Fighting Words: Gore Campaign Rejects Options for Near-term, Robust Missile Defense Lest They ‘Destroy the A.B.M. Treaty’

Bush Could Offer Voters Real Choice

(Washington, D.C.): On Friday, an unnamed “senior foreign policy advisor to [the Vice President Al] Gore campaign” offered the clearest indication to date of the priorities of the Clinton-Gore Administration when it comes to defending the United States against missile attack: The Veep and his associates clearly believe that it is more important to protect the obsolete 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, signed with a country (the Soviet Union) that ceased to exists eight years ago, than it is to provide Americans with either near-term anti-missile protection from the sea or longer-term — and more comprehensive — protection from space.

According to a 27 March article circulated by the Armed Forces Newswire Service, this campaign aide claimed that:

Gore believes Administration negotiations with the Russians for modifications to the ABM Treaty should not involve allowing possible sea- and space-based National Missile Defense (NMD) systems [because] those kind of modifications would destroy the Treaty and with it any chance we have of seeing ratification of START II, or, to be more exact, of seeing START II go into force and probably also destroy the chances for START III.

What we’re talking to the Russians about now is a [land-based] proposal, which is wrapped around the technology we’ve been developing for deployment by 2005 if the president decides that’s the way he wants to go. If you go back to the Russians and say “Hey, we want this thing opened up so [we] can do this, this and this,” I don’t think we have a chance to close it back up again.

This statement was made in the wake of — and, presumably, in response to — a Capitol Hill press conference last Thursday sponsored by the new Coalition to Protect Americans Now. It featured forceful remarks by members of the Senate and House Republican leadership (Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho and Rep. Tillie Fowler of Florida, respectively) and other influential legislators (including Senators Jim Inhofe and Jon Kyl and Reps. J.D. Hayworth, Bob Shaffer and David Vitter) concerning the present danger posed by proliferating ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

They were joined by highly respected national security experts (including Amb. Henry Cooper, a former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, and Dr. William Graham, a former Science Advisor to President Reagan and member of the blue-ribbon Rumsfeld Commission) and public policy activists (including Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and David Keene of the American Conservative Union) in calling for the prompt deployment of missile defenses, starting with precisely the sort of sea-based systems the Vice President is said to oppose — i.e., those that could be acquired rapidly and relatively inexpensively by modifying the U.S. Navy’s existing AEGIS fleet air defense ships.

Appeal to Gov. Bush — Make Near-Term Missile Defense a ‘Defining Element of the Campaign’

The Coalition used the occasion, which marked the 17th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s SDI speech, to release a letter (see the attached) to the Republican presidential nominee, Texas Governor George W. Bush. It commended him for his “commitment to realize President Reagan’s dream of saving lives, rather than avenging them” and warned against the Clinton-Gore Administration’s failure to date to initiate deployment of an “effective National Missile Defense.”

The Coalition letter was signed by a number of Cabinet and sub-Cabinet level officials of the Reagan Administration — including National Security Advisors Richard Allen and William Clark, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Attorney General and Counselor to the President Edwin Meese and UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick — as well as an impressive array of other national security practitioners and leaders of grassroots organizations with interests in myriad public policy areas but who share a common concern about protecting Americans. The signatories observed that:

It will take at least five years to construct the limited missile defense system in Alaska that [President Clinton] appears to espouse. This deployment may well prove to be too late, as well as too little, to provide the kind of anti-missile protection that Americans not only expect, but deserve.

Fortunately, we do not have to accept this dangerous “window of vulnerability.” If directed to do so — and freed from the restraints of a treaty signed twenty-eight years ago with the Soviet Union — the U.S. military could rapidly develop and bring on-line a sea-based anti-missile system based on the Navy’s Aegis fleet air defense system. Such a system could provide interim protection for our people and their forces and allies overseas until such time as more comprehensive ground-, air- and/or space-based defenses become available.

Declaring that “the Coalition to Protect Americans Now believes that the United States can ill-afford to wait for five years (or longer) to begin deploying missile defenses for the American people” and that the Nation “cannot…safely agree to a new arms control agreement entailing additional limitations on its options for protecting the men, women and children of America,” the signatories urged Gov. Bush “to make the following two pledges defining elements of your campaign and, upon your election, of your presidency:

1) the immediate initiation of the deployment of a sea-based defense as a starting point for more comprehensive anti-missile protection for the American people; and

2) the rejection of the Clinton-Gore Administration’s premise, embodied in the obsolete ABM Treaty and underpinning its efforts to negotiate a new treaty restricting U.S. missile defenses — namely, that any other country may exercise a veto over this country’s ability to defend its people.”

The Bottom Line

If Governor Bush accepts these recommendations — amplifying upon his previously expressed commitment to defend the Nation against missile attack and not to allow the lapsed ABM Treaty to stand in the way of doing so, by emphasizing his commitment promptly to initiate the modification and deployment of AEGIS-based missile defenses — and Vice President Gore affirms the opposition to such an approach expressed on his behalf by one of his “senior foreign policy advisors,” the American people could have a real choice this November: In the words of Senator Kyl, that choice may be between a presidential candidate who favors “peace through strength” and one who prefers “peace through paper.” There are worse, and certainly less definitive, bases upon which to decide into whose hands to entrust the awesome responsibilities of Commander-in-Chief for the next four years.