Clinton Legacy Watch # 13: Mixed Signals On Proliferation Help Perpetuate U.S. Posture Of Vulnerability

(Washington, D.C.): The coincidence of the publication of a new Defense Department report on
proliferation with the Clinton Administration’s bungling in the ongoing crisis with Iraq — a crisis
that showcases the myriad, acute dangers posed by such proliferation and America’s vulnerability
to the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — is but the latest of a series of mixed signals
on this subject being sent by Clinton and Company. On balance, its commendable (if fairly
uneven) official efforts to educate the public about the spread of WMD have been more than
offset by policies and actions that exacerbate it.

Heads Up

On the one hand, the Clinton Administration — and most especially and recently Secretary of
Defense William Cohen — have raised an alarm about the threat of proliferating chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons. The following are illustrative examples of these efforts:

• In recent public appearances, Secretary Cohen has starkly described the extraordinary
  lethality of modern chemical and biological arms. Particularly gripping was his use of a
  five-pound bag of sugar as a stage prop to illustrate how little anthrax virus it would take to
  kill every man, woman and child on the planet.
• Secretary Cohen also deserves credit for the timely publication of Proliferation: Threat and
  Response, the second annual treatment of this complex issue. It is a far more
  comprehensive and useful document than its predecessor. Notably, it includes one of the most
  threatening WMD states — Syria — which the Administration left out of last year’s report,
  presumably as part of its fatuous effort to appease Hafez Assad into playing a constructive role
  in the Mideast “peace process.”

Unfortunately, this report is not without its own examples of politicization. For
instance, a number of states, including Russia, are discussed in terms of having the
“capability for offensive biological warfare.” There is no reason to believe that rogue
states like Syria, Iran and North Korea — to say nothing of Russia, which has the
world’s largest and most aggressive biological warfare program — have failed to
actualize their potential for BW.

• Someone, presumably in the Administration, has also been going to considerable lengths to
  leak information about Iraq’s biological warfare program. A chilling and very detailed
  description of what is known and what is suspected about this large, ongoing effort appeared
  in the Washington Post on 21 November.
• In November 1994, the President signed Executive Order #12938 stating that “the
  proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (‘weapons of mass destruction’) 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, and [I] hereby declare a state
  of emergency to deal with that threat.” Although he issued this Order for reasons having to
  do with vestigial efforts to control the export of dangerous technologies, it nonetheless
  correctly characterizes the problem — and creates a legal basis for far more concerted action to
  address it.
• The Administration has, as part of its newly unveiled Defense Reform Initiative, assigned the
  National Guard responsibilities for dealing with the civil catastrophes that would flow
  from the use of WMD in the United States.
• The Clinton Administration has also announced that it has embarked upon a two-part
  “training program” which will: 1) train “first responders (fire, law enforcement and medical)
  to enhance their [WMD] response capabilities” in the country’s 120 largest cities and 2)
  “develop training modules and establish mechanisms to provide federal expertise to every
  community in the Nation.” (It will be interesting to see how the 121^st -largest city — and those
  farther down the list — will react to getting just “training modules” and “mechanisms,” when
  the threat clearly dictates a vastly more robust effort.)

Head Still in the Sand

Regrettably, these salutary steps have not begun to offset the serious damage done to the United
States’ ability properly to understand, contain and respond to the threat posed by proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction. Consider but a few examples of benighted Clinton policies:

• Despite a relatively concerted effort at WMD protection by the military in the wake of
  Operation Desert Storm, Jane’s Defense Weekly Online of 12 November 1997 reports that
  “the Defense Department’s Joint Program Office for Biological Defense recently estimated that
  an anthrax attack alone would result in tens of thousands of casualties in theater and
  leave warfighting strength at just over 30%.”
• The vulnerability of the United States’ civilian population, however, makes the armed
  forces, by contrast, appear practically immune to the effects of biological or chemical attack.
  The Clinton Administration is doing virtually nothing to provide for civil defense. Training of
  first-responders is all well and good, but in the absence of preparations either to protect
  civilians in place or evacuate them in an orderly fashion, the best that can be hoped for from
  such training is a more efficient triage system.
• The Clinton Administration continues to refuse to deploy anti-missile defenses for the
  American people, perpetuating indefinitely our present, absolute vulnerability to an attack by
  WMD-bearing ballistic missiles. While the Administration contends that it has a readiness
  program that is commensurate with the threat, this so-called “3-plus-3” program is a fraud,
  of a piece with President Clinton’s innumerably repeated claims that “there are no nuclear
  missiles pointed at our children.” It cannot and will not provide an effective missile defense
  of the entire United States and such defense as it can provide will not be available if it is
  needed any time soon. Incredibly, the Administration is even allowing vitally needed theater
  missile defenses to be slowed-down and dumbed-down in deference to the obsolete 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and amending that treaty so as to force us to do so in perpetuity.
• As one of its first acts in office, the Clinton Administration set about terminating measures
  designed to assure the continuation of constitutional, representative government in the
  event of a WMD attack on Washington. Few things could do more to weaken deterrence, if
  not actually serve to invite attack, than the prospect that the U.S. military could be paralyzed
  by “decapitation” of its command structure.
• The Administration also destroyed the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export
  Controls (COCOM) — an indispensable, if imperfect, tool for controlling the transfer of
  dangerous dual-use technologies. While a number of other multilateral mechanisms have been
  established in recent years to try to manage transfers of various types of such technologies
  (e.g., missile, chemical, nuclear, etc.), none has proven nearly as effective as COCOM. The
  upshot of eliminating this organization, neutering (and now dismantling) the Pentagon’s
  watchdog Defense Technology Security Administration and eviscerating nearly all U.S. export
  controls has been greatly to facilitate the trafficking in WMD and other potentially harmful
  materiel.
• President Clinton has put in train a policy he has called “denuclearization” that threatens
  to make it impossible for the United States to maintain a safe, reliable and effective deterrent.
  Its nuclear weapons production complex is almost entirely shut down. The trained personnel
  responsible for the development, testing and reliability of the stockpile have been hemorrhaging
  from its national laboratories. It has not conducted a nuclear test in over five years and has
  pledged never to do so again. There is no program to design or procure replacements for the
  United States’ aging missiles, long-range bombers and strategic submarines.

What is more, as CBS News has recently documented, the U.S. is not adequately
safeguarding its nuclear weapons facilities.⁽¹⁾ And Rose Gottemoeller — a woman
whose espousal of the radical idea of abolishing (read “disinventing”) nuclear weapons
helped bar her from appointment as a Clinton Assistant Secretary of Defense — has
now been made the Director of Non-proliferation in the Energy Department, a top
policy-making position!

Coupled with the elimination of its own chemical weapons stockpile and the
foreswearing of any biological weapons capability, the United States is on a glide-path that will force it to rely exclusively on conventional forces to deter WMD
attacks. This is an uncertain proposition, at best, since, as Secretary Cohen’s new
report indicates, the danger of WMD use against Americans arises, at least in part,
from the adversaries’ desire for an asymmetric response to overwhelming U.S.
conventional power.

• Instead of active and passive defenses, effective export control arrangements and a credible
  deterrent, the Clinton Administration is relying upon a host of arms control agreements
  to mitigate the dangers entailed in its policy of deliberate vulnerability — a malingering artifact
  of the Cold War theory of “assured destruction.”

Even though the experience with Iraq’s sustained thwarting of relatively comprehensive
and rigorous UN inspections over the past six-years demonstrates the futility of
initiatives like the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention,
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban, the U.S.
government is fatuously betting the farm that these treaties will help keep us safe. If
anything, this sort of “placebo effect” actually contributes to the danger by
discouraging accurate assessments of the actual danger.

• Finally, although the Administration has lately made some efforts to describe more accurately
  the threat posed by proliferation, it is still concealing much that the public needs to know.
  President Clinton’s willingness to certify that China is now behaving responsibly with respect
  to nuclear technology transfers is, at best, highly disingenuous; at worst, it is deliberately
  dishonest. No effort is being made to prepare sanitized summaries that accurately reflect the
  classified findings of National Intelligence Estimates. These assessments accurately describe
  the gravity of the emerging chemical and biological warfare problems — and the utter
  irrelevance of favored arms control treaties for dealing with them. And Gordon Oehler, an
  intelligence officer who proved too forthcoming with Congress about the emerging
  proliferation threat, has been cashiered, sending an unmistakable signal about towing the party
  line to those who remain in the community.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy urges the Clinton Administration to get its act together on the
“national emergency” that is genuinely posed by proliferation. To do so, it must stop sending
mixed signals about the gravity of this danger and eschew policies that will, if anything, make
matters worse. A consistent, realistic message and sensible program are essential preconditions to
providing what security we can for the American people in a world that is becoming ever more
menacing to them and their interests.

– 30 –

1. See reports concerning the dangerously degraded security situation at
the Department of Energy’s Rocky Flats
facility which appeared on the “CBS Evening News” on 24 and 25 November. In this connection,
please also refer to the Center’s Decision Brief entitled Inviting Life to Imitate Art: Will a
‘Peacemaker’ Exploit Deficient Security At U.S. Nuclear Facilities? (No. 97-D 158, 24
October 1997).