Tag Archives: Defense Procurement Policy

Russian Gambit on Buying Missile Defense at Cost of Nuclear Deterrence is a Non-STARTer

(Washington, D.C.): The Kremlin yesterday launched a new trial balloon with regard to missile defense. The next U.S. President — whomever he may be — would be well-advised to tell Moscow “Thanks, but no thanks.” And the lame duck incumbent should do nothing in the remaining weeks of his term to compromise his successor’s ability to do just that.

According to a report circulated by Reuters on 13 November, “General Vladimir Yakovlev, commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces, told Russian reporters it would be very difficult to persuade Washington not to violate the 1972 Anti- Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that limits defenses against nuclear attack.”

On the same day, Russia’s Interfax news agency reported:

“As is known, the current lull in the ABM Treaty issue is caused by the change of the American administration and is likely to end soon,” Yakovlev said. “The main threat posed by altering the ABM accords is that it will radically change the state of affairs in the sphere of strategic offensive weapons.”

Yakovlev has proposed that U.S. plans for ABM Treaty modification be counterbalanced with “an invariable aggregate index of strategic armaments to be made up of nuclear attack and missile defense means.”

As a counterbalance to American plans to modify the [ABM] treaty’s references to anti-missile defenses, Yakovlev proposed to introduce an unchanging general indicator of strategic weapons which would include anti-missile defense means as well as means of nuclear attack. “A country that wishes to increase one of the components will have to cut the other,” Yakovlev said.

“In that case, a country that wishes to enlarge one of the components will have to cut the other. We can seek the equaling of our ground-based intercontinental ballistic missiles with similar missiles of the United States based on submarines. In that case, they would be exempt from START II, which does not allow intercontinental ballistic missiles with multiple warheads with individually targeted elements,” Yakovlev said. (Emphasis added.)

What is Wrong With This Picture?

There are several obvious problems with such an initiative. They include:

  • This proposal is clearly intended to breathe new life into a bilateral arms control process that has grown increasingly irrelevant in the post-Cold War world. As Gov. Bush made clear during the course of the campaign, the Cold War is over; equally pass should be the idea that the United States and Russia must maintain some sort of balance of terror within the construct of negotiated agreements.
  • Were the Yakovlev proposal to be embraced by the United States, it would afford the Kremlin a wholly undesirable mechanism for interfering with and otherwise influencing U.S. missile defense programs. For starters, the Russians will surely try to lock us into a “first phase NMD” along the lines of the single, ground-based site President Clinton ultimately chose not to start building in Alaska.

    American anti-missile systems have suffered for far too long from such meddling on the part of the Kremlin and its agents of influence in the United States. It is time to build the best, most flexible and, if possible, the least costly missile defense the Nation can devise. This will almost certainly involve the use of sea-based assets utilizing the Navy’s AEGIS fleet air defense infrastructure — an option the Russians are determined to foreclose.

  • By making the United States pay for its right to deploy missile defenses with cuts in strategic nuclear forces — if Moscow has its way, at levels below 1500 warheads — this country would be driven into an imprudent, if not reckless, minimum deterrence posture. Given that the United States will likely require in the future sufficient forces (both in terms of quantity and modern, flexible weapons types) to deter myriad potential adversaries, such a posture would be most ill- advised.
  • Considerable care is in order in with regard to reductions to levels of nuclear warheads so low that China and possibly other nations may aspire to secure “superpower status” by approximating them. This is hardly a formula for strategic stability.

    By the same token, Russia’s evident interest in maintaining multiple-warhead land-based missiles threatens to make a mockery of the START II agreement — whose principal selling point was that it would de-MIRV the former Soviet ICBM force — while creating new, and strategically significant, cheating opportunities for future agreements ostensibly promising still lower levels of nuclear weaponry.

  • Since the Russians have not acknowledged — and the U.S. government has not confirmed — that the former Soviet Union has long deployed a territorial defense against ballistic missile attack, the Yakovlev gambit would allow Moscow to penalize the United States for any decision to field defensive systems without having to pay any premium for its own, massive anti- missile programs. Even if it were desirable to maintain some kind of symmetry between the two countries’ strategic capabilities, this inherent inequity would preclude such an outcome.

The Bottom Line

There is an understandable temptation on the part of proponents of U.S. missile defenses to embrace General Yakovlev’s largely undefined suggestion since it implicitly, if not explicitly, confirms what we have long maintained: Russia’s adamant insistence on the inviolability and immutability of the ABM Treaty was a negotiating ploy, subject to change whenever it suited the Kremlin’s purposes.

The General’s proposal seems especially geared toward seducing Gov. Bush’s camp, given the emphasis it placed during the campaign on its determination to deploy effective missile defenses as soon as possible while reducing to the maximum extent practicable the number of offensive weapons in the U.S. arsenal — including possibly to levels below those being contemplated for START III (i.e., 2,000- 2,500 weapons).

Extreme caution should be exercised, however, in light not only of the foregoing considerations but one other fact: Russian President Vladimir Putin chose — on the same day Yakovlev launched his trial balloon — to declare, according to the Washington Post, that “Russia is ready to consider an even lower limit than the 1,500 nuclear warheads on each side that Moscow now proposes could be reached by 2008. At the same time, he reiterated Russia’s opposition to a U.S. proposal to build a national missile defense system–a decision that President Clinton has left to his successor.”

The truth is the Russians remain adamantly opposed to any American missile defense and will use, if allowed to do so, whatever techniques are available — diplomatic or political, carrots or sticks — to try to confuse, delude or otherwise preclude the next U.S. President from deploying any effective anti- missile shield. They must not be allowed to succeed in this gambit.

Hallelujah: Joint Chiefs, Strategic Command Oppose Reckless Clinton Disarmament Initiatives

(Washington, D.C.): According to a front-page, above-the-fold report published in today’s Washington Times by the paper’s National Security correspondent Bill Gertz, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have sided with the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Strategic Command, Gen. Richard Meis, in objecting to radical reductions in American offensive nuclear forces sought by the Russian government. Specifically, the Chiefs and CINCSTRAT do not believe that cuts to 1500 strategic weapons as part of a START III Treaty are compatible with what “Strategic Command needs to execute its nuclear deterrence and warfighting missions” in the post-Cold War world (i.e., no fewer than 2500 warheads).

Who’s in Favor of this Bad Idea?

This opposition takes on all the more importance insofar as Mr. Gertz confirms what has long been rumored: The Clinton White House and State Department have decided to embrace the Russian proposal, even though it would — under present circumstances and START counting rules not only dictate the certain evisceration of the U.S. “Triad” of forces. It would also precipitate the dismantling of scores of long-range bomber aircraft armed with conventional weaponry.

