WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 (UPI) -- It's a sunny summer day in Boston. Families are strolling in the city's beautiful parks. The Red Sox are winning. Young people are enjoying wine in the city's outdoor cafes. Within an instant, everything is gone. A huge explosion has occurred.
Killed immediately are 125,000 of the city's 600,000 residents. Another 25 percent are injured. Most buildings in a one-mile radius of Harvard Square are destroyed. Fires start all over the city, causing another 60,000 to die and another 120,000 to be injured.
What was once unthinkable, even in the Cold War, is now very plausible given the tenacious opponents we face in al Qaida and other Islamic terrorist outfits who are determined to destroy America.
That is why I would hope every concerned foreign policy maker in the Bush administration and every congressman would carefully read a new study issued by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, "Scenarios Involving Various U.S. Cities Attacked by al Qaida Terrorists with Sea-Launched Scud Missiles."
This study should be a chilling wake-up call to anyone who does not believe that we are vulnerable to attack.
The study looks at the impact of attacks on a number of major U.S. cities including Washington and New York, calculating the widespread loss of life and destruction that would be caused by a terrorist-launched attack.
The premise of the study is that a single SCUD missile, a weapon we know that at least one terrorist-sponsoring nation possess, will be launched against a major city in the United States.
Do the terrorists have nuclear capability? Most of those who calculate threats to this country believe the terrorists may indeed have nuclear capability based on the fact that nuclear scientists and materials are unaccounted for from the former Soviet Union.
What makes the study even more disturbing is the fact that too many in our nation's elite policy-making positions do not seem to know or care about just how vulnerable America is to a missile attack. We have the know-how to protect ourselves, but have not been able to summon the will to do so.
It has been nearly twenty years since President Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI. Quickly dubbed "Star Wars" by a determined opposition, the program proved to be popular with the public.
Reagan would not opt out of our disarmament arrangements with the Soviet Union known as the ABM Treaty, so the best that could be done during the last six years of the Reagan presidency was to conduct research on SDI and to do some limited testing of it.
The administration of President George Herbert Walker Bush was purposely less friendly to SDI, because the elder Bush felt himself bound by the ABM Treaty, which he viewed as the cornerstone of our defense policy. President Bill Clinton all but killed the program, and only a determined group in the Congress and some enthusiasts in the Pentagon kept it alive.
Now, there is President George W. Bush, who raised hopes that a U.S. missile defense system will at last become a reality. He served notice to Russia, the successor state to the collapsed Soviet Union, that the United States would withdraw from the ABM Treaty. The presumed outcome to that initiative, that relations between the United States and Russia would disintegrate, never occurred. Russia accepted the United States' position, despite registering its disagreement with it.
So everything appeared to be set for actually deploying a missile defense system. The majority of tests conducted with interceptors were successful. The tests showed that the system would work. It is important to note that this is not the massive SDI system envisioned by Reagan, who was dealing with a hostile Soviet Union that had thousands of missiles with nuclear warheads pointed at us.
Rather the system now to be deployed is aimed at thwarting a single missile, perhaps launched by a rogue state or terrorists on a freighter at sea. But there is a glitch in the plan, and it is in the U.S. Senate.
Unfortunately, for Bush, Carl Levin, D-Mich., took over as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee from Sen. John Warner, R-Va., last year when control of the chamber switched from the Republicans to the Democrats.
Levin has thrown every single obstacle in Bush's way and it is regrettable that the president has not fought as hard for deploying a missile defense system the way that many of us who believe in such a system had expected.
The result is that we are beginning to go backward instead of forward in the deployment of a system that works.
We are more vulnerable now than at any time in our nation's history. Sept. 11, 2001 was a terrible day in this country's history. I would like to think that our nation's policymakers and politicians learned some lessons from that day that would help to prevent such an awful occurrence from happening again.
Unfortunately, they do not seem to have done so. The consequences of their inability to grasp the new realities of our post-Cold War world may very well prove to be needlessly worse than Sept. 11. "Who lost Boston?" or New York or Los Angeles is one cry that I pray we will never hear being sounded by the American public -- that is, those of us who are still alive. But we had better brace ourselves to hear just that.
(Paul M. Weyrich is president of the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative research and education foundation located in Washington)
("Outside View" commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers who specialize in a variety of important global issues)
