IT’S OFFICIAL: CLINTON APPROVES FORMULA FOR FORECLOSING EFFECTIVE THEATER MISSILE DEFENSES
(Washington, D.C.): The Center for
Security Policy has learned that, within
the past few days, President
Clinton formally approved negotiating
instructions that will effectively
preclude the most promising U.S. options
for defending against short-range missile
attack. Unless Congress acts to
block the significant, unilateral
concessions envisioned in these
guidelines for amending the 1972
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the
United States may well be permanently
consigned to the same, complete
vulnerability to “theater”
missile strikes that it now suffers in
the face of longer-range or
“strategic” ballistic missiles.
This development is all the more
striking insofar as it completely
contradicts statements that the
Clinton Administration’s made following
its 13 May 1993 announcement that it was
“taking the ‘Stars’ out of ‘Star
Wars.'” That announcement presaged
the effective gutting of the U.S.
investment in strategic defenses and the
office responsible for managing that
investment, the Strategic Defense
Initiative Organization.
What ‘Commitment’ to
Theater Missile Defense?
While the Administration made no bones
about its intention to terminate the most
highly leveraged and cost-effective
anti-missile program — i.e., the
space-based interceptors known as
Brilliant Pebbles and the Global
Protection System, of which they were to
be a critical part — it did
profess a commitment to the urgent
development of competent theater defenses.
Put differently, even though the Clinton
team had no objection to maintaining
permanently the Nation’s present posture
of absolute vulnerability to long-range
missile attack, it claimed to be seized
with the need to correct the
vulnerability of allied nations and U.S.
troops overseas to shorter-range versions
of such threats.
Along the way, much was made of the
fact that funding was going to be
preserved for several important
initiatives, notably the Army’s Theater
High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)
system, the Navy’s Lower and Upper Tier
missile defense programs and the Air
Force’s airborne boost-phase interceptor
development effort. The latter two, in
particular, offer the potential of
deploying promising technologies quickly
and cost-effectively by exploiting the
sunk investments in existing assets
(i.e., the Navy’s AEGIS air defense
system and its SM-2 missiles and the Air
Force’s fighter aircraft.)
The Clinton Administration’s stated
commitment to pursue theater missile
defenses (TMD) aggressively has enjoyed
considerable support from the Congress.
Indeed, even the House Armed Services
Committee — chaired by the notoriously
anti-defense Rep. Ron Dellums (D-CA) —
has added funds to accelerate or
otherwise enhance TMD developmental
efforts.
That Was Then…
The Clinton Administration now
appears, however, to have dramatically
shifted course on TMD: If it last
year took the “Stars” out of
“Star Wars,” the Administration
this year seems bent on taking
the defense out of “theater
missile defense.”
This was the clear thrust of a
concession made quietly in the
March-April 1994 session of the Standing
Consultative Commission in Geneva.(1)
It involved a Clinton decision to agree
to amend the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty so as to foreclose the option of space-based
theater missile interceptors. On
3 May 1993, a horrified Senator Malcolm
Wallop (R-WY) observed: “We
apparently have given Russia [a
commitment not to pursue] space-based
[interceptors for] nothing in
return.”
To the contrary, the Russians
responded by pocketing this strategically
momentous concession and then demanding
that all space systems and
sensors for theater missile defenses
should be similarly banned. They also
insisted that all other TMD systems be
limited to interceptor velocities of less
than three kilometers per second.
No Defense for Us, Billions
in Sales for Russia
Unfortunately, the new U.S.
negotiating instructions appear to
respond to Moscow’s demands in the manner
foreign interlocutors have come to expect
of the Clinton Administration — namely, by
its abject, if not unconditional,
surrender. They authorize the acting
U.S. SCC Commissioner to: accept a
permanent three km/sec limitation on
ground-based TMD systems like THAAD;
propose an “interim” limit of
three km/sec on sea-based TMD systems
like the Navy’s Upper Tier program; and
suggest a somewhat higher interceptor
velocity for airborne defensive systems.
The Russians will inevitably recognize
these for what they are:
“going-in” positions. It is
predictable that the Russians will insist
on making the three km/sec limit on naval
systems a permanent one and
demand that it be applied to airborne
systems, as well. If the Clinton
Administration’s practice to date is any
guide, the U.S. position would then erode
still further in Moscow’s direction.
Worse yet, even if no additional
erosion occurs in the Clinton position,
its effect on the American theater
missile defense program will be
catastrophic. It was for this
reason that the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Staff of
the Air Force and the Chief of Naval
Operations formally opposed the adoption
of the new instructions at various points
in their preparation.
Hardest hit will be the most valuable
technologies.(2)
Under the latest Clinton guidelines, the
Navy’s promising Upper Tier program will
have to be killed. The Air Force’s
air-launched boost-phase program will
enter a bureaucratic “Twilight Zone,”
slowed by uncertainties about future
negotiating outcomes and the
understandable reluctance to invest
significant sums in a program that may
ultimately be prohibited. Even the Army’s
THAAD system — a program that was
specifically supposed to be protected and
facilitated by the Administration’s
machinations — will very likely wind up
being constrained by the three km/sec
interceptor velocity limitation.(3)
Indeed, THAAD’s development has already
been affected and delayed by
questions concerning its present and
future compliance with the ABM Treaty.
Why Are We Constraining
TMD?
It is not hard to comprehend why the
Russians are interested in imposing new
constraints on theater missile defenses:
They already have deployed reasonably
effective defenses against short-range
missile attack — and even some
longer-range missiles — while the U.S.
has not. Such a strategic situation has
traditionally been viewed by Moscow as a
desirable one and the Russians have gone
to great lengths in their propaganda and
diplomatic machinations to perpetuate it.
