LONDON -- Appearing before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary William Cohen has confirmed that he and his colleagues see the threat to the United States of long-range missile attack as growing. The intention to develop a national missile defense system against is therefore still firmly in place, despite a recent test failure.

Considering that NMD if successful, alters the entire structure of ground rules on which international security has been based for several decades past, it is strange that policymakers and opinion-formers around the globe have not been more stirred by this project and by the U.S. announcement.

At the recent Okinawa summit, commentators hardly gave the summit leaders' deliberations on nuclear weapons and the missile debate a paragraph, preferring to concentrate on the issue of debt relief for poorer countries -- and why it is going ahead so slowly -- and such earth-shaking issues as the total cost of the Okinawa event -- a figure that Japan's Foreign Ministry spin doctors would have been wiser to keep under wraps, or at least disaggregate, before feeding to the world's press.