Norman K. Swazo
Copyright remains w/
Professor Norman K. Swazo
Department of Philosophy & Humanities
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Fairbanks, AK 99775-5740Tel: 907-474-7343; FAX: 907-474-5817
Email: ffnks@uaf.edu
For "Just Results":
Questioning NMD Research in Alaska
With the election of the Bush Administration there is added commitment to research and development of a national missile defense system (NMD). The Bush proposal is quite in contrast to the limited, two-site missile defense system proposed by the Clinton Administration. It is expected that some of this NMD R&D will occur partly with the services of science and engineering faculties at US research universities. Given that initial planning for NMD includes selection of prospective sites for deployment of the system, and given that possible sites in Alaska are under consideration, it is not surprising that NMD R&D projects are to be carried out in Alaska. The state's research institution - the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) - specifically UAF's well-reputed Geophysical Institute (GI), is ably positioned to participate in such R&D. One of the research units of the GI is the Poker Flat Research Range (PFRR), described as "the largest land-based research rocket range in the world and the only high-latitude range in the United States", established for "auroral and middle-to-upper atmospheric research". It can be argued that any institution of higher education that commits its faculty to participation in classified research linked to NMD has to be concerned with whether such research yields "just results". Here I will engage this issue with reference to what is for some in Alaska a seemingly innocuous proposal, dubbed the "Arctic Missile Signature Program" (AMSP).
Proponents of NMD argue that protection of the entirety of the US, including Alaska and Hawaii, requires deployment of defenses in Alaska. Post-Cold War assessments of the threat of a missile attack upon the US are concerned about surprise, covert delivery of a nuclear (or biological or chemical) payload from "rogue nations" such as North Korea or Russia's loss of control over elements of the former USSR nuclear arsenal to accidental or terrorist launch against US targets, civilian or military. Air Force Lieutenant General Lester L. Lyles, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, stated in February 1999 that "the NMD system is intended to use a ground-based interceptor launched from a site from within the United States (North Dakota or Alaska) to strike reentry vehicles above the atmosphere". A security assurance against a threat from the Russian landmass in particular requires a capacity to evaluate missile signatures under "arctic" conditions of launch and correlative defense deployments.
The expectation that a research university such as UAF participate in missile signature research raises the unavoidable question of how scientists and engineers engaged in any such project are properly to construe their scientific responsibility and research integrity. In the case of NMD the issue is complex, because this category of classified research is all too likely to be undertaken by a science and engineering faculty who do not maintain the requisite critical distance. Their assessment of the question will reference a mission to solve applied geophysical problems and to develop related technologies. But, more often than not, the assessment issues from a more or less informal cost-benefit analysis that centers on the more immediate and tangible benefits associated with federal funding for NMD research. In the case of AMSP the tangible benefits may include otherwise unavailable opportunities in space physics research, access to high-tech equipment, enhanced communications bandwidths for radar facilities, higher use of otherwise underutilized infrastructure such as PFRR, etc., all of this manifest in a hefty multi-million dollar contract. These benefits or "values" are especially attractive to a research institute having a recurrent budget that is about 90% external funding, and especially important for a research faculty having significant grant writing expectations as part of their workload and as a criterion in tenure/promotion peer review. Taken by themselves in the context of the institutional mission and a normal research agenda, these benefits provide good reason to consider acceptance of a Department of Defense contract for classified research. However, the policy decision taken by a research university cannot rest here, given that a comparative value assessment is in order. Consider that the wider context of the current public policy debate on NMD that is engaged by scholars in international ethics and international law can be - and often is - readily dismissed as irrelevant to the narrower cost-benefit approach taken by geophysical research scientists and their administrators. Here I wish to argue that any cost-benefit analysis associated with AMSP surrenders significant moral and legal obligations for which research scientists are accountable if such analysis excludes the at-large policy discussions emanating from the domain of international ethics and international law.
Policy analysis has rightly been said to be "a normative pursuit" insofar as analysis combines attention to facts and values. Policy analysts may not, however, routinely consider the normative presuppositions of their contributions to political decision-making. In fact, policy analysts are methodologically committed to largely quantitative value assessments, i.e., to cost-benefit analyses that do not explicitly or routinely engage questions of "justice" even though such analyses in practice represent an implicit commitment to consequentialist ethics - that is, an approach seeking to optimize resource utilization relative to designated benefits and costs that are important to some set of interested parties. It is significant, therefore, to have the recent report that "Policy analysts are increasingly inclined to believe that cost-benefit analysis, at least as developed so far, does not provide a method to incorporate a philosophically defensible concept of justice into aggregate decision contexts".
