[Page: E847]
- Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, North Korea stands firm in its resolve to develop nuclear weapons despite the Clinton administration's diplomacy and exhortation. The administration's current strategy of looking to the U.N. Security Council promises to be equally ineffective. Meanwhile, it has limited our ability to act by not funding the most effective defense against North Korea's nuclear threat--missile defense technology. The following article by Richard Perle in the May 3, 1994, edition of the Wall Street Journal reveals the dangerous course the administration has put us on by letting our defenses down while North Korea's threat has been building. I commend to my colleagues' attention the following:
There are few things one can be certain about in international affairs these days, but I can think of two: (1) With or without international inspections, the North Koreans will not give up their nuclear weapons program; and (2) when they eventually get many nuclear weapons--and they will--we will wish we had a reliable ballistic missile defense, and we won't.
These expectations are not shared by the Clinton administration, which is facing important decisions regarding North Korea, as well as the future of the ballistic missile defense program started by Ronald Reagan more than a decade ago.
On the evidence to date, the Clinton administration is working harder, and much more effectively, to halt the development of our own missile defense system than it is to halt Kim Il Sung's nuclear weapons program. There is no other way to comprehend the administration's dithering on North Korea while devoting its meager ration of decisiveness to killing what remains of the Strategic Defense Initiative and cutting back sharply on other defensive systems.
Despite its worsening poverty and post-Cold War isolation, North Korea still considers the development of nuclear weapons its highest priority. The North Korean `Manhattan Project' is run by Kim Il Sung's son and heir apparent, Kim Jong Il, who, if it can be imagined, is even more ruthless and monomaniacal than his father. Together they have relentlessly borne a huge financial burden, brushed aside American admonitions and scorned near-global opprobrium as they work to accumulate nuclear weapons.
There is not the slightest reason to suppose, or even hope, that North Korea will quit before it achieves success, which is now within reach. It is particularly foolish to believe that North Korea will be talked out of the nuclear weapons it is sacrificing so much to acquire. Kim Il Sung believes nuclear weapons are essential for his security and his ambitions to reunify Korea on his terms. He may also believe that there are billions of dollars to be earned by selling nuclear weapons in a market that until now has had no willing suppliers to satisfy a queue of eager potential buyers.
That diplomacy and exhortation alone will not suffice is hard to accept for an administration that tries to get by with words rather than deeds, redefinition rather than resolve. President Clinton's firm autumn stand, `North Korea cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb,' has gone the way of last winter's snow. In is place is a new objective--International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of those nuclear facilities that North Korea volunteers to identify. Such an inspection regime cannot reliably reveal, much less halt, the North Korean nuclear weapons program. And to accomplish even this modest purpose, the White House is looking again to its preferred diplomatic instrument--the United Nations Security Council, that engine of will and determination (ask any Serb).
But far worse than words without deeds is a dangerous pattern of words contradicted by deeds, as when U.S.-South Korean military exercises are called off or postponed as a concession to Kim Il Sung or when defensive Patriot missiles dispatched prudently--and vociferously--to protect American troops in South Korea are deliberately sent by slow ship.
After months of North Korean maneuvering and American backing and filling, we have failed to gain Kim Il Sung's consent to inspections that would not, in any case, prevent the covert continuation of the North Korean program or its quick resumption if it were temporarily halted.
Contemplating North Korea's potential bang with an American whimper, Under-
secretary of State Lynn Davis last month summarized the administration's thinking: `Through diplomacy, we have made a serious effort to find out whether North Korea is willing to accept a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. . . . Our strategy if diplomacy fails takes us back to the U.N. Security council.'
Whatever else the Security Council can do, it is not very good at stopping bombs or missiles (ask any Bosnian). That is a task for our armed forces. But this task is, unhappily, one they cannot now carry out.
It is not unreasonable to suppose that the specter of a nuclear-armed North Korea--to say nothing of its likely customers, Iran, Iraq and Libya--would cause the administration to think again about how we might defend against the missiles that Kim Il Sung or someone like him might someday aim at us, our allies or our troops abroad.
The wise decision to send Patriot missiles to South Korea proves again an important lesson of the Gulf War: In crisis as in war, missile defenses are much to be preferred to the abject vulnerability favored by the administration. That this lesson is so dimly perceived by the very team that ordered the Patriots to the rescue is striking commentary on the administration's failure to see the interconnections that distinguish a deliberate policy from a collection of unrelated reactions.
While decrying its lack of options for dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea, the administration is out to throttle some of the most promising technologies for missile defense. Yet it is precisely this defenselessness that limits our freedom of action.
With help from its friends in Congress, the administration has decimated the missile defense budget while straitjacketing the development of promising defensive technologies on the grounds that they are not allowed under a narrow and controversial interpretation of the antiballistic missile treaty of 1972. It has reduced by 80% the amount of money projected by the Bush administration for work on a nationwide defense system. More recently, it has proposed extending the ABM treaty, by now an artifact of the Cold War, to all of the former Soviet republics, thus diminishing greatly the possibility that it might one day be revised to allow us (and the Russians) to build nationwide defenses against emerging nuclear powers.
When it comes to killing missile defenses, an administration given to drift and vacillation has found an uncharacteristic sense of purpose.
The extraordinary thing about the opposition to an American strategic defense is its resilience. The now obsolete (and perhaps always misplaced) concern that the development of an American missile defense would deepen a U.S.-Soviet arms race has managed to survive the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union with no loss of fervor.
Administration success in ruling out the use of space-based components capable of intercepting missiles early in their flight will guarantee that we face future Kim Il Sungs without effective means of defense. It will also sacrifice some of the most promising options for theater defense. This will force us to rely on threats to use nuclear weapons in retaliation, as President Clinton has hinted we would do. But in nearly all contingencies such threats are unlikely to be convincing.
In the end, nuclear coercion, especially as part of a politico-military strategy, is bound to triumph over deterrence. For in the end, coercive threats coming from a Kim Il Sung who defied the world and managed to get a bomb are more likely to be believed than deterrent threats coming from an American president who decided we should not develop the means to intercept it.
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