It is simply absurd to believe it desirable (not to say essential) for U.S. strategic nuclear force decisions to be influenced (not to say determined by) the number of land- and/or sea-based nuclear missiles and intercontinental-range bombers the Russians can afford. Obviously, that is even more true of decisions governing the size, capability and effectiveness of America’s non-nuclear weaponry.

Still more preposterous is the underlying reality: The most determined adherents to such outdated Cold War mirror-imaging in the U.S. government are those who were, by and large, not in favor of waging that conflict when it was underway and who now proclaim it to be irreversibly over at practically every turn.

You Want it Bad…

Evidently concerned that the military and/or the Congress may not accept the draconian and unwise strategic force cuts the Russians and Clinton-Gore civilian officials desire, the Administration is reportedly considering ordering them to be undertaken on a unilateral basis. According to Mr. Gertz, such a step might be taken as part of a “presidential nuclear initiative” — loosely modeled after one taken by President Bush in 1991 leading to massive reductions in and deactivation of U.S. tactical and theater nuclear forces. At the time, then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced that his nation would make its own, unilateral but reciprocal reductions in such forces. (It is worth noting that, notwithstanding this pledge and the demise of the USSR, Russia is believed to retain huge numbers of such weapons in its active inventory, although the exact whereabouts and operational status of cannot be determined with precision by U.S. — and even by some official Russian — sources.)

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA), the influential chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Research and Development Committee, has properly denounced any such ill-considered unilateral “presidential initiative” in the absence of full consultation with and the approval of the Congress. In particular, he notes that “an assessment required under law to gauge strategic nuclear stability under a future START III agreement” has not been completed — a step that obviously should precede any decision (either of a unilateral or bilateral nature) to go to or beyond the 2500 weapons contemplated by the framework agreement for that treaty agreed between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin in 1997.

An indication of the sort of congressional repudiation President Clinton is inviting if he persists in making further, massive cuts in U.S. strategic forces can be seen in the rejection yesterday by Rep. Weldon’s committee of what Mr. Gertz described as “an amendment to [the FY2001] Defense authorization bill that would have given Mr. Clinton greater authority to cut nuclear forces.”

The Bottom Line

President Clinton is courting disaster — possibly politically and certainly strategically — if he pursues, in the face of rising opposition from not only the Congress but the uniformed military, unilateral or negotiated arms control agreements that would make more difficult the preservation of an effective nuclear deterrent. Insult would only be added to injury were he to compound this error by seeking an agreement with the Russians that would severely limit U.S. options promptly to deploy an effective, layered missile defense.

Words to the Wise on Missile Defense: Woolsey Confirms the A.B.M. Treaty Has Lapsed; Kim Jong-Il Confirms the Threat

(Washington, D.C.): Against the backdrop of a presidential campaign in which differences between the Republican and Democratic contenders1 on the question of deploying missile defenses are becoming a major focus (as even the New York Times acknowledged in its editions yesterday), two signal developments have occurred within the past forty-eight hours.

Jim Woolsey: What ABM Treaty?’

First, in the attached op.ed. article which appeared in the Washington Post on 15 August, President Clinton’s former Director of Central Intelligence, R. James Woolsey pronounced that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty no longer can, under international legal practice and precedent, be considered legally binding on the United States. In so doing, Mr. Woolsey — an eminent Washington attorney and experienced arms control negotiator — lent his considerable authority to the definitive legal analysis of this question produced last year for the Center for Security Policy by Douglas J. Feith and George Miron. 2

This study (which agrees in virtually all particulars with two others — the first of which was performed for the Heritage Foundation by David Rivkin and Lee Casey; the second (to which Mr. Woolsey alludes) by Professor Robert Turner of the University of Virginia law school — concluded that, as Mr. Feith stated in a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May 1999: “When the USSR became extinct, its bilateral, non-dispositive treaties lapsed. Hence, the ABM Treaty lapsed by operation of law — that is, automatically — when the USSR dissolved in 1991. It did not become a treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation.

Accordingly, in Mr. Woolsey’s words:

“The next President should [confer with our allies and Russia about his plans for missile defense]…but [he] need not, indeed he should not, do so from the disadvantaged position that he will have to abrogate a treaty before he proceeds to deployment….Unless some president submits the 1972 ABM Treaty, with its new parties, to the Senate and obtains its consent to the substantive changes, there is nothing to abrogate.”

This finding is especially relevant insofar as the Clinton-Gore Administration — which has yet to provide an authoritative response to any of these legal analyses, despite having been formally asked to do so last year by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jesse Helms in connection with the Feith-Miron study — has made every effort to encourage both the Russians and America’s allies to believe that the ABM Treaty remains in force. Worse yet, it has implied (if not explicitly communicated a commitment) that the United States will not deviate from the ABM Treaty without the Kremlin’s permission. This premise should be debunked officially; if neither Mr. Clinton nor Mr. Gore will do so, Governor Bush should.

Kim Jong-Il: Just Kidding’

The second development was the revelation by the dictator of North Korea that he was only joking last month when he and Russian President Vladimir Putin cooked up a scheme whereby Pyongyang might be induced to give up its ballistic missile program — and the overseas sales it involves to other, dangerous nations like Iran and Syria — if only the West gave it enough inducements (e.g., satellite launches, help with space technology, etc.)

This gambit gave impetus to a formal Russian diplomatic proposal for a “Global Monitoring System.” As the Center for Security Policy noted earlier this week3, this is an initiative “whose ostensible purpose is to enhance efforts to curb the proliferation of ballistic missiles. In fact, it is a transparent Soviet-style ploy, aimed at creating further impediments to U.S. ballistic missile programs (including cooperation with allies like Britain and Israel) and undercutting the rationale behind efforts to deploy national missile defenses for the American people.”

The Bottom Line

Fortunately, as the attached editorial in today’s Washington Post makes clear, Kim’s latest statements serve to underscore the folly of ignoring decades of North Korean behavior — to say nothing of abandoning needed U.S. efforts promptly to deploy national missile defenses — on the basis of romantic illusions spawned by his much-ballyhooed summit with South Korea’s president.

The North Korean’s ridicule also makes a mockery of the new “Code of Conduct” on missile proliferation Under Secretary of State John Hollum is currently trying to cobble together with the Russians in Geneva. That potentially profoundly insidious exercise should be brought to an immediate halt, as should companion efforts to prepare arms control agreements (e.g., START III, new codicils to the ABM Treaty, space arms negotiations in the Conference on Disarmament4, etc.) in the whose effects will be to make it still more difficult to deploy needed American missile defenses.




1As the attached article published by the Center for Security Policy’s President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., in National Review On-Line makes clear, a more accurate way to describe these differences would be between Governor Bush, Secretary Cheney and Senator Lieberman — all of whom favor the prompt deployment of effective, layered missile defenses (including, as needed, in space) — and Vice President Gore, who appears still to be more committed to protecting the ABM Treaty than the American people.

