Tag Archives: Congress

Jim Inhofe, Tom DeLay and Nina Shea: Legends in Their Own Time

January 31, 2000Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Three individuals deserve special recognition for waging sometimes lonely fights against long odds on behalf of the national security. Each has, in their way, earned the gratitude of their fellow citizens for service similar in quality if not in kind to that of the ancient Roman, Horatius, who, according to legend, spared his city from destruction at the hands of its enemies by his singlehanded defense of a critical bridge.

Senator Jim Inhofe

The Oklahoma Republican has tirelessly worked to prevent political operatives in San Juan and the Clinton White House from colluding to deny the Navy and Marine Corps use of a unique, live-fire training facility on the island of Vieques off Puerto Rico. Sen. Inhofe serves as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee. He takes very seriously his responsibilities to oversee and provide the U.S. military with the personnel, resources, equipment and realistic experience to provide the combat capability needed to deter aggression and, if deterrence fails, to prevail in the Nation’s wars.

In this connection, he has made countless visits to American units and bases all over the world. These visits have, among other things, persuaded him of the indispensability of the Vieques range to the qualification of Navy and Marine forces for combat operations. He will be testifying about his findings tomorrow in an Armed Services Committee hearing, together with the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jay Johnson, and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Jones, who have advocated a referendum of the people of Vieques as the fairest and most accurate means of establishing whether those most immediately affected would support resumed live-fire training on the island.

Interestingly, the Puerto Rican politicians — who have shamelessly exploited the accidental death of a civilian guard at the base and its subsequent illegal occupation by leftist protesters to advance their agenda of statehood, if not outright independence from the United States — oppose a plebiscite of the people of Vieques.¹ They have vilified and even threatened Sen. Inhofe for resisting their efforts to euchre a deal that would compromise the national interest. To his lasting credit, the Senator is standing firm, immeasurably helping the Navy and Marine Corps to do the same, in the face of intense political pressure to capitulate.

Tom DeLay

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas (R-TX) has, together with Representatives Chris Cox (R-CA), Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and International Relations Committee Chairman Ben Gilman (R-NY), fashioned and will bring to a vote perhaps as early as tomorrow the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act (TSEA). This legislation is designed to restore a balance to the United States’ relationships with Communist China and democratic Taiwan that is more strategically sound and consistent with American values and interests than the Clinton Administration’s Sino-centric policy.

Specifically, the TSEA would set the stage for substantially increased defense cooperation between the armed forces of the United States and those of Taiwan. It calls for improved communications between the two. The bill would also clear the way for the sale of improved defensive capabilities of the sort needed to offset the massive upgrades China has been making in its offensive weaponry aimed at the state across the Taiwan Strait — whose de facto independence and sovereignty Beijing refuses to acknowledge and seems poised to try to liquidate by force.

Especially urgently needed by Taiwan are AEGIS air defense destroyers. These ships’ radars would help rectify Taipei’s most serious current shortfall: its lack of effective early warning of missile or aircraft attack. They also would provide the infrastructure for sea-based anti-missile defenses of the sort that the United States needs every bit as much as Taiwan — and whose developmental costs could be partially defrayed by the latter, Japan and perhaps other allied nations faced with threats to their territories from ballistic missile-wielding adversaries.

It is to be hoped that Rep. DeLay’s success in creating bipartisan support for the TSEA — in the face of stiff opposition from China and its friends in the Clinton Administration — will not only secure enactment of this important legislation but encourage him to play an equally decisive role in energizing congressional oversight and action in other national security areas, as well.

Nina Shea

Ms. Shea is the highly respected director of the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House and an influential member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. She has most recently played a leading role in forging a coalition of human rights, religious leaders and national security experts opposed to the penetration of U.S. capital markets by select Chinese and other foreign entities engaged in unacceptable activities.

The first targets of Ms. Shea’s coalition have been two firms — Talisman Energy, Inc. of Canada and PetroChina, a spin-off of China National Petroleum Company (CNPC) — engaged in oil exploration and development in Sudan. The proceeds help the odious government in Khartoum prosecute its efforts to enslave or exterminate Christians and others living in that country’s oil-rich south, support terrorism and procure weapons of mass destruction.

Under Ms. Shea’s leadership — with technical counsel from, among others, Roger Robinson, the chair of the William J. Casey Institute of the Center for Security Policy — this coalition has in recent weeks taken several momentous steps. First, over two-hundred of its members and friends (including former National Security Advisor William Clark and former Treasury Secretary William Simon), wrote President Clinton last month urging that he block efforts by CNPC or its subsidiary to issue an expected $5-7 billion Initial Public Offering on the New York Stock Exchange. The Administration is properly nervous about doing otherwise.²

Second, a divestment campaign promoted by Ms. Shea and other activists has resulted in a huge sell-off of Talisman shares by four of the Nation’s leading investment funds — TIAA-CREF, the California and New Jersey public employees’ pension funds and of Texas teachers. In recent months, Talisman’s connection to Sudan has reportedly resulted in a decline of the stock’s value of over 20 percent.³

Then last week, nine of the coalition’s leaders wrote over 240 executive directors and CEO’s of many of this country’s largest public pension funds and private mutual fund families, as well as all fifty state treasurers. The letter called on these leading money managers and state officials to forego the purchase of PetroChina stock, should it become available, on the grounds that mechanisms purported to prevent U.S. and other investor proceeds from finding their way to Khartoum represented an unworkable “contrivance.” Notice has thus been served that purchase of such CNPC stock will probably precipitate a divestment campaign like that which has hounded Talisman.⁴

The Bottom Line

Every American owes a debt of gratitude to these individuals who, like Horatius at the bridge, are not only protecting their national security interests but, in so doing, are displaying a steadfastness, courage and commitment to principle that serves as an inspiration to us all.

¹Patrick Ortega, a courageous Hispanic-American who is president of the Civic Family Institute in Los Angeles, described the real and troubling agenda of the anti-Navy agitators in an excellent op.ed. article published in the Washington Times on 4 January 2000. See the Center’s Press Release entitled A Democratic Solution to the Vieques Stand-off (No. 00-P 02, 4 January 2000).

²See the Casey Institute Press Release entitled A New Era: 200 U.S. Leaders Call on President Clinton to Prevent China Petroleum’s Sudan-Tied Initial Public Offering (No. 99-R 143, 10 December 1999).

³See Casey’s Robinson Testifies Before California Legislature on Prospect of Global “Bad Actors” Penetrating State Portfolios (No. 00-R 04, 14 January 2000).

⁴See Washington Post Article Could Prove a Turning Point in Efforts of Problematic Chinese Entities Seeking to Penetrate U.S. Capital Markets (No. 00-F 08, 28 January 2000) and Human Rights and Religious Leaders Urge Hundreds of Pension and Mutual Funds To Forego Imminent PetroChina IPO on NYSE (No. 00-C 9, 28 January 2000).

Wisdom of Senate Rejection of C.T.B.T. Confirmed as ‘Alternative to Testing’ Runs into Technical, Political Trouble

December 24, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): A hardy perennial of the sales job for President Clinton’s
Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has been that the complex and aging U.S. deterrent could be maintained
indefinitely without further nuclear testing, thanks to the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP).
Fortunately, the United States Senate — which takes the responsibility of assuring the continuing
effectiveness, safety and reliability of America’s nuclear forces more seriously than the
Clinton-Gore team — saw this assertion for what it is: a complete fraud.

