The Boulder Sunday Camera - Insight
9 July 2000
The scientific community in the U.S., physicists in particular, tacitly rejoiced when the lunacy of SDI, better known as Star Wars, quietly (almost without notice) vanished from most of the nation's laboratories soon after the Clinton Administration took office. Unfortunately, bad ideas can often be sustained and even made to prosper when political culpability colludes with public gullibility in an election year to create a truly grand fiasco. While the public's media-managed attention was focused on Elian, the WTO and the errant stock market, Star Wars was being groomed for a triumphal comeback. Only this time the name has been changed to National Missile Defense (NMD), and one of its most influential proponents is the sitting President whose election campaign was predicated in part on the elimination of expensive, senseless, and counterproductive weapons programs...exemplified by Star Wars.
The President's abject capitulation to the Republican NMD cabal is as untimely as it is political. It is untimely because it coincides with the extraordinary elevation of Vladimir Putin to the Russian Presidency. This event radically transformed the way that Russia views its relationship to the West and its own commitment to nuclear arms control. In April the Russian Parliament, following years of equivocation, ratified the START II Treaty. Russia is now poised to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) rejected by the Republican dominated Senate in October 1999. Under its new leadership, Russia is also clearly motivated to move ahead on a broad front of agreements toward nuclear disarmament. It is manifestly in its economic as well as its security interests to do so, just as it is in ours.
Driven by the political urgency not to appear 'soft' on national defense, the American President on a different tack has opted to pursue a program of 'limited' missile defense despite the ineluctable fact that such action of itself will automatically abrogate the 1972 AntiBallistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. During his meeting with Clinton on June 4th, Putin emphatically stated that a U.S. withdrawal from ABM will force Russia to consider all existing treaties with the U.S. null and void - an unmistakable message that the recently expired and unmourned cold war may yet be restored to life and former vigor.
And not only Russia; Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder presented the recently visiting U.S. President with the same grim warning: NMD might "trigger a renewed arms race." European powers are clearly not impressed with the Pentagon's offer to provide a nuclear shield for 'our friends and allies' on that continent.
National Missile Defense, proposed by Republican hard-liners, is vastly more grandiose than the President's plan; moreover, it has shed little of the absurdities that permeated Reagan's SDI. Rather, it has acquired some new ones employing the ruse of defense against 'rogue' nations. This latter fiction attempts to market the notion that some of the most isolated, poor and internally conflicted nations on the face of the earth have the wherewithal to mount a space war against the U.S. and its allies. Common sense suggests that if a 'rogue' nation were so motivated to wreak vengeance on a perceived hostile country it would do so at far less cost and greater efficiency with nuclear bombs carried in panel trucks or suitcases as some fanatical miscreants have amply demonstrated in recent years with chemical bombs, albeit with limited but horrific results.
On the other hand, if they were so committed to pour their meager national treasure into a suicidal space war with the U.S., they would surely endeavor to ensure the success of that enterprise by equipping their attacking fleet with warheads accompanied by a covey of decoys, indistinguishable in flight from the warheads - a stratagem which the U.S. is demonstrably incapable of overcoming at any cost. The basis for this is contained in a cold war principle enunciated by U.S. arms negotiator Paul Nitze nearly two decades ago at the time of the Reagan Administration: Any space defense can be overwhelmed by an attacking force composed of warheads and decoys; it is cheaper and more efficient on the part of the offense to improve the cunning and lethality of its mode of attack than it is for the defense to devise effective countermeasures.
At the present time both Vice President Gore and Governor Bush are pushing for a missile defense shield, differing primarily in scale. Clinton team member Gore's plan mirrors the Administration's which would station 100 interceptors in Alaska at a cost of $60B. The cost of the Bush plan, not having been divulged but one might guess, is significantly larger, commensurate with the usual Republican largess in matters related to exotic weaponry procurement.
President Clinton's concept of 'limited' missile defense is at best a delusion, perhaps an order-of-magnitude less costly delusion than the debacle envisioned by the Republican NMD lobby, but a delusion nonetheless. It would be far better if the President were to demonstrate a little executive backbone by opposing specious military ventures like NMD whose transparent main objective is to sustain the surviving giants of the aerospace/military industry. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and TRW, are the principal contenders for NMD; they also happen to be among the biggest soft money contributors to the GOP. Big surprise!
In the aftermath of the Republican rejection of CTBT, the President vowed, "The fight is far from over. When all is said and done the United States will ratify the treaty." These are bold words spoken at a time when Republicans, savoring the time they anticipate the next U.S. President will be their own, defiantly proclaim that they will kill any arms-control agreement with the Russians that would limit the scope of a future NMD deployment - this in a letter to President Clinton recently reported by The Nation, signed by twenty-five GOP senators commandeered by Jesse Helms.
The President need not kowtow to such abusive threats. The Constitution provides that the President have the power to negotiate and sign treaties. He could, if he chose, return to Geneva and resign the CTBT. Furthermore, he could negotiate and sign any treaty intended to curtail nuclear proliferation with the Russians or any other nation. The United States could then reassert its declared dedication to world peace to nations that recently have had reasonable cause to doubt that dedication.
Howard Garcia