2See Definitive Study Shows Russians Have No Veto Over Defending U.S. (No. 99-P 11, 22 January 1999).

3See Clinton’s October Surprise(s) ( No. 00-D 74, 14 August 2000).

4See the Center’s National Security Alerts for the Weeks of 7 August 2000 (No. 00-A 30, 4 August 2000); 22 May 2000 (No. 00-A 19, 22 May 2000); and 10 January 2000 (No. 00-A 01, 10 January 2000).

Clinton’s October Surprise(s)

(Washington, D.C.): President Clinton’s self-indulgent, “Me-Generation” excesses in recent days before a convention of ministers, his admirers in Hollywood and the Democratic Convention has a companion, darker side that is threatening to do serious harm to U.S. national security interests.
State’s Agenda

A memorandum circulated by the State Department to other agencies last week makes clear that Mr. Clinton intends to try to commit the United States to more than a dozen dubious U.S.-Russian and/or multilateral arms control-related initiatives. They are clearly meant to burnish his tattered public image and round out his “legacy” as a statesman.

These measures appear most likely, however, to lock-in his successor to policies, accords, arrangements and institutions that will prove highly problematic for, if not downright inimical to, the Nation’s ability to deter aggression, safeguard its intelligence secrets and minimize the transfer of strategic dual-use technologies to potential adversaries.

What is more, the timing of this frenzy of diplomatic doings — at least some of which might lend themselves to highly publicized unveilings in October — may even be calculated by Mr. Clinton to influence the election of the man who will succeed him.

Holum’s Folly

The first of these initiatives out of the box will be the subject of bilateral negotiations this week in Geneva. Leading the U.S. delegation will be newly installed Under Secretary of State John Holum. That should be cause enough for concern. Holum is a former George McGovern staffer and unalloyed arms control ideologue whose nomination was so controversial that it failed to receive Senate approval for over a year — a situation that surely would have persisted until Mr. Clinton left office, had it not been ended by a recess appointment after the Senate left town earlier this month.

No less troubling is Holum’s assignment. He aims to reach agreement with the Russians on a “combined U.S.-Russian proposal” to be presented in September to a group the diplomats have, in their inimitable fashion, dubbed the “Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) Reinforced Point of Contact Meeting.”

The starting point for this drill is a Kremlin proposal for a “Global Monitoring System” (or GMS). Its ostensible purpose is to enhance efforts to curb the proliferation of ballistic missiles. In fact, it is a transparent Soviet-style ploy, aimed at creating further impediments to U.S. ballistic missile programs (including cooperation with allies like Britain and Israel) and undercutting the rationale behind efforts to deploy national missile defenses for the American people.

Worse yet, Moscow proposes “incentive measures for states that have renounced the possession of missile systems for the delivery of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and assistance to national space programs.” Put in layman’s terms, the Russians want the West to provide technical and financial support for the Kremlin’s clients, like North Korea, that fraudulently promise to “give up” their own missile programs.

The Clinton-Gore Administration has responded to this scam with characteristic fawning unctuousness. In a “non-paper” given the Russians, it actually “acknowledge[d] the important role Russia has played in making this the critical time to address a first-ever global missile non-proliferation mechanism, and in proposing new and important ideas for its substance and direction.” Never mind that the government of Vladimir Putin is one of the world’s most egregious proliferators of ballistic missile and WMD systems and know-how.

The State Department sees the Russian proposal as an opportunity to up the ante. It has proposed a draft “Code of Conduct,” whose stated purpose is to “delegitimize missile proliferation while providing a framework for carefully-crafted incentives for countries to give up their missile programs.”

Been There, Done That

These are vintage, if thoroughly discredited, arms control nostrums: If only international norms can be created by banning things like chemical or biological weapons or landmines, they will lose their legitimacy and, then no one will want to have or use them any more. And, just to sweeten the deal, give them “incentives” like the Atoms for Peace provisions of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty or the corresponding sections of the Chemical Weapons Convention pursuant to which those who promised to forgo prohibited activities would be given advanced Western technology with which to pursue them covertly.

As with these previous, failed experiments in international law, the likely effect of the proposed “incentives” meant to wean would-be ballistic missile states from their missiles will be actually to proliferate at least some of the capabilities the “Code of Conduct” agreement is intended to curb. To add insult to injury, the State Department wants such “benefits” to be promised on a “conces sionary/subsidized basis.”

Meanwhile, vital American missile developments, our ability to use and control space for commercial and military purposes and technology-sharing activities with our allies are likely to be subjected to criticism — if not actually sanctioned — to the extent they are contrary to a commitment to “reduce…holdings [of] ballistic missiles and space-launch vehicles to the maximum extent possible.” To their credit, the Joint Chiefs of Staff are expressing serious concerns about what is now being billed as a “Global Action Plan Against Missile Proliferation” (or GAP), a multilateral effort to codify, among other things, the worst of the Russian and U.S. proposals.

Other Worrisome Initiatives

Similar reservations should attend other eleventh-hour Clinton diplomatic initiatives. These include:

  • a START III Treaty that contemplates reductions in strategic nuclear forces — and attendant constraints on dual-capable platforms (notably, bombers) that are unacceptable to the Joint Chiefs;
  • briefing Moscow on the latest classified U.S. National Intelligence Estimate about missile proliferation a step sure further to compromise fragile sources and methods of collecting such intelligence;
  • a multilateralized monitoring center that will, in due course, require pre-notification of missile and space launches, with obvious adverse implications for operational security;
  • the bankrolling a dubious Russian satellite scheme known as Raymos with at least $344 million in U.S. taxpayer funds; and

  • “cooperation” on theater missile defenses that may assist in the development and proliferation of countermeasures against U.S. anti-missile systems.

Clinton’s Unconsitutional Effort to Implement the C.T.B.T.

The Center for Security Policy has learned that the Clinton-Gore Administration is also aggressively participating in efforts to prepare for implementation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) an accord a majority of the United States Senate voted last year to reject. By some estimates, three linear feet of documents have been produced in connection with such implementation, with each paper being subjected to review by U.S. government personnel — if not actually drawn up by them. Similarly, American officials are participating in myriad working groups, meetings of experts, interagency backstopping sessions and other conclaves for the purpose of establishing procedures for on- site inspections, reporting requirements, etc.

It is one thing for President Clinton to announce, as he did following the Senate’s repudiation of his CTB Treaty that he would ignore the clear intent of the Framers of the Constitution and continue to represent the United States as bound by an accord that had been denied Senate advice and consent. It is another, even more outrageously unconstitutional act for him to expend huge amounts of manpower and taxpayer resources on activities not consistent with America’s status as a non-party.