Now, even the fatuously pro-CTBT New York Times has had to confirm that the
centerpiece of
the SSP, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), has fallen into serious difficulty — so much so that
“its role as a leading justification for ban on nuclear tests” has been “undermined.”

A ‘Bird in the Bush’

Even before the recent revelations about huge cost-overruns, as-yet-unsurmounted technical
challenges and lengthy delays in the NIF’s availability, the Senate majority appreciated that the
Stockpile Stewardship Program remained a gleam in the eye. The National Ignition Facility and
other ambitious technology development initiatives — intended to permit the U.S. nuclear
weapons laboratories to perform vastly improved surveillance and diagnoses of the condition of
old nuclear “pits” and other weapons components — were many years and scores of billions of
dollars from realization.

Worse yet, even if the technology actually panned out and the requisite funding were
forthcoming, were the United States unable to assure itself that these new devices faithfully
simulated nuclear tests by conducting real detonations for calibration purposes, it would be
impossible to have the necessary, high confidence in the SSP and the judgments it would inform
about the status of the Nation’s nuclear arsenal.

These were among the reasons that fifty-one Senators voted in an extraordinary exercise of
political courage and legislative responsibility to reject a zero-yield test ban. As a result
of that
action, the United States is free to conduct the sort of periodic underground nuclear tests
that it will surely need in the future — either to perform competent “stockpile
stewardship” in
the absence of the high-technology capabilities of the SSP and/or to conduct the calibration shots
required to bring those capabilities on-line.

The NIF is in Trouble

According to a report published in the Times on 21 December, the National
Ignition Facility has
suffered a number of setbacks since August. The NIF would use powerful lasers to simulate
conditions that are similar to those found during a nuclear explosion. Despite repeated, highly
publicized representations by Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson to the effect that the NIF was
on-budget and on-time, ¹ it has actually experienced to date
a cost overrun of SSP of at least
$400 million and is many months behind schedule.

The New York Times quotes the leader of the Department of Energy’s review
team for the NIF
project, Dr. John McTague, as saying that the majority of the problems associated with the cost
overruns and other difficulties stem from the fact that the DoE vastly underestimated the
technical hurdles necessary to complete the Facility. This view was seconded by the private,
anti-nuclear Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), whose spokesman told the
Times:
“Difficulties in producing the laser’s optics and fuel pellets…could prevent it from
ever
operating properly.” (Emphasis added).

NIF’s Other Problem – CTBT Radicals

The NRDC is but one of the partisans of radical arms control that have not only pushed for
the
ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The more zealous of these activists argue
that the CTBT’s absolutist prohibition on testing should prevent the construction of the NIF and
other SSP components. The goal of unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament would certainly be
advanced by such an interpretation, as the Nation would thereby be denied any hope
of assuring
the continuing effectiveness of its deterrent arsenal.

Citing the Clinton-Gore Administration’s post-vote contention that the United States
remains
bound by the CTBT — notwithstanding its rejection by the Senate, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA)
argued in a late October letter to Secretary Richardson that the National Ignition Facility could
violate the zero-yield test ban. Sen. Harkin wrote: “It is troubling that we are planning to ignite
thermonuclear explosions at the NIF that may violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty’s ban
on nuclear explosions.” It is predictable that the Senator and his allies like the NRDC will
happily seize upon any pretext — let alone the NIF’s present, serious problems — eventually to
prevent the Stockpile Stewardship Program from coming to fruition.

Sen. Harkin’s assertion only serves to reinforce the point that President Clinton stance on the
current status of the CTBT with respect to the United States threatens one of the most important
provisions of the Constitution — the Senate’s co-equal role in the making of treaties. If the
President can disregard the Senate’s decision that a treaty is not acceptable and continue to
subordinate American defenses and policies to the strictures of a repudiated accord, he is clearly
contravening the plain meaning and intention of the Framers’ Article II.

The Bottom Line

The technical, financial and political troubles currently plaguing the NIF are not the only
reason
for skepticism about the CTBT proponents’ appeal that they be trusted to assure the future
viability of the nuclear deterrent in a permanent no-test environment. Such difficulties
nonetheless helpfully showcase the Senate’s wisdom in rejecting that treaty, while further
rebutting preposterous claims by its champions that partisanship and isolationism — rather than
legitimate concerns about the CTBT’s myriad flaws — led to that salutary outcome. Under these
and foreseeable circumstances, the United States must preserve and exercise its right
to conduct
periodic underground nuclear tests.

¹ Questions about the competence of Richardson’s own stewardship
at the Department of
Energy have been raised by his indignant assertion that he was blindsided by program managers
who misled him about the actual status of the NIF program. It must be asked: What else is the
Secretary of Energy unaware of about the SSP — or for that matter the rest of his portfolio? And
what other representations is he making that will prove equally misleading, if not actually false?

The Empire Strikes Back: ‘Stanford 5’ Help Beijing’s Effort to Discredit the Authoritative Cox Committee Report

December 21, 1999Frank Gaffney, Jr.

(Washington, D.C.): “Friends of China” is a term the Communists in Beijing use to identify
individuals and organizations in the West upon whom the PRC can rely to promote its party line.
In the United States, they have come to be known collectively as “the China Lobby.” Lenin had
a less charitable term for the breed: “Useful idiots.”

Whatever their appellation or motivation, these advocates seem determined to mark the
anniversary of the single most devastating assessment of the policies, purposes and intentions of
the People’s Republic of China — the completion of the unanimous report of the “Cox
Committee” ¹ — with a full-scale effort to discredit that
bipartisan initiative. As the dangers
associated with allowing U.S. policy towards China to be guided by naive illusions or
self-serving parochial interests inexorably grow, this cynical campaign must not be allowed to go
unchallenged.

Enter the ‘Stanford 5’

The most recent salvo unleashed at the report issued in December 1998 by the Select
Committee
on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the Peoples Republic of
China — universally know by the name of its chairman, Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA) — was fired last
week by Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). ²
This organization is chaired by William Perry — a man who has had longstanding, cordial and
often controversial ³ ties with Communist China before,
during and after his services as
President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense. Dr. Perry is currently Mr. Clinton’s Special Envoy to
East Asia and the principal architect of the Administration’s policy of appeasement toward
Beijing’s ally and client, North Korea.

For months, CISAC has sponsored a study prepared by four specialists and edited by a fifth
who
appear to share its chairman’s generally benign view of the People’s Republic of China:
Professor Alistair Iain Johnston, a Chinese foreign policy expert at Harvard University; Dr.
Wolfgang Panofsky, a participant in the Manhattan Project who has been a harsh critic of U.S.
nuclear weapons activities ever since; Dr. Marco Di Capua, a former foreign service officer who
currently is a physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory working on “proliferation prevention”
regarding China; Lewis Franklin, a career intelligence officer specializing in Sino-Soviet missile
programs; and Dr. Michael May former director of the Livermore Laboratory who serves as
co-director of the CISAC program. The transparent goal of the so-called “Stanford 5” authors is
to help discredit the Cox Report, which they have characterized as based upon “skewed
research,” “misleading” information and “sloppy” analysis.

