Washington's plan for a national missile defence shield is unlikely to work, unnecessary, and predicated on exaggerated assessments of threats to the United States, according to a former congressional adviser on security affairs.
"Missile defences are unlikely to provide military commanders reliable and effective defences anytime in the next decade," Joseph Cirincione, the director of the Carnegie Endowment's non-proliferation project, will tell a London conference today.
"All available evidence, including the performance of the Patriot [missile] in the Gulf war, missile defence tests to date and current deployment schedules, support this conclusion," he says in a text prepared for a meeting organised by the the International Security Information Service and King's College centre for defence studies.
"Current threat assessments exaggerate the danger" posed by Iraq, Iran and North Korea, described by Washington until last week as "rogue states", but now called "countries of concern". Threats described in America's 1999 national intelligence estimate (NIE) were assessed by projecting "possible and likely missile developments by 2015 independent of significant political and economic changes", Mr Cirincione will point out.
He says the NIE report contained two critical findings which are often overlooked: Any country with long-range missiles would be able to develop "numerous countermeasures" to penetrate a missile-defence system; and that there were "several other means to deliver weapons of mass destruction to the US that would be more reliable, less expensive and more accurate than potential new intercontinental ballistic missiles over the next 15 years".
Mr Cirincione's criticism is echoed in a recent report by the British American Security Information Council (Basic).
The US has spent $122bn (£81.5bn) on missile defence and it will take tens of billions more to deploy and maintain the proposed system, which has not yet been shown to be effective, says Basic.
Deeper cuts in Russian and US nuclear arsenals would be severely jeopardised, as would opportunities to bring China, India and Pakistan into the arms control process, it says. It adds: "North Korea, if it decides it needs to attack the US, could put weapons on a plane, boat, or truck, rather than a missile."
The next test for the proposed land-based system is scheduled for July 7, when a target missile will be launched from Vandenberg air force base in California, and an interceptor fired from Kwajalein island in the South Pacific will attempt to destroy it.