The Bottom Line

If the Clinton-Gore Administration is willing to defer to the next President the decision to deploy effective missile defenses something that the Nation urgently needs the least it can do is defer actions on initiatives like Holum’s “Code of Conduct” that will be harmful to vital U.S. interests and that need not be taken now (or for that matter, ever).
In any event, if, as seems likely, a President George W. Bush would rather not be saddled with the detritus of such orgiastic lame-duck negotiating, he should make it known at once. By so doing, he will put the Russians and America’s other diplomatic interlocutors on notice that the United States may not be bound by the fruits of the present negotiations and, therefore, that their energies would be better spent on other activities until after the November election.

China’s Missile Business

Washington Post, 14 July 2000

INTELLIGENCE reports indicate that China is helping nuclear-armed Pakistan build
long-range
ballistic missiles. The problem persists after the visit to Beijing last weekend by John D. Holum,
the State Department’s senior arms control adviser. Though Mr. Holum claimed some progress in
the talks, the Chinese took the occasion to deliver yet another lecture about U.S. missile defense
development and arms sales to Taiwan–and to link resolution of those complaints to the issue of
Beijing’s exports of missile technology.

The question, then, is whether U.S. policy needs more teeth. Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.)
and
Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) are sponsoring the China Nonproliferation Act, which would
require the president to make an annual report on China’s distribution of potentially dangerous
technology, and to impose sanctions on persons or companies within China that appear
responsible, as well as on the Chinese government.

The Clinton administration says this would make an improving situation worse. Dialogue
with
China has produced results, such as a 1994 Chinese promise to stop selling M-11 missiles to
Pakistan and to abide by the “guidelines” of the Missile Technology Control Regime (which
China has still not formally joined). Beijing also foreswore “new” nuclear help to Iran. The
administration further contends that the bill’s sweeping language could mean punishing U.S.
businesses that innocently sold “dual use” technology to China that was passed on to Pakistan.

Yet, as Mr. Holum has just experienced, the U.S.-China dialogue on
nonproliferation–recently
resumed after Beijing suspended it over the accidental bombing of China’s Belgrade
embassy–remains hostage to Chinese pique over, and designs on, Taiwan. And Beijing clearly
interprets its
promise to observe the Missile Technology Control Regime as permitting assistance to Pakistan
short of actually transferring weapons. This aid may obey the letter of the 1998 public joint
pledge by President Clinton and China’s President Jiang Zemin not to provide ballistic missiles
to any South Asian country–but it’s not exactly in keeping with the spirit. Yes, Mr. Clinton
already has authority to sanction China under current law. But he has doggedly declined to do so
without a “smoking gun” from U.S. intelligence.

No doubt the Republican sponsors of the China Nonproliferation Act are playing
election-year
politics. And the White House has a point when it asks why the bill addresses only China when
other countries, such as Russia and North Korea, engage in similar behavior. Still, China’s
continuing assistance to Pakistan’s weapons program in the face of so many U.S. efforts to talk
Beijing out of it shows the limits of a nonconfrontational approach. Clearly, China views certain
missile-making projects abroad as vital to its national security strategy–vital enough to trump
some other economic and diplomatic interests. By the same token, the United States should make
clear that a certain amount of Chinese missile-making is incompatible with business as usual.
Sen. Thompson is negotiating with Senate Democrats and the White House to modify the
clumsier aspects of his bill, so that it can be brought to a Senate vote without obstructing passage
of permanent normal trade relations (which we support). If the bill is appropriately refined and
separated from the trading relations legislation, then its passage will send Beijing a useful
signal.

The Navy Clears for Action’ on Missile Defense CNO’s Reorganization Will Prove More Important than Intercept Test

(Washington, D.C.): While the media, pundits and critics of the so-called National Missile Defense program obsess about the results and implications of today’s scheduled intercept test, that event is sure to be overshadowed in the long-run by a Pentagon announce ment made earlier in the week: The U.S. Navy is “clearing the decks for action” on developing and deploying competent, global anti-missile systems.

To his credit, the outgoing Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jay Johnson has recognized that providing protection against ballistic missile attacks is a natural, valuable and increasingly necessary mission for his service.1 Adm. Johnson also recognized that for the Navy to be able to perform this function, it had to square itself away — replacing fractured, uncoordinated and often conflicting divisions of labor with a consolidated and streamlined management structure under the command of a dynamic and visionary leader. Such an arrangement produced, under Admiral Hyman Rickover, the Nation’s extraordinarily successful nuclear Navy program.

Organizing and Staffing for Success

Toward this end, the CNO has created (clearly with the endorsement of his successor, Adm. Vernon Clark) — a new office in his immediate staff: the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations (ACNO) for Missile Defense. No less laudable is Adm. Johnson’s choice for the first occupant of this position, Rear Admiral Rod Rempt. For a decade, Adm. Rempt (who, as befits his new responsibilities, is expected to become Vice Admiral Rempt in short order) has been a prime-mover behind the Nation’s efforts to adapt its vast investment in AEGIS fleet air defense platforms for anti-missile purposes. The new ACNO’s promotion is especially welcome insofar as, until recently, he was planning to retire which would have been a terrible loss to the Navy and the country.

To be sure, given the Clinton-Gore Administration’s adamant determination to prevent Navy assets from providing timely and competent missile defenses for the American people, or for that matter to defend “theaters” other than that of North America — an opposition that mirrors, if not exceeds, that of the Russians, Chinese and other potential adversaries — the full benefits of this reorganization will only be realized by the next President. But by taking these long-lead-time steps now, Admiral Johnson has laid the groundwork for the next Administration to have options for an accelerated deployment of sea-based missile defenses that are virtually certain to be available more quickly, at a fraction of the cost and with greater strategic benefits (e.g., offering the ability to provide protection to U.S. forces and allies overseas) than the ground-based alternative Mr. Clinton professes to favor.2

The Bottom Line

Today’s test is, of course, not an inconsequential event. If it successfully intercepts the target missile, however, it will be but the third out of nineteen planned experiments. And critics have already sought to minimize the political boost that might flow from such an outcome by claiming that the test was rigged or otherwise made less challenging/realistic.

On the other hand, if the test proves to be another “incomplete success,” opponents of defending America against missile attacks will wrongly overstate its significance as evidence that the technology either cannot be made to work or, at least, is insufficiently mature to justify going forward with deployment decisions.

The fact is that, either way, the right response will be to accelerate the effort to bring anti- missile technology to fruition as required by the Missile Defense Act of 1999, which Mr. Clinton signed into law last August — namely “as soon as technologically possible.” Fulfilling that legal obligation means taking the fullest possible advantage of every available shortcut, including those that may finally become available thanks to Admiral Johnson’s courageous vision and leadership and Admiral Rempt’s actualization of the potential they have created for a near-term, militarily valuable and cost-effective global missile defense.




1For more on Adm. Johnson’s visionary leadership in this area, see the Center’s Decision Brief entitled The Nation’s Top Sailor Endorses a Near-term Approach to Missile Defense: The Aegis Option’ (No. 00-D 18, 28 February 2000).

