U.S. Needs Better Missile Defense for a Scarier Nuclear Age

In the last few weeks, the world has become a measurably more dangerous place. The apparent collapse of the North Korea talks, U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear pact, Russia’s threat to shoot down U.S. planes over Syria, and China’s placement of anti-ship and anti-air missiles on its manufactured islands in the South China Sea have all pushed the needle one tick closer to the unthinkable: nuclear war.

So now, more than ever, is the time to think about it — and plan for it.

America’s primary domestic defense system against a nuclear-missile attack is the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, with bases in Alaska and California. More than $40 billion has been spent on this successor to Ronald Reagan’s so-called Star Wars project. Yet it has only 44 “kill vehicles” intended to defend against a small-scale intercontinental attack of the sort North Korea might attempt, and its success rate in testing is only about 50 percent.

A second system based in Eastern Europe since 2016 uses an on-shore version of the Navy’s excellent Aegis combat system and is intended to protect Europe from an Iranian nuclear attack. But it isn’t geared toward defeating the longer-range ballistic missiles Iran is thought to be developing in violation of United Nations resolutions. Testing of the system has been limited.

If the uncertainty over whether these systems could knock even a single attack by a rogue state out of the sky isn’t unsettling enough, the U.S. would be all but defenseless from a mass attack by nuclear superpowers China and Russia. The only U.S. defense is its overwhelming offense of 6,800 nuclear warheads in Midwestern bunkers and aboard nuclear submarines and long-range bombers.