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33 Minutes: All Our Enemies Need to Change America as We Know It

National Review Online

February 2, 2009

33 Minutes: All Our Enemies Need to Change America as We Know It

Kim R. Holmes

33 minutes—about the time it takes to get a pizza delivered—is all it takes for a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile to travel halfway around the world and obliterate an American city. In less time, if detonated high above the homeland, its Electromagnetic Pulse would incapacitate everything from ATM and hospital machines to traffic lights and computers for thousands of miles. Life would never be the same.

This is not science-fiction. Recently, the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Proliferation, and Terrorism said, “Terrorists are determined to attack us again—with weapons of mass destruction if they can.” The Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack reported in 2004 that an attack from a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile would have “catastrophic consequences,” citing effects like those above felt in Hawaii after a test 1400 kilometers away in 1962. Amazingly, some pundits say the threat of such attacks is farfetched, and our military can repel them anyway. They are wrong. Though our capabilities have come a long way in eight years, they are not enough to protect all of America. It is morally wrong to suggest that the government should settle for protecting only some of us.

Twenty countries have ballistic missiles. Some are our friends, but others like North Korea and Iran should give us pause. The good news is that most Americans understand the threat. And after 9/11, they want—they expect —Washington to do what it must to protect them.

The bad news is that the Obama administration has not yet made a commitment to the range of programs we need for an effective, layered system—with missile defenses on the ground, at sea, and in space.

Our new leaders need to hear that we want them to continue investing in missile defense. To help us understand what is at stake, The Heritage Foundation has produced 33 Minutes: Protecting America in the New Missile Age ( http://www.heritage.org/33-minutes/ ), a high-definition documentary that spells out in plain language the growing threat, what missile defense entails, how far we’ve come, and most important, what we still need to do.

The threat is clear. Lt. Gen. Henry “Trey” Obering, the just retired director of the Missile Defense Agency, puts it this way in 33 Minutes: “We have already seen the transfer of very short-range rockets and missiles from a state to a terrorist organization. When you marry that with a weapon of mass destruction, even one … fired into an American or allied city could cause tremendous devastation.”

We can’t negotiate the threat away. We’ve tried. Bad actors like Iran want these weapons to hold the U.S. and other nations hostage. They don’t want us to deploy missile defenses because that would make their weapons useless.

It’s unconscionable that we do not have adequate missile defenses to deal with the threats they pose. Washington is morally obligated to provide what we need, because as Obering soberly concludes, “When all else fails—when all the negotiations have broken down, when there is a missile in the air—you have to have the ability to destroy it, because the only other ability that you would have would be to apologize to those that have died.”

This is an inconvenient truth for those who think talking to our enemies from a position of vulnerability trumps military strength. Obama’s team needs to hear from us, just as it is from people in Poland, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere. We want protection from ballistic missiles. Anything less is abrogating their oath to uphold the Constitution and “provide for the common defense.”

Kim R. Holmes, Ph.D., is the Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, a former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, and author of Liberty’s Best Hope: American Leadership for the 21st Century (2008).

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Posted on 2/3/2009 at 5:14 PM PST