03'02: CHRIS MASTERS: Tonight, Four Corners takes you inside the war room of missile defence.
COL TANKER SNYDER: Mr Masters, where you're sitting is where General Eberhart would sit. The Commander in Chief of NORAD and US Space Command -- he'd be sitting in that seat and have his senior –
CHRIS MASTERS: Inside the old Cold War command centre, the world's most powerful nation for attack from new enemies.
04'03: RICHARD PERLE, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: They've captured US warships, have shot down planes.They've bombed civilian airliners. They had a terrible massacre of almost half the Cabinet at Rangoon. It doesn't seem to be the actions of people who are risk averse.
04'20: ALEXANDER DOWNER, FOREIGN MINISTER: I would say, sort of, conceptually perhaps, the Korean peninsula is one of the most dangerous places in the world.
CHRIS MASTERS: On the strength of such a threat, the United States is preparing to tear up arms control agreements, spend a fortune, risk a foreign policy catastrophe and a new arms race.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: It is not a serious threat to the territory of the United States. But the United States has reacted to it as if it's a resurgence of a Soviet threat, as if we're in danger of the North Koreans coming through the gap at any moment.
05'04: RICHARD GARWIN, PHYSICIST AND MEMBER OF RUMSFELD COMM: One of the reasons to argue that deterrence wouldn't work, is because that argument favours the deployment of a missile defence system that people want for unstated reasons, probably against China.
CHRIS MASTERS: So is the focus of missile defence about China, about neutralising deterrent capacity and shielding Taiwan?
RICHARD ARMITAGE, US DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE: No, that's a silly question.
05'34: NICK BERRY, CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION: The administration will never say China is the real or perceived threat. But the fact of the matter is they're very concerned about China.
05'45: SHA ZU KANG, DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF ARMS CONTROL PRC: It's our problem. It's not their problem. Hands off, please.
CHRIS MASTERS: On the 56th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Four Corners asks whether the faultline in a new nuclear conflict will also be to our north.
06'24: JAMES LINDSAY, FOREIGN POLICY, BROOKINGS INSTITUTE: Missiles are likely weapons in future wars because they can strike devastatingly quickly with devastating results.
CHRIS MASTERS: In a California desert, a small private army of rocketeers has gathered for their annual international fire-off. How close to the way the military does it, is the way you do it?
07'15: ANDY WARNER, ROCKETEER: Well, rocket science is all pretty much the same. All rockets work pretty much the same. So, we, er, build them the same way the military does.
CHRIS MASTERS: In the 21st century, it seems, rocket science is no longer rocket science.
Rockets can be assembled far more cheaply than modern aircraft and you don't need pilots to fly them.
07'46: RICHARD GARWIN: They have to get the parts and they either manufacture themselves -- but that's a lot easier. Everybody has computer-controlled machine tools. It's a lot easier to get the gaskets and the fuel. Er, China sells rocket fuel to a lot of countries.
CHRIS MASTERS: And just to show you how sophisticated it gets, Australian David Wilkins has helped build a one-sixteenth scale working replica of a 1960s three-stage Soviet rocket.
08'23: DAVID WILKINS, ROCKETEER: ..a little astronaut on top. Rocket science is becoming better understood. It's like building a first atomic bomb is hard. Building 20,000 is very simple. It's a matter of production. And this is very similar.
08'49: RICHARD GARWIN: You don't need the latest in missile technology, just the way you don't need the latest in nuclear weapon technology in order to pose a threat. And that's what makes this so difficult. 1960s technology is good enough to threaten a country in the 21st century.
CHRIS MASTERS: And the best example of that argument is drawn from the Gulf War, which changed the way the world thought about missiles. What if Saddam Hussein had been able to arm his Scuds with nuclear warheads?
09' 23: RICHARD PERLE: The point is well-taken that that ability to intimidate could well have changed the course of history when Saddam went into Kuwait. Would the Saudis have provided the bases from which the 'Desert Storm' was launched, if they had been vulnerable to a nuclear weapon?
CHRIS MASTERS: While both the Scuds and the Patriots that tried to intercept them made little difference in a military sense, their psychological power was immense.
The Gulf War delivered a terrific boost to the missile industry, with the US recognising it had no real defence against missile attack, and its enemies realising the immense coercive power that missiles project.
10' 17: RICHARD ARMITAGE: Well, for rogue states, we feel that they may feel that they can -- with the use of one, two or a handful of missiles -- actually blackmail developed nations who they feel have much more to lose from a strike.
CHRIS MASTERS: Richard Armitage is part of a new White House administration kicking up some dust in foreign policy and defence thinking. Although some of the new ideas do have a familiar ring to them. Adviser Richard Perle was an assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. New Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld performed the same role for President Ford in the '70s. Rumsfeld came back into prominence in 1998 when he led an inquiry investigating future threats. He identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea at the top of a list of countries with an emerging capacity to rain missiles upon Americans. Six weeks later, the North Koreans did no harm to Rumsfeld's credibility by launching their three-stage Taepo Dong missile which arced across Japan and demonstrated a potential to reach Alaska.
11'45: RICHARD ARMITAGE: Well, I think it was quite significant both in terms of what it did to the Japanese -- It brought them clearly into the search for peace as well as the search for defence in North-East Asia. It galvanised opinion here in the United States.
The realisation that there are missiles from North Korea that could possibly reach the US shore. So it had a remarkable effect both in North-East Asia and in Washington.
12'11: SHA ZU KANG: Our source of information is that we don't believe that North Korea has that capability to develop missiles to threaten the security of the United States.
Not at all. Not at all.
CHRIS MASTERS: While there was now proof that North Korea could build long-range missiles, there was little to suggest they could arm them with nuclear warheads. The further obvious question is even if they could, in what possible circumstance would they be mad enough to use them?
12'48: BARRY BLECHMAN, MEMBER OF RUMSFELD COMMISSION: Does the person we're trying to deter believe our threats? Does he understand our capabilities? Is he sane at the time? Is he dying of some terminal disease and desperate for one last triumph? Is he drunk at the time?
13'11: RICHARD GARWIN: Why should he do that? There are easier ways to destroy his country -- which he's probably doing now anyhow -- than to launch a weapon of mass destruction at the United States. So these people may have different values than we, they may be ruthless, but they're not stupid.
13'27: RICHARD PERLE: You conclude that it's a low probability event, but it is such a catastrophic event -- and we're not talking only about today, we're talking about the indefinite future -- that it makes sense to mount a response to that catastrophic threat.
CHRIS MASTERS: The last time the world was threatened with catastrophe, not so long ago at that, deterrents appeared to have worked very well. In 1961 the United States built this bunker 700 metres inside a granite mountain in Colorado.
It housed the command centre for the anticipated WWIII. For the next 30 years the United States and the Soviet Union built nuclear arsenals capable of killing the world many times over.
