The Moral Necessity of Missile Defense Reprinted from Navigator , Volume 4, Number 3, March 2001 . At the June 1967 Glassboro Summit, President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara implored Soviet premier Alexsei N. Kosygin to end work on the Soviet missile defense system or risk a renewed arms race.
Offense is immoral.
Thirty-four years later, the United States is beginning to discover that the Soviet premier may have been on to something. The missile threat to America is real. A 1998 bipartisan commission chaired by Donald Rumsfeld, now Secretary of Defense, reported a much bleaker outlook for missile proliferation than a similar 1995 National Intelligence Estimate. The response would seem obvious. Countries have not always chosen to render themselves defenseless.