DESPITE THE END of the Cold War, America has not fully escaped the threat of attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). On Jan. 23, 1996, a triumphant Pres. Clinton proclaimed, "For the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there are no Russian missiles pointed at America's children."

Although the fall of the Soviet Union may have reduced the risk of a ballistic missile exchange between the superpowers, it did not eliminate the threat from smaller, rogue states. Several governments, in an attempt to expand their military capabilities and international influence, have embarked on programs to strengthen their arsenals. Increasingly, those attempts include research and development of NBC weapons (nuclear, biological, and chemical) of mass destruction and ballistic missiles.

According to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, more than 25 nations have, or will soon have, ballistic missiles, and a comparable number possess or are developing weapons of mass destruction to complement these delivery systems. Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea--all noted sponsors of international terrorism--pose the greatest threat to the U.S.

The induction of those nations into the vaunted "ballistic missile club" could weaken America's faith in its long-held policy of deterrence. Deterrence--the theory that nations will be prevented from taking certain actions when faced with the threat of retaliation--assumes the adversary is rational. However, that assumption is not guaranteed, especially in light of the unpredictable and often irrational past behavior of several leaders of rogue regimes, particularly Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi and North Korea's Kim Jong Il. Given the reckless tendencies of these despots, American policymakers can no longer be completely assured that the threat of retaliation will preclude attack. In the face of these threats, America must deploy a limited national missile defense system to provide the homeland with added protection against ballistic missile attacks.

North Korea and Iran pose the most prominent threats to American security interests. Those two nations possess the technology and research infrastructure to support missile development programs that have the greatest potential to threaten the U.S. homeland.

Iran has extensive experience with ballistic missiles. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran fired nearly 120 Scuds at Iraq, including 77 missiles during a 52-day period known as the War of the Cities. The backbone of the Iranian ballistic missile force is the Scud B, obtained from Libya and North Korea. Israeli analysts estimate that Iran possesses 250-300 Scud Bs and 60 to 100 longer-range Scud Cs. With these missiles, Iran could strike targets in the other Gulf States, eastern Turkey, and several states of the former Soviet Union. Iran is also attempting to acquire newer, more advanced missiles, such as the No Dong and the Taepo Dong 1 and 2--the latest missile prototypes under development in North Korea.

Using North Korean technology as a foundation, Iran has initiated its own missile design and development program. On July 23, 1998, it tested the Shahab-3, a medium-range missile with an estimated range of 800 miles derived from the No Dong. This test--marking further progress toward Iran's apparent goal of possessing an intercontinental ballistic missile--has added to the Clinton Administration's already deep concern about Iran's strategic capabilities, especially its growing chemical and biological stockpiles. Experts claim Iran is seeking to develop a missile in the 3,500-mile range in the next few years, which would present a direct threat to Europe and American forces stationed there. If Iran develops an even longer-range missile, the U.S. could be in peril.

North Korea--the most technologically advanced of the rogue states and the most notorious proliferator of missile-related technology--poses the gravest threat to the security of the American homeland. After acquiring missile technology from the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, North Korea developed a sizable indigenous production capability of at least 100 Scud missiles annually. Assessments by the South Korean Defense Ministry claim that North Korea has several hundred Scuds in its inventory. All of those missiles are capable of hitting targets throughout the Korean peninsula--from the South's capital city of Seoul to military staging areas that would be used if hostilities broke out.

Western observers are also sounding alarms over North Korea's potential NBC weapons capabilities. Analysts believe that North Korea may have produced enough plutonium to produce one or two nuclear devices before acceding to cease efforts to build a nuclear bomb under the 1994 Agreed Framework. Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Defense maintains that North Korea has a sizable stockpile of nerve, blister, choking, and blood agents, along with crude biological weapons--all of which could be delivered by ballistic missiles.