14'45: JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INT'L PEACE: Nobody thought up Mutually Assured Destruction. Nobody decided, "This is a good way to have global stability." It just happened. The United States in the beginning had a monopoly. It thought it could maintain that monopoly.
It lasted about four years.
CHRIS MASTERS: On average, US military spending during the Cold War on behalf of the Free World was $300 billion a year. And happily the cost of the arms race ended up being measured in dollars rather than human lives.
15'26: RICHARD PERLE: It sometimes amuses me how the Left in particular -- which was never keen to engage in the Cold War, which was ready to accept the permanence of the Soviet Union and communist ideology -- um, now believe that the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight without any help from the Western alliance.
15'50: FRANK GAFFNEY JNR, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY: It was no accident, comrade, that the Soviet Union collapsed. It was not entirely a function of a successful American policy deliberately conceived and purposefully implemented, but it wouldn't have happened, I believe, without that policy.
CHRIS MASTERS: Underneath a cornfield in North Dakota is OSCAR launch centre where, until it was decommissioned in 1997, Captain Rich Nameth commanded 10 Minuteman missiles. I guess the presumption was that you would fire only if you were fired upon. Is that so?
16'38: CAPTAIN RICH NAMETH: We'll fire when the President tells us to fire. And we'll follow his orders.
16'46: REAR ADMIRAL EUGENE CARROLL, CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION: I'm sure the Soviets were totally convinced that we were planning a first-strike strategy because it didn't make sense to do what we were doing if we didn't.
FRANK GAFFNEY: I believe the Soviets were deadly serious about the possibility of fighting and prevailing in a nuclear war.
CHRIS MASTERS: In 1972 there was a check on the madness with the signing of what's been described as the world's most effective mechanism for arms control, the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
17'23: THEODORE POSTOL, PHYSICIST, MIT: Both agreed not to build defences because the impetus to respond to the other's defences would be impossible to deal with, and thereby it would be impossible to control the upward growth of these gigantic arsenals.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: And it worked. Starting with that process, the US and the Soviets first froze the number of ballistic missiles they could deploy and then started reducing them. And Ronald Reagan accelerated that process with his START treaties.
CHRIS MASTERS: In the last 15 years, international treaties have destroyed 3,000 long-range ballistic missiles.
18'08: LARRY VETTER, DEMOLITION SUPERVISOR: It's a reduction of the number of nuclear warheads that, you know -- And the destruction of the silo is an insurance that they can't put another missile in here to launch these warheads.
CHRIS MASTERS: Critics of the ABM Treaty say it's no longer necessary to maintain that delicate balance of terror, and that it's morally offensive to legitimise fear.
18'43: RICHARD PERLE: It's a relic of the Cold War. It expresses a relationship of mortal hostility.
And that's a world that we're not living in today.
BARRY BLECHMAN: The much better posture is one which has no offences -- the ideal posture -- no offences and a totally effective defences. Thereby no-one can destroy the other one, or even hurt the other one, and each side can be sure of that because they have a failsafe defence system.
CHRIS MASTERS: But is there any such thing? History suggests that the search for an impenetrable shield may itself be a field of dreams. Not far from North Dakota's Minuteman silos, we see what is left of the United States' last antiballistic missile system. The ABM Treaty ended up allowing both sides one battery of defensive interceptors. Then North Dakota's $21 billion Safeguard site was being built in the early '70s, the local bar was packed. For how long was it up and running?
20'07: BILL VERWAY, FORMER MAYOR NEKOMA: About two days is all. It was completed and ready to operate and then they shut it down. I don't know -- it didn't make sense, but that's what they did.
RICHARD GARWIN: Really, the system had no merit, no function at all, but there was so much enthusiasm for doing something -- then just as now -- that they built a nonsense system in North Dakota to defend 150 of our 1,000 Minuteman missiles. So, that's a lesson -- that for no reason except political and technological enthusiasm, you deploy systems which cause unending trouble and take an awful lot of money.
20'46: JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: What would happen when you detonated the first nuclear device in the atmosphere was that it would fry the electronics of the entire country, blinding not just your defensive system, but all your communications for the rest of the country.
CHRIS MASTERS: What also became clear was that defence and offence are inextricably linked. A bigger shield leads to bigger swords, and a fence is cheaper. The Soviet answer to Safeguard would have been to overwhelm it.
21'19: RICHARD PERLE: Well, a defensive system that has a specific offensive force in place can be overwhelmed if it is fixed and the offensive force is permitted to grow, but that's not what we're proposing to do.
CHRIS MASTERS: After the Safeguard experience, scientists began working on a non-nuclear interceptor designed to strike an oncoming warhead in space. The challenge was and is daunting.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: Can you hit a bullet with a bullet? Sure, under ideal circumstances. And that's a remarkable technological achievement. We've tried in tests 21 times since the early 1980s, and we've hit five times. So we know we can do it. The question is -- can you do it reliably? Can you do it repeatedly?
Can you do it when the enemy is trying to have you not do it? When they're deploying countermeasures? When their warhead is manoeuvring?
When they're targeting your defensive systems, trying to blind you, trying to spoof you? That is unknown, and I think as you play that game out the offence always has the advantage. Defence is always playing catch-up.
CHRIS MASTERS: Over the last five years, the United States has staged a series of tests in the Pacific. A rocket is fired from California, an interceptor is fired from Kwajalein Atoll. The aim is to affect a mid-course collision between two small objects approaching one another at 12km/second, 400km above the earth.
23'05: PHILIP COYLE, FORMER CHIEF TESTER, PENTAGON: National missile defence is the hardest thing that the United States Department of Defense has ever tried to do -- more difficult than any aircraft carrier or ship or plane or submarine or anything you can think of. So in a sense we've never really gotten to the hard part, which is finding and discriminating amongst all the objects in the target set.
THEODORE POSTOL: In effect, the system has no way to choose which is the right target, and that's the crux of the problem.
CHRIS MASTERS: After the US Department of Defense claimed promising results from earlier tests,
physicist Ted Postol independently examined the data.
23'46: THEODORE POSTOL: Let's say this is the warhead, and you expect to hit the warhead in the middle and destroy it.
CHRIS MASTERS: Postol concluded the tests had been deliberately dumbed-down to ensure a positive result.
THEODORE POSTOL: Basically what they did is they designed the decoys so that they could artificially create the impression that they could discriminate between credible decoys and the warhead. So they literally rigged the entire flight test program.
CHRIS MASTERS: Postol was so concerned, he wrote to President Clinton, and was soon joined by a school of eminent physicists who believe that interception in space can't work.
24'27: UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS COUNTERMEASURES ANIMATION: Instead of a single large warhead, the attack is made with many small warheads called 'bomblets' or 'sub-munitions'.
CHRIS MASTERS: You could overwhelm defences not just with decoys, but a scatter of bomblets, making the task more like hitting a shotgun blast with a bullet.
ANIMATION: Now, every object the defence sees is a real warhead, but there are simply too many for the defence to intercept them all. And a defence that won't work is no defence at all.
