GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Bush is fitting pesky treaties for shredder

President George W. Bush 's national security team knows its enemy, and it isn't Russia or even China.

It's the "Cold War mindset" regarding arms control treaties that set ground rules for how to avoid blowing each other up. The Bush team knows how to fix the problem: Get rid of the treaties.

How else to read its rush to fell trees in Alaska next month to build a national missile shield that even its proponents say can't work all the time and may not even work most of the time?

In the system's first big test 1 years ago, the prototype interceptor missile hit the incoming missile only because of a fluke. It failed the next two tests, prior to Saturday's successful attempt.

Defense analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a Virginia watchdog group, said this spotty record comes despite spending $75 billion over the last two decades, "half what we spent on the Apollo [moon-landing] project."

Yet a momentous decision to deploy this system was being couched last week as simply building a "test bed" in Alaska for "more robust" testing.

The land is to be cleared this summer, with construction of the missile silos to start next April. When or whether these "test" silos will violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, the granddaddy of strategic arms control, is unclear. The Bush administration hedges.

Yet it's hard to escape a conclusion that they will. More than just test silos, these missile interceptors are to form the basis of a rudimentary, operational anti-missile system, the Pentagon says.

If so, that leaves only three months to strike a deal with the Russians on revising the ABM treaty before we have to serve the required six months' notice of withdrawal from the accord.

Democratic senators who were told three weeks ago by Pentagon officials that next year's tests would not violate the 1972 accord were irate last week to learn the United States may thus be "only months" away from ending the accord.

The revelation was also a slap at our allies. President Bush told them last month that they would be consulted every step of the way. Evidently, he didn't mean quite every step.

Granted, part of the game now is to butter up Moscow for concessions and for a tight negotiating deadline once detailed talks start. But the core of the Bush team really believes the ABM is an Edsel destined for the junk heap. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters last month that virtually the entire treaty had to go.

Moreover, this country has seemed willing to walk away from other key arms treaties.

Far from trying to salvage the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Bush administration is quietly holding the door open to resuming underground nuclear tests, if required to perfect our arsenal. It's also trying to block a draft verification protocol for the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention on grounds it could hamstring biowarfare defense.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands of assault weapons washing illegally over borders into the hands of warlords and rebels. The United States should hold much of the legal high ground, given its exceptionally tough export-licensing system to keep military arms of all types from being sold to rogue states, terrorists and paramilitaries.

One wouldn't have known that from the opening comments of the chief U.S. delegate to the first U.N. conference on this illicit trade under way in New York. Most delegates lamented the killing of a half-million people yearly, and the turning of some sub-Saharan societies into armed camps. U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton got up and unceremoniously ripped the draft document as an effort to undercut Americans' right to bear arms. He said the United States would not support review conferences, anti-gun advocacy or any blanket bar on arms sales to insurgents.

Granted, Bolton left no doubt about where the United States stood. This helped focus the U.N. windbags and probably speeded things up. Yet many delegates professed to be shocked by his remarks, seeing them as U.S. bullying.

Bullying gets one only so far in a world where 28 nations already own ballistic missile technology, and more want it. There's nothing wrong with trying to defend against the rogues and crazies out there - as long as we don't make things worse by trading a proven deterrent, arms control, for an unproven one.

Copyright 2001 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.