| There are two central questions that the U.S., NATO, or the Soviets should ask before they decide to deploy a ballistic missile defense (BMD). (a) Is the BMD stabilizing or de-stabilizing? That is, does it increase or reduce the incentive for each country to start a war? (b) Will the BMD be cost-effective?;The first half of this dissertation reviews the literature on stability and then develops an original model of the effect of defenses against tactical ballistic missiles on the likelihood of war in central Europe. This model shows that, theoretically, a European BMD would be stabilizing because it substitutes for dispersing the defender's general purpose forces, which are highly concentrated on a few bases.;However, this does not mean that such a system can be built cost-effectively. The second half of the dissertation develops a model for calculating the number of BMD interceptors needed to save a specified portion of a target set. The result is that even to accomplish the limited goal of protecting half of NATO's air defenses from a conventional ballistic missile attack would require that NATO buy 2 to 5 times as many BMD interceptors as the number of re-entry vehicles the Soviets use in the attack. No BMD system is likely to be cheap enough to make this cost effective for NATO. |