Most observers were disturbed by North Korea's decision to revive its missile test program. On Aug. 31, 1998, North Korea conducted its first missile test since 1993 by launching a multi-stage Taepo Dong 1 missile over Japan and into the Pacific Ocean. The missile launch, which the State Department later confirmed to be a failed attempt to orbit a satellite, represented a tremendous technological advance. Henry Sokolski, a former proliferation official with the Pentagon during the Bush Administration, observed, "This is a totally new threat. It looks like [the North Koreans] leap-frogged from a two-stage missile to a three-stage missile. What is alarming is that they are working on a three-stage missile at all."

Most worrisome for American security interests was the range of the missile. Intelligence agencies tracked debris from the launch nearly 4,000 miles into the Pacific Ocean. Rep. Curt Weldon (R.-Pa.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Military Research and Development of the House Committee on National Security, interpreted the test as an indication that North Korea may have the capability to hit Alaska and Hawaii. Lt. Gen. Lester Lyles, head of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, told Congress that North Korea may be able to threaten the continental U.S. with ICBMs by early 2000. The increased range of the Taepo Dong 1 certainly makes American troops stationed in Japan vulnerable to attack. In the near future, the U.S. could become vulnerable.

While several rogue states are well on the road to acquiring NBC weapons and delivery technology, there is increasing concern that America's intelligence services--the nation's primary means of detecting emerging threats--may not be capable of providing early warning of new security dangers arising from such developments. More disturbing is the possibility that the products of the intelligence-gathering process, passed on to intelligence consumers and policymakers in the form of National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs), may be politicized to suit the Clinton Administration's interests.

Produced by the National Intelligence Council, NIEs are the chief way intelligence information is disseminated from intelligence services to the appropriate government officials. The Council reviews the reports of the intelligence community--which includes the Central Intelligence Agency, several government departments and agencies, and outside organizations such as universities--and drafts them into a formal estimate. The Foreign Intelligence Board, composed of the heads of the various intelligence agencies, meets and reviews the document before it is released to the president and other top policymakers. In theory, that process should produce unbiased and accurate intelligence reports. However, certain troubling developments indicate that NIEs may be vulnerable to political influence.

In early 1995, Lt. Gen. Malcolm O'Neill, then head of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, requested an assessment of the ballistic missile threat to the U.S. The CIA responded with NIE 95-19, Emerging Threats to North America During the Next 15 Years, a document that claimed to give an accurate picture of the threat facing the U.S. Among its key findings were the following:

* No country will develop or otherwise acquire a ballistic missile in the next 15 years that could threaten the contiguous 48 states.

* North Korea is unlikely to obtain the technological capability in order to be able to develop a longer-range operational ICBM.

* American intelligence agencies are likely to detect an indigenous long-range ballistic missile program many years before deployment.

Upon the NIE's release, however, those findings were met with charges that politics had been injected into the intelligence process. The circumstances surrounding the document's release would seem to lend at least some support to the charges. The completed NIE was not only delivered nearly seven months overdue, but was released to Senators Carl Levin (D.-Mich.) and Dale Bumpers (D.-Ark.),--not to O'Neill, the estimate's original customer.

The estimate was released to Congress by the CIA's congressional Affairs Office during debate on the National Defense Authorization bill, which contained funding for ballistic missile defense research. The release of the document, clearly optimistic about the ballistic missile threat to the U.S., had obvious political advantages for the Clinton Administration. The estimate helped it stand solidly by its "3+3" deployment plan for a national missile defense system, instead of supporting a more ambitious program sponsored by Congressional Republicans.

Cautionary reports

The charges of political manipulation and erroneous conclusions prompted Rep. Floyd Spence (R.-S.C.), chairman of the House Committee on National Security, to ask the General Accounting Office to conduct its own evaluation of the estimate. The GAO found several critical flaws in NIE 95-19, among them a failure to state its fundamental assumptions explicitly. The GAO identified these beliefs as the following:

* A flight test program lasting about five years is essential to the development of an ICBM.

