Letters to the Editor

Defense shield will precipitate arms build-up

Melissa Waage '01's March 26 column deriding national missile defense proposals parallels most critical writing on the subject in its tendency to portray unsupported assertions as truth. The argument that a missile defense will cause devastating arms races with Russia is naive, to say the least. Anyone familiar with the missile defense literature understands that Russia lacks the financial resources to engage the United States in a meaningful nuclear build-up. If we construct a missile defense, there is little Russia can do in response — this explains its insistence on sticking to a 30-year old treaty that, for all practical and legal purposes, died alongside the Soviet Union.

Furthermore, even if Russia were capable of reciprocating, Waage never explains why arms races and additional proliferation are bad, nor does she offer an argument that these "evils" are worse than already existing threats to national security. Proliferation is rampant now and, so long as demand for nuclear weapons persists, it probably always will be. In fact, most international relations scholars would be hard-pressed to deny that the presence of nuclear weapons in multiple countries has not been a stabilizing force for several decades.

Though I am not an ardent advocate of current missile defense plans, I find little reason to be bothered or worried about the implications of the big bad Russian bear getting "understandably peeved." Let's not pretend that a vertical nuclear build-up with Russia, something we endured quite peacefully for 40 years, is a reason sufficient to reject current missile defense plans. Brad Simmons '03