A Day that Will Live In Infamy: 25^th Anniversary Of The A.B.M. Treaty’s Ratification Should Be Its Last

(Washington, D.C.): Twenty-five years
ago tomorrow, the United States ratified
the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)Treaty;
this Friday will mark the 25^th
anniversary of that Treaty’s entry into
force. With those acts, America became
legally obliged to leave itself
permanently vulnerable to nuclear-armed
ballistic missile attack.

It is highly debatable whether such a
policy of deliberately transforming the
American people into hostages against one
means of delivering lethal ordnance
against them (in contrast to U.S. policy
with respect to land invasion, sea
assault or aerial attack) made sense in
1972. It certainly does not today,
in a world where the Soviet Union no
longer exists and Russia no longer has a
monopoly on threatening ballistic
missiles or the weapons of mass
destruction they can carry.

The Reagan Legacy

Indeed, as long ago as March 1983, President
Reagan dared to suggest that the
United States might be better off
defending its people against
nuclear-armed ballistic missile attack
rather than avenging their deaths after
one occurs. And yet, while Mr. Reagan’s
address spawned a research program that
became known as the Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI) — into which tens of
billions of dollars have been poured over
the past fourteen years, the ABM Treaty
remains the “supreme law of the
land.” As a consequence, the United
States continues to fail what has been
called “the one-missile
test”: No
defenses are in place today to prevent
even a single long-range
ballistic missile from delivering
nuclear, chemical or biological warheads
anywhere in the country.

This is all the more extraordinary
since Republicans and like-minded
conservatives have generally recognized
that such a posture has become not just
dangerous, but also reckless in
the “post-Cold War” world. In
fact, one of the few commitments
of the ‘Contract With America’ that
remains unfulfilled was arguably among
its most important — namely, its promise
to defend the American people against
ballistic missile attack.
Successive legislative attempts to
correct this breach-of-contract have all
foundered for essentially two reasons.

Why Are We Still
Undefended?

First, most Republicans have
shied away from a fight over the ABM
Treaty. Some deluded themselves
into believing that the opportunity
afforded by the Treaty to deploy 100
ground-based anti-missile interceptors in
silos at a single site in Grand Forks,
North Dakota would allow the U.S. to get
started on defenses. Even though such a
deployment would neither make
strategic sense (it would not cover
the entire United States from even a
limited attack) nor be justifiable
from a budgetary point of view
(while estimates vary widely, costs of
this minimal system could be well over
$10 billion), some missile defense
proponents rationalized their support for
it by claiming that the anti-defense
crowd would not object to this
“treaty-compliant” deployment
and that it would be better than nothing.
To date, however, all these
“camel’s-nose-under-the-tent”
schemes have come to naught.

Second, while Republicans (and many
Democrats) have been quite willing to
spend upwards of $3 billion per year on
SDI-related research, opponents
of missile defenses have skillfully
exploited many legislators’ fears of the
large, budget-busting price-tags said to
be associated with more comprehensive
missile defense schemes. The
prospect of being pilloried for adding to
the deficit to buy unproven “Star
Wars” technology in violation of a
major U.S.-Soviet arms control agreement
was generally enough to dissuade all but
the most visionary and courageous of
political figures from pressing for
prompt deployment of effective
anti-missile systems.

Beginning of the Endgame on
the ABM Treaty

Developments on both the treaty and
technology fronts, however, suggest that
the time has finally come when Ronald
Reagan’s vision can be accomplished and
America defended — a vision made all the
more compelling by the hemorrhage of
missiles and deadly weaponry far beyond
the control of the Kremlin:

‘Strengthening’ the ABM Treaty?

The Clinton Administration last Friday
signed agreements that create new
parties to the ABM Treaty (in
the stead of the long-gone Soviet Union
would be Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and
Ukraine) and that expand the
Treaty’s scope. Instead of
dealing exclusively with defenses against
long-range missiles, the ABM Treaty would
be amended to include new limitations on
so-called “theater”
anti-missile systems designed to deal
with shorter-range threats.

