Arms Control Mystique

The Wall Street Journal, 14 April 1997

In the impending vote on the Chemical Weapons Convention, ratification would require a two-thirds majority, which is to say the votes of 22 of Trent Lott’s 55 Republicans. This currently seems not only conceivable but even likely, despite opposition from four Republican Secretaries of Defense–Caspar Weinberger, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Jim Schlesinger (whose especially trenchant testimony is extracted nearby).

After the chemical treaty will come the agreements on ballistic missile defenses reached between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin at Helsinki last month, repeating and entrenching the solemn U.S. pledge never to defend its homeland against a missile launched anywhere in the world. The real stake is not any particular treaty, but the continuing mystique of arms control, epitomized by the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war in 1928. The fundamental issue is whether we can entrust our national security to agreements with not only Mr. Yeltsin’s Russia, but with the likes of, say, Iran.

In pursuit of arms control symbolism, we’ve reached a chemical pact undertaking to police the world for weapons we know a Japanese cult cooked up in a basement laboratory. From the failure of the world to condemn Iraq when it actually used chemical weapons, we further know that no real sanction is likely even if a treaty violation is unmistakable. And in our guts we must surely know that once the papers are signed we will despite all promises to ourselves relax our vigilance in defending against chemical threats.

For such gains American industry will be forced to open its plants to batches of international busybodies, actually working for who knows whom. Worst of all, the treaty specifically provides for “sharing” of chemical technologies; that is to say, in the end the treaty will not be a constraint on chemical weapons, but a vehicle for their proliferation.

The Clinton-Yeltsin agreements in Helsinki, meanwhile, purport to draw a fine line. Defense will continue to be outlawed against intercontinental ballistic missiles, while defense will be encouraged against their less capable cousins, theater ballistic missiles. If you have trouble figuring out what kind of missile is coming down on you, the agreements provide an answer. So long as it’s coming slower than five kilometers a second, you’re allowed to shoot it down. If it’s coming even faster, duck and good luck. Meanwhile, putting any kind of defense in space, where it might shoot down a missile on the way up instead of down, is strictly forbidden.

After some hemming and hawing, the Administration has agreed that these understandings are a major amendment to the 1972 ABM treaty, and that accordingly it will submit them for the advice and consent of the Senate. But the Administration has said that adding Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to the ABM treaty is not a major amendment requiring Senate approval, since, like Russia, these states are “successors” to the Soviet Union.

This means, obviously, that the number of states with intercontinental missiles grew by three the day the Soviet Union collapsed. We now have to trust not only Mr. Yeltsin, but whoever has fingers on the button in Kazakhstan and Belarus. And with penniless Russian generals peddling arms around the world, what is to prevent Iran or Libya from buying a few SS-19s and becoming a missile power overnight? Some 25 countries already possess ballistic missiles, and several of them are reaching for intercontinental range.

A Defense Department study released this week notes that China has a “large, well-established infrastructure for the development and production of ballistic missiles,” and says it has the capacity to produce “as many as a thousand” ballistic missiles over the next decade. While we regard it a mistake to seek China as an inevitable foe, it is also true that an Assistant Secretary of Defense, Charles Freeman, reported a 1995 conversation about missiles with Lt. General Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of staff for intelligence of the People’s Liberation Army. Gen. Xiong told him, “In the end, you care a lot more about Los Angeles than you do about Taipei.”

In today’s world the threat is no longer a massive nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, but a few nuclear missiles or a sneak chemical attack coming from a nearly endless list of possible sources: a China trying to take Taiwan, an accident in the new, anything-goes Russia, a wacko leader in the Iraqs and North Koreas of the world. Whatever sense the idea of arms control may have made under the former conditions, it certainly is not suited for the realities of the post-Soviet world.

Pursuit of the arms control grail seems to lead us into absurdities, and to detract from our own best efforts to defend ourselves. If Senator Lott and his Republican colleagues can’t stop long enough to take a close new look at the whole philosophy, they should turn the gavel and keys back to the Democrats.