2For additional details on the “AEGIS Option,” see How to Share’ U.S. Missile Defense Protection: Deploy Sea-Based Anti- Missile Systems (No. 00-D 53, 1 June 2000) and Sea-Based Missile Defenses – For the Allies, for the U.S. (No. 00-D 52, 30 May 2000).

Record Surplus Must Address the Hollow Military’ Will the Presidential Candidates Seek a Mandate to Do So?

(Washington, D.C.): President Clinton’s announcement on 26 June that the U.S. government’s projected budget surplus would amount to as much as $1.9 trillion dollars over the next ten years has produced the typical response from politicians and interest groups: Give it back to the American people in tax cuts and/or spend more of it on a plethora of domestic programs — from a new prescription drug entitlement program to making social security solvent to improving education.
Meanwhile, Back at the Pentagon

Notably absent from the debate to this point has been what is the federal government’s first responsibility: providing for “the common defense.” Neither Vice President Al Gore nor Texas Governor George Bush has pledged to address the sorts of vast shortfalls in defense investment that have been identified by the Joint Chiefs of Staff — on the order of $30 billion per year over the six- year Future Year Defense Plan (FYDP). Regrettably, neither the Chiefs, the presidential candidates nor practically any other elected official has proposed to correct the well-documented, and far larger, deficiencies laid out by Daniel Gour and James Ranney in their seminal work, Averting the Defense Trainwreck — i.e., roughly $100 billion per year for the next five years.

According to the highly respected Messrs. Gour and Ranney, there is a $376 billion deficit in the funding needed over the next five years to meet the Clinton Pentagon’s own modernization goals as defined in its latest blueprint, the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). In fact, the Gour-Ranney study suggests that the procurement shortfall in Fiscal Year 2000 alone is $71 billion. If the QDR projections prove unduly optimistic, moreover, even that staggering amount would actually be understated.

Yet, according to the Washington Post, “Gore’s plans for a Medicare lockbox, target tax cuts, prescription drugs and other spending would cost $1.75 trillion. Bush’s proposals for a bigger tax cut and health, education, environment and other programs total $1.8 trillion.” In other words, neither of the two parties’ incipient standard-bearers are leaving appreciable room in their budgets for major new infusions of funds for national security activities.

Lip Service?

To be sure, both candidates have, to varying degrees, expressed their support for maintaining a U.S. military “second to none” and promised to improve readiness and the acquisition of modern weapons. Unfortunately, neither has made a concerted effort to educate the American people about the extent of the damage done to the armed forces as a result of the steep decline in Pentagon spending during much of the past decade. According to the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Floyd Spence: “Over the past eight years, the Administration’s cumulative defense budget requests have fallen more than $300 billion short of even covering the costs of inflation relative to the Fiscal Year 1993 defense spending levels it inherited.”

By failing to address with the American people the strategic and policy implications of these yawning mismatches the public is denied the opportunity to understand them, let alone to hire someone who will take corrective action. This merely exacerbates the problem arising from the candidates’ reluctance to date to promote a real national debate about the dynamic and increasingly volatile international environment that seems likely to follow the “Post-Cold War world” — and that could make the deteriorated state of the U.S. military a major liability for the country.

Don’t Just Throw Money at the Problem

The grievous difficulties afflicting the American armed forces today are, of course, not limited to the effects of denying them the requisite funding over many years. Neither will they be corrected simply by adding funds.

Robust presidential leadership will be required to correct the cumulative effects of eight years of an administration that has pursued a “counter-culture”-style agenda that has weakened the power and morale of the Nation’s military. Elements of this agenda include: an abiding hostility towards security — particularly, information, personnel and physical security — whose bitter fruits have become increasingly evident in a succession of scandals across the government; social experimentation pursued in the name of opening up the combat arms to women and homosexuals without regard for the deleterious effect on either good order and discipline or the readiness of the armed services to fight the country’s wars; and the subordination of U.S. military capabilities and freedom of action to multinational institutions like the UN.

There’s No Getting Around the Need for Significant Increases in Defense Spending

That said, even if the next President understands the need for and is prepared to effect corrective action in these areas, he will still have to address the the procurement “gap” — and similar, although less acute, shortfalls in the research and development, operations and maintenance and personnel pay accounts.

Happily, these would essentially disappear if the United States were willing for the foreseeable future to allocate 4% of its Gross Domestic Product to defense, rather than today’s less than 3%. Such a proportion of GDP is well below the more than 5-6.7% that President Reagan dedicated during the 1980s to rebuilding our military after its last hollowing-out. And this percentage is a small fraction of the allocations the Nation made to national security earlier on, notably during John F. Kennedy’s administration.

It is unlikely that any President could accomplish such an allocation of resources — particularly in an era still widely perceived to be one of durable peace as well a sustained prosperity — without engaging in a vigorous dialogue with the American people and seeking their mandate for a new defense build-up. It seems unlikely that even with his electoral landslide Ronald Reagan would have been able to accomplish his vital defense modernization program, whose legacy the U.S. military and successive Presidents have continued to draw upon to this day, without making that initiative a centerpiece of his 1980 election campaign.

To achieve such a mandate, the presidential candidates will have to exhibit vision and will. They will have to address the actual state of the world and the reality that, in important ways, the American people are less safe today than they were eight years ago. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missile delivery systems is but one example of a problem that has grown much more acute since 1993, despite President Clinton’s repeated effort (until very recently) to deny that the United States was at risk of missile attack.

The presidential candidates are also going to have to eschew the temptation to play fast and loose with the options for rebuilding the sort of U.S. military that will be required down the road. Glib promises of “doing things smarter” and fielding lighter, more mobile and yet more lethal forces cannot change the fact that the maintenance of global presence and power projection capabilities will, for quite some time to come, require the sorts of forces we have today — and will, therefore, require that their obsolescing equipment be modernized as quickly as possible with available technologies. We are simply unable to wait in every case for the generation-after-next technologies that may emerge from the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).

The Bottom Line

Fortunately, the American people have sufficient common sense to be willing to pay the price for a robust defense posture that is at least comparable to that available at the time of Desert Storm. This is especially true when it can be done with surplus government revenues, rather than deficit spending. All they require to make such a sacrifice is to be told coherently, consistently and credibly that the world in which we now live is not one free of missile and other dangerous threats and is one in which vital American interests and even our people are at risk.

Most especially, they require the truth from their elected leaders and above all from their military commanders the truth. To their credit, the Joint Chiefs of Staff have started to tell it; it’s time for those who would be their Commander-in-Chief to do so as well.

Clinton Legacy Watch #49: Rogue States by Any Other Name… North Korea Still a Threat; China is a Country of Concern’

(Washington, D.C.): Last week, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered fresh proof that the Clinton-Gore foreign policy can accurately be characterized just as President Clinton did offhandedly to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow earlier this month: “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” In an NPR radio interview on Friday, Mrs. Albright declared that the United States government would no longer use the term “rogue states” to describe what were henceforth to be characterized as “countries of concern.”

