Protecting America in the New Missile Age – Chapter Four: The Cost of Missile Defense

Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Ph.D.

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in an 18-part series of excerpts from Protecting America in the new Missile Age – A Reader. Published by The Heritage Foundation with a number of prominent contributors, its purpose is to inform and educate all Americans about the security challenges we face in an ever-changing world.

Missile defense represents a relatively small part of the total U.S. defense budget: just over $8 billion out of a total 2008 defense budget of $700 billion. This is less than one-70th of national defense spending, and defense spending is only about 4%of gross domestic product. By reasonable standards, missile defense is a modest national security investment that pales in comparison to the consequences of a ballistic missile attack against even one U.S. city. Instead of the few thousand fatalities resulting from the 9/11 attack, we could lose hundreds of thousands and suffer vastly greater physical destruction from the detonation of a single warhead comparable to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. One need only read the obituaries published by the New York Times in the weeks following 9/11. They make somber reading for anyone in doubt of the human tragedy caused by such an attack.

Nevertheless, we are entitled to ask what we are receiving for our investment in missile defense. As other contributors to this reader have pointed out, the United States has had a missile defense research program for several decades. President Ronald Reagan, in his seminal address on March 23, 1983, challenged the scientific and technological community to produce missile defense concepts to defend against the growing Soviet missile threat. ....