Threat? What Threat?

The Washington Times, 29 October 1996

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of
misleading the American people about the
potential threat of a devastating nuclear
missile attack on this country, President
Clinton actually did something about it?
Mr. Clinton has been campaigning on the
myth that, thanks to his efforts, not a
single nuclear missile is targeted at
American children. There is, of course,
no way Mr. Clinton can be positive that
this impossibly broad statement is
actually true. Nor has he managed to
mention that it takes all of 15 minutes
to retarget Russia’s missiles. But it
sounds good, and for this president, this
is all that counts.

In fact, there’s mounting evidence
that the administration is deliberately
downplaying the danger facing Americans
from Russian nuclear missiles, a fact
scandalous enough in itself, and made
even more so by Mr. Clinton’s refusal to
protect this country against the
deliberate or accidental launch of
missiles from abroad. Whatever Mr.
Clinton’s reasons, which are presumably
political and certainly wrongheaded, this
is unconscionable.

According to a top secret report
obtained by The Washington Times’ Bill
Gertz, the Central Intelligence Agency
certainly does not share Mr. Clinton’s
sanguine outlook. The agency is seriously
alarmed over who exactly controls the
Russian nuclear arsenal at a time when
the Russian armed forces are in serious
disarray. “The Russian nuclear
command and control system is being
subjected to stresses it was not designed
to withstand as a result of wrenching
social change, economic hardship and
malaise within the armed forces,”
the report notes.

Particularly worrisome is the
assertion that command posts of the
Strategic Rocket Forces (SRF) “have
the technical ability to launch without
authorization of the political leaders or
the general staff” and that
“some submarine crews probably have
an autonomous launch capability for
tactical nuclear weapons and might have
the ability to employ SLBMs
[intercontinental range submarine
launched ballistic missiles] as
well.” As a result, so the document
says, the SRF has set up a new procedure
to report improper missile launches!

Add to the concern over an accidental
launch the possibility that a situation
could arise in which “the Russian
general staff, holding firm its view of
the United States as the enemy, might
choose to launch a pre-emptive nuclear
attack during an international crisis
because of its diminished early-warning
system and fears of a Western
strike.”

Instead of acknowledging the danger,
the administration hastened to spin the
story, with State Department spokesman
Nick Burns once again taking aim at Mr.
Gertz and his sources. According to Mr.
Burns, the report concluded that the
likelihood of an unauthorized nuclear
launch is low. Sure, low is better than
high, but the fact is still that it takes
only one SS-18 to ruin your morning.

If the CIA is worried, so are the
Russians themselves. “The armed
forces are on the edge, beyond which
extremely undesirable and even
uncontrollable events might take
place,” Russian Defense Minister
Igor Rodionov stated on Friday. That
extraordinary things can happen when
soldiers go hungry and bored was
underscored on Sept. 8 in an amazing
incident at the missile installation
Komsomolsk-na-Amur in the Russian Far
East, as reported by the newspaper
Izhvestia. It appears that three
privates, very green and clearly not very
bright, had heard that missile warheads
contain gold and precious metals, which
they dearly wanted to get their hands on.
Accordingly, they nabbed a 175-pound
warhead, dragged it into a ravine, and
attempted to break it open with a hammer.
In the good news category, it was not a
nuclear warhead, and the incident took
place far from populated areas. The bad
news? There was not enough of the three
dim bulbs left to give a funeral. Other
reported incidents are equally worrisome,
the fact, for instance, that the Russian
nuclear command was unable to tell the
difference between a Norwegian weather
satellite and a nuclear attack back in
December, 1995, and as a consequence went
on high alert.

All of which confirms what critics of
the administration have been saying all
along, that the National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) – published last year and
used to justify the administration’s
opposition to national missile defense –
vastly understated the danger facing this
country.

In fact, the administration has been
so irresponsible that this summer, 41
members of Congress filed suit in D.C.
federal court to force the administration
to comply with the Ballistic Missile
Defense Act, something that the Defense
Department has plainly and outspokenly
refused to do. While Judge Stanley
Sporkin dismissed the civil case on Oct.
9 as premature, he sided with the
plaintiffs in two important regards: That
members of Congress do have
“standing” to challenge the
president in court when he refuses to
execute the law of the land; and that the
courts can have a role in the resolution
of political disputes between Congress
and the executive branch.

Wrote Judge Sporkin: “The Court
does not believe that the executive can
blatantly defy Congress where the
national security interest may be at
stake. Under such circumstances, this
Court will not condone the executive
branch defying the explicit laws enacted
by the Congress.” In other words,
the administration has been put on
notice. Douglas Feith, co-counsel for the
plaintiffs, says that in the event of a
second Clinton term, “there’s likely
to be an immediate resumption of the
dialogue” from members of Congress.
It’s to their great credit that
Republicans are working overtime to
provide the protection for American
citizens that’s so blatantly being
flouted by the Clinton administration.