Candid Halperin Remark, Cynical Clinton Statement Reflect Administration’s Abiding Hostility to Missile Defense

(Washington, D.C.): At a recent State Department meeting to prepare Secretary Albright for
a
National Security Council discussion of U.S. policy with respect to the deployment of a national
missile defense system, a wisecrack was reportedly made that perfectly captured the Clinton
team’s abiding hostility to the idea of such a deployment.

According to last Friday’s Washington Times, the director of the State
Department’s Policy
Planning Office, Morton Halperin — an individual with a long history of controversial and even
radical views — demeaned the idea of defending
American citizens in Alaska over the
opposition of Russia. The context was an internal deliberation concerning whether to defend
some of the U.S. from a single ground-based site in North Dakota (which some believe would
have been permissible under by the now-defunct ¹
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 ²) or to
defend all of the United States from multiple sites — which the Russians have made
clear they
would strenuously oppose.

Halperin is said to have opined that “A thousand people out there aren’t worth
upsetting the
Russians over.” With this quip, the State Department’s senior planner not only
wrote-off the
inhabitants of Alaska’s Aleutian Islands — who clearly cannot be protected from North Dakota
and will soon be in the cross-hairs of North Korea’s long-range missiles, if they are not already.
He also reflected the Clinton Administration’s continued determination to subordinate
America’s defensive needs to a Russian veto.

Although the State Department disputed the Times’ account, calling it totally
inaccurate, its
disclaimer was less than convincing: “Secretary of State Madeleine Albright strongly believes
and has stated that any NMD (National Missile Defense) system that the United States may
decide to deploy needs to provide protection for every part of all 50 states, including
Alaska and
Hawaii.”

What Deployment Decision?

In fact, this comment underscores the Administration’s abiding determination to defer the
decision to deploy a missile defense for any of the American people — a
determination made
even more explicit later on Friday in connection with President Clinton’s signature of the Missile
Defense Act of 1999. With that step, a momentous change in U.S. government policy was
enacted into law: For the first time since 1972, it is now official policy that the
American
people be defended against ballistic missile attack “as soon as technologically
possible.“

Yet, at the time of the Missile Defense Act’s signing, President Clinton announced:

Section 2 of this Act states that it is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as
technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense (NMD) system with funding
subject to the annual authorization of appropriations and the annual appropriation of funds for
NMD. By specifying that any NMD deployment must be subject to the authorization and
appropriations process, the legislation makes clear that no decision on deployment has
been
made. This interpretation, which is confirmed by the legislative record taken as a
whole, is also
required to avoid any possible impairment of my constitutional authorities. (Emphasis added.)

Wrong on Missile Defense, Wrong on Alaska

It is truly Orwellian for Mr. Clinton to pretend that the clear meaning of the Missile Defense
Act
is other than that a commitment has been made to deploy missile defenses as soon as
technologically possible. Even more objectionable, however, is the evident and continuing
disregard his Administration feels for Americans who are among the most exposed to the dangers
of ballistic missile attack — notably those in Alaska.

After all, the Halperin remark is not the first indication of this attitude. In 1995, Alaska and
Hawaii were deliberately excluded from the National Intelligence Estimate on the missile threat
to the United States. This was necessary in the Administration’s view because these two states
are inconveniently located too close to shorter-range missile threats. As a result, their inclusion
would have made it impossible to reach the conclusion, as the Clinton team was determined to
do, that there was no imminent threat of missile attack to the U.S. ³

The Halperin comment puts into sharp relief the views of two of the Nation’s most senior
legislators, Rep. Don Young, Chairman of the House Energy and Natural
Resources Committee
and Sen. Ted Stevens, Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee,
both of Alaska. In an
angry press release issued in the wake of the Washington Times article, Rep. Young
declared
Halperin’s remark to be a “slap in the face to all Americans.” And even before this episode, Sen.
Stevens served notice that he believed that the ABM Treaty should not be a concern of
US
policy makers when it comes to NMD. Sen. Stevens calling it “a piece of paper with no real
meaning.”

The Bottom Line

The time has come to begin defending America against missile attack. In the face of
continued
obstructionism from the executive branch, Congress must go beyond setting policy and insist on
its implementation. A good place to demonstrate its seriousness of purpose would be by
demanding the resignation of Morton Halperin. It should then direct
the testing and
deployment of missile defenses capable of providing protection against at least
missiles like
those the North Koreans are now acquiring.

¹See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled
Chairman Helms Endorses Center’s Feith-Miron
Analysis Showing A.B.M. Treaty to Be Defunct (No.
99-D 28, 3 March 1999) and Definitive
Study Shows Russians Have No Veto Over Defending U.S. ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=99-P_11″>No. 99-P 11, 22 January 1999).

² The ABM Treaty prohibited any territorial defense of the United
States. While in its amended
form, the Treaty allowed a single site defense is permitted at Grand Forks, North Dakota, that
exception was intended to permit only an anti-missile defense for the purpose of protecting a
ballistic missile wing deployed in the immediate vicinity. It is not clear that the Treaty would
have allowed larger areas of the U.S. to be protected even from that single, permitted site.

³ See It Walks Like a Duck…: Questions Persist That
Clinton C.I.A.’s Missile Threat
Estimate Was Politically Motivated (No. 96-D
122, 4 December 1996).