Whose Missile Shield Is It, Anyway?

Now we're talking about putting expensive, useless interceptors in Europe.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, May 23, 2006, at 5:48 PM ET

The Bush administration's ballistic-missile-defense program—wildly expensive and no less ineffective—has a new mission, it seems. Monday's New York Times reports that the Pentagon plans to build a new site of interceptors in Europe, probably in Poland or the Czech Republic, for the purpose of shooting down nuclear missiles launched by Iran.

At the moment Iran has neither nuclear weapons nor long-range missiles, but the U.S. anti-missile missiles—a battery of 10—won't be in place until 2011, so that's not an issue. Two critical points are worth making, though: