On Monday, Joe Biden, the chairman of the American Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, gave Washington journalists a disconcertingly prescient speech. 'Our real security needs,' he said, 'are much more earthbound and far less costly than National Missile Defence_ the Joint Chiefs say a strategic nuclear attack is less likely than regional conflicts, or major theatre wars, or terrorist attacks at home and abroad. We will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship or the belly of a plane or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack.' The next day, mid-twentieth-century jet flight and seventh-century ecstatic martyrdom combined to produce mass murder. Biden didn't exactly predict the method which would devastate the Pentagon and downtown New York. But he was far closer to the mark than the extravagantly funded secret policemen in the intelligence services and bluff analysers of clear-and-present danger in the West's terrorism and foreign policy institutes.  'Blowback' is the jargon word for his well-founded fears. 'We have nothing, you have everything,' the hijackers said in effect to the financial and military &eacute;lites of the world's hyperpower. 'We can still take your technology and blow it back in your faces.' Blowback weapons must necessarily be relatively low-tech and easy to obtain and deploy: sarin or VX nerve gas released in a subway; an old Soviet nuclear weapon smuggled over the border in a lorry and exploded in the capital; fuel sprayed into the skies and ignited to create an 'air bomb'. Blowback works best when, as last week, there's no claim of responsibility or obvious target for reprisal.  One might have thought that invokers of national security would be alert to the menace. But just as those who are hardest on criminals are softest on crime, so the loudest patriots make the most treacherous garrison. For years, rational debate on the proliferation of weaponry has been drowned by the howls of the American Right barking up the wrong tree. The 'threat' it chose to magnify was the most unlikely imaginable. National Missile Defence, or the 'son of Star Wars' programme, envisages that starving Iraq or North Korea or Afghanistan would spend billions of dollars building intercontinental ballistic missile systems. These would be sitting targets long before they could be armed with warheads. Despite these handicaps, Star Wars' defenders insisted, 'rogue states' or terrorist groups would carry on regardless and risk annihilating nuclear retaliation by launching missiles from identifiable bases against America.  Billions of dollars have been spent by the Clinton and Bush administrations to protect the United States against this fantastical nightmare. Star Wars probably won't work, but the fear that America will be able to dispense with the mutually assured destruction of deterrence theory, and fire nuclear weapons   from behind the safety of an anti-ballistic shield, will push Russia, China, India, Pakistan and, possibly, Japan into a grotesque and unnecessary arms race.  If it is to have Star Wars, America must make the world a more dangerous place by tearing up the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty. The unilateral insistence that the laws which apply to others do not apply to the United States incites the anti-Americanism righteous Americans find incomprehensible. The dizzying gulf between Washington and the rest of the planet was perfectly exemplified by Douglas J. Feith, an anti-Soviet hawk who Bush dug out of post-Cold War obscurity and plonked into the highest echelons of the Pentagon.  On Tuesday, he was in Moscow. He told the Russians there could be no compromise on Star Wars. His hosts took him to a press conference where he learned that the World Trade Centre and his very own offices in the Pentagon had been blown to pieces. Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian Prime Minister, said that all America's arguments for missile defence had been 'swept aside' by the slaughter. Journalists followed up by asking if Feith would reconsider Star Wars, given that it wouldn't have prevented one plane being hijacked or saved a life. 'I don't think it's fair to say that the system that is designed for a specific purpose is flawed because it doesn't accomplish something that it is not designed to do,' Feith sniffed. 'I guess I have difficulty with the question.'  He found it easier to contemplate the murder of his fellow citizens and the destruction of the Pentagon he served than to doubt the theology of Star Wars. He just didn't get it. But Britain didn't either.  After George W. Bush plucked up the courage to return to Washington, he made an appeal for multilateral unity. In less terrible circumstances, it would have been as risible as Tony Blair's loyal reply that he would stand 'shoulder to shoulder' with the President. The question both begged was what was the world meant to unite around? Blair told the Commons on Friday that common purpose could be found in abhorrence of crimes against humanity. 'These attacks were not just attacks upon people and buildings, nor even merely on the USA. These were attacks on the basic democratic values in which we all believe so passionately and on the civilised world.'  In 1998 the civilised world, as represented by 140 governments, created the International Criminal Court to judge the grossest violators of life and liberty. Bill Clinton gave the court America's endorsement in the dying hours of his presidency. Bush is determined that America will not meet global standards. He has asked the lawyers, who fought so well for him in Florida, to discover if there is a way of 'unsigning' the treaty. Bush's Republican allies in Congress want to authorise the US military to free American soldiers remanded in custody by the court. The only explanation for American opposition to international law was that her generals could see themselves committing a few war crimes, as they may well do in the coming days.  After Blair had sat down, Jack Straw sensibly added: 'We also need to focus our attention on where the next threat to our collective security will come from. Efforts to prevent the proliferation of chemical, biological and other weapons must be redoubled.' In July, Bush wrecked a decade of negotiations on the enforcement of the global prohibition of biological weapons. The protocol would have given independent inspectors access to laboratories in the signatory countries. The pharmaceutical conglomerates, who bankrolled Bush's campaign as enthusiastically as the manu facturers of Star Wars, claimed industrial and military espionage would follow.  Without independent verification, the ban on biological warfare is so much waste paper. Any laboratory which wants to manufacture the ideal blowback weapons - they're cheap and can be 'smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack,' as Biden said - has little to worry about. People who ought to know in the defence bureaucracy tell me that the rogue laboratories may be American. The Star Wars fantasy is accompanied by the dream of building a biological weapon programmed to target the DNA of Saddam Hussein, for example, or Osama bin Laden, if anyone knows where he is.  Neither the Prime Minister nor Foreign Secretary had the bad taste to ask if unity is meant to be found in unconditional support for the most criminal members of the Israeli Right? Or the judicial execution of children? Should we agree, perhaps, to come together in opposition to the Kyoto protocol on global warming? Or the proposed agreement to regulate the trade in small arms? Or to the comprehensive ban on the testing of nuclear weapons? On all these matters, a unilateral America is on its own or thereabouts, although with so much anti-Islamic junk about the 'clash of civilisations' in the air at the moment, Bush can deflect accusations of racism by pointing out that Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are standing 'shoulder to shoulder' with him on a sovereign state's inalienable right to kill kiddies.  I'm sure he is grateful for their backing. Nevertheless, it seems a little late in the day to be asking the rest of the world for multilateral support.  To be fair, Tony Blair may have grasped the contradictions and be using the kamikaze attacks to persuade Bush that he must co-operate with others. Yet whatever gentle hints he's dropping in private, the Prime Minister has already failed the big test. If there is to be concerted action against terrorism in the Middle East and Central Asia it will require the support of Russia and China. Both have been infuriated by Star Wars.  Blair might have stopped the nonsense at the start by refusing to allow the American bases at Fylingdales and Menwith Hill to be used as forward stations to track missiles. I've written before that Star Wars won't defend Britain and Blair was obliging a foreign power by turning his country into an unprotected target. I have to confess I wasn't at all sure how simple it would be for America's enemies to attack Yorkshire. Last week got rid of that doubt.  The Prime Minister chose to put indulging Bush before the true interests of Britain and America. He has proved, yet again, that sycophants are the worst of friends.