It is not hard to understand why “friends of China” want to undermine the Cox Committee’s
credibility and public confidence in its conclusions. The picture painted by the Select Committee
— on the basis of twenty-two hearings, hundreds of hours of testimony and the full participation
of the U.S. intelligence community — concerning China’s activities and their import for U.S.
security (and other) interests is damning. At the insistence of the Clinton-Gore Administration,
fully one-third of the Select Committee’s report remains classified. ⁴ Committee members, led
by Rep. Cox and his ranking minority member, Rep. Norm Dicks (D-WA), however, emphasized
that everything in its unclassified portions is supported by the large quantity of material redacted
prior to the report’s release to the public. Among the most important of these findings were:

The PRC has stolen design information on the United States’ most advanced
thermonuclear weapons and associated re-entry vehicles; the PRC’s next generation of
thermonuclear weapons, currently under development, will exploit elements of stolen
U.S. design information, including targeting, penetration aids, MIRV capability and
greater survivability owing to the enhanced mobility afforded by miniaturization; and,
PRC penetration of our national weapons laboratories spans at least the past several
decades and almost certainly continues today.
These thefts enabled the PRC to achieve capabilities on a par with our own much sooner
than would otherwise have been possible — leaping from 1950’s-era technology in a
handful of years to a level which took the U.S. decades of work, hundreds of millions of
dollars and several nuclear tests to reach.
The deployment of weapons based on the thefts could have a significant effect on the
regional balance of power; the PRC has also stolen or otherwise illegally obtained U.S.
missile, guidance and space technology that improves the effectiveness and reliability of
the PRC’s military and intelligence capabilities that could be used to attack American
population centers and assets; and the PRC has proliferated such technology to other
countries, including regimes hostile to the U.S., notably Iran and North Korea.
U.S. technology export controls and laws are insufficient and lack proper enforcement
and the Nation’s intelligence community is insufficiently focused on the threat posed by
the PRC to obtain militarily useful technologies by legal (commercial and political) and
illegal means.
Finally, the PRC’s long-run geopolitical goals include incorporating Taiwan into the PRC
and becoming the primary power in Asia, goals which conflict with current U.S. interests
in Asia and the Pacific.

Far from being a one-sided, partisan or strictly congressional critique, these findings have in
the
main been reinforced by independent assessments subsequently conducted by the President’s
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a CIA damage assessment and a National Intelligence
Estimate, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and, not least, by a number of admissions by the
PRC. The latter include public acknowledgments that Beijing has acquired the neutron bomb
and is doing pre-deployment testing of the Jl-2. In addition, federal indictments and other
judicial proceedings — most recently against former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee — appear
to confirm the thrust of the Cox Committee’s warnings. ⁵

No Sale

Fortunately, despite some favorable publicity, ⁶ the
CISAC team has failed in its effort to
impugn the Cox Report described by the New York Times as “the most comprehensive
examination of the issue ever conducted by any part of the American government.” ⁷ This is
due, in part, to the CISAC team’s acknowledged inability to evaluate the as-yet-unreleased
classified information that underpins many of the Select Committee findings about which they
express such criticism. In part, it is because their effort is full of strawman arguments,
mis-characterizations of the Cox Report and their factual errors. ⁸

But most importantly, the CISAC effort ultimately fails to debunk the Cox Report
convincingly because it is driven by a competing and ever-more-incredible world-view —
one that is not only sharply at variance with that of the Cox Committee, but with the facts,
as well. ⁹ The Stanford 5 appear to
perceive the PRC as a nation that is squarely on a glide-path
toward becoming a status quo power, one with whom the United States can — perhaps after a
tense transitional interlude — safely divide the world into spheres of influence with Asia
rightfully conceded to China. A central tenet in this conception is that “China will only
become
an enemy if we treat it as one” or if we fail to accord the Chinese sufficient prestige.

Indeed, this theme has become a leitmotif for China’s “friends” in the United States.
Notably,
the Clinton administration embraced the concept of a “strategic partnership” with China so that
the latter would feel it was being treated as at least a prospective co-equal. In this fashion, the
theory went, Beijing would be given an incentive toward status quo behavior —
including
curbing proliferation and joining Western regimes on arms control and other matters.

In fact, “engagement” as pursued by the Clinton-Gore Administration in particular,
and as
advocated by the Stanford 5, is creating the basis for China’s growing, comprehensive
national strength, especially benefitting its military and strategic nuclear and
information
warfare capabilities — this is manifestly not in our interest.
Especially worrisome it the fact
that the policies being advanced in the name of engagement will not lead to mere linear advances
for the PRC over decades. ¹⁰ Rather, they are likely to
translate into ominous technological
leaps. Worse yet, they are likely to be of the sort that the blue-ribbon commission headed by
former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned last year will be hidden from us and very
costly to counter. They may be of a character that will cause one or the other party to
miscalculate or act precipitously in future crises.

‘What, Me Worry?’

Incredible as it may seem, some like CISAC “friend of China” Alistair Iain Johnston, evince
no
concern about such a development. In fact, he appears less troubled about growing Chinese
ballistic missile threats than about American efforts to defend against them. As he wrote in
China Quarterly in March 1998, just as U.S. “plans for the unilateral deployment of
ballistic
missile defenses threatened to destabilize U.S.-Soviet deterrence in the 1980’s,” so too
“asymmetric ballistic missile defenses will destabilize Sino-U.S. relations in the 21st Century.”

Johnston says that rather than protecting U.S. interests, allies and troops in the region from
missile attack from North Korea, China or anyone else — thus creating disincentives to their
further investment in threatening ballistic missile capabilities, “the United States ought to be
assisting China to develop an assured second-strike minimum deterrence capability [including]
submarine-launched ballistic missile technology in return for verifiable, bilateral and/or
multilateral commitments to eschew MIRVing, ballistic missile defense, and anti-satellite
weapons development and deployment.”

Unfortunately, it turns out that China has indeed acquired from the United States, albeit
illicitly,
this sea-based missile technology and integrated it into its new submarine-launched ballistic
missile, the JL-2. What is more, far from eschewing the acquisition of MIRVing capability the
PRC is actively pursuing it (thanks, again, in part to technology thefts and diversions from the
United States. It is engaged in anti-satellite weaponry development and ABM-defense research
as well.

A similar line was taken earlier this year by the RAND Corporation’s Jonathan Pollack at a
two-day Carnegie Endowment event. He averred that it might have been bad form for the
Chinese to steal the United States’ “legacy codes,” representing the fruits of some fifty-five years
of U.S. nuclear weapons development and deployment experience, “but that doesn’t mean it is
bad [that] they have them.” This view, well-received at the conference, seems to mirror that of
the Clinton Administration which reportedly encouraged China to rely upon such data and the
powerful supercomputers (whose unprecedented transfer President Clinton has repeatedly
approved) needed to exploit it. ¹¹

The theory goes that such a quantum enhancement of the technology base of the PRC’s
nuclear
weapons program would be desirable insofar as it helped to wean Beijing from
underground
testing and, thereby, clear the way for China’s accession to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Never mind the fact that, as the U.S. Senate determined earlier this year, the CTBT is wholly
unverifiable and that militarily significant Chinese cheating could go undetected. ¹² In the minds
of China’s “friends,” strengthening the People’s Liberation Army is a necessary and desirable
contribution to strategic stability.

CISAC Misconstrues China’s Guiding Philosophy

Such thinking is dangerously out of touch with reality. Even the Clinton Administration’s
Pentagon felt constrained in its 1999 Strategic Assessment to note that:

^st

It seems likely that the PRC will do this in accordance with techniques taught by Sun Tzu —
that
is, via stealth and deception, seeking to “alter the enemy’s strategy,” “cloud his perceptions,”
“disrupt his alliances,” “feign weakness when strong” and by exploiting asymmetric technologies
that place the United States at risk, making respectable gains at an acceptable level of cost.