This is no mere semantic adjustment. It is a substantive as well as symbolic step, designed to clear the way for Mr. Clinton’s end-game effort to build a dubious legacy by normalizing relations with every bad actor on the planet.

Ignoring North Korean Capabilities in Favor of Wishful Thinking About Its Intentions

The first beneficiary of this linguistic/material sleight-of-hand is North Korea. Immediately following the charm-offensive-masquerading-as-a-summit-meeting between the Kims of North and South Korea in Pyongyang last week, the Clinton-Gore Administration announced that it was lifting economic sanctions against the Communist regime.

Those increasingly persuaded that President Clinton and his subordinates have displayed a sustained disregard for security matters can only feel confirmed in their assessent. After all, whether acknowledged as such or not, the clear implication is that a single meeting — however distorted its public relations impact in South Korea and elsewhere in the West — has actually precipitated a significant, to say nothing of a permanent, change in North Korea’s intentions (not to mention its formidable military capabilities). This is foolish in the extreme, and may prove to be recklessly so.

Even more troubling are indications that the Clinton-Gore Administration hopes that by no longer seeing North Korea as a “rogue state,” or calling it that, will enable the President to finesse his increasingly problematic approach to building a limited national missile defense. In the first seven years of their tenure in office, neither Mr. Clinton nor Vice President Gore evinced a serious commitment to defending America against missile threats. To be sure, as a lengthy (if grossly imbalanced) report in the New York Times yesterday makes clear, the Administration has been willing to pay lip-service to the need for such protection whenever it became politically necessary to do so. This was especially evident in the 1996 election and in the run-up to the 2000 campaign.

The Administration would like nothing better than to find a pretext for deferring a decision on deploying missile defenses — if it could do so without exposing Al Gore to undue political risk. The desire to find a way out has only grown in the face of: a mass revolt on the part of the Veep’s ideological base (which shares his historic, intense hostility to missile defenses); an aggressive campaign by Putin to divide the U.S. from its allies; discomfort on the latter’s part about an American missile defense plan that will provide them with no protection; and questions about the limited utility and high costs of an Alaska deployment designed primarily with ABM Treaty considerations in mind. The Administration’s hunt for a deus ex machina has become all the more intense in the wake of ridicule heaped on recently revealed efforts by Administration lawyers to reinterpret the Treaty in such a way as to construe the start of construction on a new radar on Shemya Island to be compatible with an accord that clearly prohibits such activity.

If the aforementioned considerations explain the Clinton-Gore team’s willingness to write-down the threat posed by North Korea’s missile program on the basis of a summit meeting and highly perishable promises from Pyongyang not to continue flight tests of its long-range Taepo Dong missiles, they do not justify such revisionism. More to the point, even if the North Korean government fell tomorrow and its missile program was genuinely and permanently terminated, the United States would still need a defense against other states whose behavior and/or military programs indisputably must make them “countries of concern.”

Mother of All Rogue States: China

As an important hearing conducted Wednesday by the House Armed Services Committee made clear, the United States ignores at its peril the fact that Communist China is a nation that increasingly must qualify as a “country of concern.” Among the highlights of this event were the following excerpts from the testimony delivered by Dr. Arthur Waldron, a world-renowned Sinologist who is a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.

  • Absent some systemic change in China, we can expect a steady level of military tension with Beijing with the real possibility of a crisis.
  • China is carrying out a massive military buildup not because it faces threats or dangers — it does not — but rather because it remains a communist dictatorship and needs enemies. It is in the leadership’s best interest to give [the Chinese military] what they want, which is the best and most advanced of everything.
  • China is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on enormously costly military and military-related programs, ranging from a manned space program to extensive nuclear warhead development to the perfection of new generations of mobile, solid-fueled ballistic missiles, to submarines to aircraft to aircraft carriers, not to mention communications, satellites, electronics, and so forth.”
  • U.S. pressure prevents Taiwan from developing missiles, and Japan has none. But China’s missile program gets a free pass…when all is said and done, what drives the entire arms race in Asia is China’s missile program. See to it that China cannot use free world finance for military plans….There is no reason for the rest of the world to finance a Chinese military buildup aimed outward.”
  • As in Europe, our security in Asia depends above all upon our alliances….At present, China is working very hard to cut our alliance ties in Asia….The recent Korean diplomacy, in which China clearly had a major role, prepares the way for a campaign to end South Korea’s close alliance status with the United States. That, in turn, will bring the Japanese alliance into doubt….I find it all deeply worrying.
  • At the same time that China is attempting to cut US alliances, she is building up a network of her own. Internationally, she is cultivating Russia by pouring money into the floundering ex-Soviet arms industry, and receiving in return technology that greatly increases her military where withal….Such behavior undermines alliance cohesion, while the military gains China is making, through Russian and Israeli as well as Western European transfers, are definitely non-trivial….
  • China’s dubious claims to most of the South China sea would be strengthened and Singapore would undoubtedly join the tilt. Under such conditions, the U.S. would be well-nigh excluded from Asia, just as we were in the late 1930’s and 1940’s when Japan had hegemony there….What I am describing here is a possible Chinese hegemony over the Asia region…the fact that China is actively pursuing this course is very worrying.”

Further grounds for “concern” about China — notably, its ongoing proliferation to Pakistan and other “rogue states” — are illuminated in an important op.ed. article by Edward Timperlake and William Triplett William, authors of the best-sellers Year of the Rat and Red Dragon Rising, which appeared in yesterday’s Washington Times. It noted, in part, that:

  • For some time, the American intelligence community has known that Chinese communist nuclear and missile arms smuggling has been increasing dramatically. By whatever means, this month private information from the Administration relating to Chinese nuclear weapons and missile sales to Pakistan has made its way to MSNBC, the Washington Times and the Far Eastern Economic Review.
  • What we now know: 1) American military and intelligence officials now estimate Pakistan’s nuclear strike capability is five times that of India. This represents an American reassessment in the order of 500 percent. 2) right now, Communist China is secretly building a second M-class ballistic missile plant in Pakistan. When this comes on stream, it will be able to increase Pakistan’s nuclear missile stockpile by an additional 100 percent. And 3) if Chinese arms smuggling to Pakistan is fivefold what we originally estimated, how good are our estimates of Chinese nuclear arms sales to North Korea? Iran? Syria? Libya? Iraq?

    What about our estimates of Chinese germ warfare sales to Iran and other places? All our current estimates of Chinese proliferation to terrorist nations and others have to be labeled, “Suspect. To be re-assessed.” (Emphasis added.)

We Are Going to Share Intelligence With Whom?

