Will The Senate Let Clinton Rewrite The C.F.E.Treaty Without Its Advice And Consent?

(Washington, D.C.): The United States
Senate’s de facto rejection last
week of the Chemical Weapons Convention
has set the stage for a critically
important show-down with the Clinton
Administration over the arms control
process. As noted in href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-P_86at”>the attached column published
in today’s Washington Times by
the Center for Security Policy’s
director, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Senate
action on the CWC creates an opportunity
for that institution once again to serve
as the “quality control”
mechanism on treaties envisioned by the
Founding Fathers.

The timing of such a development is
especially fortuitous since, as Mr.
Gaffney’s column notes, there are several
Clinton arms control initiatives in the
pipeline that require the Senate’s
critical scrutiny. These include:

• The Comprehensive Test
  Ban Treaty — an
  unverifiable accord that will not
  meaningfully restrict the
  proliferation of nuclear weapons
  technology but will undermine the
  safety, reliability and
  effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear
  deterrent.

• A “global ban”
  on landmines — a
  fatuous idea in a world where:
  some 100 million mines are
  believed already to be in the
  ground; crude anti-personnel
  mines can — and will — be
  cheaply and covertly produced and
  exported by countries like China
  without fear of detection; and
  U.S. military personnel will be
  forced to risk being overrun in
  exposed positions or violate
  international law by jury-rigging
  land-mines for their own
  protection.

• A fissile-material
  cut-off — a perennial
  hobby horse for the
  “denuclearizers” who
  shape Clinton arms control
  policy. The value of this
  initiative is greatly reduced by
  the vast quantities of plutonium
  and highly enriched uranium
  already in the Russian stockpile
  and by the fact that such
  materials are a by-product of
  many Russian nuclear power
  reactors.

Worse yet, as Mr. Gaffney observes, the
Clinton Administration hopes to bypass
the Senate altogether with respect to
some momentous arms control initiatives.
The most prominent of these is the effort
to rewrite the 1972
Anti-Ballitstic Missile Treaty
so as to expand its signatories and
scope. Were these changes to come into
effect, new impediments to the prompt
deployment of strategic and theater
ballistic missile defenses would be
created.

The Center has just learned of a new,
low-profile Clinton effort to circumvent
the Senate’s advise and consent
responsibilities on changes it has
quietly negotiated to another important
treaty — the Conventional Forces
in Europe (CFE) accord. The
Administration evidently hopes to have a
rider inserted in routine legislation
that would authorize the President to
approve strategically significant
amendments contained in a “Document
Agreed Among States Parties”
initialled on 31 May 1996. This document
would modify hard-won limits on the size
and armaments of Russian forces on the
flanks in ways that will threaten the
sovereignty of former Soviet republics
and undermine the security of America’s
allies in those regions.

The Center for Security Policy
urges the Senate to build upon its
recent, laudatory action on the CWC by
insisting that substantive changes
affecting the ABM and CFE Treaties
receive formal approval by the Senate.