Clinton Legacy Watch # 37: An End to the U.S. Posture of ‘Assured Vulnerability’?

(Washington, D.C.): Over the past ten days, the Clinton Administration
has signaled its intention
to make the most significant sea-change in U.S. security policy since March 1983, when President
Ronald Reagan surprised the world by unveiling his Strategic Defense Initiative. The question is:
Is this a real change or is it but one more in a series of Clintonian “triangulations” — the term
coined by Dick Morris for a bait-and-switch maneuver that robs the political opposition of its
most politically potent issues, often at a cost of little more than lip-service to the need for action.

The Administration’s New-found Concern About Vulnerability

Announcements made first by Secretary of Defense William Cohen and then by Mr. Clinton
himself suggest that the United States is now finally poised to abandon the posture of “assured
vulnerability” that it adopted in the wake of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In accordance
with that treaty, the U.S. government formally renounced any interest in defending the Nation
against ballistic missiles. And, having decided not to protect its people against that most palpable
of threats from the missile-wielding Soviet Union, it came to embrace as a practical matter the
idea that there was no sense expending huge sums to protect them against other threats, either.

Missile Threats: As a result, today, Americans are
exposed to blackmail or mass destruction
by missile-delivered chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in the hands not only of an
increasingly hostile Russian government. Nations from China to North Korea to Iran
and
Libya either already have or shortly will acquire the means credibly to threaten this country with
one or more of these devices. As long as the United States allows its defense policies and
programs to be governed by the restrictions of the ABM Treaty, we will be unable to prevent
even a single missile from these or other rogue states from reaching our shores with devastating
effect.

Non-Missile WMD Threats: The notion that American
vulnerability was actually desirable gave
rise to a combination of decades of inattention to and lack of investment in programs that would
mitigate the danger posed by weapons of mass destruction — whether delivered by crop-dusters,
tramp steamers or suitcases. The Nation accordingly now finds itself without the means to assure
control of its air space, the infrastructure to provide effective civil defenses or even the capability
to assure the continuity of the U.S. government in the event of such attacks.

Cyber Threats: In recent years, as our society and defenses
have become ever more dependent
upon computers and information technology (IT), a new threat has emerged: a growing likelihood
that enemies ranging from individual thrill-seeking hackers to terrorists to hostile nations will
engage in deliberate attacks aimed at disrupting or destroying critical IT networks. Concerns
about the so-called “Millennium Bug” have provided insights into the myriad ways in which the
security of both the Nation and its citizens could be severely harmed by even temporary
disruptions in power grids, financial markets and systems, the telecommunications infrastructure,
vital government functions, etc.

The Clinton Administration has, in recent months, begun to evince a growing sensibility to
these
risks. Until very recently, however, it has seemingly confined itself to understated public
hand-wringing and those favorite government activities — reorganizations, meetings and studies.

Is It Real?

Then came nearly back-to-back announcements by the Secretary of Defense and the
President.
On January 20^th, Mr. Cohen ended six years of Administration
prevarication by
acknowledging that there is a growing threat of missile attack against the United States —
and that we would have to deploy a limited national missile defense to protect the
American people against it. Then, two days later, the President himself delivered a
speech
warning that “The enemies of peace realize they cannot defeat us with traditional military means.
So they are working on two new forms of assault…cyber attacks on our critical computer
systems, and attacks with weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological, potentially even
nuclear weapons.”

In connection with the former, Secretary Cohen declared that the Administration would be
setting
aside $6.6 billion for the deployment of ground-based missile defenses. While Mr. Cohen stressed
that the decision to make such a deployment would not be made for another sixteen months (the
money is, therefore, all in the often-fictitious “out-year” budgets) — and, indeed, the initial
operational capability for the proposed system has slipped by two years to 2005 — he took pains
to make clear that the Nation would be defended against rogue state missile threats.

For his part, President Clinton announced that his budget would include $10 billion
“to
address terrorism and terrorist-emerging tools…includ[ing] nearly $1.4 billion to protect
citizens against chemical and biological terror — more than double what we spent on such
programs only two years ago — [and] $1.46 billion to protect critical systems from cyber
and other attacks.”

Perhaps most important of all these announcements was Mr. Cohen’s suggestion that the
new-found determination to address America’s ever-more-reckless posture of vulnerability would
not
be precluded by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty or Russian opposition. Such a stance would
clear the way not only for the limited, relatively ineffective and expensive ground-based system
the Administration fancies, but for the much more flexible, capable and cost-effective sea-based
approach favored by many experts as the best way to begin providing near-term U.S. missile
defense.

Not So Fast

Unfortunately, within hours of the Secretary of Defense’s press conference, Administration
spokesmen were clarifying what the Secretary meant to say — namely, that the U.S.
actually has
no intention of departing from the ABM Treaty or even of pursuing limited defenses
without Russian assent. This point was evidently reinforced by Secretary of State
Madeleine
Albright in her just-completed talks in Moscow. And her deputy, Strobe Talbott, a life-long
devotee of this and other arms control treaties, will be dispatched to Moscow next month to
continue these discussions. It is hard to imagine that the result will be an actual, early end to the
American posture of assured vulnerability.

The Bottom Line

The good news is that a new, rigorous legal analysis by former Deputy Assistant
Secretary of
Defense Douglas Feith and George Miron has conclusively
demonstrated that there is no ABM
Treaty. Under international legal precedent and practice, it lapsed when the Soviet Union became
extinct. ¹ So, Members of Congress should feel
free — indeed, feel compelled — to direct the
executive branch to effect the deployment of missile defenses as soon as technologically
possible and pursue aggressively other means of reducing the Nation’s vulnerability to the
various emerging non-missile threats.

The Administration’s response to such an initiative will be edifying. Should it persist in
opposing
efforts to defend America, the recent high-level expressions of a commitment to do just that will
add to, not reduce, our insecurity — and to the indictment against this most cynical of Presidents.

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