RICHARD PERLE: The same physicists who say we can't distinguish the decoys are ready to attribute often to Third World countries the ability to build sophisticated decoys. I'm sufficiently confident of our technical capabilities so that if it comes to an American ability to find decoys and an Iraqi ability to deploy them, I'll bet on the United States.
25'26: THEODORE POSTOL: To suggest that these people could build a warhead, but can't figure out how to build a balloon, is really at best a self-deception, and at worst a lie to your own countrymen that could lead to a military disaster.
CHRIS MASTERS: The Bush administration has pursued the $40 billion mid-course interception program in another controlled test, hitting the target. But getting around the decoys remains an article of faith, which supporters believe might be realised when they get around the constraints of the ABM Treaty, which also prohibits deployment in space.
RICHARD PERLE: It so encumbers the technology that it requires us to build defences in the most difficult manner, and without the benefit of systems in space, for example, which is the logical place to locate much of what you would need for a missile defence system.
CHRIS MASTERS: They also from time to time make the point that a country which can put a man on the moon can do anything.
26'46: RICHARD GARWIN: The moon didn't turn off its lights, it didn't jump out of the way, it didn't fight back. And so you have to ask what are the feasible technical ways to defeat the particular defence.
CHRIS MASTERS: Richard Garwin and many of his colleagues believe that missile defence has a better chance of working at what is called 'boost phase' interception.
RICHARD GARWIN: Instead of putting an umbrella over the entire United States and the eastern Pacific, as the Clinton administration and the Bush administration want to do with their mid-course intercept system, we put a lid over the tiny state of North Korea.
CHRIS MASTERS: Garwin believes the Russians would accept amendments to the ABM Treaty which prevents moving interceptors close to their targets.
27'39: PHILIP COYLE: Yes, you've got to be physically close to where the enemy missile is being launched from to shoot it down in boost phase. For example, boost phase would not work against China, because China's too big of a country. You just can't get close enough.
CHRIS MASTERS: China is not a signatory to the ABM Treaty. It has about 20 long-range missiles capable of reaching the United States. And the world's most powerful dictatorship is building up its defensive inventory, in one year spending $23 billion on new weapons.
28'23: FRANK GAFFNEY JNR: China is telling its own military forces, leadership cadre and people that war is inevitable with the United States. The communist Chinese Government, I believe, is pursuing policies that are preparing for conflict with our country.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: For many people, the whole point of missile defence is China. It's not really about North Korea. It's not really about Iran. It's the fear that some time in the next 20 or 30 years the United States is going to have a confrontation with China. Some see that as almost inevitable. It has to have a shield in place ready to face down those missiles, therefore face down China, otherwise the fear is the US will back down, and begin a slow but steady global retreat, and the American century will come to an end.
CHRIS MASTERS: The United States has 90,000 troops stationed to our north, most of them in Japan and South Korea.
29'30: PHILIP COYLE: From my point of view, the threat from short-range missiles is a real threat, and that's where our money and our priority ought to be going.
CHRIS MASTERS: Theatre missile defence, part of the Bush layered missile defence proposal is sometimes seen as code for protecting Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
If a missile war is to be fought, the narrow straits separating the Chinese mainland from Taiwan is a likely stage. Here mock armies stare down one another across an Asian iron curtain. But in the last years, the psychological war has been stepped up, taking on the form of missile age sabre-rattling.
30'35: FRANK GAFFNEY JNR: Taiwan is clearly one of the places where missile defences are needed today. There are some 300 Chinese missiles, several of which were lobbed at Taiwanese waters a few years back, er, that are now aimed at targets in Taiwan. Um, estimates suggest that that may go up to 600 or even 1,000 missiles in the future.
CHRIS MASTERS: The stakes were raised again this year when President Bush moved beyond the US prior position of creative ambiguity, which accommodates support for a One China policy and military assistance to Taiwan.
REPORTER: Do we have an obligation to defend the Taiwanese?
31'26: PRESIDENT BUSH, US PRESIDENT: Yes, we do. And the Chinese must understand that. Yes, I would.
REPORTER: With the full force of American military?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself.
RICHARD ARMITAGE: It was not a departure from our policy. If the equation in the Taiwan Straits has changed in recent years, it has changed because the Chinese have put many missiles across the straits from Taiwan, they've had rather bellicose rhetoric, they've had very robust military exercises, and they've made some suggestions about the need to resolve this in a very rapid, or relatively rapid fashion. That's been the change in the Taiwan Straits, so I think our President was trying to send them a signal that we do pay attention.
32'26: SHA ZU KANG: United States can help this kind of peaceful unification process instead of making such kind of remarks like defending Taiwan. Why, why, why?
CHRIS MASTERS: The big fear is a blockade will trigger a hot war, with China using its Sunburn missiles to keep the US fleet at bay, and its small ICBM arsenal as a deterrent against nuclear intervention.
BARRY BLECHMAN: Certainly, without the United States intervening they could do it. And I have no doubt that if there was an overt move toward Taiwan's independence, that they would take military action. It just seems very clear that should that happen, there would be a confrontation in the region.
32'56: REAR ADMIRAL EUGENE CARROLL, (RET), CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION: First I want to question the wisdom and the Chinese thinking about a blockade. To impose a blockade is an act of war and would immediately alienate all of the Western world. They simply would see this as a terrible threat to the peace and China would be cut off from the foreign trade which it desperately needs to continue its economic development. In the second place, the United States navy would drive them off of the sea in a matter of days.
CHRIS MASTERS: So is the focus of missile defence about China -- about neutralising deterrent capacity and shielding Taiwan?
33'35: RICHARD ARMITAGE: No, it's a -- it's a silly question. Er, the Chinese capacity in terms of their strategic deterrent would far overwhelm any of the missile defence capabilities which the United States has spoken about with friends and allies to -- and, by the way, with China. We're talking about a defence against, oh, at most, a handful of missiles, while the Chinese program envisions quite a more robust capability.
33'58: ALEXANDER DOWNER: The Chinese have -- have obviously become very preoccupied with that being the Americans' secret agenda. It's not. The Americans have made that clear to us privately. They've made it clear publicly. But, you know, they've got a big task here, but they need to assure China of that as well.
CHRIS MASTERS: A more realistic concern is weapons proliferation -- an arms race to our north, which, it's fair to say, had already started.
34'29: SHA ZU KANG: Such superiority could imply a kind of threat to others. Then others may take necessary steps, you know, to -- offset or reduce such a kind of possible potential threat. Then the -- here then lies the factor that may stipulate the arms race. You know, that's our worry.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: That's the question. It's not just c -- ca -- should we have a defence, can we have a defence, it's what does the other guy do when you deploy your defence? What happens next? What kind of chain reaction are you setting off?
35'07: LAURIE BRERETON, SHADOW DEFENCE MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS: For India following suit and Pakistan following suit. The -- such developments, were they to occur, have real implications for us in our region down here in Australia.
