Charles Krauthammer for the (Missile) Defense

Center’s Gaffney Calls for Debate on How Best to Do the Job

(Washington, D.C.): In today’s Washington Post, one of the Nation’s most highly
regarded
syndicated columnists, Charles Krauthammer, addresses himself to one of the Nation’s most
serious public policy issues: the absence of a deployed American ability to stop even a
single
ballistic missile launched at the United States from reaching our shores with devastating effect. In
an article entitled “Missile Defense at Last” (see attached), Mr.
Krauthammer calls attention to
the absurdity of the present situation — in which even the Clinton Administration acknowledges
the need for deployment of anti-missile defenses in light of the burgeoning proliferation of
missile-borne weapons of mass destruction, yet it proposes to afford the Russians a veto over any
such
deployment.

As Mr. Krauthammer put it: “What standing does Russia, of all nations, have to dictate how
and
whether the United States will defend itself? Russia is the principal supplier to Iran of precisely
the missile and nuclear technology that could one day turn New York into Hiroshima.”

The question of standing is, as the columnist notes, especially pertinent in light of an
extraordinarily impressive new study distributed last week by the Center for Security
Policy. ¹
This legal analysis, authored by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Douglas
J. Feith
and George Miron, conclusively demonstrates that the Russians
currently enjoy no such
standing thanks to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty: As a matter of international
legal
practice and precedent, Messrs. Feith and Miron establish, the ABM Treaty lapsed when
the
Soviet Union became extinct in 1991.

The Center for Security Policy applauds and endorses Mr. Krauthammer’s
bottom line concerning
an upcoming mission to Moscow by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott — a mission whose
purpose evidently is to try to arrive at new arms control arrangements that will perpetuate an
ABM Treaty regime that impedes, dumbs down and adds enormously to the cost of U.S. missile
defenses:

“The only purpose of such a mission should be to politely tell
the Russians to go
jump in the lake. After having admitted that the ICBM threat is real and that we must
defend ourselves, the Clinton administration cannot possibly allow Russia to stop us
from doing what it has just said we must do. Or can it?”

A copy of a companion piece by the Center’s Director, Frank
J. Gaffney, Jr., which
appears in his column in today’s Washington Times, argues that, in light of the
Administration’s changed position, there should no longer be any impediment to establishing as
U.S. government policy that the Nation will deploy missile defenses as soon as technologically
possible. The task then should be to determine how best, most flexibly, most quickly and most
cost-effectively to do so — and to adopt that approach at once.

¹See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled
Message to Albright, Primakov: New Legal Analysis
Establishes That The A.B.M Treaty Died With The
U.S.S.R. ( No. 99-P 11, 26 January 1999).