Clearly, NMD is an issue of considerable public and professional debate, with arguments for or against NMD taking into account both a set of facts and a set of value assumptions. At issue in present context is whether AMSP yields "just results", i.e., results (matters of fact) that are defensible when evaluated by the relevant standards of justice (value commitments). The claim here is that in the case in which AMSP does not promise or deliver just results, AMSP is a morally objectionable undertaking. Standards of justice here necessarily include treaty law as well as customary international law, inasmuch as these conventions are intended to preserve the peace, add to stability in the international legal order, and prevent instability in arms control. Consistent with the well-known recommendation in global policy analysis to "think globally" while "acting locally", even a project such as AMSP stands to be evaluated as a local action having global implications within some pertinent time frame. "Local" values cannot but be superseded by "global" values in a case in which the "national-state" interest is not comprehensively coordinate with the human and planetary interest represented by the international legal order. This latter claim is especially critical given that Alaskan state legislators adopted a resolution in May 1997 requiring the U.S. President to assure Alaska of protection against foreseeable foreign aggression, "including deployment of a ballistic missile defense system to protect Alaska". The state legislature resolved further "that Alaska's safety and security take priority over any international treaty or obligation". (Alaska is the only state in the nation to have adopted such a resolution.)
AMSP as a local action certainly has its tangible benefits as identified by the geophysics research community (noted above), benefits that are clearly relevant given that they are perceived to be consistent with the UAF/GI mission and thus instrumental to achieving expressed institutional goals. There are those in this community of scientists, moreover, who will argue that (premise 1) research contributing to the defense of the nation is an honorable pursuit, that (premise 2) AMSP contributes to the defense of the nation, and that (conclusion) therefore participation in the classified research of AMSP is an honorable pursuit. The claim that AMSP contributes to the defense of the nation depends on the veracity of the claim that NMD contributes to the defense of the nation. Thus, AMSP has extrinsic value even as NMD has extrinsic value relative to defense of the nation, itself ostensibly an intrinsic value (for now to be granted, given the logic of statecraft and its principle of sovereignty, but clearly subject to challenge from arguments that privilege the human planetary interest without surrendering to the geopolitical frame of value identification).
Let us consider in the first place, then, that an argument in favor of NMD will find a research project such as AMSP justifiable on those grounds. But the prior question is precisely whether the grounding argument is itself cogent. Said otherwise, only if NMD is justified is AMSP justified (excepting here the case in which such classified research is in fact directed at monitoring and verification activities already permitted by extant treaties). Brown and Klintworth observe that "No-one, least of all the US itself, disputes that a US NMD deployment would violate the ABM Treaty as it stands". As it stands, Article I of the ABM Treaty prohibits an ABM defense that encompasses the entire national territory, Article III limiting ABM system deployment to the national capital. In other words, given the absence of a negotiated amendment to the ABM Treaty by the US and Russia and successor states of the former USSR - which is the current state of affairs - the legality of AMSP research on behalf of the US government (Department of Defense) is itself questionable insofar as this project represents a component of NMD research preliminary to the political decision to deploy. Scientists who undertake AMSP research are compelled, therefore, to evaluate their "scientific" activity relative to the probable consequences (costs) that would ensue from the US's violation of or unilateral withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. To the extent they do not, to that extent is their scientific integrity compromised.
It is important that research scientists bear in mind that notwithstanding the collapse of the former USSR, the ABM Treaty remains binding upon the US. In September 1997, the United States, the Republic of Belarus, the Republic of Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation and Ukraine signed a memorandum of understanding in which (Article I) they constituted themselves "the Parties to the [ABM] Treaty" and (Article II) clarified as a matter of lawful agreement that "The USSR Successor States shall assume the rights and obligations of the former USSR under the Treaty and its associated documents". This legal commitment is sustained even in the face of legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in March1999 (S.257, Cochran-Inouye National Missile Defense Act of 1999; HR 4), which declared it US policy to deploy NMD.
The point here is that adherence to the ABM Treaty is said to have extrinsic value even as NMD is said to have extrinsic value relative to the intrinsic value of defense of the nation. But here we have conflicting extrinsic values, and this conflict calls for a comparative assessment of these values if a policy decision is to be morally defensible. As Ellis advises, "If two extrinsic values have as their only purpose to promote the same intrinsic value, yet conflict with each other, then the conflict between them can be resolved by determining which one will most effectively promote the intrinsic value at stake". Here the discussion shifts to a dispute about facts, i.e., whether (1) full and unambiguous compliance with the ABM Treaty or (2) deployment of NMD "most effectively" achieves national security.
