CLINTON’S DETERMINATION TO LEAVE AMERICA DEFENSELESS SHOULD DOOM START II

Last night, by a vote of 51-43, the United States Senate completed work on a landmark piece of legislation: H.R. 1530, the Fiscal Year 1996 Defense authorization bill. This bill is noteworthy primarily because it fulfills an important element of the Contract With America — the promise to provide a defense against ballistic missile attack for the United States’ people, allies and forces overseas. H.R. 1530 directs the Pentagon to put into place a missile defense system capable of protecting the entire United States by the year 2003.

In voting to affirm this provision, a bipartisan majority of Senators joined an even larger bipartisan majority in the House (267-149) to reject the principal argument made by the Clinton Administration and its supporters on Capitol Hill like Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA): The United States cannot defend its people against even limited ballistic missile threats that might arise from countries like North Korea or Iraq lest it jeopardize the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Doing so, they argue, would in turn prompt Russia to refuse to ratify the START II Treaty and to withdraw from the earlier START I accord.

There are several reasons for saluting the rejection of this argument:

Yes, Virginia, There is a Threat: By adopting H.R. 1530, Congress acknowledges that the United States can ill-afford to remain absolutely vulnerable to ballistic missile attack. As the Armed Services conferees to this bill correctly noted, "determined countries can acquire intercontinental ballistic missiles in the near future and with little warning by means other than indigenous production." This refers to the fact that there is not only the danger that nations like China and North Korea might decide to use home-grown missile capabilities to exploit America’s vulnerability in the future. Today, states aspiring to acquire such threatening capabilities also have the option of simply buying intercontinental-range missiles from the former Soviet Union.

It must be noted that, in the course of yesterday’s Senate debate, Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR) — one of the Senate’s more fatuous supporters of the ABM Treaty — reported that "the intelligence community believes it extremely unlikely [that] any state with ICBMs will be willing to sell them." This assessment is simply astounding. After all, the United States reached an agreement with Russia last month that explicitly authorizes the sale of "space launch vehicles" and associated "facilities" to anyone it wishes. As it happens, Moscow is actively marketing its SS-25 ICBM as a "START I space launch vehicle," complete with its standard-issue mobile transporter-erector-launcher. It is gratifying that Congress was not misled by the CIA’s untenable implication that such missiles do not pose a threat as a result of superficial changes in name or external characteristics, changes that do not preclude "space launch vehicles" from delivering deadly payloads to distant places on earth.

Rejecting Linkage: In signing the START I and II Treaties, the Reagan and Bush administrations, respectively, explicitly rejected Russian efforts to link them to continued U.S. adherence to the ABM Treaty. The Clinton Administration, however, has unilaterally abandoned this U.S. stance on linkage. Yesterday, for example, Senator Nunn (1) read a letter from Secretary of Defense William Perry sent on 15 December to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD). It said, in part: "The bill [H.R. 1530] puts at risk continued implementation of the START I Treaty and Russian ratification of START II, two treaties which together will reduce the number of U.S. and Russian strategic warheads by two-thirds from Cold War levels, significantly lowering the threat to U.S. national security."

By voting for H.R. 1530 despite such objections, Congress has effectively endorsed the original U.S. position on linkage. This is entirely appropriate since — as the Center for Security Policy’s director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., noted in his column in yesterday’s Washington Times — the benefits of START Treaties’ reductions do not justify leaving America permanently vulnerable to ballistic missile attack:

"Let’s be clear: If the 3,500 START II-accountable thermonuclear weapons Russia could retain under the Treaty were to be unleashed on the United States, the devastation would likely be so vast that few would appreciate the difference between such an attack and one involving substantially larger numbers of ‘incomings.’ On the other hand, if — as the price for achieving what amounts to an inconsequential draw-down in Russian forces — America must remain unable to stop even one nuclear missile fired at it by, say, Iraq or North Korea, most citizens would probably view that as a very bad deal."

Setting the Stage for Responding to a Presidential Veto of H.R. 1530: Congressional action on the FY96 Defense authorization bill comes at a propitious moment. The Senate is expected shortly to be asked to give its advice and consent to the START II Treaty. For reasons described in an important op.ed. article by a distinguished member of the Center’s Board of Advisors, Sven Kraemer, in today’s Washington Times (see attached), the Senate should not agree to ratification of this accord on its merits.

A further reason, however, for withholding Senate consent to START II would be provided by the expected presidential veto of H.R. 1530. Such a veto would in no small measure be justified on the aforementioned grounds that this legislation impinges upon the START-ABM Treaty linkage. Since the Senate has properly rejected such linkage in approving the Defense authorization bill, it could hardly be expected to go along with a Clinton Administration request to embrace that linkage by affirming START II on the heels of the President’s veto of H.R. 1530.

The Bottom Line

Perhaps the most important reason for applauding congressional approval of H.R. 1530, however, is the fact that — by so doing — Congress has finally joined what is, arguably, the single most important national security debate of our time: America’s vulnerability to ballistic missile attack. If President Clinton does veto the Defense authorization bill, he will have handed his Republican opponents a winning platform for demonstrating to the public Mr. Clinton’s inadequacies in the field of national security and foreign policy.

The President will also have given the Senate perhaps the most powerful argument of all for resisting his Administration’s hope that it will merely rubber-stamp START II: It cannot do so without at least implicitly endorsing arguments made by the Russians, by Secretary Perry, by Senator Nunn and others — namely, that the Senate agrees to leave America permanently unprotected against missile attack. Clearly, those who so recently voted to defend America in H.R. 1530 cannot accept such an outcome.

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(1) Senator Nunn’s acquiescence to such a fundamental shift in U.S. government policy concerning a ratified agreement — on the basis of unilateral executive branch action — is extraordinary. As noted in a recent Center Decision Brief entitled Where’s Sam Nunn When We Need Him? Mutating Treating Require — But Lack — Senate Oversight (No. 95-D 93, 16 November 1995), this stance sharply contrasts with Sen. Nunn’s strenuous objection to such steps when taken by previous, Republican administrations.