CHRIS MASTERS: China is already selling missiles and missile technology to other countries, notably Pakistan.
SHA ZU KANG: Why make such a fuss about very normal, really, exchanges between China and Pakistan. It's not fair! Absolutely unfair.
CHRIS MASTERS: China is in turn watching as the United States moves closer to India, and protesting proposed new defence linkages that would draw the United States, South Korea, Japan and Australia closer together.
35'59: ALEXANDER DOWNER: It doesn't constitute the emergence of an East Asian NATO and in fact, I mean, I don't think any of us would want to see that because one of the continuums of Australian foreign policy -- and I suspect, United States policy -- but certainly Australian policy, in terms of dealing with China, is a policy of engagement rather than a policy of containment.
LAURIE BRERETON: Well, the Chinese think it's aimed at China. That's the important thing.
FRANK GAFFNEY JNR: I think every effort should be made, in fact, to contain that threat. But I think we have to appreciate that is enormously more difficult than was containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War because for most of the past 30 years, we've been actively enabling China to penetrate every facet of our society, er, our political system, er, our economy. And not just that of the United States, but of the West more generally. So I'm under no illusion as to how difficult this would be.
CHRIS MASTERS: Australia, unlike many other Western nations, emerged an early and enthusiastic supporter of missile defence. The joint Pine Gap facility has an early warning function that could have a small role to play.
37'23: RON HUISKEN, STRATEGIC AND DEFENCE STUDIES CENTRE, ANU: It's part of a critical function for missile defence, but -- but Australia's association with it is probably no longer compulsory in the sense that it was during the Cold War.
SHA ZU KANG: I-I-I read about somewhere that if, er, it was decided to proceed with the missile defence, they would have to establish facilities in Australia. You know, and, er, I don't think such kind of development would increase or help Australia's security -- or security of the Asia-Pacific region.
CHRIS MASTERS: So would missile defence protect Australia too?
38'00: FRANK GAFFNEY JNR: Well, if the Australians don't want to be protected, I think we should make arrangements to ensure that they are not.
CHRIS MASTERS: So is this the main entrance, Lynne?
LYNNE: This is the West Tunnel entrance to the bunker. It would've been the home for about 1,000 to 1,100 people.
CHRIS MASTERS: Back in 1958, the United States began building this facility beneath an exclusive country club to the south of Washington. It is one tiny corner of a multi-million dollar civil defence program designed to protect Americans.
It was meant to house Congress and was, thankfully, proved useless. Critics of missile defence see a revival of a bunker mentality with the resuscitation of the careers of some old cold-warriors.
38'51: REAR ADMIRAL EUGENE CARROLL: It's no accident at all that the current administration is not only a reflection of the Reagan-Bush era, but actually almost an intensification of it. We are the superpower. We call the shots.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: They see themselves on a mission to break -- ...to tear down these illusions, to alert America to the dangers that the new century presents, and to get America ready for the next conflicts, whatever they may be.
CHRIS MASTERS: What do you say to the criticism that missile defence is about ideology, it's about a historic mission by people like yourself, who see deterrence as immoral?
39'39: RICHARD PERLE: Well, there's certainly some truth that many of us who have thought that exclusive reliance on deterrence was dangerous, and if justifiable in the Cold War, highly questionable after the Cold War. But that isn't the situation today, so we now have the option for a defence that we didn't have then. And, yes, there's a consistency among some of us that it is better to protect against nuclear attack than to avenge it.
CHRIS MASTERS: This generation, the generation to be protected from missile attack, has the world literally at its feet.
STUDENT: Just take a look at the past 30 years, what we've come up with, like what we're now growing up with, that our parents would never have thought of.
CHRIS MASTERS: How proud are you of America's achievements in space?
40'34: STUDENT: I think it's really cool. I know the Russians beat us to a lot of places but we beat 'em to the moon -- yeah.
CHRIS MASTERS: Even without missile defence, the United States is already light-years ahead in space and weapons technology.
RON HUISKEN: The US is now operating in a conventional military environment that pretty much no-one else on the planet can really comprehend.
41'01: JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: If you live in America, you believe in that technological solution. I mean, look at the wonders that the United States has helped create over the last 100 years. Americans have a deep, ingrained belief in our ability to do anything we set our minds to.
THEODORE POSTOL: But the downside is when you have people who really don't understand the limits of what science and technology can produce. And they treat it almost as if anything is doable, and they forget that there are principles of science and technology, and we see this overwhelmingly prevalent in this debate over missile defence.
41'41: STUDENT: As you know, China's becoming more and more powerful every year. They are getting -- $40-50 billion from us every year. I mean -- from trading, and all that, they are becoming more and more powerful. I don't think that we should break the treaty with Russia, but I think we do need some kind of missile defence to help intimidate them.
CHRIS MASTERS: The United States has a sovereign right to defend itself, and deep within the national psyche is a fear that, if an attack comes, it will be unexpected.
Supporters see that even if it's decades away, the time to prepare is now, and that busting the treaty is not a matter of if, but when.
42'31: RICHARD PERLE: It's very hard to believe that over the long term we will not see the emergence of other countries with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction on top of those missiles. How long do we want to wait?
5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? Can anyone say what the threat will look like, 25 years from now? If we don't start to build a defence today, we won't have one in the future.
CHRIS MASTERS: For the present, European allies in particular are having trouble understanding why the United States is so keen to overturn a treaty that has kept the peace, for a costly system that is not only unproven, but may make the world more dangerous. uld the United States go it alone, if that's the way it turns out?
43'27: RICHARD PERLE: Of course. We're certainly not going to subject the sensitive issue of our own defence to some kind of majority vote among other people who are not directly affected.
ALEXANDER DOWNER: Let's make no mistake about this -- if they can't get amendments to the ABM Treaty, they're not allowing that to stand in the way of the development of their missile defence technology and they will abrogate the treaty if they have to.
43'53: NICK BERRY: In effect, that unilateralism -- and that's really what it is -- goes against the whole process and system of globalisation which you find greater interaction, by the way that produces -- ...greater prosperity, greater cultural exchanges, greater technological exchanges, greater multilateralism. It goes against all that, and I think it's anti-historical.
SHA ZU KANG: I don't think that anybody can stop them, stop their missile defence program, but to be honest, we only can hope that they don't do it -- don't do it. But if they insist, I'm sure that others will take necessary countermeasures, you know? And they cannot stop others either.
44'45: STUDENT: Once we start a mission -- a missile defence, then every other country's going to want one and then all we need is that one person sitting there with a button to start a nice little World War III. I mean, that's the bad part about it. I mean, yeah, we're defending ourselves, but once someone presses that button, it's going to be just --
SECOND STUDENT: Yeah, because it's kind of pointless just having everyone just pointing guns at each other, and just waiting for someone to make the first move. Once that starts, the whole world's dead, so what's the point?
