Hail to the Chief: George W. Bush Demonstrates Couragerous, Visionary Leadership — again — by Jettisoning A.B.M. Treaty

(Washington, D.C.): In his first 11 months in office, President Bush has — to his lasting credit — reestablished "peace through strength" as the guiding principle of American security policy. This has been most evident in his extraordinary leadership in the war on terrorism.

Arguably, an even more important manifestation of Mr. Bush’s determination to be realistic about the threats we face and to respond to them vigorously has been his breathtakingly clear-headed view of arms control. In contrast to virtually every one of his predecessors since John F. Kennedy — and countless others in academia, diplomatic circles, scientific conclaves, think tanks, Congress and the media who have made careers out of producing and/or promoting various arms limitation treaties, President Bush has seen such treaties for what they generally are: Accords that are all too often unverifiable, generally inequitable to the United States and frequently violated by the other parties. As a result, these usually well-intentioned pacts often have very deleterious effects on U.S. national security and interests.

There is no better example of an arms control agreement having such a deleterious effect than the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. As the following op.ed. article by Center for Security Policy President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., which appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal, makes clear, the fact that this treaty compelled the American people to remain permanently vulnerable to the real and growing danger of ballistic missile attack made it not only a moral abomination; for a nation at war in the 21st Century, it had become an invitation to disaster.

The Center for Security Policy commends President Bush for his principled, courageous and entirely correct view of the need for effective missile defense of the United States and its forces and allies overseas. It applauds him for rejecting the appalling idea of leaving the ABM Treaty in place while somehow pursuing missile defense-related development and testing it prohibited. And the Center joins the vast majority of our countrymen in thanking him for clearing the way at last, by withdrawing from that accord altogether, for the quintessential application of the principle of "peace through strength" — the deployment of such defenses at the earliest possible moment.

A Milestone for Missile Defense
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
The Wall Street Journal, 13 December 2001

A year ago, shortly after George W. Bush officially won the presidency, political guru Karl Rove held an informal meeting with Washington policy wonks to discuss the incoming administration’s agenda. I asked him whether we could expect the new president to fulfill his campaign promise to defend the American people against ballistic-missile attack as soon as possible — even if doing so required the United States to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty?

Mr. Rove’s response: "People in this town are going to be surprised to discover that George W. Bush means what he says, and does what he says he’ll do."

Today, Mr. Bush will live up to that advance billing. He will exercise the U.S. right, pursuant to the ABM Treaty’s Article XV, to declare that the accord jeopardizes America’s "supreme interests." Six months from now, America will be free — for the first time in nearly 30 years — to develop and deploy whatever technologies it deems necessary to protect itself against missile attack.

Significant Contribution

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this contribution to the national security. Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983 out of a conviction that it would be better to "protect American lives than to avenge them" after a nuclear missile attack. President Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, pursued a Global Protection Against Limited Strikes system and, at one point, even had Boris Yeltsin’s public support for jointly fielding such a capability. Yet neither of those presidents chose to withdraw from the ABM Treaty.

Bill Clinton adamantly opposed missile defenses and, not surprisingly, his administration expended most of its related energies trying to make the ABM Treaty — which it called "the cornerstone of strategic stability" — even more restrictive of American anti-missile technology. Although Mr. Clinton was compelled in 1999 by veto-proof bipartisan majorities in Congress to sign legislation making it the policy of the U.S. to deploy a limited, effective national missile defense "as soon as technologically possible," he resisted calls to exercise our Article XV right to withdraw so as to implement that policy.

George W. Bush has now gone where his predecessors declined to go, for one simple reason: Today’s world bears no resemblance to that of 1972, when the ABM Treaty was signed. The global superpower and nuclear peer that was the other party, the Soviet Union, has been out of business for over a decade. In its place is a world awash with weapons of mass destruction and rogue states seeking ever-more-capable means of delivering them via ballistic and cruise missiles.

