MORE STEPS ON THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TOWARD TERMINATING U.S. THEATER MISSILE DEFENSE OPTIONS

(Washington, D.C.): In recent months,
the Clinton Administration has made
steady progress in negotiating away what
little latitude remains to the United
States in developing effective defenses
against missile attack. Since the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty essentially
precludes useful strategic defenses
(i.e., those against
intercontinental-range missiles), as long
as the United States continues to be
bound by this treaty,⁽¹⁾
the best hope for acquiring militarily
useful and efficient anti-missile
capabilities has been through theater
missile defenses (TMD) which are not
constrained by the Treaty. Thanks
to Clinton diplomatic initiatives with
the Kremlin, however, this option is also
about to be permanently foreclosed.

The Latest ‘Breakthrough’
— More Erosion in the U.S. Position

The vehicle for accomplishing such an
undesirable goal has been negotiations
nominally aimed at developing amendments
to the ABM Treaty that would define the
differences between limited strategic
missile defenses and
“unconstrained” TMD systems. In
practice, the result of these
negotiations has been to develop what
amounts to a new Anti-Theater
Ballistic Missile Treaty — a document
that not only defines but bans the most
promising means of defending against
shorter-range missile attacks.⁽²⁾

The latest developments in these
negotiations occurred as a result of
meetings held during the week of 11 July
when the Clinton Administration
dispatched a high level team to Moscow,
Kiev, and Minsk to present a new U.S.
position on defining TMD demarcation. The
American delegation, led by the director
of the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, John Holum, informed its
interlocutors that the U.S. was prepared
to accept Moscow’s standing demand for
stringent limitations on the velocities
permitted theater anti-missile
interceptors. (This concession would
round out an earlier, disastrous decision
undertaken unilaterally by the Clinton
team permanently to ban space-based
theater missile defenses.)

Specifically, the United States would
agree to 3 kilometer/second as an upper
limit for deployed ground- and
sea-based systems. The Holum team
announced, however, that it wanted to
preserve the option to test
higher velocity systems for
“ascent-phase” defense. (This
going-in position would have protected
the right to test the Navy’s promising
“Upper Tier” program, but not
to deploy it.) At the same time, the U.S.
indicated it was amenable to operational
restrictions regarding range, payload,
and size of an interceptor that would so
limit the defensive capabilities of
higher velocity ascent-phase interceptors
as to render them essentially useless.

The Russian Response: Par
For the Course

The Russians are clearly determined to
settle for nothing less than restrictions
that will preclude promising American
defensive technologies. As the Center
noted in its 30 June analysis of these
negotiations, Moscow appears motivated by
two considerations:

“[First,] they already have
deployed reasonably effective
defenses against short-range missile
attack — and even some longer-range
missiles — while the U.S. has not.
Such a strategic situation has
traditionally been viewed by Moscow
as a desirable one and the Russians
have gone to great lengths in their
propaganda and diplomatic
machinations to perpetuate it.

“[Second,] the Russians also
have another, more practical
motivation for demanding the
negotiation of limits that would
principally have the effect of
precluding advanced American theater
defense programs. By constraining or
precluding particularly those U.S.
systems that can be easily
retrofitted into existing weapons
platforms, Moscow will eliminate
competition for the potentially
lucrative international market in
such defenses. Russian officials have
described this market as a “gold
mine”; Moscow clearly would like
to ensure that its SA-10, SA-12,
S-300 and other air-defense/ATBM
systems remain best positioned to
exploit it.”

It is hardly surprisingly, therefore,
that the Kremlin reacted to the
Administration’s proposal by allowing
that it represented progress, but did not
go far enough in limiting TMD systems
under the ABM Treaty. For its part, the
Administration was astonished that Moscow
would want still more constraints.
Therefore, Washington pushed to hold
further discussions in the form of an
“experts meeting” held in
Geneva during the last week of July.

More Erosion

On 25 July, the U.S. acting
representative to the Standing
Consultative Commission, Stanley Riveles,
took up the mission of explaining the
“logic” behind the U.S.
position initially laid out by the
Holum’s delegation earlier that month.⁽³⁾
After two weeks of exploring the Clinton
Administration’s latest capitulation to
its demands, Moscow insisted on even
more.

On 8 August, the Russian team
presented a proposal creatively worded to
look like an acceptance of the
U.S. position. In fact, it
amounted to a repackaging of the
Kremlin’s original demand for 3 km/sec
velocity limits across the board (i.e.,
for land-, sea-, and air-based theater
missile defense systems.) The
Russian position boils down to an
insistence on an interceptor velocity
limit of 3 km/sec in testing and/or
deploying any TMD systems with the
exception of a limited number of
higher-velocity tests for “ascent
phase” defense concepts. In effect,
this low limit would kill U.S. plans for
Navy’s “Upper Tier” missile
defense, and every other advanced TMD
program the U.S. currently has under
development. The Russians also proposed
additional, ill-defined restrictions on
deployed systems — such as range and
operating mode — that would affect all
U.S. TMD systems and further hamper
effective missile defenses.

Riveles either did not recognize that
the Russian proposal was even more
restrictive than the U.S. position on the
table — or, like many others in the
Clinton Administration, supports measures
to preclude missile defenses of virtually
any kind. That same night he transmitted
Moscow’s proposal to Washington and asked
for permission to accept it! The
Russian proposal circulated through the
interagency process on 9 August.

Perhaps concerned that such a swift
and abject capitulation would reinforce
criticism of how it is conducting these
negotiations, the Clinton team declined
to approve Riveles’ request for
instructions, directing him instead to
return to Washington on 12 August for
consultations. An interagency meeting on
the subject is scheduled for 29 August.

