[EXCERPTS] DoD News Briefing
Mr. Kenneth H. Bacon, ASD (PA)
Tuesday, March 25, 1997 - 1:45 p.m.
Q: Secretary Cohen said this morning that there was nothing in the Helsinki Accord that would impede U.S. development of theater missile defenses. Some Republicans in Congress have disputed that, saying that just by, in a sense, essentially codifying this distinction between theater and national missile defense, it puts the U.S. at a disadvantage. Can you amplify at all why the Pentagon feels there's nothing detrimental to the U.S. interest in this agreement?
A: Let's be clear about one thing. It was Congress that said in the 1996 Defense Authorization Bill that there should be a codification of the difference. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is a central building block of the arms control regime. What it says, it limits the amount, it limits the size of defenses that either the U.S. or now Russia, then the Soviet Union, could deploy.
The reason why this was important is that if you had no limit on anti-ballistic missile defenses, the only way around a large defensive system was to keep building more and more offensive missiles, so it would have been an encouragement, actually, to build arsenals that were much larger than either side was then contemplating. By capping the size of a defensive system, it made it possible to have a series of arms control agreements that reduced the size of offensive arsenals, and that's, in fact, what's happened.
As you know, the START I agreement limits each side to 6,000 countable launchers. That's down from around 10,000 or so before the START I agreement. START II would bring that down to 3,000 to 3,500 warheads. And President Yeltsin and President Clinton in Helsinki last week said they would like to move forward after the Russian Duma ratifies START II, to a START III agreement. That START III agreement would bring down warhead totals even further, and they talked in the range of 2,000 to 2,500. None of these reductions would be possible without an ABM Treaty.
So the question is, if you believe the ABM Treaty -- so there's a dilemma. The ABM Treaty is important. We believe it's important to stability and to continued progress in arms control. The Russians believe it's important to stability and continued progress in arms control. We both believe that arms reductions make the world more safe and more stable.
On the other hand, we face a threat which is from theater missiles. Missiles that could be developed by rogue nations such as Iraqi SCUDs, that can threaten our forces deployed abroad. They can be used against port facilities, against airports, or against concentrations of forces.
We take the view that the theater ballistic missile threat is entirely different from a strategic missile threat which are longer range missiles designed to be used against our homeland, against the continental United States; whereas the main threat we face from theater ballistic missiles is that they would be used against our troops stationed abroad or the bases from which they operate. We need to develop, we learned clearly from Desert Storm, a theater ballistic missile defense ability. We are now working on that. We've got six projects underway.
We always maintained that the ABM Treaty allows us to develop defenses against missiles fired at less than strategic range, but we wanted to be clear and make sure that the Russians were clear so that there wouldn't be any confusion over this, and a lot of -- or anything that could destroy or damage the ABM Treaty -- that it was possible to proceed with theater ballistic missile defenses under the umbrella of the ABM Treaty, and that's what this agreement makes clear. It basically allows us to -- it does completely allow us to go ahead with all the projects we currently have underway, and it makes it very clear that the ABM Treaty is not challenged by the development of defenses against shorter range theater ballistic missiles. So we've given up nothing here. This allows us to do what we are already working on. It does nothing to interfere with the Clinton Administration 3+3 program which is to spend three years developing -- I'm sorry. It does nothing to interfere with our theater ballistic, with our theater missile defenses. We think this is very good because it clears up any confusion about ABM and TMD.
Q: Does it draw a line that in a sense it's okay for all the programs currently on the drawing board, but could become a problem later as technology advances?
A: We don't believe so. We don't believe that it will become a problem later at all. And Secretary Cohen pointed out, this incorporates the language that was in the 1996 Defense Authorization Act. This was language that the Congress wanted us to include, and we included it.
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