End: 46'41
COL TANKER SNYDER: Mr Masters, where you're sitting is where General Eberhart would sit. The Commander in Chief of NORAD and US Space Command -- he'd be sitting in that seat and have his senior –
CHRIS MASTERS: Inside the old Cold War command centre, the world's most powerful nation for attack from new enemies.
04'03: RICHARD PERLE, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: They've captured US warships, have shot down planes.They've bombed civilian airliners. They had a terrible massacre of almost half the Cabinet at Rangoon. It doesn't seem to be the actions of people who are risk averse.
04'20: ALEXANDER DOWNER, FOREIGN MINISTER: I would say, sort of, conceptually perhaps, the Korean peninsula is one of the most dangerous places in the world.
CHRIS MASTERS: On the strength of such a threat, the United States is preparing to tear up arms control agreements, spend a fortune, risk a foreign policy catastrophe and a new arms race.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: It is not a serious threat to the territory of the United States. But the United States has reacted to it as if it's a resurgence of a Soviet threat, as if we're in danger of the North Koreans coming through the gap at any moment.
05'04: RICHARD GARWIN, PHYSICIST AND MEMBER OF RUMSFELD COMM: One of the reasons to argue that deterrence wouldn't work, is because that argument favours the deployment of a missile defence system that people want for unstated reasons, probably against China.
CHRIS MASTERS: So is the focus of missile defence about China, about neutralising deterrent capacity and shielding Taiwan?
RICHARD ARMITAGE, US DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE: No, that's a silly question.
05'34: NICK BERRY, CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION: The administration will never say China is the real or perceived threat. But the fact of the matter is they're very concerned about China.
05'45: SHA ZU KANG, DIRECTOR-GENERAL OF ARMS CONTROL PRC: It's our problem. It's not their problem. Hands off, please.
CHRIS MASTERS: On the 56th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Four Corners asks whether the faultline in a new nuclear conflict will also be to our north.
06'24: JAMES LINDSAY, FOREIGN POLICY, BROOKINGS INSTITUTE: Missiles are likely weapons in future wars because they can strike devastatingly quickly with devastating results.
CHRIS MASTERS: In a California desert, a small private army of rocketeers has gathered for their annual international fire-off. How close to the way the military does it, is the way you do it?
07'15: ANDY WARNER, ROCKETEER: Well, rocket science is all pretty much the same. All rockets work pretty much the same. So, we, er, build them the same way the military does.
CHRIS MASTERS: In the 21st century, it seems, rocket science is no longer rocket science.
Rockets can be assembled far more cheaply than modern aircraft and you don't need pilots to fly them.
07'46: RICHARD GARWIN: They have to get the parts and they either manufacture themselves -- but that's a lot easier. Everybody has computer-controlled machine tools. It's a lot easier to get the gaskets and the fuel. Er, China sells rocket fuel to a lot of countries.
CHRIS MASTERS: And just to show you how sophisticated it gets, Australian David Wilkins has helped build a one-sixteenth scale working replica of a 1960s three-stage Soviet rocket.
08'23: DAVID WILKINS, ROCKETEER: ..a little astronaut on top. Rocket science is becoming better understood. It's like building a first atomic bomb is hard. Building 20,000 is very simple. It's a matter of production. And this is very similar.
08'49: RICHARD GARWIN: You don't need the latest in missile technology, just the way you don't need the latest in nuclear weapon technology in order to pose a threat. And that's what makes this so difficult. 1960s technology is good enough to threaten a country in the 21st century.
CHRIS MASTERS: And the best example of that argument is drawn from the Gulf War, which changed the way the world thought about missiles. What if Saddam Hussein had been able to arm his Scuds with nuclear warheads?
09' 23: RICHARD PERLE: The point is well-taken that that ability to intimidate could well have changed the course of history when Saddam went into Kuwait. Would the Saudis have provided the bases from which the 'Desert Storm' was launched, if they had been vulnerable to a nuclear weapon?
CHRIS MASTERS: While both the Scuds and the Patriots that tried to intercept them made little difference in a military sense, their psychological power was immense.
The Gulf War delivered a terrific boost to the missile industry, with the US recognising it had no real defence against missile attack, and its enemies realising the immense coercive power that missiles project.
10' 17: RICHARD ARMITAGE: Well, for rogue states, we feel that they may feel that they can -- with the use of one, two or a handful of missiles -- actually blackmail developed nations who they feel have much more to lose from a strike.
CHRIS MASTERS: Richard Armitage is part of a new White House administration kicking up some dust in foreign policy and defence thinking. Although some of the new ideas do have a familiar ring to them. Adviser Richard Perle was an assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan. New Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld performed the same role for President Ford in the '70s. Rumsfeld came back into prominence in 1998 when he led an inquiry investigating future threats. He identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea at the top of a list of countries with an emerging capacity to rain missiles upon Americans. Six weeks later, the North Koreans did no harm to Rumsfeld's credibility by launching their three-stage Taepo Dong missile which arced across Japan and demonstrated a potential to reach Alaska.
11'45: RICHARD ARMITAGE: Well, I think it was quite significant both in terms of what it did to the Japanese -- It brought them clearly into the search for peace as well as the search for defence in North-East Asia. It galvanised opinion here in the United States.
The realisation that there are missiles from North Korea that could possibly reach the US shore. So it had a remarkable effect both in North-East Asia and in Washington.
12'11: SHA ZU KANG: Our source of information is that we don't believe that North Korea has that capability to develop missiles to threaten the security of the United States.
Not at all. Not at all.
CHRIS MASTERS: While there was now proof that North Korea could build long-range missiles, there was little to suggest they could arm them with nuclear warheads. The further obvious question is even if they could, in what possible circumstance would they be mad enough to use them?
12'48: BARRY BLECHMAN, MEMBER OF RUMSFELD COMMISSION: Does the person we're trying to deter believe our threats? Does he understand our capabilities? Is he sane at the time? Is he dying of some terminal disease and desperate for one last triumph? Is he drunk at the time?
13'11: RICHARD GARWIN: Why should he do that? There are easier ways to destroy his country -- which he's probably doing now anyhow -- than to launch a weapon of mass destruction at the United States. So these people may have different values than we, they may be ruthless, but they're not stupid.
13'27: RICHARD PERLE: You conclude that it's a low probability event, but it is such a catastrophic event -- and we're not talking only about today, we're talking about the indefinite future -- that it makes sense to mount a response to that catastrophic threat.
CHRIS MASTERS: The last time the world was threatened with catastrophe, not so long ago at that, deterrents appeared to have worked very well. In 1961 the United States built this bunker 700 metres inside a granite mountain in Colorado.
It housed the command centre for the anticipated WWIII. For the next 30 years the United States and the Soviet Union built nuclear arsenals capable of killing the world many times over.
14'45: JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INT'L PEACE: Nobody thought up Mutually Assured Destruction. Nobody decided, "This is a good way to have global stability." It just happened. The United States in the beginning had a monopoly. It thought it could maintain that monopoly.