Incredibly, it is against this backdrop of incoherence about U.S. policy towards threatening “countries of concern” and growing alarm about Clinton-Gore mishandling, if not outright malfeasance, with respect security issues, that the Administration has just unveiled a new “intelligence-sharing” initiative with Communist China.

In Beijing last week, the President’s “drug czar,” General Barry McCaffrey, announced that he and his Chinese counterpart had just signed a new cooperation agreement aimed at improving U.S.-PRC efforts to combat the drug trade. With this initiative, the United States is repeating similar, well- intentioned but seriously misguided efforts — notably in the latter day Soviet Union and Russia: Equipping governments and institutions tied to drug traffickers with intelligence, training and other information that is likely to make it more difficult to counteract their cultivation, transhipment and/or smuggling operations.

The Bottom Line

The Clinton pursuit of a legacy that will bind his successor and the Nation to policies of appeasement and an attendant unpreparedness to deal with real and growing threats from what remain “rogue states” cries out for congressional oversight and sustained debate in the coming election season. To those with a sense of history like Dr. Waldron, this behavior bears ominous similarities to what proved to be the last inter-war period:

The pattern is so similar to what occurred before World War II: the cutting of Japan’s alliance with Britain, the substitution of a weak multilateral system, an international tilt toward China that left Japan feeling cheated — and finally, of course, Japan’s catastrophic decision that, because the international community was unwilling to take her security needs seriously, therefore she had no choice but to act unilaterally.

By allowing feckless and irresolute U.S. leadership to contribute to the weakening, if not the actual severing of important alliance relationships, and the emboldening, if not actually the empowering, of potential adversaries, the United States risks transforming the present age of peace and prosperity into another interlude book-ended by terrible conflicts.

Unfortunately, the Congress — under intense election year pressure from Archer-Daniels- Midland and other agribusinesses (who may or may not speak for the classic American family farmer but whose immense lobbying resources have repeatedly been put at the disposal of causes that are contrary to larger national interests) — is poised to deny itself the moral standing to criticize such dangerous Administration policies. The House of Representatives is expected shortly to adopt legislation that would not only effectively remove the “rogue state” label from nations like Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Libya. By ending embargos on trade in food and medicines with these countries, this initiative would inevitably communicate as well that these states are no longer even “countries of concern.” To its credit, the Republican leadership has until recently tried to resist these steps; its reported, reluctant willingness now to accommodate the lobbyists and the Members of Congress under their influence may be expedient politics in the short-term but threatens real and long-term strategic harm to the Nation.

Like it or not, American interests and security are at risk from nations that wish us harm. They may choose to inflict or threaten such harm with missile-delivered weapons of mass destruction — and the United States simply can no longer afford to be defenseless in the face of that prospect. Building an effective, global missile defense is a necessary, but hardly sufficient, corrective step. The Nation must also attend, though, to threats to its homeland posed by other means of delivering chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons. It must reinvigorate its alliances. And it must pursue policies designed to resist and undermine, not appease, hostile despotic regimes and other potential adversaries. To do so, however, those entrusted with safeguarding our security must recognize and portray accurately the nature of rogue states and other countries of concern.

Lady Thatcher on Missile Defense

By James Hackett
The Washington Times, 05 June 2000

Last month, I brought bad news – most of America’s allies are siding with Russia and China in opposition to a U.S. missile defense. Now I bring good news – Lady Margaret Thatcher and a defense study group of the House of Lords have endorsed U.S. missile defenses.

Once again, Lady Thatcher has stood for what is right against the majority. In commenting on a report issued last week by the House of Lords Missile Proliferation Study Group, she wrote “This report is a wake-up call to the West. The threat from ballistic missile attacks against us from rogue states turns out to be greater, and growing more quickly, than anyone thought. We ignore it at our peril.”

She urges the British government to acquire ballistic missile defenses and encourages the United States to create a global missile defense. “Our leaders will not be forgiven if they shirk this challenge,” she wrote. Lady Thatcher, who stood virtually alone in her determination to fight the Argentine occupation of the Falklands, again is standing almost alone against the weight of European opinion.

The report she endorsed comes none too soon. It was issued on May 15 with the title, “Coming into Range: Britain’s Growing Vulnerability to Missiles and Weapons of Mass Destruction.” Prepared under the leadership of Lord Chalfont, president of the bipartisan defense group of the House of Lords, the study director was Gerald Frost.

Like its predecessor, the Rumsfeld Commission report issued here two years ago, the British report concludes the proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction “poses a much more alarming threat” than a succession of British governments have been willing to admit. The threat, the study finds, presents both a direct danger to the population of Britain and its overseas forces, and an indirect danger of intimidation or blackmail by states with such weapons.

The report notes that the ballistic missile is the weapon of choice for Third World states because of its assured penetration, ease of concealment, the prestige it confers, and an increasing range that soon will enable rogue states to target Europe and America. It also finds the threat of ballistic missile attack can be a major deterrent to Western intervention when national interests are at stake.

The report adds, “Traditional arms control approaches to the proliferation problem have demonstrably failed.” Nor can Britain rely any longer on Cold War deterrence to deal with threats to its interests. A ballistic missile defense, the report notes, is important both to preserve Britain’s ability to project power to defend its interests, and to defend Britain itself if deterrence fails.

“It is not in Britain’s interests,” the report finds, “for the leader of the Western Alliance the U.S. to be vulnerable to missile threats as a result of misplaced faith in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and a flawed Cold War dogma.” Britain, it adds, should support a U.S. decision to “free itself from the constraints of the treaty.”

The paper concludes with the observation that a U.S. missile defense that does not cover the allies could lead rogue states to target them, rather than America. Therefore, it urges deployment of a global ballistic missile defense to protect the security interests of both America and its allies. This, it says, would enhance the cohesion of the Alliance and contribute to international stability.

Writing about the report, study director Mr. Frost was critical of European governments for failing to grasp the far-reaching political and strategic implications of the rapid proliferation of ballistic missiles. Europeans, he charged, have entered a new century with a misplaced confidence in arms control. They fail to grasp that rogue states will target countries that are undefended instead of those that are defended. If Europe is included in a missile defense system, it could lead to a renewal of the Western Alliance. If not, it could wreck it.

This bipartisan British report mentions neither the Blair government nor the Clinton administration, yet is implicitly critical of both. It accuses British governments of ignoring the threat and relying too heavily on arms control, while criticizing the U.S. for proposing to defend this country alone. The solution, Mr. Frost suggests, is to get out of the ABM treaty and deploy a global missile defense.

This support from England is welcome. It also is a warning, as Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, and Texas Gov. George W. Bush said recently U.S. plans to defend against missile defenses also must defend the allies. A missile defense of North America should be just the first step. At the same time it is being deployed, NATO and America’s other allies should be offered advanced Patriots and the Army’s high-altitude THAAD interceptors to give them regional missile defenses. Then sea-based interceptors and other technologies can be added as soon as they are ready, to create a truly global missile defense.

