AN ‘I.Q. TEST’ FOR SENATORS: WHO WILL BE DUPED BY A ‘BIPARTISAN COMPROMISE’ THAT FAILS TO DEFEND AMERICA?

(Washington, D.C.): Official Washington these
days affects grave concern about the contempt for
politicians expressed by increasing numbers of Americans.
The dissatisfaction that is fueling grassroots campaigns
to limit congressional terms and to promote independent
candidacies has much to do with a widespread popular
perception that federal officeholders are often
dishonest, saying one thing while cynically doing the
opposite. The elected are seen as condescending to those
they represent; the impression that the governing class
regards the governed as stupid and easily manipulated
feeds resentment and questions about the judgment — if
not the intelligence — of those in power.

Against this backdrop, the United States Senate faces
an interesting test when it reconvenes next Tuesday —
one that might be called an Indifference Quotient or
“I.Q.” test: It will be asked to vote on a key
amendment to the FY1996 Defense authorization bill
(S.1026) — one that purports to advance the effort to
end the American people’s present, absolute vulnerability
to missile attack. Closer inspection, however, shows
this so-called “bipartisan compromise” does
exactly the opposite, delaying for the foreseeable future
the commitment to begin deploying national anti-missile
defenses.

This amendment is the product of fevered
negotiations primarily conducted by four Senators —
Democrats Carl Levin (MI) and Sam Nunn (GA) and
Republicans John Warner (VA) and William Cohen (ME) —
aimed at sabotaging an Armed Services Committee missile
defense initiative on three separate occasions by a
majority of their colleagues. The initiative mandates the
deployment of a multiple-site, ground-based anti-missile
system that could begin providing limited protection in
1999, with the full system beginning to come on line in
2003. ⁽¹⁾

With the Senate’s votes on 3 and 4 August to sustain
the funding and legislative direction recommended by its
Armed Services Committee (by a 51-48 and 51-49 vote
margin, respectively) and a subsequent, 54-45 vote, the
Clinton Administration was in a pickle. It was publicly
committed to vetoing the legislation if the missile
defense language were not gutted. Yet this President,
in particular, was not pleased at the prospect of having
to veto a Defense authorization bill — especially if
doing so had to be justified on the grounds that the
Senate was in favor of protecting the American people
against a dangerous and growing threat, something Mr.
Clinton is adamantly opposed to doing.

Accordingly, the White House directed Senate
Minority Leader Tom Daschle to filibuster S.1026. Days of
intense bipartisan negotiations ensued. In the end, the
four compromisers insisted that all Senators committed to
deploying a national missile defense be excluded from
their deliberations. Not surprisingly, they were then
able to achieve an agreed amendment that left the essence
of the Senate-approved text on the cutting-room floor.

An Incoherent, Deceptive Mish-Mash

Unfortunately, the bipartisan compromisers went to
some lengths to disguise the extent of their evisceration
of the Armed Services Committee’s initiative. The result
is an incoherent, self-contradictory but highly deceptive
mish-mash: Extremely robust language supporting missile
defenses is included in several places. It is,
however, exclusively hortatory language. All the
operative language is designed seriously to impede if not
permanently to foreclose near-term deployment of
effective national missile defenses.

The former includes statements like the following
“congress[ional] findings”:

• “The threat that is posed to the national
  security of the United States by the
  proliferation of ballistic and cruise missiles is
  significant and growing, both quantitatively and
  qualitatively.
• “The intelligence community…has
  estimated that…the missile proliferation trend
  is toward longer range and more sophisticated
  ballistic missiles….There is a danger that
  determined countries will acquire
  intercontinental ballistic missiles in the near
  future and with little warning by means other
  than indigenous development.”
• “The deployment…of effective defenses
  against ballistic missiles of all ranges…can
  reduce the incentives for countries to acquire
  such missiles or to augment existing missile
  capabilities.”
• “The Cold War distinction between
  strategic ballistic missiles and non-strategic
  ballistic missiles and, therefore, the ABM
  Treaty’s distinction between strategic defense
  and non-strategic defense, has changed
  because of technological advancements and should
  be reviewed.”
• “The concept of mutual assured
  destruction, which was one of the major
  philosophical rationales for the ABM Treaty, is
  now questionable as the basis for stability in a
  multipolar world….”
• “Theater and national missile defenses
  can contribute to the maintenance of stability
  as missile threats proliferate and as the United
  States and the former Soviet Union significantly
  reduce the number of strategic nuclear forces in
  their respective inventories.”
• “Although technology control regimes and
  other forms of international arms control can
  contribute to non-proliferation, such measures
  alone are inadequate for dealing with missile
  proliferation, and should not be viewed as
  alternatives to missile defenses and other active
  and passive defenses.”
• “Due to the limitations in the ABM
  Treaty….the United States is currently
  prohibited from deploying a national missile
  defense system capable of defending the
  continental United States, Alaska and Hawaii
  against even the most limited ballistic missile
  attack.”

That Said, We Will Not Deploy Defenses

Most Americans could be forgiven for expecting that
such findings would prompt conscientious legislators to
craft an amendment that is responsive and proceeds with
the earliest possible deployment of anti-missile systems
for the American people. Instead the bipartisan
compromisers approved prompt deployment only for weapon
systems capable of protecting U.S. allies and
forces overseas against a full array of possible
ballistic missile threats. Those that might protect the
American people may only be “develop[ed] for
deployment.”

Before deployment decisions can be taken, moreover,
critics who have effectively used implausible theoretical
constructs like “cost-effectiveness at the
margin” to stymie earlier missile defense programs
will have to be satisfied that the prospective system
will only be capable of defending against “limited,
accidental or unauthorized ballistic missile
threats” and that it will be “affordable”
and “operationally effective.” And then, the
Russians will basically have to approve before the
American people can be defended by such a anti-missile
system; if they do not, the compromisers offer only to
“consider” the option of withdrawing from the
ABM Treaty.

In short, the compromisers more than took away with
constraining provisions what they had served up in the
way of non-binding rhetorical paeans to missile defense.
As a result, it is patently inaccurate — if not
dishonest — to portray the Levin-Nunn-Cohen- Warner
amendment as a step forward toward correcting the
Nation’s single most acute security deficiency: its utter
vulnerability to ballistic missile attack.

What’s Your Senator’s ‘I.Q.’?

This reality gives rise to some pointed questions for
leading Senators. These include the following:

• For Senator Dole: On 3 August, the
  Majority Leader spoke with considerable feeling
  about his commitment to providing the American
  people with the earliest possible protection
  against missile attacks. Among other things, he
  observed:

  “[The Armed Services Committee’s
  missile defense initiative] firmly
  establishes the critical imperative of
  defending the United States of America from
  ballistic missiles. Morally, rationally and
  constitutionally, this must be our top
  priority…Weapons can be acquired by our
  potential adversaries far more quickly than
  they can produce them indigenously…We
  cannot wait around for years until this
  threat is literally on our doorstep. We must
  prepare now.

  “…The bottom line is that the bill
  recognizes what we all should be aware of —
  that Mutual Assured Destruction, the
  doctrine underlying the ABM Treaty is not a
  suitable basis for stability in a multipolar
  world, nor for an improving relationship with
  Russia…I urge my colleagues to
  reject the [anti-missile defense amendment
  first offered by Senator Levin] or any
  other measure which would weaken or
  threaten the [Armed Service Committee’s
  bill].” (Emphasis added throughout.)

  Did Senator Dole mean those
  statements? If so, he surely cannot support
  the bipartisan compromise amendment which would
  “weaken” and mortally
  “threaten” the Armed Services
  Committee’s Missile Defense Act.