It lasted about four years.
CHRIS MASTERS: On average, US military spending during the Cold War on behalf of the Free World was $300 billion a year. And happily the cost of the arms race ended up being measured in dollars rather than human lives.
15'26: RICHARD PERLE: It sometimes amuses me how the Left in particular -- which was never keen to engage in the Cold War, which was ready to accept the permanence of the Soviet Union and communist ideology -- um, now believe that the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight without any help from the Western alliance.
15'50: FRANK GAFFNEY JNR, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY: It was no accident, comrade, that the Soviet Union collapsed. It was not entirely a function of a successful American policy deliberately conceived and purposefully implemented, but it wouldn't have happened, I believe, without that policy.
CHRIS MASTERS: Underneath a cornfield in North Dakota is OSCAR launch centre where, until it was decommissioned in 1997, Captain Rich Nameth commanded 10 Minuteman missiles. I guess the presumption was that you would fire only if you were fired upon. Is that so?
16'38: CAPTAIN RICH NAMETH: We'll fire when the President tells us to fire. And we'll follow his orders.
16'46: REAR ADMIRAL EUGENE CARROLL, CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION: I'm sure the Soviets were totally convinced that we were planning a first-strike strategy because it didn't make sense to do what we were doing if we didn't.
FRANK GAFFNEY: I believe the Soviets were deadly serious about the possibility of fighting and prevailing in a nuclear war.
CHRIS MASTERS: In 1972 there was a check on the madness with the signing of what's been described as the world's most effective mechanism for arms control, the Antiballistic Missile Treaty.
17'23: THEODORE POSTOL, PHYSICIST, MIT: Both agreed not to build defences because the impetus to respond to the other's defences would be impossible to deal with, and thereby it would be impossible to control the upward growth of these gigantic arsenals.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: And it worked. Starting with that process, the US and the Soviets first froze the number of ballistic missiles they could deploy and then started reducing them. And Ronald Reagan accelerated that process with his START treaties.
CHRIS MASTERS: In the last 15 years, international treaties have destroyed 3,000 long-range ballistic missiles.
18'08: LARRY VETTER, DEMOLITION SUPERVISOR: It's a reduction of the number of nuclear warheads that, you know -- And the destruction of the silo is an insurance that they can't put another missile in here to launch these warheads.
CHRIS MASTERS: Critics of the ABM Treaty say it's no longer necessary to maintain that delicate balance of terror, and that it's morally offensive to legitimise fear.
18'43: RICHARD PERLE: It's a relic of the Cold War. It expresses a relationship of mortal hostility.
And that's a world that we're not living in today.
BARRY BLECHMAN: The much better posture is one which has no offences -- the ideal posture -- no offences and a totally effective defences. Thereby no-one can destroy the other one, or even hurt the other one, and each side can be sure of that because they have a failsafe defence system.
CHRIS MASTERS: But is there any such thing? History suggests that the search for an impenetrable shield may itself be a field of dreams. Not far from North Dakota's Minuteman silos, we see what is left of the United States' last antiballistic missile system. The ABM Treaty ended up allowing both sides one battery of defensive interceptors. Then North Dakota's $21 billion Safeguard site was being built in the early '70s, the local bar was packed. For how long was it up and running?
20'07: BILL VERWAY, FORMER MAYOR NEKOMA: About two days is all. It was completed and ready to operate and then they shut it down. I don't know -- it didn't make sense, but that's what they did.
RICHARD GARWIN: Really, the system had no merit, no function at all, but there was so much enthusiasm for doing something -- then just as now -- that they built a nonsense system in North Dakota to defend 150 of our 1,000 Minuteman missiles. So, that's a lesson -- that for no reason except political and technological enthusiasm, you deploy systems which cause unending trouble and take an awful lot of money.
20'46: JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: What would happen when you detonated the first nuclear device in the atmosphere was that it would fry the electronics of the entire country, blinding not just your defensive system, but all your communications for the rest of the country.
CHRIS MASTERS: What also became clear was that defence and offence are inextricably linked. A bigger shield leads to bigger swords, and a fence is cheaper. The Soviet answer to Safeguard would have been to overwhelm it.
21'19: RICHARD PERLE: Well, a defensive system that has a specific offensive force in place can be overwhelmed if it is fixed and the offensive force is permitted to grow, but that's not what we're proposing to do.
CHRIS MASTERS: After the Safeguard experience, scientists began working on a non-nuclear interceptor designed to strike an oncoming warhead in space. The challenge was and is daunting.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: Can you hit a bullet with a bullet? Sure, under ideal circumstances. And that's a remarkable technological achievement. We've tried in tests 21 times since the early 1980s, and we've hit five times. So we know we can do it. The question is -- can you do it reliably? Can you do it repeatedly?
Can you do it when the enemy is trying to have you not do it? When they're deploying countermeasures? When their warhead is manoeuvring?
When they're targeting your defensive systems, trying to blind you, trying to spoof you? That is unknown, and I think as you play that game out the offence always has the advantage. Defence is always playing catch-up.
CHRIS MASTERS: Over the last five years, the United States has staged a series of tests in the Pacific. A rocket is fired from California, an interceptor is fired from Kwajalein Atoll. The aim is to affect a mid-course collision between two small objects approaching one another at 12km/second, 400km above the earth.
23'05: PHILIP COYLE, FORMER CHIEF TESTER, PENTAGON: National missile defence is the hardest thing that the United States Department of Defense has ever tried to do -- more difficult than any aircraft carrier or ship or plane or submarine or anything you can think of. So in a sense we've never really gotten to the hard part, which is finding and discriminating amongst all the objects in the target set.
THEODORE POSTOL: In effect, the system has no way to choose which is the right target, and that's the crux of the problem.
CHRIS MASTERS: After the US Department of Defense claimed promising results from earlier tests,
physicist Ted Postol independently examined the data.
23'46: THEODORE POSTOL: Let's say this is the warhead, and you expect to hit the warhead in the middle and destroy it.
CHRIS MASTERS: Postol concluded the tests had been deliberately dumbed-down to ensure a positive result.
THEODORE POSTOL: Basically what they did is they designed the decoys so that they could artificially create the impression that they could discriminate between credible decoys and the warhead. So they literally rigged the entire flight test program.
CHRIS MASTERS: Postol was so concerned, he wrote to President Clinton, and was soon joined by a school of eminent physicists who believe that interception in space can't work.
24'27: UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS COUNTERMEASURES ANIMATION: Instead of a single large warhead, the attack is made with many small warheads called 'bomblets' or 'sub-munitions'.
CHRIS MASTERS: You could overwhelm defences not just with decoys, but a scatter of bomblets, making the task more like hitting a shotgun blast with a bullet.
ANIMATION: Now, every object the defence sees is a real warhead, but there are simply too many for the defence to intercept them all. And a defence that won't work is no defence at all.