* No country with ICBMs will sell them to other countries.

* The Missile Technology Control Regime will continue to limit international transfers of missiles, components, and related technology significantly.

Disregarding the question of the NIE's political intentions, merely reviewing these linchpin assumptions reveals several significant deficiencies that raise serious doubts about the NIE's key conclusions.

Among the NIE's most glaring shortcomings is the assumption that it will take five years after an initial flight test for a nation to develop an ICBM. In the past, standard Soviet missile development programs did require five years of flight testing. However, this estimate assumes that every nation wants to develop a reasonably accurate and reliable missile. Since the end of the Cold War, nations that are likely to acquire ballistic missiles probably want them for use as weapons of terror, rather than to hit specific targets. As Gen. Howell M. Estes III, head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, has said, "We're finding that countries who are developing these [ballistic missile] systems today are not doing it the way [the superpowers] did. They're not going for accuracy. They're going for having the capability--which, in fact, is an indication of military might and national power." Because the reliability, payload, and accuracy requirements of the nations aspiring to ballistic missile capabilities are not as stringent as in the past, a five-year estimate is excessively sanguine.

Second, the assumption of a five-year warning time appears to have been made in ignorance of the timetables for other early ICBM development efforts. The first Soviet ICBM--with capabilities comparable to what rogue states seek today--became operational just 27 months after its first flight test. Later ICBMs generally required less than two years of flight testing before deployment--and that was more than 40 years ago. Since then, missile technologies have become increasingly available in the global marketplace. As former Reagan Administration science advisor William R. Graham told Congress in 1997, most of the expertise needed to build a missile is taught in graduate schools, increasing the likelihood of proliferation.

The estimate also errs in assuming that no nation with ICBMs will sell them, which runs counter to empirical evidence. China peddled intermediate-range ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia in 1988 (largely without the CIA's knowledge) and to Pakistan five years later. More alarming, North Korea has been implicated in missile transfer deals with other rogue states--most notably Syria and Iran. Sales of space launch vehicles from the former Soviet Union may also contribute to the proliferation of missile technology. In September, 1995, the Clinton Administration revised the 1991 START treaty to allow Russia and Ukraine to sell their most advanced ICBMs as space launch vehicles, which can be easily converted back to offensive ballistic missiles. Given the serious lack of safeguards governing the sale of those launch vehicles, there are few protections that would prevent North Korea, Iran, or Syria from purchasing stripped-down ICBMs.

In the wake of the controversy over the 1995 NIE, Congress convened another independent review board to assess the ballistic missile threat facing the U.S. The Rumsfeld Commission provided the most comprehensive, accurate, and apolitical review of the current threats to the nation. The Commission's report also largely corrected the faults of NIE 95-19. In the unclassified version released by the Commission, the panel concluded that:

* North Korea and Iran would be able to inflict major destruction on the U.S. within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability, the U.S. might not be aware that such a decision had been made until it was too late.

* The threat to the U.S. posed by these emerging capabilities is broader, more mature, and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in the estimates and reports by the intelligence community.

* The intelligence community's ability to provide timely and accurate estimates of ballistic missile threats to the U.S. is eroding.

* The warning times the U.S. can expect of new, threatening ballistic missile deployments are being reduced. Under some plausible scenarios--including re-basing or transfer of operational missiles, sea- and air- launched options, shortened developmental programs that might include testing in a third country, or some combination of these--the U.S. might well have little or no warning before operational deployment.

What makes those findings dramatic is that they differ sharply from the conclusions of the Administration's NIE. Despite the inclusions of committee members such as Richard Garwin, Barry Blechman, and Gen. Lee Butler--all appointees expected to oppose an incisive critique of the Administration's earlier findings--the panel perceived a more severe near-term threat to the U.S., including Alaska and Hawaii.

