In hawking a missile defense shield, Representative Weldon traveled in the first dangerous direction when he assured the defense conferees that although Congress was not ignoring the threat posed by terrorists with truck bombs, "when Saddam Hussein chose to destroy American lives, he did not pick a truck bomb. He did not pick a chemical agent. He picked a SCUD missile.... The weapon of choice is the missile."

Potentially worse, however, is the Reaganesque theology propelling the Bush Administration's decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Putting aside the question of whether withdrawal requires formal Congressional approval and other questions of international relations, one must ask why any administration would destroy the cornerstone of strategic stability. The ban on national missile defenses not only prevents a defensive arms race but also obviates the need to build more offensive missiles to overload the enemy's. Why would a country withdraw from the ABM treaty without knowing whether its own missile-defense system will even work, and before conducting all the tests permitted by the treaty that would provide greater confidence in the system's ultimate success?

Readers of Keith Payne's recent book The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction, might guess the probable answer. Payne, chosen by the Bush Administration to help shape the Defense Department's recently completed but still classified Nuclear Posture Review, writes about a new, post-cold war "effective deterrence," to which even an imperfect missile-defense system might contribute: "In the Cold War, the West held out the threat of nuclear escalation if the Soviet Union projected force into NATO Europe; in the post-Cold War period it will be regional aggressors threatening Washington with nuclear escalation in the event the United States needs to project force into their regional neighborhoods.... In short, Washington will want effective deterrence in regional crises where the challenger is able to threaten WMD [weapons of mass destruction] escalation and it is more willing to accept risk and cost."

The real concern, then, is less about protecting America from sneak attacks by rogue states ruled by madmen, and more about preserving our unilateral options to intervene throughout much of the world. Thus, President Bush's speech at The Citadel in December was disingenuous. His rhetorical question asking what if the terrorists had been able to strike with a ballistic missile was primarily an attempt to steamroller frightened Americans into supporting missile defense. The speech simply seized upon the wartime danger to compel a military transformation that has been debated for almost a decade and resisted by the services and the military industry since the beginning of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's tenure.

Lest we forget, China hasn't disappeared either. Its muted criticism of America's withdrawal from the ABM treaty was accompanied by a call for talks to achieve "a solution that safeguards the global strategic balance and doesn't harm international efforts at arms control and disarmament." Failing such talks, China may feel compelled to increase its offensive arsenal to insure penetration of an American missile defense, which could provoke India, and consequently Pakistan--perhaps rekindling tensions that have already brought them to the brink of war.

Russia, for its part, believes it has little to fear from America's current missile-defense programs but is awaiting the inevitable: the moment when the technological utopians push America to expand its modest system into a full-blown shield. How will Russia respond then?

To court such reactions by withdrawing from the ABM treaty before even testing against decoys is pure strategic illiteracy--which only a Reaganesque theology (founded on exceptionalism, commercialized militarism, technological utopianism and righteous unilateralism) shrouded by the "fog of war" might explain.

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