RICHARD PERLE: The same physicists who say we can't distinguish the decoys are ready to attribute often to Third World countries the ability to build sophisticated decoys. I'm sufficiently confident of our technical capabilities so that if it comes to an American ability to find decoys and an Iraqi ability to deploy them, I'll bet on the United States.
25'26: THEODORE POSTOL: To suggest that these people could build a warhead, but can't figure out how to build a balloon, is really at best a self-deception, and at worst a lie to your own countrymen that could lead to a military disaster.
CHRIS MASTERS: The Bush administration has pursued the $40 billion mid-course interception program in another controlled test, hitting the target. But getting around the decoys remains an article of faith, which supporters believe might be realised when they get around the constraints of the ABM Treaty, which also prohibits deployment in space.
RICHARD PERLE: It so encumbers the technology that it requires us to build defences in the most difficult manner, and without the benefit of systems in space, for example, which is the logical place to locate much of what you would need for a missile defence system.
CHRIS MASTERS: They also from time to time make the point that a country which can put a man on the moon can do anything.
26'46: RICHARD GARWIN: The moon didn't turn off its lights, it didn't jump out of the way, it didn't fight back. And so you have to ask what are the feasible technical ways to defeat the particular defence.
CHRIS MASTERS: Richard Garwin and many of his colleagues believe that missile defence has a better chance of working at what is called 'boost phase' interception.
RICHARD GARWIN: Instead of putting an umbrella over the entire United States and the eastern Pacific, as the Clinton administration and the Bush administration want to do with their mid-course intercept system, we put a lid over the tiny state of North Korea.
CHRIS MASTERS: Garwin believes the Russians would accept amendments to the ABM Treaty which prevents moving interceptors close to their targets.
27'39: PHILIP COYLE: Yes, you've got to be physically close to where the enemy missile is being launched from to shoot it down in boost phase. For example, boost phase would not work against China, because China's too big of a country. You just can't get close enough.
CHRIS MASTERS: China is not a signatory to the ABM Treaty. It has about 20 long-range missiles capable of reaching the United States. And the world's most powerful dictatorship is building up its defensive inventory, in one year spending $23 billion on new weapons.
28'23: FRANK GAFFNEY JNR: China is telling its own military forces, leadership cadre and people that war is inevitable with the United States. The communist Chinese Government, I believe, is pursuing policies that are preparing for conflict with our country.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: For many people, the whole point of missile defence is China. It's not really about North Korea. It's not really about Iran. It's the fear that some time in the next 20 or 30 years the United States is going to have a confrontation with China. Some see that as almost inevitable. It has to have a shield in place ready to face down those missiles, therefore face down China, otherwise the fear is the US will back down, and begin a slow but steady global retreat, and the American century will come to an end.
CHRIS MASTERS: The United States has 90,000 troops stationed to our north, most of them in Japan and South Korea.
29'30: PHILIP COYLE: From my point of view, the threat from short-range missiles is a real threat, and that's where our money and our priority ought to be going.
CHRIS MASTERS: Theatre missile defence, part of the Bush layered missile defence proposal is sometimes seen as code for protecting Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
If a missile war is to be fought, the narrow straits separating the Chinese mainland from Taiwan is a likely stage. Here mock armies stare down one another across an Asian iron curtain. But in the last years, the psychological war has been stepped up, taking on the form of missile age sabre-rattling.
30'35: FRANK GAFFNEY JNR: Taiwan is clearly one of the places where missile defences are needed today. There are some 300 Chinese missiles, several of which were lobbed at Taiwanese waters a few years back, er, that are now aimed at targets in Taiwan. Um, estimates suggest that that may go up to 600 or even 1,000 missiles in the future.
CHRIS MASTERS: The stakes were raised again this year when President Bush moved beyond the US prior position of creative ambiguity, which accommodates support for a One China policy and military assistance to Taiwan.
REPORTER: Do we have an obligation to defend the Taiwanese?
31'26: PRESIDENT BUSH, US PRESIDENT: Yes, we do. And the Chinese must understand that. Yes, I would.
REPORTER: With the full force of American military?
PRESIDENT BUSH: Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself.
RICHARD ARMITAGE: It was not a departure from our policy. If the equation in the Taiwan Straits has changed in recent years, it has changed because the Chinese have put many missiles across the straits from Taiwan, they've had rather bellicose rhetoric, they've had very robust military exercises, and they've made some suggestions about the need to resolve this in a very rapid, or relatively rapid fashion. That's been the change in the Taiwan Straits, so I think our President was trying to send them a signal that we do pay attention.
32'26: SHA ZU KANG: United States can help this kind of peaceful unification process instead of making such kind of remarks like defending Taiwan. Why, why, why?
CHRIS MASTERS: The big fear is a blockade will trigger a hot war, with China using its Sunburn missiles to keep the US fleet at bay, and its small ICBM arsenal as a deterrent against nuclear intervention.
BARRY BLECHMAN: Certainly, without the United States intervening they could do it. And I have no doubt that if there was an overt move toward Taiwan's independence, that they would take military action. It just seems very clear that should that happen, there would be a confrontation in the region.
32'56: REAR ADMIRAL EUGENE CARROLL, (RET), CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION: First I want to question the wisdom and the Chinese thinking about a blockade. To impose a blockade is an act of war and would immediately alienate all of the Western world. They simply would see this as a terrible threat to the peace and China would be cut off from the foreign trade which it desperately needs to continue its economic development. In the second place, the United States navy would drive them off of the sea in a matter of days.
CHRIS MASTERS: So is the focus of missile defence about China -- about neutralising deterrent capacity and shielding Taiwan?
33'35: RICHARD ARMITAGE: No, it's a -- it's a silly question. Er, the Chinese capacity in terms of their strategic deterrent would far overwhelm any of the missile defence capabilities which the United States has spoken about with friends and allies to -- and, by the way, with China. We're talking about a defence against, oh, at most, a handful of missiles, while the Chinese program envisions quite a more robust capability.
33'58: ALEXANDER DOWNER: The Chinese have -- have obviously become very preoccupied with that being the Americans' secret agenda. It's not. The Americans have made that clear to us privately. They've made it clear publicly. But, you know, they've got a big task here, but they need to assure China of that as well.
CHRIS MASTERS: A more realistic concern is weapons proliferation -- an arms race to our north, which, it's fair to say, had already started.
34'29: SHA ZU KANG: Such superiority could imply a kind of threat to others. Then others may take necessary steps, you know, to -- offset or reduce such a kind of possible potential threat. Then the -- here then lies the factor that may stipulate the arms race. You know, that's our worry.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: That's the question. It's not just c -- ca -- should we have a defence, can we have a defence, it's what does the other guy do when you deploy your defence? What happens next? What kind of chain reaction are you setting off?
35'07: LAURIE BRERETON, SHADOW DEFENCE MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS: For India following suit and Pakistan following suit. The -- such developments, were they to occur, have real implications for us in our region down here in Australia.
