missile defense system has been successfully tested against decoys. "There's a misconception that we cannot handle countermeasures," he says. "We cannot handle very complex countermeasures. I won't go into what that means, but there are things that an enemy can do to really try to confuse the system."

That's bull jargon for "we can handle test decoys but not the real ones."

Dr. Garwin, who has infinitely less anxiety about getting his fourth star than Lieutenant General Obering does, says that against the countermeasures Iran is likely to put on any ICBM it might shoot at the U.S. "the defense is helpless." Garwin further states that, "Should a state be so misguided as to attempt to deliver nuclear weapons by ICBM, they could be guaranteed against intercept in midcourse by the use of appropriate countermeasures," and "Protecting the United States against attack by nuclear weapons or biological weapons is a failure and will remain so for the foreseeable future, so long as MDA attempts to carry it out by mid-course intercept."

On the other side of the firing line: ballistic missiles are deterrence weapons. So if Iran ever did have an ICBM that would reach the United States, and actually launched it and it actually flew here and actually blew up, it still wouldn’t have worked because we already would have done whatever the ballistic missile was supposed to stop us from doing. And then we'd lob about eight nukes back at them and bring the 6,000-year old Persian civilization to an abrupt end.

On young Mr. Bush's watch alone, we'll have tinkled away $63 billion on missile defense. That kind of money could have bought 30 B-2 stealth bombers, or eight Gerald R. Ford class nuclear aircraft carriers, or six more months of our woebegone war in Iraq, or an end to world hunger.