The concept of scientific responsibility surely takes into account an estimate of consequences that follow from AMSP research, but the concept also takes into account those relevant duties the performance of which research scientists are to undertake and for which performance they are to be held accountable. In the present case, duty is specified in its performance by applicable international law. This law, though positive, nevertheless presupposes a commitment to an international morality, to the creation of a world order and constituted world peace in which correlative rights and duties are essential to sustained moral community. Scientists participating in AMSP engage in research not merely qua scientists but qua civil servants. In becoming civil servants scientists do not surrender their moral autonomy; on the contrary, the combination of scientific knowledge and civil service underscores more emphatically their obligation to exercise critical citizenship. As critical citizens they are obligated to ask themselves: "Are there instances in which my duty (and thus someone else's right) conflicts with what I want?" It is important to note here that by referring to what is wanted we are distinguishing between what Ellis calls "necessary" and "less necessary" benefits, such that in present case it is dubious that the tangible benefits from AMSP identified by the UAF/GI research community indeed are necessary benefits. International law represented by the ABM Treaty and START II specifies those rights to national security that citizens of the signatory states have thereby, but also the duties that citizens qua civil servants have imposed upon them thereby. Citizens qua civil servants - the research scientists who act qua servants of the state - no less than "the government" have the duty of facilitating rather than obstructing or withdrawing from compliance with legal agreements such as the ABM Treaty and START II. This imperative is set aside only if there is "good reason" not to remain compliant with extant treaties; and any proffered good reason cannot be of "merely prudential or self-interested value" if it is to be genuinely of moral value.
Let us consider, second, that even if it should turn out that diplomatic discussions between the US and the Successor States to the former USSR lead to mutual agreement not to amend the ABM Treaty to permit deployment of NMD, R&D today entails a significant investment of resources that is scandalous in the face of any assessment of opportunity costs. Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., warns of pressing too far or too soon given that "There is a long history of missile defense systems that have simply failed or have not provided the security we sought". "[W]hen we led the world in deploying land-based ballistic missiles with multiple re-entry vehicles", says Biden, "we set off a costly arms race that we later concluded was a threat to crisis stability. A generation later, we are still trying to correct that mistake by bringing into force the START II treaty that bans those missiles. Ironically, if we should press ahead imprudently with a ballistic missile defense, the START process may be one of the first casualties." It has been noted that the Gulf War situation "led to the intensified pursuit by all three U.S. military services of a half-dozen overlapping tactical and theater missile defense programs at an estimated future procurement cost of more than $50 billion. Concurrently, increased congressional pressure developed for a firm commitment to deployment by 2003 of a limited national ballistic missile defense designated to permit early expansion to a layered defense at a cost estimated by the Congressional Budget Office of between $31 billion and $60 billion by the year 2010, independent of operations and maintenance costs". With US expenditures on theater and national missile defense exceeding $120 billion, "without fielding a single effective system", the opportunity costs are excessive even for someone taking a consequentialist approach to the policy question. Surely scientific responsibility at this point requires that even geophysical scientists consider some estimate of the consequences of such a prospective major casualty represented by nullification of the ABM Treaty. A US unilateral withdrawal from the provisions of the ABM Treaty, including here NMD R&D that Russia and Successor States already perceive to be inconsistent with the treaty, threatens Russia's abrogation of START II. The event in which START II is abrogated would be an event entailing an arms race between the US and Russia, a consequence that both the ABM Treaty and START II have until now helped to halt.
In the "Second Agreed Statement" signed in September 1997, the US committed itself to preserving the ABM Treaty, to preventing its circumvention, and to enhancing its viability. The US agreed further not only not to deploy an ABM system that would pose "a realistic threat to the strategic nuclear force of another Party"; the US agreed also not to engage in any testing that would "give such systems that capability". Proposals for NMD, including testing that is part of NMD R&D, are clearly inconsistent with the 1997 agreement and therefore unlawful when undertaken. If AMSP constitutes testing that is part of NMD R&D, then AMSP is clearly inconsistent with the 1997 agreement and therefore unlawful. In fact, AMSP constitutes such testing. AMSP is, therefore, unlawful under the terms of the 1997 agreement. AMSP is all the more inconsistent with the provisions of the ABM Treaty if the testing at the Poker Flat Research Range is intended to make this a test range for ABM launches with "deployment of radars of a type tested in an ABM mode". The treaty and the 1978 Agreed Statement recognize only two test ranges for the US - "in the vicinity of White Sands, New Mexico, and on Kwajalein Atoll".
