Ballistic Missile Defense: It Just Doesn't Make Sense

I've always been against missile defense. I just can't see the logic of it at all. The threat from ballistic missiles pales in comparison to being hit by bombs delivered by other sorts of delivery systems - like how about FEDEX? Or a boat landing in a port?

But, in this Washington Post column by David Ignatius, he describes the threat from short range cruise missiles.

Kier [a Lockheed Martin VP] starts by noting how vulnerable the United States is to a terrorist attack from offshore. He estimates that 75 percent of the U.S. population and 80 percent of its economic wealth are within 200 miles of coastline. The weapons for such an attack are available on the world's arms bazaars. By Kier's count, the potential cruise-missile inventory includes about 6,000 Silkworms and 11,000 Seersuckers. Assuming they were fired from less than 120 miles offshore, it would take them just 11 minutes to reach their targets.

Kier calculates that if a missile with a chemical warhead detonated over Washington, there would be thousands of casualties within the first 10 minutes and tens of thousands after an hour; if the missile were armed with a biological warhead, it would cause hundreds of thousands of casualties in the first hour. If the biological weapon were detonated over New York, casualties in the first five hours would be in the millions, he says.

So what would Lockheed Martin planners do to protect against these missile attacks? Kier proposes a detection system he calls a "passive coherent locator," which is based, believe it or not, on an amplification of existing FM radio signals. He says it would be easy to detect a disturbance in this FM energy field that had the unusual signature of a cruise missile, which is fast but low-flying and therefore doesn't resemble an airplane.

Read this column, please. By the way, I wish that Canada had supported the war in Iraq...and then said no to BMD.