ABM Stands For: A Big Mistake

President George W. Bush's decision to announce this week he intends to pull the United States out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty is wrongheaded and profoundly disappointing. Its timing is counterproductive to waging the war on terror. It is certain to cause tensions with Russia and European partners abroad and to raise a divisive partisan issue at home, at a time when maintaining unity against terror should be a top national priority.

A unilateral withdrawal from the treaty with Russia - the cornerstone of nuclear arms control - cannot be explained rationally other than as a manifestation of an ideological obsession that has had Bush in its thrall since he took office: the quest for a national missile defense shield. The ABM treaty prohibits such a shield. Although Russian President Vladimir Putin has indicated he would be amenable to accommodating the testing of a missile defense system, Bush apparently couldn't wait and felt he had to pull Washington out of the treaty entirely. It's a bad move.

The obsession with a shield that could deflect or destroy incoming nuclear ballistic missiles is mired in strategic calculations that have more to do with the Cold War than with current realities. And an obsession is a precarious, even dangerous, basis for defense policy. The real dangers the nation faces at this point, as Sept. 11 made tragically clear, are not likely to come from nuclear adversaries or even rogue nations that might obtain a nuclear missile. The terror we face doesn't need missiles. It comes in letters in the mail or in aerosol cans or ticking bombs and kamikaze pilots.

The move to abrogate the ABM treaty doesn't clash only with logic, but with the White House's own security worries. Just last week, the Bush administration raised serious concerns that Osama bin Laden might resort to a "dirty nuke", a low-tech device that uses conventional explosives wrapped around nuclear wastes that could be exploded to poison an entire city with radioactive particles. A missile defense system would be useless against a dirty nuke steaming our way on a ship.

The Russians can't stop Bush's missile defense scheme, nor can the Europeans. But the pullout from the ABM treaty will sour relations that ought to be strengthened for the war on terror, not weakened to fulfill an obsession.