Since the
full text of the second amendment, known
as the “demarcation” accord,
has not been made available as of this
writing, it is currently impossible to
assess with certainty just how
constraining these limitations will prove
to be. (Such an analysis will be
forthcoming from the Center shortly.)
Suffice it to say, however, that the
history of arms control is one in which
even seemingly innocuous accords
generally are interpreted and
administered by the U.S. government in an
unexpectedly restrictive and
unreciprocated manner.

(Interestingly, a Clinton
Administration official today explained
the continuing unavailability of this
document — which was, after all, signed
last week by Secretary of State Albright
— on the grounds that it still had
not been translated from the Russian.
Presumably, Mrs. Albright read the text before
signing it.)

Clearly, a fight over the ABM
Treaty now can no longer be avoided.
The Administration is expressly stating
its intention to breathe new life into
this accord by making it more difficult
to amend and more comprehensive in its
impediments to U.S. missile defenses. The
Republican Congress now has no choice but
to explicate the risks associated with a
posture of defenseless, and to take
corrective action. This will
entail defeating Mr. Clinton’s proposed
amendments; if thirty-four Senators
reject the multilateralization of the ABM
Treaty, there will be no other party to
it and the treaty should die a natural
death.

An Affordable Option for
Defending America

Fortunately, the United States
also has near-term missile defense
options that would allow it quickly to
field global, militarily effective
anti-missile defenses at relatively low
cost. All that is required would
be to adapt the infrastructure that
is already in place — thanks to the
Navy’s $50 billion investment over the
past few decades in its AEGIS fleet air
defense system — giving it the
capability to shoot down both shorter- and
longer-range ballistic missiles⁽¹⁾

Such a system would create a basis for
addressing near-term missile threats and
complement space-based assets that may be
needed in the future. The only
problem is that the ABM Treaty prohibits
such an affordable, formidable sea-borne
defensive system. It must no longer be
allowed to do so.

The Bottom Line

As it happens, the opening salvos in
what may be the endgame of the ABM Treaty
fight were sounded this weekend at the
first International Conservative Congress
(dubbed by one participant “the
Conintern”). One preeminent leader
after another — including House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, former British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,
once-and-future presidential candidate Steve
Forbes, former UN Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Senator Jon
Kyl and nationally syndicated
columnist Charles Krauthammer
— denounced the idea of making it still
harder to defend our people against
ballistic missile attack. Several,
notably Senator Kyl and Mr. Forbes, have
explicitly endorsed the AEGIS option to
begin performing that task.

In an impassioned appeal for missile
defenses as part of a robust military
posture, Lady Thatcher said yesterday:

“A strong defense, supported
by heavy investment in the latest
technology, including
ballistic missile defense,
is as essential now, when we
don’t know who our future enemy
may be, as in the Cold War era.
And my friends, we must keep
ahead technologically. We must
not constrain the hands of our
researchers. Had we done so in
the past, we would never have had
the military superiority that in
the end, with the dropping of the
atomic bomb, won the war in the
Far East and saved many, many,
lives, even though it destroyed
others. We must always remain
technologically ahead. If not, we
have no way in which to be
certain that our armed forces
will prevail. And the research
and technology of the United
States is sheer genius, and it
always has been.”

With such leadership, there now
looms a distinct possibility that the
American people can finally be acquainted
with the ominous reality of their
vulnerability and empowered to demand and
secure corrective actions.
Thanks to the Clinton ABM amendments and
the new technical options for defending
America, we have both the vehicle for
getting out from under an accord that was
obsolete even in Ronald Reagan’s day and
the means for making good and
cost-effective use of the freedom that
will flow from doing so.

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1. For additional
information on this option, see the
reports issued in 1995 and 1996 by the
Heritage Foundation’s blue-ribbon Missile
Defense Study Team (Team B) entitled Defending
America: A Near- And Long-Term Plan to
Deploy Missile Defenses and
the Center for Security Policy’s Decision
Briefs entitled Jim
Woolsey Helps U.S. Reach ‘Critical Mass’
on Missile Defense ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_74″>No. 97-D 74, 2
June 1997) and Unhappy
Birthday: Twenty-Five Years of the A.B.M.
Treaty Is Enough: Sen. Kyl Points Way To
Begin Defending America ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_72″>No. 97-D 72, 23
May 1997).