A key ingredient in the realization of this Chinese agenda is the utilization of the PRC’s
growing
economic strength to support the military’s program. Few points more clearly illustrate the gap
between the views of the “friends of China” and those with a more clear-eyed appreciation of
Beijing’s thinking than their differences over the meaning and implications of Deng Xiopeng’s
“16 Character Statement” featured prominently in government offices throughout China and
cited in the introduction to the Cox Report: “Combine the military and the civil;
combine
peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military.”

The CISAC report attempts unconvincingly to portray this broad and sustained “16
Character”
policy as one limited to defense-conversion projects under a leading commission, COSTIND.
Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, the correct interpretation of Deng’s slogan is evident in its
implementation,
especially since Tiananmen, when the Communist Party’s dependence on the military to retain
power was placed in sharpest relief. This record is summarized by one of the world’s leading
authorities on China’s politics, the South China Morning Post‘s Willy Wo-lap Lam,
in his new
book The Era of Jiang Zemin:

After June 1989 [i.e., the time of the Tiananmen massacre], Deng himself reversed many of
his
earlier doctrines. He boosted the party’s “absolute leadership over the gun”….His previous
teachings on army modernization were superceded by one central concern: to ensure that the
PLA become a “steel Great Wall” that would protect the Party against the onslaughts of hostile
foreign forces” ….Throughout the 1990’s Politburo and Central Military Commission members
and leading generals “were having a bigger say in the use of economic resources, even in
industrial policy;” articulating polices of “fusion of peace-time and war-time needs…the
synthesis of war and peace” and “Army production should take precedence over the civilian
sector.”

…Shanghai party boss and Politburo member Huang Ju…said development in the civilian
sector
should take place “in lockstep” with that of the army.” “The National Defense Law of
1997…enshrin[ed] the PLA’s status as a ‘state within a state'”….This ran counter to Deng’s
original insistence that…it must be subordinate to the requirements of economic
development”….Li Peng in his National Party Congress address of 1997…called the army a
“special guarantor” of economic development; other government units were asked to furnish the
PLA with unquestioned assistance: “All levels of government must support the PLA.”

Clearly, the all-pervading aim of the Chinese regime is not the conversion of the PRC into a
pluralistic political system with a free market economy modeled after, and integrated with,
Western institutions. Rather, its purpose is to perpetuate the Communist Party’s rule. For this it
needs nationalism and the army; all else is subordinated to the furthering of those indispensable
instruments of state power.

The Bottom Line

The CISAC report shows that there will always be those who argue in the face of all history,
fact
and logic that conflict is improbable or outmoded because of “global interdependence,” parity of
“status,” or other factors of dubious relevance except to their partisans. For them, factors like
espionage, technology controls and effective deterrence are extraneous issues or bothersome
hypotheticals.

The truth of the matter is, however, that the only thing more recurrent than these shopworn
and
historically discredited propositions is conflict itself. The studied inability (or unwillingness) of
the Stanford 5 to see the larger pattern behind the PRC’s relentless militarization over two
decades is precisely why the Cox Report remains such a valuable and necessary benchmark
work.

¹For a copy of the Cox Report see the Select Committee’s web site
(http://cox.house.gov/sc/index.htm).

²The same acronym was applied to this organization during its
previous incarnation, when it
was known as the Center for International Security and Arms Control. The substitution of “and
Cooperation” for “Arms Control” in CISAC’s title presumably reflects a recognition of the
dwindling relevance of the arms control theology — or at least its cachet — in the post-Cold War
world.

³See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
‘Inquiring Minds Want to Know’: Does Bill Perry
Have What it Takes to Make Sound Defense Policy? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_13″>No. 94-D 13, 2 February 1994).

⁴It appears that the Administration took full advantage of its ability
to control the
declassification process to delay the public release of the Cox Report and to control the contents
of such information was released and its characterization. Predictably, some — like the “Stanford
5″ — are now exploiting the Committee’s refusal to disclose material that supported its
conclusions and recommendations in deference to the CIA’s assertions that doing so could harm
sensitive sources and methods.

⁵For additional information about the various ways in which the
Cox Committee’s assessments
have been confirmed or otherwise reinforced, see “Update on the Select Committee Report” on
the Committee’s web site ( href=”http://cox.house.gov/sc/index.htm”>http://cox.house.gov/sc/index.htm).

⁶Notably, a laudatory report in last Wednesday’s Washington
Post by staff reporter Walter
Pincus. In this article as in many previous ones, Pincus appears to be trying to excuse, obscure
or otherwise minimize the damage done by the Clinton-Gore Administration’s security policies.
See Giving ‘Clinton’s Legacy’ New Meaning: The Buck Stops at the President’s
Desk on the
‘Legacy’ Code, Other D.O.E. Scandals (No. 99-D
52, 29 April 1999) and The Politicized
C.I.A.: The Real Problem Has Been Under – Not Over – Estimating Moscow’s
Weaponry (No.
95-D 95, 20 November 1995).

⁷An even more impressive testament to the Cox Report’s credibility
is the fact that, after
members of the House of Representatives had an opportunity to review this lengthily classified
document in its entirety, legislators adopted fully two-thirds of the Cox Committee’s
recommendations by a vote of 428-0.

⁸These errors are detailed in a response to the CISAC study (and
three similar critiques
published previously) that was written by Nicholas Rostow, a former senior member of the Cox
Committee’s staff and present Staff Director of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence. Rostow’s essay, entitled “50 Factual Errors in the Four Essays,” can be accessed at
( href=”http://cox.house.gov/sc/coverage/SenIntell.pdf”>http://cox.house.gov/sc/coverage/SenIntel
l.pdf).

⁹Interestingly, this world-view similarly afflicted CISAC in its
earlier incarnation. In the
1980’s, the organization went to great lengths to “document” Soviet arms control compliance in
order to gainsay the Reagan Administration’s intelligence-driven conclusions about widespread
Soviet cheating on its disarmament obligations.

That CISAC effort became increasingly untenable after 1989 when the then-Soviet
Foreign
Minister Eduard Shevardnadze acknowledged that the Soviets had violated the ABM Treaty by
deliberately building a prohibited large, phased-array radar (LPAR) at Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.
With greater access to damming Soviet and Russian internal documents and memoirs following
the Berlin Wall’s collapse — concerning such matters as the USSR’s illegal territorial
anti-ballistic missile defense system and its chemical and biological weapons — all but the most
determined of the “useful idiots” recognize that purposeful violation of the USSR’s arms control
commitments was endemic in the “Evil Empire.”

¹⁰For example, as Yale University’s Paul Bracken points out, the
PRC perfected its DF-15
medium range missile’s targeting capabilities between its firings in the Taiwan Straits in July
1995 and its March 1996 reprise from an initial accuracy of 2.5 miles to within a few hundred
feet. This astonishing achievement means that in a mere 8 months the PRC did what it took the
U.S. and the Soviet Union, with vastly larger resources, 25 years to perfect. Thanks to, among
others (most notably Russia) American help, China is expected to have 1000 improved ICBM’s
and cruise missiles before 2010.

¹¹See Broadening the Lens: Peter Leitner’s
Revelations on ’60 Minutes,’ Capital Hill Indict
Clinton Technology Insecurity (No. 98-D
101, 6 June 1998).

¹²See C.T.B.T. Truth or Consequences #5:
Opposition to a Zero-Yield, Permanent Test Ban’s
is Rooted in Substance, Not Politics (No. 99-D
111, 11 October 1999) and C.T.B.T. Truth or
Consequences #4: The Zero-Yield, Permanent Test Ban’s Pedigree is Hard Left, Not
Bipartisan or Responsible (No. 99-D 110, 11
October 1999).

