Attempts by the US defence secretary, Mr William Cohen, to play down the recent failure of a rocket test vital to the proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) system are unlikely to impress either those who outrightly oppose NMD or America's sceptical European allies. Mr Cohen in the course of his visit to China will have the task of bringing US relations with that country back to normal following NATO's disastrous bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade during last year's Yugoslav conflict. His insistence, in the course of a stopover on his way to Beijing, that the NMD programme should continue despite the failure of the test, will not help him achieve that aim.
The NMD system has been designed specifically, according to the US, as a protection against possible attack by "rogue states" such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. While nuclear weapons are possessed by many countries none, outside the major powers, has developed the intercontinental rocketry necessary to launch an attack on the United States. Russia and China are vehemently opposed to the system which they see as posing a major threat to the world strategic balance of power. Moscow claims, with some justification, that the development of NMD is in breach of the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.
Hopes of a compromise on the issue have been based on the premise that a deal between the White House and the Kremlin is on the cards. Washington's willingness to destroy larger numbers of missiles than scheduled in the Start-2 treaty could, the argument goes, allow Moscow to agree to modifications in the ABM treaty which would allow NMD to proceed. The test failure has put such a deal in jeopardy. While there may have been an element of schadenfreude in the Russian military's response to the failed test, an obvious hardening in Moscow's attitude was detectable. Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, the head of international co-operation in Russia's defence ministry, has claimed that both Russian and American experts know that the proposed system cannot work. His colleague, deputy chief of staff Gen Valery Manilov described NMD as "politically dangerous and strategically wrong."
If the US goes ahead with NMD unilaterally Russia has threatened to scrap all its international arms agreements. This would amount to a return to Cold War attitudes and while Russia's super-power status is a thing of the past it still possesses a formidable nuclear arsenal. America's allies in Europe, who consider themselves because of their geographical location to be considerably more vulnerable than the US to a rogue attack, have not been enthusiastic about NMD either. The start of a possible new arms race is in no country's interest and the weekend's failure indicates that many more rockets than previously anticipated may be needed in order to make NMD function with any degree of accuracy. The test failure may also change the time scale of President Clinton's decision on NMD's future. He had hoped to do this later this summer. It may now be a wiser course to leave the matter to 2001 when his successor may be able to make the decision against a more favourable background.