Finally, insofar as at issue here is scientific responsibility and research integrity, it is incumbent upon research scientists at UAF/GI who would commit themselves to participation in AMSP to consider the positions on NMD taken by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). UCS "strongly opposes US deployment of a national missile defense (NMD) system because the security costs incurred by deploying such a defense would far outweigh its potential security benefits". Yet, UCS is fully cognizant of the international legal issues as well as the technical-scientific assessments of NMD effectiveness. UCS's evaluation accounts for the fact that "Russia has made it clear…that it is opposed to modifying the [ABM] treaty and that its compliance with the existing START arms-reduction treaties is contingent on continued US compliance with the ABM Treaty". Authorities associated with UCS and the MIT Security Studies Program, such as Dr. Andrew Sessler ("former director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and past president of the American Physical Society"), are unequivocal not only that NMD "won't do the job"; they conclude that "the current NMD testing program is not capable of assessing the system's effectiveness against a realistic attack". In like manner, John Pike, director of the Space Policy Project of the Federation of American Scientists, has remarked that "we continue to be in a condition of mutual assured destruction, under which, for better or worse, the original logic of the ABM Treaty continues to hold". Moreover, says Pike, the current NMD debate has "a lot more to do with service bureaucracy and corporate contractor politics with Congress [think here, e.g., Lockheed-Martin] than it has to do with national security. Given the fundamental irrationality of what we're doing, it would be the height of folly for us to start rearranging time-tested institutions, such as the ABM Treaty, in a fit of absent mindedness".
The foregoing statements from the relevant scientific community having authority to judge the effectiveness of NMD contribute to resolving the comparative assessment of extrinsic values. We noted earlier that a problem of conflicting extrinsic values in present case shifts to a dispute about whether (1) full and unambiguous compliance with the ABM Treaty or (2) deployment of NMD most effectively achieves national security. The scientific-technical assessment of effectiveness rendered by the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Federation of American Scientists, and scientists from the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, combined with highly probable escalated instability in arms control that is projected to ensue, leads to affirmation of disjunct (1) rather than disjunct (2): Either full and unambiguous compliance with the ABM Treaty most effectively achieves national security OR deployment of NMD most effectively achieves national security. It is not the case that deployment of NMD most effectively achieves national security. Therefore, full and unambiguous compliance with the ABM Treaty most effectively achieves national security. In the conflict of the two extrinsic values at issue, this value prevails.
Having thus engaged the consequentialist and deontological aspects of the question before us, I now turn briefly to one additional argument that I shall call "the argument from academic freedom". Some in the academic community, appealing to the principle of academic freedom, do not sanction any proscription of or limitation upon scientific research. Academic freedom, they argue, entails the free pursuit of scientific research irrespective of "political" influences such as the debate over NMD. In present case the claim is that whereas NMD is a political issue outside the concern of the university as such, AMSP is a scientific research project engagement in which is protected in the academy by the principle of academic freedom. An institution of higher education violates this principle if it proscribes or limits any scientific research, including AMSP. Because a research university in particular ought not violate the academic freedom of its research faculty, therefore the University of Alaska administration ought not proscribe or limit any scientific research, including AMSP.
The foregoing argument manifests a degree of naïveté about government-sponsored research, neglecting to take into account two undeniable facts: (1) all government-sponsored research is itself an outcome of a political process of appropriation and allocation of resources among competing interests; (2) AMSP is itself a project linked to a politically driven interest in NMD, especially given those interests in NMD expressed by Alaska's representatives to the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives and the R&D arm of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing corporations. It is, quite simply, false to assert that AMSP is a purely scientific project.
As for the argument from academic freedom as such, without doubt academic freedom has been and remains a cornerstone of the American academy's self-concept. This principle has been championed in the US chiefly by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). A faculty formally affiliated with AAUP through collective bargaining (such as at UAF) will, of course, seek to preserve the AAUP standard in practice even as the UA Board of Regents policy sustains the principle. While the AAUP "Statement of Principles" on academic freedom recognizes that "Freedom of research is fundamental to the advancement of truth", the Statement also grants that "Institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole". Further, the Statement construes academic freedom to carry with it "duties correlative to rights", and here duty includes responsibility "when undertaking government-sponsored research". The AAUP Statement is silent on the question of whether there are circumstances in which an institutional limitation or denial of participation in government-sponsored research may be consistent with academic freedom.
An argument to this effect, however, may be adduced. This argument takes as its major premise the AAUP Statement's acknowledgment that institutions of higher education are conducted for the common good, this common good to be distinguished from (though it may incorporate) the interest of the individual faculty member and the interest of the institution. This premise implies that in a conflict between the common good and such interests, it is the common good that is to be privileged. In the present case the common good is equivalent to the national security broadly construed. It has been argued above that, on grounds both consequentialist and deontological, the national security is not effectively served by NMD, including NMD R&D. Hence, NMD R&D does not effectively serve the common good. Faculty research interests in NMD R&D (including here AMSP) conflict with the institution's responsibility to conduct itself in the reasonable pursuit of the common good. This conflict is to be resolved by privileging the common good over the NMD research interests of the faculty. Therefore, an institution of higher education ought to proscribe faculty participation in NMD R&D. In doing so, the institution of higher education balances duty with right, gives duty its place, and so acts on behalf of academic freedom and its legitimate construal. Academic freedom is never absolute but is instead relational, having meaning in the context of some assessment of the common good. Thus, the mission of an institution of higher education, especially of a research university concerned with the advancement of scientific knowledge, has integrity relative to that common good. Institutional integrity measured by the degree to which the common good is pursued and achieved entails reasonable limits upon scientific research.
To conclude: The foregoing discussion leads to the conclusion that on both consequentialist and deontological grounds AMSP is a morally objectionable engagement, and that, therefore, research scientists who engage in such a project compromise their research integrity and neglect their scientific responsibility in the context of applicable international law. While it could be argued that (a) research scientists at UAF/GI who commit to AMSP act in a way consistent with the resolution of the Alaska State Legislature as well as the US Congress's adoption of a policy to deploy NMD, (b) that UAF as the research institution of the State of Alaska acts in the service of the state to the extent that it commits to a policy permitting NMD classified research, the fact is that such an argument does not have sufficiently countervailing weight when measured against the competing claims of international law. As the Council for a Livable World Education Fund has remarked, "it has been argued by the Constitution and 200 years of practice that while the Senate must give its advice and consent to a treaty to bring it into effect, it is up to the President to carry out, modify or terminate the treaty". That is, it is the President who has the constitutional authority on the question of how the US satisfies its obligations of international law - and on this point the President is committed by legal agreement that the Standing Consultative Commission is responsible for promoting and implementing treaty objectives. The Commission has not, through the requisite mutual agreement of the US and Successor States of the former USSR, amended the ABM Treaty in any way permitting NMD; and until it does so, international law represented by the treaty stands to be sustained rather than circumvented or abrogated.
Moreover, the US government is bound by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which entered into force in January 1980, eight years after the ABM Treaty was concluded. Article 26 of the Convention, expressing the universally recognized principle of pacta sunt servanda, states that "Every treaty in force is binding upon the parties to it and must be performed in good faith". Further, Article 27 of the Convention declares that "A party may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as justification for its failure to perform a treaty". Given Article 27, the Alaska State Legislature's resolution requiring that the safety and security of the state take priority over any international treaty or obligation simply fails to comprehend the federal government's responsibility under international law, as if the resolution could somehow mandate the federal government's abrogation of the ABM Treaty. In fact it cannot. As Frederick Kirgis remarks, US courts "would not permit a state of the union to force the United States to breach its international obligation to other countries under the [treaty or other international] agreement. The state or local law would be struck down as an interference with the federal government's power over foreign affairs".
Those who would cite a new threat to Alaska as a legitimate reason for the US withdrawal from the ABM Treaty ignore Articles 61 and 62 of the Convention. According to Article 61, "A party may invoke the impossibility of performing a treaty as a ground for terminating or withdrawing from it if the impossibility results from the permanent disappearance or destruction of an object indispensable for the execution of the treaty". This condition has not obtained by any measure. The nuclear arsenals of the signatories to the ABM Treaty yet threaten mutual assured destruction, so that Article 61 cannot be invoked in the face of that fact. START I and START II have been undertaken precisely because the strategic weapons arsenals remain excessive. Article 62 of the Convention provides for the relevance of a "fundamental change of circumstances" warranting termination or withdrawal from a treaty. Two conditions must obtain: (a) "the existence of those circumstances constituted an essential basis of the consent of the parties to be bound by the treaty"; and (b) "the effect of the change is radically to transform the extent of obligations still to be performed under the treaty". The available intelligence estimates of the threat of an attack upon the US territory by rogue states such as North Korea do not represent a threat that radically transforms US obligations under the ABM Treaty. Neither the Clinton nor Bush proposal for NMD is assessed to be effective against the most likely threat, viz., a missile carrying a biological or chemical payload.
The extended argument expounded here clarifies the relevant obligations of research scientists in Alaska in the face of any proposed NMD research agenda. The ABM Treaty stands to be sustained rather than circumvented by NMD R&D or abrogated by yet other means. This is no less the obligation of the research scientist, who cannot responsibly abdicate the general duty to exercise critical citizenship and to assure the achievement of "just results" essential to scientific responsibility and research integrity.Back to UAF NMD research main page
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