United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

December 9, 1999Center for Security Policy

December 6, 1999

The Honorable William S. Cohen
Secretary of Defense
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington D.C. 20301-1000

Dear Secretary Cohen:

We are writing to express our strong opposition to any further delay in deployment of the
Navy
Theater Wide and THAAD systems. According to Defense News, Defense
Department officials
are reviewing several options including cutting funding for the Navy Theater Wide program by
$2.5 billion over several years in order to fully fund the THAAD program, or trimming funding
for both programs, which would delay the deployment of both systems until 2010. In any case,
neither of these programs should be delayed by funding limitations.

In testimony to the Senate, Army, Navy, and Defense Department officials have repeatedly
made
it clear that valid requirements exist for both systems, which perform different missions.
Congress has also been strongly supportive of the Navy Theater Wide and THAAD programs,
and opposed a recent Administration proposal to adopt a strategy that would advance one
program at the expense of the other. In fact, section 232 of the FY 2000 Defense Authorization
Act states:

“The Secretary of Defense shall establish an acquisition strategy for the two upper tier
missile
defense systems [THAAD and Navy Theater Wide] that–

(1) retains funding for both of the upper tier systems in separate, independently managed
program elements throughout the future-years defense program;

(2) bases funding decisions and program schedules for each upper tier system on the
performance
of each system independent of the performance of the other system; and

(3) provides for accelerating the deployment of both of the upper tier systems to the
maximum
extent practicable.”

As the unclassified summary of the 1999 National Intelligence Estimate on the ballistic
missile
threat states, “the proliferation of medium-range ballistic missiles–driven primarily by North
Korean No Dong sales–has created an immediate, serious, and growing threat to U.S. forces,
interests, and allies in the Middle East and Asia, and has significantly altered the strategic
balances in the regions.” We agree, which is why both of our upper tier systems–THAAD and
Navy Theater Wide–must be deployed soon.

We strongly urge you to ensure adequate funding for both the Navy Theater Wide and
THAAD
programs, such that their deployment is constrained only by the pace of their technological
developments.

Sincerely,

Jon Kyl

Thad Cochran

Trent Lott

Larry Craig

Paul Coverdell

Wayne Allard

Mitch McConnell

Frank Murkowski

James Inhofe

Jim Bunning

John McCain

Spencer Abraham

Bob Smith

Phil Gramm

Don Nickles

Tim Hutchinson

Clinton Dare Not Gut Funding for Sea-Based Missile Defenses in Light of Strong Senate Support for the ‘AEGIS Option’

December 9, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Clinton Administration officials intent on slashing the budget for the
Navy’s sea-based missile defense program were put on notice earlier this week sixteen of the
Senate’s most influential voices on defense policy. In a letter to Secretary of Defense William
Cohen (see the attached), virtually the entire Senate
Republican leadership, along among
highly respected legislators, ¹ warned that the Congress
would oppose efforts to rob the
Navy Theater Wide (NTW) program to pay for the Army’s Theater High Altitude Area
Defense (THAAD) system on strategic and legal grounds.

In particular, the authors observed that cancellation or significant reduction of the NTW
program
not make strategic sense, given the proliferation of medium-range ballistic missiles. It
would
also violate portions of the FY 2000 Defense Authorization Act. ²

Highlights of the letter include the following passages (emphasis added):

Neither of these programs should be delayed by funding
limitations.

both

We strongly urge you to ensure adequate funding for both the Navy
Theater Wide and THAAD programs, such that their deployment is
constrained only by the pace of their technological developments

Candidate McCain Endorses Sea-Based Missile Defenses

The following day, while receiving the Intrepid Freedom Award aboard the U.S.S. Intrepid
Museum, another leading Republican presidential candidate ³ — Senator John McCain (R-AZ)
— affirmed his strong support for the Navy’s anti-missile program:

to develop programs that will provide for broader
regional coverage, such as the Navy’s proposed Theater Wide system.

The Bottom Line

Clearly, given the growing political support for the AEGIS Option, the United
States will have
a sea-based ballistic missile defense system. The only question is: Will we
have it before we
need it — or after?

¹ The signatories on the 6 December letter to Secretary Cohen were:
Jon Kyl, Thad Cochran,
Trent Lott, Larry Craig, Paul Coverdell, Wayne Allard, Mitch McConnell, Frank Murkowski,
James Inhofe, Jim Bunning, John McCain, Spencer Abraham, Bob Smith, Phil Gramm, Don
Nickles and Tim Hutchinson

²See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Will Clinton-Gore Get Away with Killing the Most
Promising Near-term Missile Defense System — The AEGIS Option? ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=99-D_138″>No. 99-D 138, 1
December 1999).

³ See The Emerging G.O.P. Alternative on Missile
Defense — Exercising the ‘AEGIS Option’
(No. 99-D 135, 18 November 1999).

Clinton Lets Trade Trump Security, Again

November 29, 1999Frank Gaffney, Jr.

(Washington, D.C.): The World Trade Organization meeting that opens tomorrow in Seattle
will
provide an unparalleled backdrop for demonstrations by those around the country worried about
the Clinton-Gore Administration’s proclivity to put trade above every other national interest.
Interestingly, there is one group whose equities have been perhaps even more seriously afflicted
by this practice than have those of the voluble labor union operatives, environmentalists, human
rights organizations, AIDS activists and opponents of world government — namely, the
national
security community.

Just how grievously America’s defense posture has suffered at the hands of the trade
uber alles
crowd has been obscured by other manifestations of the “hollowing out” to which the U.S.
military has been deliberately subjected over the past seven years. It is far easier to see, for
example, the devastating effects being wrought by the combination of: sustained
over-commitment of the armed forces’ personnel and assets on innumerable peacekeeping,
humanitarian and other assignments; inadequate force structure and recapitalization; and
plummeting morale.

Decimating the Nation’s ‘Qualitative Edge’

It could be argued, however, that even more serious damage has been done to our armed
forces’
“qualitative edge” — the decisive advantage in technology that has in the past permitted
numerically inferior American units to dominate the battlefield and accomplish their mission
with minimal casualties. That advantage has been compromised by Mr. Clinton’s single-minded
determination to curry favor with deep-pocketed U.S. exporters and/or foreign governments by
selling Communist China or other potential adversaries militarily relevant equipment and
manufacturing know-how. The latter include, for example: supercomputers, advanced machine
tools, fiber optic and other sophisticated telecommunications gear, jet engine hot sections, rocket
propulsion and guidance components, “stealth” technology, to name a few.

There is no indication that the Defense Department is properly addressing the prospective
costs
to the United States associated with these transactions. These can be huge. Consider the case
nearly two decades ago of the Soviet Union’s illegal acquisition of tools needed to produce very
quiet submarine propellers. For an expenditure of roughly $40 million, the Kremlin was able to
degrade dramatically the U.S. Navy’s acoustic anti-submarine warfare (ASW) techniques. At the
time, it was conservatively estimated that restoring the Nation’s previous advantage in ASW
would require an investment of over $1 billion. No one has proposed adding many times that
amount to the Pentagon’s budget to help preserve or restore America’s qualitative edge in the
wake of more recent — and Clinton-approved — technology transfers.

