This led to estimates that North Korea could now have a minimal capability to inaccurately deliver a non-nuclear warhead to Alaska or Hawaii and could develop a similar limited capability against the continental United States between 2000 and 2005. These estimates have been restated and significantly modified by senior administration officials who proclaim that a North Korean missile threat to the United States exists today. If these misleading statements are allowed to stand, the Intelligence Community will be credited, however unfairly, at home and abroad, as becoming the instrument for rationalizing a politically driven decision to deploy a NMD, despite overwhelming arguments to the contrary. Few, if any, observers abroad agree with the U.S. assessment of the immediacy or significance of the alleged North Korean missile threat. Russian officials look at the North Korean threat as a clumsy excuse for a small deployment that would become a very slippery slope, eventually leading to a base for a robust defense directed at Russia.
China dismisses the North Korean threat as a transparent ruse to deploy a system directed at China.
Our NATO allies are confused and troubled by a U.S. program that appears unnecessary and provocative. The manner in which intelligence estimates have been modified and exploited by senior administration officials is particularly disturbing. In defining the earliest date of the threat, the secretary of defense and others changed the intelligence estimates wording from could to will. When this proved inadequate to inspire sufficient urgency, will became is, which, in turn, has become already achieved. This hyperbole in high places may make for effective rhetoric, but to those who do not have access to the heavily caveated estimate, it further demeans the credibility of U.S. intelligence.