In 2001, we see even more clearly the validity of warnings sounded in 1998 by a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission chaired by Donald Rumsfeld: While the Cold War was characterized by relatively predictable, deterrence-based strategic stability, the danger of devastating attacks via long-range missiles could now emerge at any time and with little warning.

President Bush has also recognized another ineluctable reality. The U.S. simply could not acquire, let alone field, an effective anti-missile system for its people and territory within the limits of the ABM Treaty. This was no accident. That’s precisely what the treaty was designed to prevent the parties from legally doing.

For starters, the Treaty’s Article I flatly prohibited the deployment of any territorial defense against "strategic" ballistic missiles. Article V barred the development of the most efficient approaches to defending against long-range missiles (sea-, air- and space-based systems). Various other provisions prohibited techniques that could be used to circumvent the treaty, including cooperation with allies.

Of course, these limitations did not keep the Soviet Union and, after its demise, Russia from putting into place a territorial anti-missile system. As this page has reported in the past, former CIA analyst William T. Lee has accumulated irrefutable, unclassified evidence of a dirty little secret: Those responsible for designing and deploying the Kremlin’s ABM system around Moscow (which was allowed under the 1972 ABM Treaty) were under orders to use its radars and 8,000-10,000 surface-to-air interceptors to assemble an illegal nation-wide missile defense. The existence of this system renders absurd Kremlin complaints about America’s perfectly legitimate withdrawal from the treaty.

Now some, like Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden (D., Del.), cavil that Mr. Bush "has not offered any convincing rationale for why any missile-defense test it may need to conduct would require walking away from a treaty that has helped keep the peace for the last 30 years." This is especially rich. Sen. Biden is one of those who has in the past strenuously insisted that the U.S. observe the most restrictive interpretation of what the treaty allows and does not.

Hard as it may be to fathom, many of the ABM Treaty’s champions believe it more important to protect that accord than our country. Their theological attachment to what President Bush has properly called an "obsolete" and "dangerous" agreement appears to have little to do with logic or common sense. Rather, it seems to stem from the fact that entire careers in academe and defense circles have been based on this house of cards. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D., S.D.) gave voice to this sentiment in denouncing the Bush decision to withdraw as a "slap in the face for many people who have committed years if not decades" to arms control.

Mr. Bush is under no illusions about the ABM Treaty. He has been formally advised by the Pentagon that continued adherence to it has required developmental tests to be curtailed, dumbed-down or otherwise made less useful than they could, and should, be. These warnings confirm what U.S. missile-defense program managers and engineers have known for three decades: You simply can’t acquire militarily valuable and cost-effective missile defenses of the U.S. and its allies overseas within the confines of the ABM Treaty. So it should come as no surprise that we are still without a fully deployable missile-defense system, despite many years and billions of dollars spent on related work — all done within the ABM Treaty straightjacket.

The challenge now is to capitalize on the opportunities created by ending the ABM regime. Specifically, President Bush should direct not only a far more aggressive and unfettered development program but the deployment of anti-missile systems (even if their initial capability may be quite limited) in keeping with the mandates of the 1999 Missile Defense Act — that is, as soon as technologically possible.

Start With Aegis

The really good news is that, thanks to roughly $60 billion invested over the past 30 years, the U.S. Navy today has a fleet of 60 cruisers and destroyers equipped with the Aegis air-defense system. If the president directs that these ships and their existing sensors, missiles and communications systems be immediately upgraded as a matter of the utmost priority, a dozen or so of these vessels could be given limited capability to intercept ballistic missiles roughly six months after the ABM Treaty expires. The prior investment in infrastructure makes this far and away the most cost-effective, flexible and rapid means of fielding limited anti-missile systems, leaving ample funds available to bring other, complementary missile-defense technologies on line in due course.

By withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, Mr. Bush has proven himself a man of his word. If he now directs the Defense Department to get started on the deployment of the defense he promised the American people, we may just have one in place before we need it.

Mr. Gaffney was responsible for missile-defense policy in the Reagan Defense Department. He is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.