• For Senator Helms: As reported in
  yesterday’s Washington Times, on 24 July
  Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms
  (R-NC) co-signed a letter with his ranking
  minority member, Sen. Clairborne Pell (D-RI),
  demanding that language in S.1026 at odds with
  the ABM Treaty “be removed from the
  bill.” Such a stance is astounding since
  Sen. Helms has been one of the Senate’s most
  unflagging critics of the ABM Treaty (among other
  arms control agreements). Interestingly, on the
  same day, Insight Magazine published the
  second of two articles dealing with Sen. Helms’
  apparent abandonment of his long-standing
  opposition to terrorism and wasteful foreign aid
  programs in the context of approving a $500
  million gift the Clinton Administration wants
  U.S. taxpayers to make to Yasser Arafat’s
  terrorist-harboring Palestinian Authority. In the
  latter case, however, it was revealed that the
  Foreign Relations Committee’s staff director,
  Adm. ‘Bud’ Nance, has acknowledged authorizing
  subordinates to act in ways contrary to the
  Chairman’s well-established positions without
  advising his boss.

Was Senator Helms’ letter on missile
defense issued without his knowledge? Or has the
Senator actually abandoned his justified
opposition to the ABM Treaty? Given what is
at stake for America, it is simply inconceivable
that the explanation for his endorsement of a
letter starkly at odds with his historical
position lies in a petty dispute over two
committees’ jurisdictional turf.

• For Senators Interested in Removing Bill
  Clinton from the White House: All other
  things being equal, President Clinton’s slavish
  devotion to the ABM Treaty — and the posture of
  vulnerability to missile attack that it dictates
  — as the “cornerstone of strategic
  stability” offers his critics an unsurpassed
  opportunity to establish clear, and politically
  powerful, distinctions between his national
  security policies and theirs. If, however, they
  buy into a bipartisan compromise that suits a
  senator like Carl Levin, who is rabidly opposed
  to missile defenses, they would afford Mr.
  Clinton and his partisans abundant but undeserved
  political cover.

In an instance where the national interest
and political expediency actually coincide, would
the President’s adversaries in the Senate not
rather do the right thing than risk shielding
Clinton & Co. on a highly exploitable
Achilles’ heel?

• For Senator Nunn: Finally, it is unlikely
  that the bipartisan compromise would be remotely
  viable were it not for the perception that, if it
  is good enough for the respected former chairman
  of the Armed Services Committee, it should be
  good enough for mere mortals. But it must be
  asked: Is Mr. Nunn really comfortable arguing
  that this compromise has merit because it avoids
  violating the ABM Treaty when, by its terms, it
  would appear to do just that in at least two
  ways: 1) It directs the Secretary of Defense to
  “optimize sensor support and minimize total
  system costs” involving the use of
  “space-based sensors, including the Space
  and Missile Tracking System.” Taken
  literally, this would entail giving
  space-sensors the capability to substitute for
  permitted ground-based ABM radars, an action
  explicitly precluded by the 1972 Treaty. And
  2) it calls for “development of [national
  missile defense] systems and components that do
  not rely on a large permanent infrastructure and
  are easily transported, emplaced and moved.”
  Such characteristics would give rise to
  charges of violating the Treaty’s requirement
  that ABM systems be “fixed.” To be
  sure, both of these steps which some might regard
  at least as “anticipatory breaches” are
  laudable and desirable; they just happen to be at
  variance with the compromisers’ representations.

Can’t Get There From Here — It is also
remarkable that the normally careful Sen. Nunn would
associate himself with a set of programmatic directions
that are patently unacheivable. Specifically, the
compromise directs the Secretary of Defense to
“develop an interim national missile defense plan
that would give the United States the ability to field a
limited operational capability by the end of 1999 if
required by the threat.” Any such capability must,
however, be “operationally effective and on a path
to fulfill the technical requirements and schedule of the
objective system.” In other words, its component
parts must “directly support” and not
“significantly increase the cost of the objective
system.”

Now, there are basically two ways in
which an “interim operational capability” can
conform to these stringent criteria given that the
“objective” system is a fixed, ground-based,
100 ground-based interceptor system, presumably situated
at Grand Forks, ND: Either a small number of existing
Minuteman ICBM boosters and their launchers — a Rube
Goldberg arrangement recommended by a Pentagon-chartered
“tiger team” earlier this year — could be
pressed into anti-missile service or, alternatively, the
first tranche of the “objective system” could
be accelerated.