If past experience is any guide, it is
a safe bet that the upshot will be
further erosion in the U.S. position —
if not outright acceptance of the latest
Russian demands. The Administration’s
hope apparently continues to be that some
deal on theater missile defenses could be
signed at the late September summit
meeting in Washington between President
Clinton and Russian President Boris
Yeltsin.

Meanwhile, On Capitol Hill

In light of a requirement added to the
FY1995 Defense authorization bill that
requires any “substantive
change” to the ABM Treaty to be
submitted to the Senate for its advice
and consent, the Clinton Administration
has been quietly lobbying Senators to
minimize any opposition its give-away on
missile defenses might encounter. Robert
Bell, a member of the National Security
Council staff and former Senate staffer,
has spent a considerable amount of time
meeting with certain Republican Senators
trying to convince them that the Clinton
Administration truly is committed to
effective theater missile defense,
notwithstanding its track record in
negotiating with the Russians.

This argument largely rests on the
contention that the Army’s Theater High
Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system has
been fully protected by the emerging
agreement and its development and
deployment will be facilitated by that
success of these negotiations. Actually,
as noted in the Center’s 30 June href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=94-D_67″>Decision Brief:

“Even the Army’s THAAD
system…will very likely wind up
being constrained by the 3
kilometers/second interceptor
velocity limitation. The
Demonstration and Evaluation (DEMVAL)
version of the THAAD system now under
development has an interceptor
velocity of 2.4 kilometers/second —
reduced from 2.6 km/sec a few months
ago. Even if the so-called
“Objective System” intended
ultimately to be deployed can be
constrained to velocities less than
the limit, future growth options to
give the THAAD interceptor more
capability will be foreclosed.”

Under such circumstances it is not
clear that THAAD will have sufficient
capability and cost-effectiveness to
secure the necessary sustained support
required for its procurement and
deployment. Indeed, some of the strongest
supporters of missile defenses have
concluded that any THAAD likely to emerge
from these negotiations will not be worth
having.

Even though all 44 Republican Senators
signed a letter on 22 March 1994
indicating that if the negotiations were
to “add constraints on TMD
interceptors and sensor
characteristics…precluding a class of
TMD…it is unlikely that we would be
able to support any such agreement,”
Bell has reported having “some
success” with the targets of his
lobbying. He has, for example,
told his superiors in the White House
that Senator John Warner is “in my
pocket” and will accept the
Administration’s capitulation on
effective missile defenses.

Fortunately, other influential
legislators have begun to register their
strong opposition to the Clinton effort
to garrotte what remains of U.S. options
to defend against missile attack. In two
similar letters to President Clinton,
over 50 senior members of the House of
Representatives — including most of
that chamber’s Republican leadership
— have forcefully objected to any action
that would negotiate away America’s right
to effective theater missile defenses.
For example, a letter signed by Reps.
Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey, Henry Hyde,
Floyd Spence and thirty-five other
Members of Congress observed:

“We know of no compelling
argument for limiting our freedom to
pursue theater defense options with
the very best technology we are
capable of developing….No one can
now anticipate the technical
accomplishments we may be able to
achieve in the future. Nor can we
know what missile threats to our
theater forces will emerge over the
next 10, 20 or 30 years. That is why
it would be short-sighted in the
extreme to accept limits now, after
the end of the Cold War, in the
context of an ABM Treaty of declining
relevance and whose provisions were
never intended to limit theater
defenses.”

The Bottom Line

Before the Clinton Administration
takes any further steps down the
proverbial “slippery slope”
represented by negotiating new limits on
missile defenses with the Russians, the
Congress and the American people need to
be heard from. The majority appear
adamantly opposed to perpetuating the
Nation’s present, absolute vulnerability
to short-range missile attack — a stance
incidentally shared, at least
rhetorically, by President Clinton
himself. Their interests should not be
disserved, and their intelligence
insulted, by new agreements that will
deny the United States the most effective
(and perhaps any) theater
missile defense options.

– 30 –

1. The Clinton
Administration’s fealty to the ABM Treaty
can only be described as bizarre and
irresponsible in light of the fact that
even those who created it —
President Richard Nixon and Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger — have
acknowledged that the ABM Treaty has
outlived its usefulness. The bipolar
world in which essentially only U.S. and
Soviet strategic forces enjoyed ballistic
missile capabilities has given way to one
in which many potentially threatening
arsenals contain these systems and
increasingly include weapons of mass
destruction that they might deliver. In
light of these changed circumstances, the
disappearance of the Soviet Union and
Moscow’s past violations of the ABM
Treaty, the United States clearly should
no longer permit it to preclude sensible
steps toward effective missile defenses.

2. For details of
this campaign, see the Center for
Security Povlicy’s Decision Briefs
entitled: Covert Action: Clinton
Ideologues Use ABM Treaty to Garotte
Theater As Well As Strategic Missile
Defenses (No.
94-D 57, 6 June 1994) and It’s
Official: Clinton Approves Formula for
Foreclosing Effective Theater Missile
Defenses (No.
94-D 67, 30 June 1994).

3. Riveles was an
aggressive supporter of the idea of
holding additional talks in Geneva at the
end of July. The reason may have had much
more to do with personal considerations,
however, than the national interest.
According to the Washington Times,
he had purchased non-refundable airline
tickets for his family to accompany him
to Geneva when it appeared the Russians
would accept a 25 July SCC round last
spring. Failing to hold some sort of
official talks would have deprived
Riveles of his tax-subsidized family
vacation in Switzerland.