The Continuing Debate on National Missile Defenses

Over the past several years, the Clinton administration has developed a national missile defense (NMD) system, the first phase of which could be operational sometime in the second half of this decade. President Clinton was scheduled to decide this fall whether to begin deployment of the system next spring; on 1 September he announced that he did not have “enough confidence in the technology, and the operational effectiveness of the entire NMD system, to move forward to deployment,” and would leave that decision to his successor. Whether or not to go forward with deployment of this system—or any other one, perhaps based on different technologies—will be a central policy concern for the next administration.