The A.B.M. Treaty Must No Longer be Permitted to Obstruct Efforts to Defend the U.S. and Japan Against Missile Attack

(Washington, D.C.): The past forty-eight hours have shown both the promise of and the
impediments to joint U.S.-Japanese efforts to develop and deploy missile defenses. First,
Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Omura and U.S. Ambassador to
Japan Thomas Foley
signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that establishes a bilateral effort to
research
improvements in the Navy Theater Wide (NTW) missile defense system. ¹ But yesterday, an
American delegation opened negotiations in Russia that may well make it even more
difficult to
prepare and deploy such anti-missile systems — whether used to protect the Japanese people,
other allies and American forces in East Asia, the Middle East or Europe or the population and
territory of the United States.

No THAAD Radar to Japan

Unfortunately, there are ample grounds for fearing that the Clinton Administration’s
determination to accommodate Russian opposition to U.S. and allied efforts to field competent
missile defenses will so seriously constrain those efforts as to render them futile. For example,
according to a report in yesterday’s Washington Times, such considerations
prompted General
Henry Shelton, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to reject an important request
by
the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Space Command, General Richard
Myers.

Gen. Myers sought permission to move one of the impressive new radars being developed
for
another anti-missile system, the Theater High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, ² to
Japan for the purpose of testing its performance and collecting useful intelligence whenever
North Korea launches its next long-range ballistic missile. The Times‘ respected
national
security correspondent Bill Gertz reported that “[some Administration]
officials said that the
decision not to test the radar against a real-world missile threat” — despite the
support of the
Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, the U.S. Pacific Command and the Army’s
Space and Missile Defense Command — “is a sign of the Clinton Administration’s bias
against missile defenses.”

Concerns on this score prompted eight leading supporters of missile defense in the U.S.
Senate ³
yesterday to write Secretary of Defense William Cohen that alternative
justifications for this
action (see attached) — namely, that it would cost too much or adversely impact the THAAD
development program — were “unpersuasive.” They urged that “the Administration’s continued
adherence to the moribund ABM Treaty should not be allowed to continue to interfere with
prudent military and intelligence actions that are needed to defend our nation against the growing
threat of missile attack from countries like North Korea.”

The ABM Treaty Bias Could Prove a Showstopper

If the Clinton Administration’s bias concerning the ABM Treaty is allowed to continue to
operate, there is a real danger that the clear need for the most expeditious and efficient
development and deployment of sea-based anti-missile systems — the kind of program that
should be pursued under the new U.S.-Japanese MOU — will be not be met as any
NTW system
to be developed by the U.S. or Japan will be constrained by the ABM Treaty. Specifically, the
ABM Treaty will force this system to remain at a sub-optimal level to adhere to the requirements
of the Treaty. Consider just two of the provisions of the 1972 Treaty that lend themselves to the
machinations of those in Washington (to say nothing of Moscow, Beijing, or Pyongyang) who
remain opposed to significant U.S.-Japanese progress in this area:

• Article IX: “To assure the viability and effectiveness of this Treaty, each Party undertakes
  not
  to transfer to other States, and not to deploy outside its national territory, ABM systems or
  their components limited by this Treaty.”

• Article X: “Each Party undertakes not to assume any international obligations which would
  conflict with this Treaty.”

The MOU Can Realize an Optimized ‘AEGIS Option’ for Both the U.S. and
Japan

It would be far better for both countries and their respective peoples if, instead, the
spirit of
Monday’s Memorandum of Understanding were allowed to guide this collaborative undertaking
— a spirit of a concerted common endeavor to respond to and defeat a common threat. The MOU
research program will provide the basic building blocks for an AEGIS-based missile defense
system. The “AEGIS Option’ is the best hope for achieving the most effective near-term system
to protect the United States’ East Asian allies against the growing threat of ballistic missiles.

What is more, the terms of reference for this research into four discreet areas ⁴ go beyond the
scope of present U.S. research into the Navy Theater Wide Defense system.
In particular, the
MOU calls for research into the Block II version of the
NTW. Currently, the U.S. Navy is
only funded to work on the Block I version of the system. Evidently the Japanese and the U.S.
Navy have recognized what the Clinton Administration have refused to accept: Even the
theater
missile threat demands that the AEGIS system be optimized beyond the performance of the
Block I version.

Despite these positive elements, there is a danger that — all other things being equal — the
threat
posed by ballistic missiles is likely far to outpace this response by the United States and Japan.
The unhappy fact of the matter is that North Korea is set for another ballistic missile test, one
that is expected to demonstrate the North’s capability to hit targets in any of the Japanese islands,
as well as parts of the United States. As a result, neither Japan nor the U.S. has the luxury of a
leisurely research program to be conducted over the next two-to-five years, with deployment ten
years off. Yet, research is all the new MOU calls for. What is more, the Japanese are
programming $280 million (over an estimated five year research period) whereas the U.S., so far,
has only slated to fund the program at the level of $36 million for two years, hardly the sorts of
sums necessary to support the required crash development and deployment program.

The Bottom Line

As long as the Clinton Administration insists on adhering to an Anti-Ballistic
Missile
Treaty that clearly has both lapsed as a matter of international law and outlived whatever
usefulness it may once have had, it will take far longer, cost far more and in the end prove
far more difficult to provide anti-missile protection to the Japanese people, to American
forces in Japan and elsewhere around the world or to the United States, itself. Given
the
present danger to Japan posed by North Korean No Dong and Taepo Dong missiles,
to say
nothing of those in the Chinese and Russian arsenals, this is recklessly irresponsible and must be
corrected as soon as possible.

¹ See What Should Top the U.S.-Japanese Summit
Agenda: Interoperable AEGIS-Based
Missile Defenses (No. 99-C 53, 3 May 1999); Washington Post Misrepresents ‘Aegis Option’; New Study Says
Sea-Based
Missile Defenses Could be Effective, Affordable (No. 99-D 30, 5 March 1999);
and Mirabile
Dictu: The Washington Post Acknowledges The ‘AEGIS Option’s’ Promise for Missile
Defense (No. 98-D 183, 30 November 1999).

² See the Center’s Decision Briefs entitled
THAAD’s Second Successful Intercept Confounds
the Skeptics, Argues for Program Acceleration (a href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=99-D_87″>No. 99-D 87, 2 August 1999)
and Today’s
T.H.A.A.D. Test: Close — And the Cigar (No. 99-D 40, 29 March 1999).

³ The authors of this important letter — members of the Republican
leadership and influential
figures on the Senate’s Appropriations, Armed Services, Intelligence and Energy Committees —
were Senators Jon Kyl of Arizona, Paul Coverdell of Georgia, Larry Craig of Idaho, Frank
Murkowski of Alaska, Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas, Wayne Allard of Colorado and Jim Inhofe
of Oklahoma.

⁴ The specific areas that will addressed by this joint program are: an
infrared target recognition
and acquisition system; a heat-resistant covering to protect that infrared device; warheads that
can hit and destroy incoming ballistic missile warheads; and the rocket motor for the three-stage
missile’s second stage.