The missiles pointed at America

The Washington Times, September 24, 1996

“The democracies are in a greater danger than they have been at any time since Stanley Baldwin lied to the English people about the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s Germany.” House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s warning last week in a speech before the Center for Security
Policy was a rare public comment on the gravity of post-Cold War threats that the Clinton administration is covering up.

The timid spirit of the British prime minister who preceded Neville Chamberlain now occupies the Oval Office. As he has fought to undermine even the most basic defenses against foreign nuclear missiles, President Clinton has told the American public scores of times that the Cold War nuclear threat is gone.

As proof, he cited a 1994 agreement with Russian President Boris Yeltsin in which each side would “de-target” their strategic missiles away from one another’s country, and re-target them harmlessly over the Pacific Ocean.

To Russia’s hard-line military leaders, the agreement is militarily meaningless. On Jan. 22, 1995, CBS broadcast a “60 Minutes” program from the war room of Colonel-General Igor Sergeyev, commander in chief of the Strategic Rocket Forces.

Gen. Sergeyev told host Ed Bradley that his missiles can be “retargeted and launched from this war room . . . most in a matter of minutes.”

Two days later, in his annual speech to the nation, Mr. Clinton claimed, “This is the first State of the Union address ever delivered since the beginning of the Cold War when not a single Russian missile is pointed at the children of America.”

The very next day, on Jan. 25, President Yeltsin received a chilling message: Russia’s early warning system detected a possible surprise attack from the United States. For the first time, the seldom-sober Yeltsin activated his nuclear “black box” to place his strategic forces on alert -a move toward re-targeting the warheads to American soil. “I immediately contacted the defense minister and the generals,” Mr. Yeltsin told Interfax, “and we kept track of that missile from beginning to end.”

The “surprise attack” was a Norwegian meteorological rocket. Oslo had informed the Russian foreign ministry in advance, but the notice never reached the defense ministry. ]

John B. Stewart, former Director of the Office of Foreign Intelligence at the Department of Energy, later cited an authority who described Moscow’s miscalculation as “coming closer to a Russian nuclear launch than at any previous time during the Cold War, including during the Cuban missile crisis.”

Mr. Clinton said nothing, and nobody challenged him.

Five weeks later, he assured the public in an address at the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom that Moscow’s missile arsenal not only posed no threat, but was actually disappearing. “Both our countries are dismantling the weapons as fast as we can,” Mr. Clinton said. “And thanks to a far-reaching verification system, including on-site inspections which began in Russia and the United States today, each of us knows exactly what the other is doing.”

Yet he told the public nothing about Russia’s ongoing retrofitting of its massive Typhoon submarines so they could house the new SS-N-24/26 strategic nuclear missile. He gave no hint of the secret Sukhoi-T60S strategic bomber and air-launched cruise missiles under
development.

And he was silent about the new Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) the military was then preparing for its first test launch.

Mr. Clinton pretended that these modernization programs didn’t exist. He repeatedly certified to Congress that Russia was doing nothing beyond its “legitimate” defense needs – even as he doled out hundreds of millions of dollars to help dismantle obsolete parts of the former Soviet nuclear arsenal that the Russians were doing away with anyway.

Addressing the Air Force Academy graduating class of 1995, Mr. Clinton claimed, “We are dramatically reducing the nuclear threat. For the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there are no Russian missiles pointed at the people of the United States.”

Two days before, Russian television broadcast the unveiling of the new MAZ-79-221, an eight-axle mobile launcher for the Topol-M ICBM, designed to be capable of launching a first strike against the United States.

The day after Mr. Clinton’s Air Force speech, the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta
published Atomic Energy Minister Viktor Mikhailov’s revelation that his shop was producing a next-generation nuclear warhead. On Sept. 5, the Military Space Forces announced the first successful test-launch of the Topol-M from Plesetsk.