James T. Hackett is a contributing writer for The Washington Times based in San Diego.

Post-Mortem on the Summit: The Talbott Communique

Call it the Talbott Communique. To be sure, President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued what was entitled their "Joint Statement on Principles of Strategic Stability." But a DNA test would clearly demonstrate that paternity of the document issued Sunday capping the presidents’ weekend summit in Moscow belongs to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

Talbott’s preeminent role in the summit — and, indeed, in shaping U.S.-Russian relations for most of the past eight years — was underscored by his inclusion in the two leaders’ intimate dinner Saturday night. His nominal boss, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and National Security Advisor Samuel Berger were among the scores of lesser lights who did not make the cut.

Talbott’s Fingerprints

Talbott’s fingerprints can be clearly seen in the language and content of the Joint Statement. The communique reeks of the Moscow-centric, bipolar Cold War mindset which he has exhibited throughout his career as a journalist, author and, most recently, as a senior U.S. policy-maker. This paradigm — and the communique it has just spawned — attach supreme importance to arms control, in general, and the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in particular.

For example, the first principle of the Joint Statement stresses the need to "maintain strategic nuclear stability." This is Cold War code for the balance of power between the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia, as measured by the arcane (and substantially artificial) standard of treaty-accountable strategic warheads.

A second "principle" makes clear that the "capability for deterrence has been and remains a key aspect of stability and predictability in the international security environment." Translation: Russia is right in asserting that it needs to deter a threatening United States. It follows that Russia is entitled to the same number of nuclear weapons that the U.S. retains and that American anti-missile systems must not jeopardize the Kremlin’s ability to launch a devastating attack on this country.

A Slap at George W. Bush

These principles are about as direct a repudiation of the central premise advanced on May 23 by the man who may well be Mr. Clinton’s successor — Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush. In a Washington press event, Gov. Bush declared:

The Cold War era is history. Our nation must recognize new threats, not fixate on old ones….Russia itself is no longer our enemy. The Cold War logic that led to creation of massive stockpiles on both sides is now outdated. Our mutual security need no longer depend on a nuclear balance of terror….The Clinton-Gore administration…remain[s] locked in a Cold War mentality. It is time to leave the Cold War behind and defend against the new threats of the 21st century.

The Talbott Communique is most noteworthy, however, for the emphasis it places on the ABM Treaty. Mr. Clinton and his Russian counterpart agreed "on the essential contribution of the ABM Treaty to reductions in offensive forces and reaffirm their commitment to that Treaty as a cornerstone of strategic stability." In what could pass for a parody of diplomatic obeisance to an international agreement, no fewer than three of the sixteen principles explicitly call for "increasing," "enhancing" or otherwise "strengthening" what Talbott and Company euphemistically call the "viability of the ABM Treaty." If the practical effect of this serial genuflection at the high altar of the arms control theology were not so inimical to U.S. security interests, it would be hilarious. Unfortunately, its intended purpose is no laughing matter: It is designed to create the international legal equivalent of "overkill" — bilateral commitments that would effectively foreclose any U.S. missile defenses not explicitly approved by the Russians.

What ABM Treaty?

Naturally, for the ABM Treaty to be viable — let alone strengthened — it must be in force. Under international law and domestic precedent, however, the ABM Treaty had to have lapsed when the other party, the Soviet Union, was liquidated.

The powerful arguments on this score — and the utter failure to date of the Clinton Administration to rebut them in any sort of rigorous fashion — will be on display in a very timely symposium to be held on Wednesday on Capitol Hill. The meeting will be chaired by Ambassador Max Kampelman, President Reagan’s highly respected chief negotiator in the U.S.-Soviet START I talks, and sponsored by the National Institute for Public Policy. It will bring together for the first time in public debate executive branch officials, among other ABM Treaty devotees, and experts (such as former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith1) who can demonstrate why that accord has been legally "non-viable" since the dissolution of the USSR nine years ago.

Other Flim-Flams

Scarcely less bizarre than the effort to impute vital signs to the moribund ABM Treaty were two other highlights of Mr. Clinton’s adventures in Moscow. First, Principle Six of the Talbott Communique declares that "the international community faces a dangerous and growing threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, including missiles and missile technologies,2 and stress their desire to reverse that process…." While true — and the only laudatory aspect of the entire Joint Declaration — this principle blithely ignores an unsavory fact: The U.S. government knows that Russia is actively abetting such proliferation; countries we call "rogue states" the Kremlin calls "clients."

Second, in his address to the Duma, President Clinton announced that "soon I will be required to decide whether the United States should deploy a limited national defense system designed to protect the American people against the most imminent of these threats." He went on to describe the four criteria that would govern that decision: "the nature of threat, the cost of meeting it, the effectiveness of the available technology, and the impact of this decision on our overall security, including our relationship with Russia and other nations,3 and the need to preserve the ABM Treaty."

Last August, however, Mr. Clinton signed legislation adopted by veto-proof majorities in both houses. Therefore, pursuant to this Missile Defense Act of 1999, the Nation has already made a decision to deploy an effective limited national missile defense. By statute, it is to be deployed "as soon as technologically possible." The only question outstanding is how fast can that be accomplished.

The Bottom Line

The good news is that the debate is now joined. Americans will shortly have an opportunity to decide whether they wish to endorse the Clinton-Gore approach to national security spelled out in the Talbott Communique. Or will they give a mandate to Gov. Bush, who has made clear his personal commitment to defending the U.S. and its forces and allies overseas against missile attack — and who will not let an ABM Treaty that is neither viable nor desirable become a new impediment to our doing so?

1See the Center’s Press Release entitled Definitive Study Shows Russians Have No Veto Over Defending U.S. (No. 99-P 11, 22 January 1999).

2 In recent months, increasing attention is being paid to a new and particularly insidious weapon of mass destruction — electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) devices. As hearings before the House Armed Services Committee and a new "Backgrounder" by Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation entitled "America’s Vulnerability to a Different Nuclear Threat: An Electromagnetic Pulse," makes clear, a rogue state or other enemy could inflict grievous harm on an advanced society like America’s by exploding a nuclear weapon high above the United States. Without killing a single person on the ground (at least directly), such a device could fry the electronic infrastructure over a huge area with incalculable effects. Defeating such a relatively low-technology attack is yet another compelling reason to begin deploying global anti-missile systems at once.

3The attached op.ed. published in today’s Washington Times by a distinguished member of the Center for Security Policy’s National Security Advisory Council, James Hackett, makes clear that claims (by the CIA and others) about the unanimous opposition of America’s allies to the deployment of effective anti-missile systems are erroneous. The thoughtful study described by Mr. Hackett that was recently issued by Lady Margaret Thatcher and other prominent Britons should be required reading on both sides of the Atlantic.