No nukes pointed this way? Think again

By Michael Waller
The Washington Times, 06 July 1998

After years of assuring the public that no nuclear missiles are aimed at the United States,
President Clinton came to China with a proposal to Beijing – a proposal admitting that what he
told the American people was untrue.

The president asked China’s communist leaders to de-target their nuclear missiles directed
at
American cities. His proposal is modeled after a 1994 accord with Russian President Boris
Yeltsin to remove targeting data from the strategic nuclear missiles in their countries’ arsenals.
The stated purpose was to protect both countries from an accidental or unauthorized nuclear
strike by the other. Beijing agreed after rejecting at least two similar U.S. overtures.

While militarily meaningless and completely unverifiable – the missiles can be re-targeted
in
minutes – the agreement gave Mr. Clinton the grist for a crowd-pleasing line he has repeated time
and again: No more Russian nuclear missiles are aimed at America. But on many occasions, the
president and other top officials went further, saying that no nuclear missiles, period, were pointed
at the U.S. Yet in China, the president once more asked Beijing if it would please stop targeting
the people he had told were no longer targeted. Asked recently at a news conference about this
contradiction, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said, “I think that the vast majority of times
the president has made that statement, it’s been very clearly tied to Russia. There may be one time
when he didn’t mention Russia in particular. But I know that, since all of you in the press are very
fair and pay a lot of attention to context, that you realize that if he forgot to mention Russia, it
was a mistake.” A mistake?

Scanning the president’s official speeches posted on the White House internet web site, we
find
our commander-in-chief guaranteeing the public at 131 times that America is free from the threat
of nuclear missile attack. Most of the time he said it in the context of Russia. But a quarter of the
time, in at least 32 speeches, President Clinton stated very clearly that no country – anywhere –
was aiming nuclear missiles at the American people.

Not once did the White House issue a correction. Indeed, of those 131 speeches, the
president
never told the public that Russia could re-target in minutes, or that both Russia and China were
modernizing their nuclear missile forces. Mr. Clinton told a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, “for the
first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there’s not a single, solitary nuclear missile pointed at
an American child tonight.” Not one. Not one. Not a single one.

A slip of the tongue? One could argue so if it happened once or twice. But the president
said it
again and again and again:

• New York City, Oct. 23, 1995: “For the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there’s
  not a single solitary nuclear missile pointed at the people of the United States of America.
• Concord, New Hampshire, Feb. 2, 1996: “… for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear
  age, there is not a single nuclear missile pointed at an American child today.
• Philadelphia, April 26, 1996: “… for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there is
  not a single, solitary nuclear missile pointed at an American child tonight.”
• Toledo, Ohio, August 26, 1996: “… for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, on
  this
  night, this beautiful night, there is not a single nuclear missile pointed at a child in the United
  States of America.”

And so on: In Nashville, Washington, Iowa City, New Orleans, Coral Gables, San
Francisco, Santa Monica, St. Louis; Ashland, Kentucky; Sun City, Arizona; Hartford,
Connecticut – even in a telephone speech to the Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA), the very people who would coordinate disaster relief in the event of a nuclear attack.
Mr. Clinton is not alone in making this mistake.

Vice President Al Gore echoed the president in his carefully rehearsed speech to the 1996
Democratic National Convention: “Our strength at home has led to renewed respect abroad:
nuclear missiles no longer pointed at our cities….” No clear tie to Russia.

Even Mr. Bacon’s boss at the time, Defense Secretary William Perry, parroted the line. In
an
April 1996 speech at the George Washington University, Mr. Perry stated, “Today, we do not
need a national missile defense system because our nation is not now threatened by missiles of
mass destruction.” Another mistake? Paying very close attention to the context, we see that Mr.
Perry specifically acknowledged that Russian and Chinese missiles could strike the U.S. by
accident or from outside the chain of command, but added that the probability is “remote.”
Furthermore, he said, “we are working to make it even more remote through arms control and
diplomacy.”

And so, two years later and in the midst of a widening missile technology transfer-to-China
scandal, Mr. Clinton goes to Beijing with an arms-control-and-diplomacy fig leaf to beg Chinese
leaders to stop aiming their new nuclear missiles at us. He wants a regime the U.S. can’t trust to
do something the U.S. can’t verify. Mr. Clinton will do doubt boast that at long last, no Chinese
missiles target America’s children. But how can he believe his strategic partners in Beijing? More
importantly, how can we believe him?

Michael Waller is vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in
Washington, D.C.