Missile Defense: Domestic or Global Initiative? - Initiative for A Renewed Transatlantic Partnership - Vol. 1, No. 3

The Bush Administration’s 2002 “National Security Presidential Directive 23” commits the U.S. to deploy an initial missile defense capability in 2004. The concept of missile defense now faces a threat environment that has changed profoundly over the past two decades, and is now likely to involve limited raids originating from unstable states or sub-national groups that have acquired, or seek to acquire, ballistic missiles and nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads. One welcome consequence of the changing threat environment is that the more modest scale of defensive system needed to counter limited raids has brought the U.S. and its allies into closer alignment—a limited threat warrants only a limited, and potentially affordable, defense—than when a massive defensive system was required to counter the Soviet threat.