The warnings posed by the Rumsfeld Commission failed to alter the views of several key Administration officials, among them Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In response to the report, he stated that "[The Joint Chiefs of Staff] remain confident that the intelligence community can provide the necessary warning of the indigenous development and deployment by a rogue state of an ICBM missile threat to the United States." According to Shelton, some analysis argue that "rogue nations could acquire an ICBM capability, and that the intelligence community may not detect it. We view this as an unlikely development."

However, Shelton's faith in the U.S.'s intelligence apparatus seemed to be overstated, and events since the release of his statement further challenged his optimistic view of American intelligence capabilities. A week after the General's comments, North Korea demonstrated a significant advance in its ballistic technology by testing a three-stage space launch vehicle. That development caught the American intelligence community largely off guard. According to Robert D. Walpole, the CIA's senior intelligence officer for strategic programs, "Although the launch of the Taepo Dong as a missile was expected for some time, its use as a space launch vehicle with a third stage was not. The existence of the third stage concerns us. We had not anticipated it." If the CIA and other intelligence agencies--which repeatedly acknowledge that North Korea's ballistic missile program is the primary missile threat facing the U.S.--failed to track such a significant advance, how can the Joint Chiefs reasonably guarantee that other clandestine developments will be detected?

Only recently has the Administration grudgingly begun to acknowledge the severity of the threat and the limited ability of the intelligence community to detect changes in it. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen called the Rumsfeld Commission's report "a sobering analysis of the nature of the threat and the limitations of our ability to predict how rapidly it will change." Nevertheless, he stopped short of endorsing the Rumsfeld report or its major conclusions.

The Clinton Administration has not wholly come to grips with the threat facing the nation. Even its pledge in March, 1999, not to block legislation supporting missile defense most likely stemmed from political, and not security, realizations. In light of the Chinese nuclear espionage scandal and the desire to avoid a scathing debate on national security in the 2000 election, the Administration found its position on missile defense untenable. Rather than acceding on political grounds, a more prudent course would be for the Administration to recognize the threat, recant its support for NIE 95-19, and formally endorse the findings of the Rumsfeld Commission.

Policy options

Little has been done so far to protect American citizens from an attack by ballistic missiles. Far from standing still, various rogue regimes around the world have been steadily advancing their efforts to obtain the technical know-how and components to threaten their neighbors and, ultimately, the U.S.

The threat of blackmail by a rogue state with ICBMs or an unauthorized or accidental launch by either Russia or China could be greatly ameliorated by the deployment of a limited missile defense system. A system capable of intercepting up to 20 warheads would be a sufficient defense against rogue regimes, which most likely would not possess large numbers of missiles. A limited system could also defend against a small accidental or unauthorized launch by a major power.

Deploying a limited system would have the advantage of maintaining the deterrent balance between the U.S. and Russia that has been in place since the early decades of the Cold War. Although a limited system could conceivably destroy a few incoming warheads, it would not intercept enough to threaten either country's strategic deterrent--that is, the ability to annihilate the other power. Thus, a limited U.S. missile defense would probably not cause Russia to increase dramatically the number of its strategic warheads to overcome the defenses.

Despite the need for a national missile defense system, the development and deployment of such a system should proceed at a measured pace. A "third way" of procuring a missile defense system is possible. Rather than throw money at the program, as some conservatives to whom missile defense is a religion would, or completely avoid the missile defense issue, as some liberals enamored with arms control for its own sake would, the best policy is to assess honestly the nature and extent of emerging threats and develop a national missile defense system at a pace that the technology can support and that the test results will bear out. No matter what the threat is, rushing to develop a system that fails to work is not an attractive remedy.

In the early 21st century, the almost certain prospect that nations North Korea will possess long-range ballistic missiles--most likely tipped with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads--should be among America's foremost security concerns. The deployment of a limited ballistic missile defense system is critical to maintaining the security of the U.S. homeland.

Timothy M. Beard is a former researcher at the Cato Institute, Washington, D.C. Ivan Eland is Cato's director of defense policy studies.