The compromisers, however, explicitly ruled out the
first — presumably out of reasonable concerns about its
practical feasibility.⁽²⁾
And the second alternative is no less problematic. When
the Bush Administration left office it bequeathed to its
successor a budgeted plan for deploying an interim
ground-based missile defense capability by 1999. Since
the Clinton team refused even to review sealed Requests
for Proposals that would have made such an option
achievable, to say nothing of budgeting appropriately in
the meantime, the United States cannot possibly make a
1999 target date without a decision now to achieve it and
without billions of additional dollars.

What About the ‘Integrity’ of the Ratification
Process? There is one other striking
inconsistency that Sen. Nunn should be asked to address:
He has made clear his concerns that unilateral steps
towards deploying effective national missile defenses
would jeopardize Russian follow-through on promised
strategic arms reductions.⁽³⁾
Yet, Senate ratification of START I was informed by clear
Reagan and Bush Administration representations that the
U.S. government formally rejected Soviet or Russian
efforts to make adherence to START contingent upon
continued U.S. adherence to the ABM Treaty. It is hard
to imagine that a man like Sen. Nunn — who has, in the
past, forcefully rejected unilateral executive branch
attempts to alter the Senate’s original understanding of
American treaty obligations — would blithely go along
with a compromise predicated on such a dramatic, and
strategically significant, revision in the START-ABM
ground-rules.

Administration Solicits Interference in Internal
U.S. Affairs

The extent to which the Clinton Administration is
promulgating a radically different view of the START and
ABM Treaty linkage from that which prevailed when the
Senate gave its advice and consent to START I is evident
in a cable dispatched in mid-August to U.S. embassies in
Moscow, Kiev, Minsk, London, Paris and Almaty,
Kazakhstan. This cable is a transparent attempt to
encourage host governments (including specifically the
Russian parliament) to express strong opposition to the
Armed Services Committee’s language and support for the
bipartisan compromise.⁽⁴⁾

Several aspects of the cable bear special mention.
First, it emphasizes the Clinton Administration’s fealty
to the ABM Treaty. After repeating the mantra that the
Treaty is “a cornerstone of strategic
stability,” the cable instructs missions to stress
that:

“We will continue to work vigorously with the
Congress, within our constitutional process, to
ensure that the ABM Treaty’s benefits are understood,
with respect to both its ability to accommodate
changes in the global security equation and its
importance in the structure of strategic nuclear arms
control.”

The foreign governments were also told that the
President would be advised to veto S.1026 if unamended on
the grounds that — as attached
letters from the Secretaries of State and Defense and
the President’s National Security Advisor make clear —
it would jeopardize Russian performance on START I and
II. The cable also observes that the Senate initiative
argues for accelerating efforts clearly at
variance with the will of the majorities in both houses
of Congress:

“We must emphasize, however, that these
legislative proposals and their significant
congressional support underscore the critical
importance of promptly reaching an agreement on
demarcation that embodies the mutual view reflected
in the May summit statement — that highly effective
theater missile defense systems are entirely
consistent with the ABM Treaty. If we are unable to
demonstrate, through success in our negotiations that
the ABM Treaty does not stand in the way of necessary
theater defenses, it will only fuel efforts to
undermine the ABM Treaty.”

In fact, Congress correctly perceives the
Administration as trying to “demonstrate through
success in [its] negotiations that the ABM Treaty”
can be extended to constrain “highly
effective theater missile defense systems.”

A Flim-Flam on ‘Demarcation’

Such concerns are the driving force behind the one operative
provision of the bipartisan compromise that appears a
concession to the pro-missile defense forces in the
Senate. It says that the Defense Department may not
obligate or expend FY1996 funds to “implement an
agreement that would establish a demarcation between
theater missile defense systems and anti-ballistic
missile [i.e., strategic missile defense] systems”
unless certain provisions are satisfied. Unfortunately,
even if the demarcation line drawn by the compromisers
(and, for that matter, by the Armed Services Committee)
were acceptable, the Administration can readily
circumvent this stipulation. For example, all it
needs to do is say there is no “agreement”;
Moscow and Washington have simply decided to issue two,
parallel and more restrictive unilateral statements
governing demarcation.