The Topol-M would replace the old SS-18, slated to be dismantled with resources from the American taxpayer. Said the Military Space Forces spokesman, “Russia hopes to replace all its outdated missiles in the coming years.”

Then, on Oct. 4, the Strategic Rocket Forces began a massive nuclear exercise that included more test-launches of missiles designed to destroy the United States.

In the middle of this week-long operation, Mr. Clinton addressed a Freedom House conference (co-sponsored by the American Foreign Policy Council), declaring for the 55th time, “Russian nuclear missiles are no longer pointed at our citizens and there are no longer American missiles pointed at their citizens.” Clinton glanced at his audience and made eye contact with me. Then he went back to his TelePrompTer.

Russia’s doomsday drill continued for another four days without comment from the White House.

President Clinton has implied that not even the People’s Republic of China has missiles targeted at the United States, even though Beijing spurned his offer of a de-targeting agreement. In at least 23 of his statements surveyed, he contradicted his own military chiefs on this score. Visiting Des Moines, Iowa, last October, he proclaimed to a cheering
crowd, “there is not a single, solitary nuclear missile pointed at an American child tonight. Not one. Not one. Not a single one.”

That’s not what the Chinese Communists think. Early last January, after returning to Washington from talks in Beijing with senior Chinese leaders, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas. W. Freeman briefed National Security Adviser Anthony Lake about an ominous development.

According to the New York Times, Mr. Freeman informed Mr. Lake that a Chinese official told him that Beijing could attack Taiwan without fear of U.S. intervention because American
leaders “care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan.” According to the report, Mr. Freeman described the statement “as an indirect threat by China to use nuclear weapons against the United States.”

A week after the report appeared, Mr. Clinton visited students, parents and teachers in Concord, New Hampshire. Yet he was as unequivocal as ever, assuring the audience, “there is not a single nuclear missile pointed at an American city, an American family, an American child. That is not being done any more.”

He repeated the line again in Washington, in Iowa City and again in Des Moines, in New York City and twice again in New Hampshire, in New Orleans and Coral Gables. Few Americans challenged him.

But the former Soviet officer now in charge of Russia’s strategic missile-firing submarines did.

Rear Adm. Viktor Vasilyevich Patrushev, chief of the Operations Directorate of the Russian
Navy General Staff, said in the May 15 issue of Ogonek magazine, “Yes, the presidents of the United States and Russia have signed the document according to which our missiles are not targeted at each other’s countries any more.” But it was just a public relations gimmick: “I know that the missiles can be re-targeted in an hour even without returning [our submarines] to their bases.”

Yet the feel-good defense strategy of Bill Clinton and his Senate allies wouldn’t let Adm. Patrushev’s facts get in their way. Two weeks after the article appeared, Senate Democrats filibustered to kill a final Senate initiative of presidential candidate Bob Dole instructing the Pentagon to deploy a system to defend the American people from foreign missile attack. The filibusterers succeeded.

Two days later, Moscow announced it had conducted its 26th ICBM test since 1991, and that all six dummy warheads had hit their targets. Then, on June 28 in the Sea of Okhotsk just north of Japan, came the largest and most expensive submarine-launched ballistic missile test in Russian naval history. Three Delta-class subs fired multiple missiles westward across the Eurasian landmass and into the Barents Sea northeast of Norway.

It was no simple readiness drill or simulation against China; had the missiles flown eastward, they would have struck the American heartland.

But Mr. Clinton continued as if nothing had happened – in speeches to a Democratic Party gala in San Francisco, at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Santa Monica and in his Chicago speech accepting his party’s nomination for re-election as president of the United
States – for a total of at least 84 claims that Americans were safe from missile attack.

This week, the Senate is scheduled to hold two hearings on defense against ballistic missiles. Perhaps they will shed further light on the dangers of which Mr. Gingrich warned – and the comparison between Bill Clinton and the pathetic Stanley Baldwin.

J. Michael Waller is author of “Secret Empire: The KGB In Russia Today” (Westview Press, 1994).