What The Senate Votes On ABM Mean: The End Of Absolute US Vulnerability

(Washington, D.C.): Today will live in history as a day when the United States took the first, momentous step toward genuine strategic security.This was not, however, due to the signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in Moscow. Instead, it was the result of two roll call votes taken in the course of many hours of impassioned debate on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

The upshot of those votes was an emphatic rejection of the notion of absolute American vulnerability to ballistic missile attack — a parlous state in which the U.S. has remained for nearly twenty years in the wake of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Starting with its repudiation (39-60) of an amendment offered by Sen. Al Gore (D-TN), the Senate signalled that it, at least, had learned one of the most important lessons of the Gulf War: It is better to be defended, even imperfectly, against ballistic missile attack than to be defenseless against it.

"The fact that the Senate could vote to begin to defend the United States on the very day that a new START Treaty was signed — and in the face of Moscow’s explicit threat to withdraw from that accord should the U.S. deviate from the ABM Treaty is simply extraordinary," said Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., director of the Center for Security Policy. "Clearly, the boogey-man that such an American step would trigger an even more massive Soviet offensive weapons build-up than that which has occurred under the ABM Treaty — an argument which for too long has been cited to justify perpetual U.S. vulnerability — is, in the face of Moscow’s economic collapse, no longer plausible to senators."

Gaffney added, "Equally important, a substantial majority of the Senate concurred with its Armed Services Committee’s judgment: The world we will face in the future requires an ‘adequate’ territorial defense against the burgeoning danger of accidental or purposeful, small-scale attacks involving ballistic missiles. Today’s votes suggest that allegiance to what President Bush has called ‘an abstract theory of deterrence’ will no longer blind this nation’s leaders to emerging threats unanticipated and unaffected by the codification of that theory — the ABM Treaty."

Especially noteworthy was the defeat by a vote of 43-56 of an amendment offered by Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) which he described as having three objectives. It would have confined the Armed Services Committee’s deployment initiative: 1) to an approach that would enhance "strategic stability;" 2) to a single, ground-based site; and 3) to an ABM Treaty-compliant system. It can only be hoped that the Senate will be no less decisive in rejecting five amendments scheduled to be offered tomorrow, amendments intended to try to advance one or more of these broad objectives in a piecemeal fashion or otherwise to hobble progress toward effective, deployed U.S. defenses.