The Bush administration is right: The existing architecture of nuclear-arms control reflects a Cold War-centered world that is gone forever. Much of the negative response to the Bush plan for a missile-defense shield is knee-jerk reaction to the fact that yesterday's strategic certainties are having to be be challenged and discarded.

Today's strategic landscape is totally different. Both the Soviet Union and the Cold War belong to the dustbin of history. Strategic deterrence had rested on the ability of each side -- the Soviet Union on the one hand, the United States on the other -- to survive a nuclear attack and hit back hard with its remaining nuclear weapons. The ABM Treaty really is a mutual suicide pact. It would surely be criminally negligent of any U.S. president not to authorize a defensive system that actually worked and guaranteed the safety of U.S. citizens against enemy attack.

Russia is a shrinking and fading power. India and Pakistan are self-declared nuclear powers whose status cannot be acknowledged within the make-believe world of the Nonproliferation Treaty. The U.S. has no peer competitor. Its nuclear stockpile bears no relation to today's threats. It is a historical dead weight acting as a drag on a sensible defense policy for today's world. President George W. Bush actually intends to make good on the NPT promise of cutting back on nuclear arsenals decisively.