CHRIS MASTERS: China is already selling missiles and missile technology to other countries, notably Pakistan.
SHA ZU KANG: Why make such a fuss about very normal, really, exchanges between China and Pakistan. It's not fair! Absolutely unfair.
CHRIS MASTERS: China is in turn watching as the United States moves closer to India, and protesting proposed new defence linkages that would draw the United States, South Korea, Japan and Australia closer together.
35'59: ALEXANDER DOWNER: It doesn't constitute the emergence of an East Asian NATO and in fact, I mean, I don't think any of us would want to see that because one of the continuums of Australian foreign policy -- and I suspect, United States policy -- but certainly Australian policy, in terms of dealing with China, is a policy of engagement rather than a policy of containment.
LAURIE BRERETON: Well, the Chinese think it's aimed at China. That's the important thing.
FRANK GAFFNEY JNR: I think every effort should be made, in fact, to contain that threat. But I think we have to appreciate that is enormously more difficult than was containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War because for most of the past 30 years, we've been actively enabling China to penetrate every facet of our society, er, our political system, er, our economy. And not just that of the United States, but of the West more generally. So I'm under no illusion as to how difficult this would be.
CHRIS MASTERS: Australia, unlike many other Western nations, emerged an early and enthusiastic supporter of missile defence. The joint Pine Gap facility has an early warning function that could have a small role to play.
37'23: RON HUISKEN, STRATEGIC AND DEFENCE STUDIES CENTRE, ANU: It's part of a critical function for missile defence, but -- but Australia's association with it is probably no longer compulsory in the sense that it was during the Cold War.
SHA ZU KANG: I-I-I read about somewhere that if, er, it was decided to proceed with the missile defence, they would have to establish facilities in Australia. You know, and, er, I don't think such kind of development would increase or help Australia's security -- or security of the Asia-Pacific region.
CHRIS MASTERS: So would missile defence protect Australia too?
38'00: FRANK GAFFNEY JNR: Well, if the Australians don't want to be protected, I think we should make arrangements to ensure that they are not.
CHRIS MASTERS: So is this the main entrance, Lynne?
LYNNE: This is the West Tunnel entrance to the bunker. It would've been the home for about 1,000 to 1,100 people.
CHRIS MASTERS: Back in 1958, the United States began building this facility beneath an exclusive country club to the south of Washington. It is one tiny corner of a multi-million dollar civil defence program designed to protect Americans.
It was meant to house Congress and was, thankfully, proved useless. Critics of missile defence see a revival of a bunker mentality with the resuscitation of the careers of some old cold-warriors.
38'51: REAR ADMIRAL EUGENE CARROLL: It's no accident at all that the current administration is not only a reflection of the Reagan-Bush era, but actually almost an intensification of it. We are the superpower. We call the shots.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: They see themselves on a mission to break -- ...to tear down these illusions, to alert America to the dangers that the new century presents, and to get America ready for the next conflicts, whatever they may be.
CHRIS MASTERS: What do you say to the criticism that missile defence is about ideology, it's about a historic mission by people like yourself, who see deterrence as immoral?
39'39: RICHARD PERLE: Well, there's certainly some truth that many of us who have thought that exclusive reliance on deterrence was dangerous, and if justifiable in the Cold War, highly questionable after the Cold War. But that isn't the situation today, so we now have the option for a defence that we didn't have then. And, yes, there's a consistency among some of us that it is better to protect against nuclear attack than to avenge it.
CHRIS MASTERS: This generation, the generation to be protected from missile attack, has the world literally at its feet.
STUDENT: Just take a look at the past 30 years, what we've come up with, like what we're now growing up with, that our parents would never have thought of.
CHRIS MASTERS: How proud are you of America's achievements in space?
40'34: STUDENT: I think it's really cool. I know the Russians beat us to a lot of places but we beat 'em to the moon -- yeah.
CHRIS MASTERS: Even without missile defence, the United States is already light-years ahead in space and weapons technology.
RON HUISKEN: The US is now operating in a conventional military environment that pretty much no-one else on the planet can really comprehend.
41'01: JOSEPH CIRINCIONE: If you live in America, you believe in that technological solution. I mean, look at the wonders that the United States has helped create over the last 100 years. Americans have a deep, ingrained belief in our ability to do anything we set our minds to.
THEODORE POSTOL: But the downside is when you have people who really don't understand the limits of what science and technology can produce. And they treat it almost as if anything is doable, and they forget that there are principles of science and technology, and we see this overwhelmingly prevalent in this debate over missile defence.
41'41: STUDENT: As you know, China's becoming more and more powerful every year. They are getting -- $40-50 billion from us every year. I mean -- from trading, and all that, they are becoming more and more powerful. I don't think that we should break the treaty with Russia, but I think we do need some kind of missile defence to help intimidate them.
CHRIS MASTERS: The United States has a sovereign right to defend itself, and deep within the national psyche is a fear that, if an attack comes, it will be unexpected.
Supporters see that even if it's decades away, the time to prepare is now, and that busting the treaty is not a matter of if, but when.
42'31: RICHARD PERLE: It's very hard to believe that over the long term we will not see the emergence of other countries with ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction on top of those missiles. How long do we want to wait?
5 years? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? Can anyone say what the threat will look like, 25 years from now? If we don't start to build a defence today, we won't have one in the future.
CHRIS MASTERS: For the present, European allies in particular are having trouble understanding why the United States is so keen to overturn a treaty that has kept the peace, for a costly system that is not only unproven, but may make the world more dangerous. uld the United States go it alone, if that's the way it turns out?
43'27: RICHARD PERLE: Of course. We're certainly not going to subject the sensitive issue of our own defence to some kind of majority vote among other people who are not directly affected.
ALEXANDER DOWNER: Let's make no mistake about this -- if they can't get amendments to the ABM Treaty, they're not allowing that to stand in the way of the development of their missile defence technology and they will abrogate the treaty if they have to.
43'53: NICK BERRY: In effect, that unilateralism -- and that's really what it is -- goes against the whole process and system of globalisation which you find greater interaction, by the way that produces -- ...greater prosperity, greater cultural exchanges, greater technological exchanges, greater multilateralism. It goes against all that, and I think it's anti-historical.
SHA ZU KANG: I don't think that anybody can stop them, stop their missile defence program, but to be honest, we only can hope that they don't do it -- don't do it. But if they insist, I'm sure that others will take necessary countermeasures, you know? And they cannot stop others either.
44'45: STUDENT: Once we start a mission -- a missile defence, then every other country's going to want one and then all we need is that one person sitting there with a button to start a nice little World War III. I mean, that's the bad part about it. I mean, yeah, we're defending ourselves, but once someone presses that button, it's going to be just --
SECOND STUDENT: Yeah, because it's kind of pointless just having everyone just pointing guns at each other, and just waiting for someone to make the first move. Once that starts, the whole world's dead, so what's the point?
End: 46'41