Chinese cooperation to stem proliferation of WMD and missile technologies to states such as Pakistan, the DRK, and Iran.

US Policy Options

The still-emerging post-Cold War era offers clear long-term choices for US policy. Today, military, political, and even cultural preeminence confers to the United States an unprecedented opportunity for world leadership on nuclear weapons nonproliferation and arms control. The scope of this opportunity for US leadership suggests that the stakes of US choices on current strategic issues, most particularly on missile defenses, have in many ways never been higher. Whatever choices the United States makes on these international security policies, other countries are sure to react to the tenor of these choices.

The United States could take advantage of its current high relative security to build new conceptions of its role better informed by the multilateral and non-military features defining the post-Cold War world. It's preeminence and policy latitude offers the United States an opportunity shared by no other state not only to promote global peace and stability, but also to strongly protect US security interests over the long-run through the enhanced legitimacy of US global leadership.

At present, however, the new Bush Administration appears set to embolden US faith in the efficacy of absolute military strength, eschewing multilateral security approaches and deepening reliance on military alliances. The envisioned ambitious deployment of missile defenses will set the United States clearly on a path emphasizing the political efficacy of strategic weapons, undermining much of the arms control effect of the promised unilateral deep cuts in US nuclear weapons levels.

Indeed, a quite aggressive posture lurks beneath the new administration's rhetoric calling for a 'new strategy' to match post-Cold War conditions. This posture reflects the two 'lessons' conservative Republicans have drawn from the end of the Cold War. The first lesson is that US military power eventually compelled an odious regime into submission and collapse. The second lesson is that this collapse proved to be a good thing, well serving US political and security interests.

In this reading, both lessons have applications to future US policy. The first lesson - buttressed by the conviction that US strength is good for global stability, not just US interests - justifies the pursuit of maximized security capabilities. For this reason, large-scale missile defenses are desirable in and of themselves, independent of any specific missile threat.

The second lesson justifies a contin ued element of containment of authoritarianism as a core premise of the future US security posture. The implicit intention of this posture is to induce eventual collapse an/or reform of all remaining authoritarian states, concluding the now immanent victory of freedom and capitalism over tyranny and communism.

For the DPRK, this posture suggests that any US return to direct engagement will be only tactical. Such an approach characterized even Clinton policy in the early years of the Agreed Framework: most analysts were convinced the DPRK was soon to collapse, and the principal US policy aim was to create a 'soft landing.' Such analysis, though not an explicit part of US policy, naturally fueled skepticism among DPRK policy-makers unwilling merely to negotiate their own demise.

This 'collapse premise' changed in the aftermath of former Secretary of Defense William Perry's review of US policy toward the DPRK. The Perry Report shifted the premise of engagement, accepting the existence of the DPRK regime for the foreseeable future-and, indeed, recognizing the need for its existence to prevent a collapse whose implications would be devastating to US allies and interests in East Asia.

The recent Bush administration announcement of its intention to resume direct negotiations with the DPRK is a welcome acknowledgement that there is no other practical option for US policy. However, many of the administration's highest officials have been openly hostile to the DPRK regime prior to entering government, and are likely highly tempted to reverse the underlying logic of engagement and return to an implicit effort to squeeze the DPRK into submission.

With respect to China, the Bush administration's commitment to engagement may very well be more than just tactical. However, this commitment likely remains contingent on a greater end: to forestall the emergence of China as major authoritarian power. The principal concern, strongly articulated by Republican conservatives and implicit in much of the Bush approach to China thus far, is that China will probably become a major power in the coming decades and that this power would be under authoritarian rule, antagonistic to the United States. Driven by its lessons from the end of the Cold War, this school's preferred alternative would be internal Chinese political reform; however, forcing China now into internal turmoil and possibly collapse is preferable to the prospect of someday facing an authoritarian China rivaling the United States in world leadership.

Advocates of this perspective focus on one decisive element of the current circumstance: the United States has no need to acknowledge China as a strategic equal. In this view, the US-China relationship now is not comparable to the US-Soviet rivalry throughout most of the Cold War. Rather, this view sees the analogies more to the moment of US preeminence following the end of World War II, or to late-nineteenth century British preeminence prior to Germany's rise. In this view, military and political vigilance will prevent the United States from ever having to accept strategic parity with China, as the United States and Britain were both compelled to do with their principal adversaries in these previous instances. Moreover, some proponents of this view, emboldened by confidence in US material and ideological capacities, would even welcome a Chinese attempt to keep pace with the United States in military terms - a race they see China as certain to lose.

Conclusion

Even if this conservative diagnosis of the end of the Cold War were true,^[20] to apply it to the post-Cold War era is classically to 'fight the previous war,' ignoring the changed conditions of the world today.

US power preeminence today extends through so many dimensions - military, economic, and cultural - that states such as the DPRK, China, India, and Pakistan, and even Russia, are now essentially reactive to US initiatives. These multi-dimensional asymmetries make cuts in US offensive nuclear forces of marginal relevance, especially when US missile defenses fundamentally threaten to undercut these other state's own meager deterrent capabilities vis—vis the United States.

For this reason, an aggressively militarized US approach to its security concerns, despite its current power preeminence, simply increases perceptions of the US as a future threat among other states. Such US behavior reinforces balance-of-power logic driving other states to find ways eventually to neutralize US preeminence. Russia, China, India will be among the first to point to the US example to validate similar power-oriented approaches to their own policies and pursuits of strategic capabilities.

While the world is unlikely to see the emergence of an explicit anti-US great power alliance, a number of US rivals may achieve sufficient strategic weapons capabilities to deter US coercion and thwart US policy aims. The United States could find itself facing multiple fully-developed strategic rivals, effectively 'balancing' US power without alliance and without numerical symmetries. In such a world there is little hope of progress toward conflict resolution and durable security, and every prospect for continued fear-driven construction of apocalyptic weapons accompanied by solitary faith in rationalized theory - against the lessons of history - that the weapons will never be used.

This essay reflects only the views of its author who welcomes all comments and suggestions. The essay was written for the workshop "Moving Beyond Missile Defense" at Santa Barbara, March 19 21, 2001.

Wade Huntley, The Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development, Global Peace and Security Program, Nautilus Institute, 125 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 94710-1616, USA, tel: +1-510-295 61 00, email: huntley@nautilus.org.