Lest there be any doubt that the Administration is
capable of understanding and exploiting this sort of
loophole, it should be mentioned that senior NSC and
other officials were intimately involved in the
negotiations that gave rise to the bipartisan compromise.
In fact, unless the Administration were satisfied, the
Democratic filibuster against S.1026 would have
continued. This level of involvement in brokering the
deal makes a mockery of the cable’s assertion that
“[The Administration] has not taken a position on
the [compromisers’] amendment. However, an amendment
along these lines, if passed by the Senate, probably
would distinctly improve the missile defense provisions
in the Senate FY96 DOD Authorization Bill.”

The Bottom Line

In the course of the coming critical debate over
defending America against missile attack, it is
predictable that opponents of effective, near-term
national missile defenses will go to great lengths to
obscure the true nature of their positions. Some will be
as brazen as Secretary of Defense William Perry who wrote
Sen. Strom Thurmond on 28 July: “The Administration
is committed to respond to ballistic missile threats to
our forces, allies and territory. We will not permit the
capability of the defenses we field to meet those threats
to be compromised [N.B. by Congress, that is].”

Others, including in all likelihood proponents of the
bipartisan compromise, may be more subtle. But the bottom
line is the same: The choice is between aggressively
pursuing the deployment of national missile defenses —
as the Senate has voted repeatedly to do — and deferring
such deployments and the protection that they can afford
the American homeland against ballistic missile strikes.

For Senators wondering whether they can risk flunking
the “Indifference Quotient” test on Tuesday by
voting for the bipartisan compromise, one simple thought
should be borne in mind. There is no real question whether
the American people will be defended against
ballistic missile attacks. Rather, it is a just a matter
of when — before they need it, or after.
And if the answer proves to be after a ballistic
missile attack has destroyed a community in this country
or harmed U.S. forces, citizens or interests elsewhere,
the recriminations aimed at those whose votes produced
such a catastrophe are likely to make the Pearl Harbor
hearings look like a church social.

(1) The dispute revolves
exclusively around national defenses against ballistic
missile strikes. No Senator appears to oppose
defending the American people against cruise missile
attack — indeed, the bipartisan compromise has a section
devoted to launching a coordinated Cruise Missile Defense
Initiative — even though many of the same arguments can
be made against both: They will not stop truck
bombers or other forms of terrorism; there are some in
the intelligence community who take a pollyannish view
about how soon an intercontinental threat will appear;
and there is no guarantee that either mission can be
performed perfectly. The difference, rather is that no
treaty is in place prohibiting national cruise missile
defenses in the U.S. and Russia. And no one in their
right mind would propose signing such a bilateral
agreement under present circumstances — any more than
they would propose the ABM Treaty today if it were not
already in place!

(2) Such a defense would likely
require systems that look like U.S. ICBMs to be fired
from ICBM silos in the general direction of Russia on
their way to achieve intercepts of, for example, North
Korean missiles aimed at the United States. Bear in mind
that Russia nearly launched nuclear missiles at Norway
when Oslo fired a sounding rocket a few months
back. Would an American president really be
prepared to authorize the launch of such systems in times
of crisis?

(3) According to USA Today,
Sen. Nunn believes that such an American step would
“give Russia ‘a gratuitous poke in the eye’ at a
time when it is complying with treaty obligations to
destroy its atomic arsenal.” Such a statement, if
accurate, suggests an astonishing unfamiliarity on the
Senator’s part with the actual, dismal state of
Russian compliance with its arms control obligations.

(4) While the policy import of
this cable is fairly self-evident, it may have been made
even more explicit through other channels (e.g.,
“LIMDIS” or “NODIS” privileged
communications) or phone calls to embassy staff or host
government personnel.