Worse yet, the ultimate costs of the Administration’s ill-advised dual-use exports will
probably
be measured in a currency we hold still more dear: the lives of American servicemen and
women.
This is especially true since the Administration has all-but-liquidated America’s mechanisms for
controlling overseas sales of such technologies. The House select committee chaired by
Rep.
Chris Cox (R-CA) underscored this point recently in connection with Chinese
technology theft,
diversion and above-board acquisition efforts — using words that could apply equally well to
other potential foes:

Interring D.T.S.A.

Unfortunately, the Clinton-Gore team has compounded its folly in dismantling COCOM by
waging war on the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA).
The fact that this
Pentagon agency played a pivotal role in winning the Cold War by impeding Soviet efforts to
acquire Western dual-use equipment and know-how apparently earned it the abiding enmity of a
number of Mr. Clinton’s political appointees. From the get-go, they have employed one
bureaucratic instrument after another to ravage DTSA — taking job actions against and otherwise
harassing some of the organization’s most savvy and effective analysts; cutting back on of
DTSA’s resources; and reducing its role and clout in interagency decision-making on
controversial export licenses. ¹

Not content with hamstringing DTSA in these ways, Deputy Secretary of Defense John
Hamre
further weakened the agency’s critical sense of mission — and its ability to carry it out — by
imbedding this export control unit into a newly created entity with the catch-all responsibility for
“threat reduction.” The effect has been to add layers of bureaucracy, compounding the
Administration’s already considerable impediments to having key licensing actions informed by
national security-minded expertise.

Now, Hamre wants to banish this unwieldy and incoherent Threat Reduction Agency to
“temporary” and other structures at Fort Belvoir, an Army base sufficiently removed from
Washington effectively to preclude DTSA experts’ participation in day-to-day deliberations
about technology transfers. The plan calls for completing this kiss-of-death “consolidation and
relocation” by August, just before next fall’s election, thus presenting a new President who may
take a more responsible view of export controls on strategic technologies with a fait accompli.

The Bottom Line

The United States cannot afford to wait for another, more responsible administration to come
to
town to begin correcting some of the damage done by the Clinton Administration’s misfeasance,
if not outright malfeasance, with respect to the export of strategic technologies. Unfortunately,
unlike efforts to correct the underfunding of the military or its over-utilization for non-combat
purposes, it may prove not just costly but exceedingly difficult fully to redress the military
repercussions of having allowed such technologies out of the proverbial barn.

We must nonetheless start at once with a wholesale reexamination of the premises and
repercussions of the Clinton approach to exporting dual-use equipment and know-how. At the
very least, the Defense Technology Security Administration must be rehabilitated and given once
again a real say in decisions about strategically sensitive licenses. This will require, among other
things, that DTSA remain a force to be reckoned with in Washington — not a spent force
consigned to the bureaucratic equivalent of Siberia.

¹See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Profile in Courage: Mike Maloof Speaks Truth to
Power about Clinton’s Dangerous Tech Transfers to China ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_192″>No. 98-D 192, 30 November
1998); Broadening the Lens: Peter Leitner’s Revelations on ’60 Minutes,’ Capitol
Hill Indict
Clinton Technology Insecurity (No. 98-D
101, 6 June 1998); and Profile In Courage: Peter
Leitner Blows The Whistle On Clinton’s Dangerous Export Decontrol Policies
(No. 97-P 82,
19 June 1997).

Annan’s Latest Pandering to Ruthless Dictators — This Time in Beijing — Shows U.N. is Not a ‘Smart Investment’ in Our Security

November 17, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): Since March, the Better World Campaign — an organization created
and
funded by Ted Turner — has been spending millions of dollars in a highly misleading, but now
successful, effort to persuade the Congress to appropriate monies “owed” the United Nations. ¹
During the past seven months, the Turner campaign has produced and broadcast no fewer than
seventeen television commercials and numerous print advertisements, many of which feature
variations on the theme that “the UN is a smart investment” for the United States since
“[although] the UN can be frustrating, it works” in “resolving conflicts, confronting terrorism,
preventing world war. The UN continues to work in America’s interests in dangerous and distant
places around the world.”

With Friends Like the UN…

Unfortunately, in at least some of those dangerous and distant places, the United
Nations is
decidedly not working in America’s interests or, for that matter, in the interests of
“confronting
terrorism” and “preventing war.” For example, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told reporters
after meeting with China’s Foreign Minister Tang Xiaxuan in Beijing yesterday that, “I think I
leave here with a better understanding of some of the issues involved [in the PRC’s brutal
crackdown on the Falun Gong movement. Mr. Tang had assured him] that in dealing with this
issue, the fundamental rights of citizens will be respected and some of the actions they
are
taking are for the protection of individuals.”

The New York Times reported today however, that:

Mr. Annan was clearly loath to offend
China

The Times then described the lengths to which the UN Secretary General
kow-towed to his
hosts: “Mr. Annan offered United Nations help in strengthening the government’s legal
procedures to deal with the Falun Gong problem ‘in accordance with international
norms,’
Mr. Almeidae Silva [Annan’s spokesman] said. Mr. Tang gave no response, he said.”

Deja Vu All Over Again

Kofi Annan’s revolting efforts to curry favor with despotic hosts — in this case, by
legitimating
Chinese repression of a sect seeking the opportunity to practice the basic human right of freedom
of religion — is all too reminiscent of an earlier, appalling spectacle: the Secretary General’s
effort to “resolve conflicts” between Saddam Hussein and the rest of the world in February 1998,
by treating with legitimacy the ruthless and bloodthirsty Iraqi dictator.

At the time, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott properly castigated the
Secretary General’s
pathetic diplomacy: “Let’s look at what [Secretary General Annan] has said. ‘Saddam
can be
trusted.’ ‘I think I can do business with [Saddam].’ ‘I think [Saddam] was serious.’
These
are all direct quotes. The Secretary General told reporters he spent the weekend building a
‘human relationship’ with Saddam Hussein …. These comments are outrageous. They
reflect
someone bent on appeasement — not someone determined to make the United Nations
inspection regime [in Iraq] work effectively.” ²

The Bottom Line

While the Congress and President Clinton finally came to terms that allowed America’s UN
“arrearages” to be cleaned up, there is little likelihood that the Better World Campaign, or others
who subscribe to its multilateralist impulses and agenda, will cease their efforts to promote the
United Nations as a reliable tool for U.S. security in “an unstable world.” The truth of the
matter, however, is that, at least under its present leadership — and arguably under any
foreseeable alternative, given the nature of the organization — the UN is, at best,
an unreliable
substitute for effective American military power and sovereignty. More likely,
it will
actively seek to constrain and subvert both.

¹ The extent of the United States’ actual indebtedness is debatable.
Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Chris Smith (R-NJ) have correctly observed that the U.S.
could be considered a
“deadbeat” with respect to the UN only if it is given no credit for billions of dollars worth of
“voluntary” contributions it has made in recent years to the organization’s myriad peacekeeping,
humanitarian and other operations. See Center Decision Brief entitled Credit Where It Is Due
On U.S. Financial Support For The U.N (No. 99-D
122, 21 October 1999).

² See Center Decision Brief entitled
This Is The Time To ‘Bash’ — Or At Least Repudiate —
The U.N.; Bipartisan, Bicameral Consensus Emerges That Saddam Must Go ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=98-D_36″>No. 98-D 36, 26
February 1998).

