A Policy Indictment: Sen. Cochran’s Subcommittee Documents Clinton Incompetence/Malfeasance On Proliferation

(Washington, D.C.): A safe bet is that, at some point in the foreseeable future, weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) will be used against the United States, its allies and/or its
interests. This may happen as early as 1998; if not, chances increase for an attack in the
following few years.

The weapon used may be a chemical, biological, radiological (i.e., one that uses conventional
explosives rather than a nuclear chain reaction to disperse deadly levels of radiation) or nuclear
one. Such an attack may well be delivered via ballistic missile, since the U.S. has no
defenses in place to prevent it. Alternatively, trucks, ships, aircraft or cruise missiles might be
employed to do the job.

America’s ‘Assured Vulnerability’

Either way, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people will die. If the attack
occurs in this country, this toll will arise, in part, because the United States has made essentially
no civil defense preparations worthy of the name since it decided — as a matter of state policy in
1972 — to condemn its people to a posture of “assured vulnerability.” The logic was compelling:
If, pursuant to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed with the USSR in that year, there would be
no protection against a Soviet missile attack, why waste money defending the American
population against anything else?

Regrettably, the public is largely oblivious to this unhappy state of affairs. Our people
wrongly assume that the United States has a missile defense in place today that would shoot down
incoming missiles. They are largely unaware that whole cities could become uninhabitable for
many years if attacked by a weapon of mass destruction.

An equally safe bet is that should, heaven forfend, such a disaster befall this country, there
will be hell to pay. The witch-hunt to determine culpability for the surprise attack at Pearl
Harbor will likely pale by comparison with the wrath that will justifiably be felt towards those
responsible for deliberately leaving an unknowing American people vulnerable to incalculably
greater destruction.

Enter Thad Cochran

The majority of the Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on International Security,
Proliferation and Federal Services, chaired by Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS), released
today a document that will surely be the prosecution’s Exhibit A in such proceedings. Entitled
simply “The Proliferation Primer,” Sen. Cochran’s report is the single most important
publication produced by the United States government in recent memory.

The Proliferation Primer draws upon the wealth of information derived from eleven,
exceptionally important oversight hearings held by the Cochran Subcommittee over the past
year. Its damning bill of particulars is also informed by an exhaustive search of open-source
materials. Taken together, these inputs permit a thorough, unclassified assessment of the
problem posed by the intensifying traffic in WMD on the part of nations like China (“the principal
supplier of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology in the world”), Russia (a nation
that “has become increasingly active as a supplier” of ballistic missile and weapons of mass
destruction technologies) and North Korea. The progress being made, thanks largely to such
help, by the likes of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Syria is also recounted in horrifying detail.

‘The Enemy Is Us’

The most notable aspect of Sen. Cochran’s Primer, however, may be the fact that it unflinchingly
describes the very significant contribution that the United States itself is making to weapons
proliferation. Unfortunately, this is not simply a matter of the Clinton Administration’s well-documented practice of turning a blind eye to the transgressions of the Chinese, the
Russians and others — even to the point of ignoring or vitiating legal obligations to sanction
proliferators.

Worse yet, the majority report of the Cochran Subcommittee finds that, thanks to “the
Administration’s policy of liberalizing export control restrictions on dual-use technologies
like supercomputers” and otherwise making WMD-relevant information and hardware
widely available, the “United States has itself become a proliferator, however
unintentionally.“

American supercomputers are now in place in the Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons design
bureaus, contributing materially to the threat posed to this country — both directly by these
facilities and via their rogue clients in the Third World. The Cochran Primer reveals, moreover,
that “not a single one of the U.S. supercomputers [at these nuclear design bureaus] have been
subjected either to pre-license checks or post-shipment [end-use] verification.”

Meanwhile, the Information Age is affording via the Internet unprecedented access to data needed
to streamline the acquisition of deadly weapons and delivery systems. Foreign students learn the
necessary scientific and engineering skills in U.S. universities. And the Pentagon itself is serving,
in Sen. Cochran’s words, as “the preferred surplus store for the world’s rogues and others.” For
example, the Cochran Subcommittee discovered that the Defense Department had at one point
offered for sale on the open market a highly sensitive piece of testing equipment for Minuteman
intercontinental-range ballistic missiles that was considered excess to the department’s needs.

The Bottom Line

In all these ways, President Clinton has made a mockery of his 1994 Executive Order which
declares that “the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons…and the means of
delivering such weapons constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security,
foreign policy and economy of the United States.” The Cochran Primer establishes that this
“unusual and extraordinary threat” described by the Clinton Executive Order (which he
extended for the third time on 12 November 1997) will only become more severe if the
United States persists in its present policies of 1) ignoring, compounding and responding
fecklessly to others’ proliferation activities and 2) leaving the American people unprotected
against the consequences of doing so.

The good news is that the Cochran Subcommittee’s report is available now, before it has to be
used in criminal or political proceedings against those whose malfeasance or incompetence
contributed to an avoidable catastrophe. The Proliferation Primer should be required reading
(it can be obtained on the Internet at www.senate.gov/~gov_affairs/ispfs.htm) and its
recommendations an agenda for immediate action by all those who would mitigate, rather
than compound, the ever more clear and ever more present danger posed by proliferation.

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