Wall Street Journal Lauds Rumsfeld Commission Warning On Missile Threat; Reiterates Call for Aegis Option in Response

Contrast Between
Paper’s Editorial Quality and ‘News’ Reporting

(Washington, D.C.): The Wall Street
Journal’s editorial page has once again distinguished itself
as among the most perspicacious and courageous of the Fourth Estate. In a lead editorial
published today, entitled “Zero Warning” (see the
attached), the paper gives due recognition to
the extraordinary report issued yesterday by the Rumsfeld Commission — and the urgent need to
respond to its findings.

The Journal’s well-deserved plaudits go to the nine prominent Republican- and
Democrat-appointed commissioners who prepared, under former Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld‘s
able leadership, a unanimously agreed, 300-page, highly classified report — and its
accompanying
unclassified 27-page executive summary. This remarkable document is the product of six-months
of intensive study, analysis and drafting by the independent, congressionally mandated,
Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. Its findings, as
summarized by “Zero Warning” are chilling:

“America’s intelligence community has routinely judged the ballistic missile threat to
be at least 10 to 15 years away — time enough to come up with a defense. But ‘this is
not a distant threat,’ counters the report issued by ‘Team B,’ a commission
established by Congress to offer a second opinion. Iran, North Korea and other
hostile nations are now able to ‘acquire the means to strike the U.S. within about
five years of a decision’ to build such a weapon.”

“Even more worrisome, assorted new ‘means of delivery can shorten the
warning time of deployment nearly to zero.’ In other words, we may not
know about an enemy missile armed with a nuclear or biological warhead until it
is already descending on city hall.” (Emphasis added throughout.)

Commendably, the Journal restates in this editorial the two critical steps
needed to respond
to this now clear and present danger: 1) deploy a missile
defense system based on the Navy’s
AEGIS fleet air defense system⁽¹⁾ and 2)
scuttle the revised ABM treaty the Clinton
Administration has negotiated with Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. href=”#N_2_”>⁽²⁾

The intellectual rigorousness and attachment to sound principle that typify the Wall
Street
Journal‘s editorial page was all the more striking by comparison with an article in today’s
editions
written by reporter Carla Anne Robbins. The contrast does not reflect well on
the reporter, or
her superiors in the Journal’s Washington bureau, who allowed her to pass off as
“news” her
expression of sympathy for the arms control theologians who have kept this country vulnerable to
missile (and all other forms of attack with weapons of mass destruction) — people who now find
in the Rumsfeld report and events more generally irrefutable evidence of the error and
recklessness of their views.

– 30 –

1. For more on why this approach is the most near-term, effective and
affordable means of
providing world-wide anti-missile protection, see
Critical Mass # 2: Senator Lott, Rumsfeld Commission Add Fresh
Impetus to Case for Beginning Deployment of Missile Defenses
(No. 98-D 133, 15 July 1998),
Irate Senate Supporters of the ‘AEGIS Option’
for Missile Defense Demand Release of
Favorable Pentagon Study (No. 98-D 119, 25 June
1998), Words to Live By: Speaker Gingrich
Asks Clinton to Use Speech to the Nation to Begin Protecting It From Missile
Attack (No. 98-D 15, 23 January 1998) and
Validation of the Aegis Option: Successful Test Is First Step From
Promising Concept to Global Anti-Missile Capability ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_17″>No. 97-D 17, 29 January 1997).

2. For more on the reasons why the original ABM treaty is now
defunct and the ABM-related
agreements signed last September in New York constitute a new treaty, requiring the
U.S.
Senate’s advice and consent, see a legal memorandum prepared for the Heritage Foundation.