In February Iran orbited a small satellite. This event matters because it demonstrates the ability to launch a long-range missile with at least sufficient range to hit anywhere in Europe. The incident recalls the Soviet
success in launching Sputnik in 1957. Most people saw the launch as a wake-up call: the Soviet Union really was something more than a brainless steamroller. Suddenly statistics showing vast numbers of engineers and scientists graduated each year seemed menacing, and the U.S. government began giving scholarships and other aid to the American scientific establishment in hopes of closing what was seen as a frightening gap. The equivalent reaction to the Iranian feat would be the shock that a country dismissed as third world could produce such modern technology.
In both cases, shock would be somewhat belated. Well before Sputnik, the Soviets were demonstrating first-class military aircraft designs such as the MiG-15. Well before the satellite, the Iranians were claiming all sorts of domestically produced military technology. The Soviet demonstrations were probably much more valid, as much of Iran's supposedly home-grown technology really is not.
The important point, however, may be missed. A few months before Sputnik, the Soviets announced that they had launched the world's first ICBM—a missile capable of hitting a target in the United States when launched from the Soviet Union. At the time the United States had no missile that could make the return trip. If the Soviet claim were valid, the basis of deterrence would be shaken. Although in 1957 money was being spent on antimissile weapons, the technical problems were daunting, and few imagined they would soon be solved. The question was whether the Soviets really had demonstrated an ICBM. They had, after all, made all sorts of outrageous claims of home-grown advances and U.S. intelligence lacked any ability to track a Soviet ICBM in flight.
Sputnik in effect proved that the Soviet claim was valid. It seemed that only a rocket with intercontinental range could put that small sphere into orbit. The United States did orbit its much smaller Explorer using a missile of nominally shorter range, but that same rocket had managed to fly about as far as the Soviet missile (carrying less) a few months earlier. To those aware of how long-range missiles worked, Sputnik mattered not because it demonstrated scientific prowess but because it showed that the Soviets had been investing in what amounted to a technological end-run of the West. Quite soon the massive and expensive Western air defense system would lose a great deal of its strategic value.
This judgment was premature. The Soviet satellite launcher, which was also the first Soviet ICBM, was so massive that it could never be deployed in numbers. The ability simply to fire a rocket to a great range was not the same as the ability to ensure that it would get anywhere near a target. That took precision engineering, which was in very short supply in the Soviet Union. It turned out that the United States really had a vast pool of engineering talent whereas the Soviets issued a lot of credentials but never turned out enough deeply talented engineers.
Whatever lead the Soviets demonstrated in 1957-58 soon vanished, as the mature U.S. aerospace industry turned to building missiles. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's vision of a technological end-run fizzled. The Cuban crisis was one of the symptoms of that failure: Khrushchev put shorter-range missiles in Cuba after he found out (in February 1962) that his missile industry was unlikely to produce many long-range ones.
In 1962 the U.S. government still saw active defense as the appropriate way to counter whatever missile force the Soviets built. Now, despite the current antimissile deployment, most of those interested in strategic affairs still see matters from an opposite point of view. Missile defense, some argue, is not merely technically difficult, it is immoral, because it upsets the balance of power. The appropriate defense stance is deterrence: you can hit me, but I can vaporize you in return, so you will not do so. Many believe this posture saved the world from nuclear war; who can argue against that?
Now, of course, if the Iranian test is a wake-up call, the question becomes whether an Iran led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can be deterred the way the Soviets were. How does deterrence really work—if it works at all? If the Soviets were never all that ready to risk everything to destroy the West, then throughout the Cold War deterrence was in effect knocking on an open door. It may never really have been tested by a crisis so severe that any Soviet leader was willing to chance national destruction.
Deterrence did make the Soviet leadership cautious in many situations, such as the 1973 Middle East war and Vietnam. However, it is also interesting that the Soviets never entirely trusted deterrence. When they signed the treaty limiting (not banning) ballistic-missile defense, they retained the right to defend Moscow, and the missile system built there is still operational. They also continued a vigorous missile defense research effort.
The Iranian Case
So why did we come to believe in deterrence without defense? More to the point, is Ahmadinejad deterrable? He often says that he would welcome an apocalypse because that would lead directly to the world victory of his version of Islam. Saying is not doing; the problem is that we have little or no understanding of his psychology. In 1956 or 1962 few Americans would have doubted that a Soviet leader would have been willing to accept partial national destruction if that bought him final victory in the great world contest.
The U.S. turn away from active ballistic-missile defense can be credited to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. In 1967 his budget was hard-pressed by the rising cost of the Vietnam War. He realized that missile defense would be very expensive, particularly since the enemy could raise its cost by adding decoys to its missiles (he often said that a dollar spent on decoys would force the United States to spend several times as much). It seems in retrospect that he decided first to kill ballistic-missile defense and then to find an attractive strategic rationale to explain why.
Can missile defense work? No one knows, just as no one knows how strategic warfare would work out in the nightmarish world in which it might happen. Unlike all other forms of conflict, strategic warfare would be tested at the same time it was actually used. War is often compared to chess, the players trying to guess each others' strategies. In chess, each player has a good idea of what the pieces can do; the issue is what will be done with them. Nuclear strategy is more like poker. It is about uncertainty, both of what the cards are, and of what the other player or players think they have—and really have. Our confrontation with Ahmadinejad certainly falls into this category. Does he have a bomb? Early in March it was reported that Iran now has enough material for at least one bomb, but who outside Iran knows? Once he has the bomb, what will Ahmadinejad do with it? Give it to proxies like Hezbollah? Put it on a missile headed for Europe or Tel Aviv?
Ahmadinejad also must live with uncertainty. He may not believe that the West has the nerve to incinerate his country, even if he attacks—and particularly if he uses proxies, claims that rebellious fanatics launched a missile, or threatens that the next missile will render Middle Eastern oil unusable. He can have no idea whatever of whether Western missile defense will work (as we also cannot know).
If it works, the situation is very different. Instead of reacting to the horror he can inflict now and in the future, the intended target has the luxury of asking what it can do to Iran, and also of seeing the immense Iranian investment in missiles and warheads dramatically devalued. That devaluation, incidentally, is why both the Russian and the Chinese leaderships have found current Western missile defense efforts so unacceptable. Nuclear weapons are the first choice of a government that cannot afford conventional defense (and cannot rely on irregular, hence somewhat uncontrollable, forces).
There has been a great deal of talk about ways to convince the Iranians to abort their attempt to enter the nuclear club. It may turn out that they lack the means to do so, but it seems unlikely that any sort of external pressure, short of destroying the Iranian facilities (with all the terrible consequences which would follow), would work. Surely this is the time to deploy the means of neutralizing those weapons once the Iranians get them.