d is necessary to protect the United States from possible missile attacks from rouge states or terrorist groups. The problem with this theory is that its is quite expensive to acquire, maintain, and fire Inter-continental Ballistic Mis-siles, or ICBMs, which are necessary to deliver the nuclear warheads to their targets. Additionally, if a terrorist group was adamant about causing destruction in the United States, it could easily detonate a nuclear warhead from a stationary point in a crowded area, similar to the bombing attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. As Congressman Chat Edwards stated, build-ing an NMD is like putting a $5000 burglar alarm on the front door of your house, while leaving the backdoor unlocked. (Mendelsohn 1999, 30) The United States has three times tested their Missile Defense system, and twice out of those three times, the mis-siles launched have failed to hit their targeted incoming missiles. With only a 33 per-cent success rate, it is obvious that the US is nowhere near ready to implement a NMD program on any large-scale.The third fault of the NMD program is that it is in violation the ABM treaty. First, one must look at the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, or ABM treaty and see just what exactly it protects, or prevents. As was stated earlier, the ABM treaty was de-signed to limit the number of missile-defense systems that the United States and the USSR could develop to one. The NMD program, however, consists of constructing a number of launching sites for these anti-missile missiles. Having more than one site would obviously be in violation of ABM. Oddly enough, when the ABM treaty was ne-gotiated, the Soviets decided to place their anti-missile defense system outside of Mos-cow, protecting the people living there and the seat of the Soviet government. The US, on the other hand, decided to place their defense missiles in North Dakota Why in North D...
