YOU CALL THIS A “NEW DEMOCRAT” AGENDA? THE D.L.C. “NO-NUKES” IDEA IS NOT MAINSTREAM AND MUST BE REJECTED BY CONGRESS

(Washington, D.C.): Over the past few days, the
Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) — an organization
that has traditionally been associated with
moderate-to-conservative positions in the Democratic
Party has properly taken to task one of its founders,
President Bill Clinton. Specifically, the DLC decried Mr.
Clinton’s abandonment of the political center — a
constituency whose support was critical to the his
election in 1992 and whose wholesale defection in 1994
doomed many Democratic candidacies.

This message was communicated with particular feeling
by the organization’s current chairman, a generally quite
sensible Congressman, Dave McCurdy (D-OK), whose own bid
for the U.S. Senate was sunk by the political rip tide
running against President Clinton — and anyone
associated with him. As Rep. McCurdy told the DLC
yesterday:

“While Bill Clinton has the mind of a new
Democrat, he retains the heart of an old
Democrat. The result is an administration that has
pursued elements of a moderate and liberal agenda at
the same time, to the great confusion of the American
people.”

‘Goring’ the President’s Ox

Others piled on with the same theme. DLC President Al
From, for example, warned the group that the Democratic
Party must change its policy direction or, “We will
not be a national party at the beginning of the next
century.” Then, in a transparent bit of political
repositioning, Vice President Al Gore tried to distance
himself from the left-wing agenda of the Clinton-Gore
Administration. Claiming that the DLC had provided
“the intellectual basis” for the
Administration, Mr. Gore observed that it had failed to
be “100 percent faithful” to the DLC’s policy
proposals, adding, “You can — and do — make a
powerful argument that where we have not been, we should
have been.”

Looney Left Agenda — Not ‘A Mainstream
Contract’

Incredibly, in the midst of these and other acerbic
and well-deserved criticisms of the Clinton
Administration’s leftward lurch, the DLC’s in-house
think-tank, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI),
served up what it believes is — in contrast to the
Clinton agenda — a “Mainstream
Contract.” As the name suggests, the DLC/PPI program
is also intended to be seen as a counterpoint to the
Republican-sponsored “Contract With America”
which, in addition to being better known, has the
advantage of having been submitted to and endorsed by
the majority of voters in the last election.

Given this background, it is extraordinary indeed that
the DLC would include in its so-called Mainstream
Contract a proposal concerning national security that can
only be characterized as a position of the Looney Left.
In a precis of the DLC’s proposal published in the New
York Times on 5 December 1994, Will Marshall,
president of the Progressive Policy Institute, advocated
that Democrats “end the Nuclear Century.“
He went on to say:

“Nuclear weapons are now more a liability
than an asset to our security. Democrats should call
for a ‘global grand bargain’ in which the U.S. and
the other four nuclear powers agree to reduce their
stockpiles [of nuclear weapons] toward zero and other
countries agree to strong, enforceable
non-proliferation measures.”

Are All Democrats Embracing U.S.
‘Denuclearization’?

The notion that the United States can negotiate away
the nuclear century by agreeing, along with Russia,
China, Britain and France to eliminate national
stockpiles is untenable. For one thing, the nuclear genie
is forever out of the bottle. Other states beyond the
five — including India, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and
Pakistan — either possess nuclear weapons or will
shortly do so. Even if one could have confidence that the
Russians and Chinese would faithfully honor an agreement
banning nuclear weapons (and one cannot), it is
sheer self-delusion to believe that “strong,
enforceable non-proliferation measures” can be
devised and promulgated that will end others’ nuclear
programs and prevent further hemorrhaging of
thermonuclear technology.

Unfortunately, the DLC “no-nukes” proposal
sounds eerily like the Clinton Administration’s
“denuclearization” policy — the product of
precisely the sorts of “Old Democrat”
influences Messrs. McCurdy, From and Marshall have been
so lucidly denouncing. In particular, Energy Secretary
Hazel O’Leary and a cadre of anti-nuclear activists she
has entrusted with senior positions in the Department of
Energy have been engaged in a systematic effort
unilaterally to disable and dismantle the U.S. nuclear
weapons complex.⁽¹⁾
When coupled with a gratuitous swipe at the Republican
Contract for being “bent on reviving ‘Star Wars’ and
needless military spending,” the DLC/PPI program
sounds in the defense field decidedly out of touch with
the American political mainstream.

The Bottom Line

The new majority in Congress was elected on a platform
of restoring U.S. national security — not unilaterally
dismantling it, pursuing fatuous and inevitably futile
arms control agreements or foreclosing prudent
investments in defensive technologies and systems. Early
orders of business — consistent with real mainstream
political views — should, therefore be to:

• Enact the Contract With America’s
  commitment to “deploy at the earliest
  possible moment an anti-ballistic missile system
  that is capable of providing a highly effective
  defense of the United States against ballistic
  missile attacks…[and] to
  forward-deployed and expeditionary elements of
  the Armed Forces of the United States and to
  friendly forces and allies of the United
  States.”

In this connection, the Center applauds
remarks made by the incoming Speaker of the
House, Newt Gingrich, in a 5 December interview
with Aviation Week and Space Technology:

“‘I would rather rely on engineers
than diplomats for security,’ Gingrich
asserted. ‘I think with the rise of Iran,
North Korea, Iraq, Syria and China…we
should be rapidly developing a capacity to
defeat a limited missile threat. I think we
clearly have the capacity to defeat a threat
of 10 or 15 or 20 missiles. And yet, in the
scale of horror that an outlaw regime could
rain on the United States if one missile got
through is unimaginable. And nobody is taking
this seriously.'”

• Investigate the Clinton
  Administration’s dangerously misguided policy of
  denuclearizing the United States. Such
  an investigation should examine, among other
  things, Mrs. O’Leary’s astounding personnel
  practices, the deteriorating security condition
  at sensitive DOE facilities and the strategic
  implications of: having no reliable source of
  tritium (a radioactive gas that is crucial to the
  operation of modern nuclear weapons); the
  subordination of key Energy complex activities to
  paralyzing environmental impact proceedings; and
  the cumulative effects of budget cuts on
  weapons-related development, testing and
  production and on the maintenance of the existing
  stockpile.

Such an investigation, if rigorously pursued,
should precipitate the prompt removal from office
of Mrs. O’Leary and her cohorts and the adoption
of urgent course corrections for the weapons
complex they are so egregiously mismanaging.

– 30 –

1. One year ago today, Mrs.
O’Leary took an important step in this direction by
announcing the wholesale declassification of large
quantities of classified materials. In a Decision
Brief entitled U.S.
‘Denuclearization’: Who’s Minding the Store?
(No. 93-D103, 9
December 1993), the Center for Security Policy described
this step as “…Arguably the most devastating
single attack on the underpinnings of the U.S. national
security structure since Japan’s lightning strike on the
7th Fleet fifty-two years ago.” The Decision
Brief went on to enumerate several other areas
in which Mrs. O’Leary’s self-declared policy of U.S.
denuclearization was manifesting itself. The Center will
issue an update on this subject shortly.