Were Senate Foreign Relations to Get to the Bottom of Adm. Prueher’s Stint as CINCPAC, It Might Sink his Posting to Beijing

October 28, 1999Center for Security Policy

(Washington, D.C.): The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduled to hold hearings
today on the nomination of Admiral Joseph Prueher (USN Ret.), the former
Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), to become the next U.S. ambassador to Communist
China. It was
highly ironic, given the extraordinary lengths to which Admiral Prueher went in his previous
capacity to endear himself to the Chinese, that Beijing delayed this posting for many months as
part of its retaliation for the bombing of its embassy in Belgrade. If the Committee is
doing its
job, it will put the Prueher nomination on hold for a bit longer in order to permit a
close
examination of evidence that may suggest the Admiral’s demonstrated determination to
please the PRC make him unsuited to represent U.S. interests there.

Just the Facts, Ma’am

Specifically, the Center has learned that there may be a number of documents — many, if not
all
of them, classified — that could shed light on this question. If so, the Foreign Relations
Committee ought to have an opportunity to examine and evaluate them prior to acting
on this
nominee. These are said to include:

A cable describing a meeting between Taiwan’s highest military leader Tang Fei and
Admiral
Prueher in his office in Pacific Command in Honolulu.

Documentation concerning the changes Admiral Prueher made in the planning for the
defense
of Taiwan in the spring of 1996, soon after he assumed command of the Pacific Command.

The U.S. Air Force’s written objections to such changes.

The Strategic Command’s written objections (not to be confused with those expressed by
the
Air Force) when Adm. Prueher reportedly refused to accept any nuclear targeting experts at
Pacific Command.

Documentation of Adm. Prueher’s decision that no nuclear target planners would be
assigned
to the Pacific Command staff, a dramatic departure from previous practice.

Documentation of the reported decision by the JCS Chairman to remove Taiwan planning
from Adm. Prueher’s Pacific Command in Honolulu and transferred it to the JCS instead.

Documentation reflecting Adm. Prueher’s reported objections to various arms sales requests
made by Taiwan.

Evidence that Adm. Prueher did obtain the necessary permission from the Defense
Department for either a tour for People’s Liberation Army officers of a U.S. nuclear attack
submarine or for sending the PLA naval delegation to sensitive U.S. Navy training facilities in
California during the visit of several ships of the Chinese navy to San Diego.

Materials bearing on Adm. Prueher’s conduct with the PLA and the lengths to which he
went
to become the first CINCPAC to be received by the President of China in Beijing, actions that
may also bear on the issue of unauthorized military-to-military contacts between the two
countries.

The Bottom Line

Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC) has
provided immensely
important leadership throughout his career in resisting efforts to curry favor with Communist
despots at the expense of U.S. national security and other interests. Most recently, he has joined
forces with Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ) to sponsor the very valuable
Taiwan Security
Enhancement Act (TSEA) ¹ of 1999 — an act
strenuously opposed by the Chinese and by their
friends in the Clinton Administration.

Given Adm. Prueher’s track record it seems certain that, even without instructions, he will be
a
forceful new critic of this important legislation. That fact alone might justify delaying action on
his nomination until after action on the TSEA — which was adopted in a modified
form by an
overwhelming, bipartisan vote in the House International Relations Committee earlier this week
— is completed, hopefully before the congressional recess this fall.

At the very least, the principle that Sen. Helms has established in his committee’s
consideration
of the Holbrooke and Mosely-Braun nominations — namely, that Senators are entitled, before
acting on controversial (if not deeply flawed) nominations, to be privy to relevant information in
the hands of the executive branch that bears upon the candidate’s ethics, judgment and
professional conduct — should be observed in this case. No action should be taken on his
nomination until all such information has been supplied and properly considered by the
Committee. As Sen. Bob Smith (I-NH) notes in today’s Washington Times (see the
attached),
Adm. Preuher should be the first to seek the prompt release of these documents to the committee
allowing the Senate to complete its duties as expeditiously and as fully as possible.

¹ See the Center’s National Security
Alerts (No. 99-A 28, 30 July 1999) and (No. 99-A 38, 22
October 1999).

Clinton’s ‘Big Lies’ on the Senate’s Rejection of the C.T.B.T.

October 18, 1999Frank Gaffney, Jr.

“The great masses of the people…will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small
one.”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

(Washington, D.C.): In the wake of Bill Clinton’s stinging repudiation by the Senate over the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) last week, the President, his subordinates and their
allies outside the administration have responded by repeatedly smearing Republican opponents
of this accord with what can only be called “big lies.” This practice was much in evidence in the
course of Mr. Clinton’s press conference last week where he declared that the GOP was engaging
in “a reckless partisanship — it threatens America’s economic well being and, now, our national
security.”

Early in what amounted to the better part of an hour-long rant on that occasion, the President
declared without a hint of irony: “It’s been my experience that very often in politics when a
person is taking a position that he simply cannot defend, the only defense is to attack the
opponent.” The truth is, however, that it is the Clinton Administration whose position on the
CTBT is indefensible and whose only “defense” is now to attack those Senators who
courageously voted to reject a treaty that an actual majority of Senators found to be
insupportable.

A Bill of Particulars

Consider some of the more outrageous of the big lies being used to defame the fifty-one
Republicans who voted against the CTBT:

Big Lie: Partisan Republicans didn’t allow enough time for hearings or
debate or afford the
needed opportunity for amendment of the Treaty.

The Truth:

Every Senator, Democrat as well as Republican,
explicitly assented
to the unanimous consent agreement that set out the arrangements under which
the CTBT was considered.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott,

Sens. Jon
Kyl

Paul Coverdell

Energy Secretary James Schlesinger

Big Lie: The treaty was killed by hard-line Republicans who oppose
bipartisan approaches to
foreign policy in general and arms control in particular.

The Truth:

real

Big Lie: As White House press spokesman Joe Lockhart put it Friday,
in the wake of the
CTBT’s defeat: “The titanic debate that’s gone on over the last several years within the
Republican Party has finally been settled in favor of Fortress America — isolationism.”

The Truth:

The Bottom Line

Those who believe, as most Senators evidently do, that America’s global leadership,
international interests and security are better served by a credible deterrent than by an
unverifiable, unenforceable treaty that would undermine that deterrent, should welcome the
debate being promised — or, more accurately, threatened — by CTBT proponents.
Senatorial, to
say nothing of popular, opposition to this treaty can only be strengthened by intensified exposure
of the public to the wooly-headed, radical anti-nuclear agenda of which the zero-yield, permanent
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has long been a cornerstone. And that’s no lie.

Senate Majority’s Defeat of C.T.B.T. Represents Triumph of Sound Security Policy Over Placebo Arms Control

October 14, 1999Center for Security Policy

Senator Lott Deserves Great Credit for Securing
Vote

(Washington, D.C.): Last night’s action by a majority of the United States Senate to reject
the
fatally flawed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is its finest hour in a generation. The
Senate has fulfilled its constitutional role as a quality control check-and-balance on the
executive’s treaty-making power. In so doing, it has spared the Nation the obligation to comply
with a permanent, zero-yield ban on nuclear testing that would have done grievous harm to the
U.S. nuclear deterrent. And it did so on the merits of the case, thanks to
Senator Trent Lott’s
leadership, not out of partisan political considerations.

A Defeat for Substantive Reasons, Not Political
Ones

An unprecedented majority of Senators rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban because, when
it
came time to vote, even Senators like Richard Lugar of Indiana, Thad
Cochran of Mississippi,
Ted Stevens of Alaska, Pete Domenici of New Mexico and
Olympia Snowe of Maine —
legislators with unbroken records of bipartisanship in support for arms control agreements and
foreign policy initiatives they deem to be in the national interest — voted to reject this treaty.
It
is contemptible and irresponsible to suggest that these members in particular would so act
out of any motivation other than what they believed to be best for the national security and
the international effort to achieve real constraints upon the proliferation of nuclear
weapons around the world.

