John LeBoutillier
Tuesday, May 1, 2001

We have many to thank today. The Soviets are gone – yes, the Russians still sound bellicose and still want to cause us trouble – and we should all realize why they are gone.

They are 'no longer' because 1) The United States stood strong for 40 years in the Cold War; 2) The American taxpayer worked extra hard for four decades to help finance the military needed to back down Moscow; 3) Both political parties worked together here at home in a united partnership to contain communism; 4) We 'broke' the Soviets economically (their system was and still is corrupt and ill-founded); 5) Ronald Reagan's oft-derided Stars Wars Strategic Defense Initiative was the coup de grace.

Today the Bush administration will unveil its outline for the future deployment of the missile shield. Here is the irony of it: Liberals here at home are against it and say it won't work; our foes abroad fear that it will work and oppose it before we build it.

Just on that basis alone we should build it!

Anything the liberals and our potential foes oppose must be good!

Seriously, though, the SDI is a much more sensible – and humane – defense doctrine than MAD.

Mutual Assured Destruction, under which we have been operating for 50 years, basically gambles that an enemy of ours will not launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike because we will most certainly have enough warning to unleash our own massive retaliatory strike aimed at our enemy’s high population centers.

So, while we can’t stop their missiles from hitting us, we can 'assure' that we will also hit them.

Thus, deterrence is a gamble: Will our enemy’s leadership care if many of their own people get wiped out?

In the future, would you be willing to gamble that Beijing – sitting on a 1.3 billion population – would not be tempted to wipe out the U.S. in return for losing 200 million Chinese peasants?

I would not bet on that equation.

Much more preferable is a basic change in our entire defense doctrine: no more gambling on the sound judgment of any of our opponents. Much better is to develop and use what is clearly inevitable and available: high-tech lasers, satellites, computers – and the best brains in America.

Cynics and critics can attack this concept all they want. But then their only fallback is MAD – and how humane is that?

It is much better policy to build the missile shield, test it, and prove it can work.

That is the best deterrence.

Then, as Ronald Reagan said at the time, we’ll even share it with our friends and our foes! Why not? Once it is proven to work, no one needs to launch or even to build ICBMs anymore.

That will save money and lives.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Daily Political Diary
Missile Defense