‘TALKING POINTS’ FOR BUSH-YELTSIN ON SDI: YES TO ‘GLOBAL’ DEFENSE, NOTO THE ABM TREATY

(Washington, D.C.): At their meeting
this weekend, Presidents George Bush and
Boris Yeltsin will have much to talk
about. Among the most important
subjects they will discuss, however, are
the meaning and the implications of their
respective recent statements on strategic
defense.

For his part, President Bush will have
to reiterate the solemn commitment he
made to the Strategic Defense Initiative
in his State of the Union address:

“I remind you this evening
that I have asked for your
support in funding program to
protect our country from limited
nuclear missile attack. We
must have this protection because
too many people in too many
countries have access to nuclear
arms. And I urge you
again to pass the Strategic
Defense Initiative, SDI.”

For his part, President Yeltsin must
explain precisely what he had in
mind when he replied to the nuclear arms
reductions announced by Mr. Bush in his
address by saying:

“We’re prepared to design
jointly, produce jointly and use
jointly a global security
system to replace the SDI
system.”

On the face of it, Mr. Yeltsin’s
statement would appear flatly to
contradict a statement he has previously
made and which he repeated yesterday:
“Russia confirms its commitment to
the ABM Treaty.” It also strains
credulity that President Yeltsin actually
believes that the United States
would — in light of the current
state of uncertainty in the former Soviet
Union and the mounting restiveness of the
ex-Soviet military — agree now to turn
SDI into a joint venture with Russia.

But what Mr. Yeltsin has
done is to eviscerate the last, vestigial
argument for the ABM Treaty. It
is no longer possible to argue with any
credibility that this obsolete accord
must be preserved in perpetuity — lest
there be a dangerous Soviet/Russian
reaction to any decision by the United
States to end its present posture of
absolute vulnerability to nuclear attack.
The Russian president has
explicitly endorsed the value of a world
of defense, not of defenselessness
for the American people and his own.

What is more, Mr. Yeltsin has
embraced the concept of global
defenses. This means, as a
practical matter, a system incorporating
space-based components insofar as it is
only by taking advantage of the
world-wide coverage of an orbiting
constellation that can one protect
against the full panoply of present and
possible future ballistic missile launch
sites.

The Center for Security Policy
believes that President Bush
should welcome Mr. Yeltsin’s support for
strategic defenses and offer to provide
him personally with a comprehensive
briefing on the U.S. concept for a global
security system featuring space-based
Brilliant Pebbles. That briefing
should clear the way for swift agreement
between the two nations to consign the
ABM Treaty as a relic of the Cold War to
the dust-bin of history. It should also
set the stage for discussions about ways
in which Russia could benefit from an SDI
system that is no longer hamstrung by
that accord.

In addition, Mr. Bush should propose
that discussions be held between the U.S.
Department of Defense and the Russian
military to develop an approach
whereby the latter’s broader
collaboration in such a program
(e.g., “design,”
“production” and
“use”) would be contingent
upon — and commensurate with — the
degree of transformation in the Russian
political, economic and
military-industrial systems.

The Center believes that it
will be an early test of Mr. Yeltsin’s
commitment to such a wholesale
transformation if he accepts this
approach and, in so doing,
abandons the sort of “old
thinking” his Soviet predecessor,
Mikhail Gorbachev, decried — but
nonetheless routinely practiced —
with respect to arms control and military
expenditures.