Indeed, those who insist that the Senate acted in a partisan fashion display only their
own
ignorance of the substantive nature of the step taken last night and their biases with respect
to both the CTBT itself and the proposition that the Senate is supposed to be more than a
rubber-stamp in the treaty-making process.

This is all the more reprehensible in light of Sen. Lugar’s principled statement:

Credit Where it is Due

These and the other Senators who refused to consent to the CTBT’s ratification did so thanks
primarily to Senator Lott’s patient and sustained efforts to ensure that they were acquainted with
the CTBT’s myriad defects. Briefings arranged for members of the majority by and with
Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Paul Coverdell (R-GA),
involving former Secretary of Defense
and Energy James R. Schlesinger, former Assistant to the Secretary of
Defense for Atomic
Energy Robert Barker and former Assistant Director of the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency Kathleen Bailey were particularly instrumental in providing the
technical, strategic and arms control bases for finding the present test ban to be unacceptable.

Also influential were the arguments advanced in letters to the Senate, congressional
testimony
and other vehicles (notably, editorials and/or op.ed. articles in such newspapers as the Wall
Street
Journal, Washington Times, New York Times and Washington Post), by a
panoply of security
policy practitioners whose service to the country has been characterized by the pursuit of
bipartisan initiatives. These include, in addition to Dr. Schlesinger: former
Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger; former Clinton Directors of Central Intelligence James
Woolsey and John
Deutch and Bush DCI Robert Gates; and former
Secretaries of Defense Melvin Laird,
Donald Rumsfeld, Caspar Weinberger, Frank Carlucci and Dick
Cheney, former U.N.
Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard
Perle, and
nearly a score of retired senior military commanders, including one of the most revered former
chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John Vessey. The critique
offered by these
knowledgeable and respected individuals — namely, that the CTBT was unverifiable,
unenforceable and inimical to U.S. national security interests — was dispositive, not
short-term
partisan concerns.

Instrumental to the Majority Leader’s efforts to ensure that the Senate acted on these
concerns by
voting to reject the CTBT were the steadfast, principled and informed contributions to the debate
— and the process by which it was conducted — by, among others: Senate Foreign
Committee
Chairman Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Senators Jim Inhofe (R-OK),
Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Paul
Coverdell (R-GA), Phil Gramm (R-TX), Larry Craig
(R-ID), Mitch McConnell (R-KY),
Connie Mack (R-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL),
Bob Smith (I-NH), Tim Hutchinson (R-AR),
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Wayne Allard (R-CO) and
Jeff Sessions (R-AL).

The Good to Come from the CTBT’s Rejection

The Nation owes Senator Lott and his colleagues a particular debt of gratitude for helping set
the
stage for a long-overdue debate about the future course of U.S. nuclear weapons and
arms
control policy. Its principal features should be:

Encouraging greater realism about the continuing requirement for a safe, reliable
and
effective U.S. nuclear deterrent — and the role realistic, periodic underground testing
plays in assuring that these qualities abide. As President Reagan put it in a 1988 report
to
Congress:

“Nuclear testing is indispensable to maintaining the credible nuclear deterrent which has
kept the peace for over 40 years. Thus we do not regard nuclear testing as an evil to be curtailed,
but as a tool to be employed responsibly in pursuit of national security. The U.S. tests neither
more often nor at higher yields than is required for our security. As long as we must depend on
nuclear weapons for our fundamental security, nuclear testing will be necessary.”

Impressing upon the public that a permanent, zero-yield ban on nuclear testing
would
not only harm the U.S. deterrent: it would be ineffectual as a means of controlling
proliferation. Even Clinton Administration spokesmen acknowledge that it will not
prevent
determined nations from acquiring the sorts of “simple” but devastating nuclear devices that
fully satisfy the needs of the North Koreans, Iranians, Iraqis, etc. to threaten or actually use
weapons of mass destruction against the United States and/or its allies. In Senator Lugar’s
words:

“I believe the enforcement mechanisms of the CTBT provide little reason for countries
to
forego nuclear testing. Some of my friends respond to this charge by pointing out that even if the
enforcement provisions of the treaty are ineffective, the treaty will impose new international
norms for behavior. In this case, we have observed that ‘norms’ have not been persuasive for
North Korea, Iraq, Iran, India and Pakistan, the very countries whose actions we seek to
influence through a CTBT.

“If a country breaks the international norm embodied in the CTBT, that country has already
broken the norm associated with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Countries other than the
recognized nuclear powers who attempt to test a weapon must first manufacture or obtain a
weapon, which would constitute a violation of the NPT. I fail to see how an additional
norm
will deter a motivated nation from developing nuclear weapons after violating the
long-standing norm of the NPT.”

Creating greatly improved opportunities for real “advice” on the part of the
Senate — in
particular via its new National Security Working Group (the successor to the Senate’s Arms
Control Observer Group), chaired by Senator Cochran — during the crafting of negotiating
positions and the conduct of the negotiations themselves. Such a practice would avoid the
situation in which the Senate found itself on the CTBT, namely a take-it-or-leave-it position,
either rubber-stamp or reject the accord outright.

an end to bad arms control,

harm

co-equal

Affording — via the device of restoring the Senate to its rightful place in
the treaty-making
process — the executive branch and its representatives in various arms negotiations
leverage all-too-lacking in recent years. As Senator Kyl has pointed out in
the context of
the CTBT debate, had the Senate’s determination to reject a zero-yield, permanent duration
test ban been taken into account in 1995, President Clinton should have been able to resist
pressures from negotiating partners (and some within his own Administration) to abandon
positions that would have preserved the right to conduct low-yield testing and a finite duration
to the ban that had been demanded by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of
Defense, the nuclear lab directors and others.

show-stoppers

Encouraging the pursuit of new and far more promising approaches to dealing
with the
real and growing threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction than the
placebos of phony and counter-productive multilateral arms control. These include: a
vigorous effort to restore effective multilateral export controls; the rapid deployment of
anti-missile defenses; improved intelligence and counter-proliferation operations; and collective
defense measures for our populations.

The Bottom Line

With or without the CTBT, there is going to be more nuclear testing around the world. Even
before the Senate rejected the CTBT, there was evidence of recent low-level Russian and
Chinese nuclear tests. While some may blame these tests on the Senate’s action, the reality is
that rogue states and others are going to make decisions to test nuclear weapons — and, more
importantly, to pursue nuclear weapons programs themselves — on the basis of
national
decisions about the local security situation, not fatuous American efforts to create fraudulent
“norms” of behavior.

Senate Republicans — and, most especially, their leader, Senator Lott — deserve great credit
for
their willingness to risk the charge that nuclear testing elsewhere and other international
developments (for example, as some Democrats implausibly suggested, the recent coup in
Pakistan) are their fault. These charges will be as untenable as they are unfair. By
placing the
national security of the United States ahead of the understandable temptation to accede to the
pressure tactics and wooly-headed nostrums of the anti-nuclear movement, they have created
opportunities for more constructive, realistic and effective means of dealing with the threats the
CTBT would have done nothing to prevent from emerging.

Every American should welcome the national debate on these fundamental choices about
national security policy that the CTBT’s proponents promise to provoke in the hope of
resurrecting their rejected treaty. Let that debate begin!