The Russians also have another, more
practical motivation for demanding the
negotiation of limits that would
principally have the effect of precluding
advanced American theater defense
programs. By constraining or precluding
particularly those U.S. systems that can
be easily retrofitted into existing
weapons platforms, Moscow will eliminate
competition for the potentially lucrative
international market in such defenses.
Russian officials have described this
market as a “gold mine”; Moscow
clearly would like to ensure that its
SA-10, SA-12, S-300 and other
air-defense/ATBM systems remain best
positioned to exploit it.(4)
But why is the United States
interested in rendering its TMD
capabilities anything less than the most
effective systems available? The answer,
of course, is that the Clinton
Administration continues to believe that
the sanctity of a certified
“artifact of the Cold War” —
the 1972 ABM Treaty — is more important
than the assured survivability of those
Americans or others who might be attacked
by ballistic missiles. It is,
therefore, bent on amending the Treaty,
nominally for the purpose of
distinguishing and protecting permitted
theater anti-missile systems from the
prohibitions imposed upon strategic
defenses. In fact, the Administration is
blurring those distinctions and
broadening their applicability in
important ways to increase the
vulnerability of potential U.S. and
allied targets to missile strikes.
Checkmate on Liberalization
of the ABM Regime: The Multilateral
Gambit
One other manifestation of the Clinton
Administration’s real agenda is its
effort to “multilateralize” the
ABM Treaty. This initiative, begun in
December 1993, has already resulted in
representatives of Ukraine and Belarus
being present at the SCC negotiations.
There has been discussion as well of the
idea of bringing seven other former
Soviet republics into the treaty as
independent states. According to Spurgeon
Keeney, president of the Arms Control
Association and one of the most
doctrinaire advocates for the ABM Treaty:
“…The Administration
interprets [the offer to
multilateralize the Treaty] as a very
positive move, and that is they
argue, the Administration does, that
this will make it quite difficult to
ever amend the ABM Treaty in the
future. So if there were ever
an effort by a succeeding
administration to try to do what the
Reagan-Bush Administration wanted to
do to the ABM Treaty, with many
partners to the ABM Treaty in the
future, those kinds of amendments
would be very unlikely to be carried
through.“Actually the U.S. Defense
Department for that reason opposed
multilateralization within the U.S.
councils — the U.S. government
councils. Eventually, though, they
were overruled.”(5)
The Bottom Line
It is distressing — if not exactly
surprising — that the Clinton
Administration appears to be pursuing one
course of action while purporting to
pursue an altogether different one.
Still, the fact that it is doing
so in an area that jeopardizes the
present and future vital interests of the
United States makes the fraud being
perpetrated with respect to theater
missile defense a cause for special alarm.
Unfortunately, the Administration’s
choice of a secretive diplomatic channel
to finish off the Nation’s most promising
TMD options — without appreciable
consultation with Capitol Hill, let alone
the Senate’s advice and consent — could
shortly present the Congress with a fait
accompli: An enormously broadened
ABM Treaty, the result of amendments
effected exclusively by executive fiat
that are likely to prove anathema to the
legislative branch and the American
people but that may, nonetheless, be
effectively irreversible.
The Center for Security Policy
strongly encourages the U.S. Senate — as
part of its current consideration of the
FY1995 Defense authorization bill — to
make unmistakably clear the
unacceptability of the Clinton
Administration’s efforts to kill off
vital TMD options and to make it still
harder to withdraw from the dangerously
obsolete ABM Treaty. At a
minimum, notice must be served that such
travesties will not be permitted to
become binding on the United States
unless and until two-thirds of the
members of the Senate consent.
– 30 –
1. For more on
this insidious initiative, see the
Center’s recent Decision Brief
entitled, Covert Action:
Clinton Ideologues Use the ABM Treaty to
Garotte Theater as Well as Strategic
Missile Defenses, (
June 1994).
2. Ironically, the
Clinton Administration’s May 1994
response to a congressional mandate for a
study of “Nonproliferation and
Counterproliferation Activities and
Programs” identified
wide-area/regional defenses —
particularly those with boost-phase
intercept capability — as being among
the highest priority shortfalls in U.S.
operational capabilities. Indeed, this
was one of 14 areas listed in this
interagency-prepared report that Deputy
Secretary of Defense John Deutch
highlighted in his cover letter as having
“the greatest potential for making a
contribution to our proliferation
technology efforts.”
3. The
Demonstration and Evaluation (DEMVAL)
version of the THAAD system now under
development has an interceptor velocity
of 2.4 km/sec — reduced from 2.6 km/sec
a few months ago. Even if the so-called
“Objective System” intended
ultimately to be deployed can be
constrained to velocities less than the
limit, future growth options to give the
THAAD interceptor more capability will be
foreclosed.
4. In a 11 March
1994 article in Nezavisimaya Gazeta
entitled “Joint Ballistic Missile
Defense: It Is Essential to Shed
Illusions,” Aleksandr Savelyev makes
the connection between Russian efforts to
market its S-300 air defense/ATBM system
and the negotiating of new constraints on
American systems: “For its part,
Russia could put pressure on the THAAD
program at the discussion in the SCC,
championing stricter limits on tactical
ABM systems.”
5. From an 8
December 1993 joint press conference
featuring a number of Washington-based
arms control groups sharing a nearly
theological attachment to the ABM Treaty.
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