Save START! That is the new rallying point of the national security team of the administration. The new START treaty is getting an extraordinary push to secure ratification prior to the end of the calendar year while Congress is in town doing the nation’s business. Should it be ratified now or should a new Congress get to examine its merits?

At first glance, what could be the problem? Many former senior national security cabinet officials have endorsed the treaty. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has voted 14-4 to approve it. Most of America’s currently serving military commanders have said it should be approved. So why the hold-up?

There are five reasons. (1) The historical poisonous political atmosphere that has enveloped past arms control efforts; (2) The rhetorical excesses of many, particularly the contempt for missile defense, exhibited by its critics; (3) The lack of transparency in the Administration’s future plans for the US nuclear enterprise; (4) The fear and mistrust of the current Russian Federation leadership; and (5) The push that places the new START treaty within the boundaries of the push for a nuclear free zone, otherwise known as “Global Zero”.

Let us examine these issues more closely. For example, while the original SALT treaty in 1972 was overwhelmingly approved, it did allow the buildup of nuclear weapons to over 12,000 deployed weapons, while limiting to some degree the number of missiles on which such warheads could be deployed. But it did nothing to constrain the awesome destructive power of our respective nuclear stockpiles. Its sequel, SALT II, was withdrawn by the Carter administration almost immediately following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It would have codified and capped the build-up allowed by SALT I.

With the 1980 election of President Reagan, however, arms control became part of a vicious campaign not only to defeat him but to wipe out America’s strategic modernization programs. The “nuclear freeze” as it was known would have locked the United States into a condition of strategic inferiority to the Soviets, while leaving Moscow’s nuclear forces free to expand, such as the nearly 2000 warheads deployed on SS-20 missiles in Europe and Asia.

The rhetoric of the nuclear freeze held Reagan to be ready and willing to fight a nuclear war. His finger was on the nuclear button, we were told, ready to go. The late Senator Edward Kennedy was working with the Politburo seeking a joint campaign with the Soviets to bring down Reagan, specifically aimed at stopping the American strategic modernization programs.

Ironically, proposals by the United States to eliminate all intermediate nuclear missiles and cut strategic nuclear weapons in half were greeted with cries of derision, ridicule and skepticism from the nuclear freeze people. Reductions, as Reagan proposed? No! They cried. Freeze over 24,000 nuclear weapons in place? Yes!

And in March 1983, when the US administration announced missile defenses, the rhetoric became even shriller. “Star Wars” immediately became the moniker for all missile defenses, an appellation designed to ridicule. No further debate was considered even necessary. As Ambassador Max Kampelman noted during a keynote speech to the American Bar Association, “The term ‘Star Wars’ was designed solely to stop debate in its tracks”.

Some of the leaders of these two campaigns—the nuclear freeze and the opposition to missile defense—now rhetorically embrace both strategic modernization and missile defense which they previously condemned. They act as if their previous positions and rhetoric never even existed. And some of these folks are senior leaders of this administration.

Now we are assured that the administration will support future robust strategic nuclear modernization—our labs, our infrastructure and our delivery vehicles such as Minuteman missiles, Trident submarines and strategic bombers such as the B52 and B2. Conveniently forgotten is that many in the administration have been trying to kill these very same programs for three decades! While at the same time lambasting at every turn the INF, START and Moscow nuclear weapons elimination and reduction treaties as “not real arms control” or too reminiscent of “cold war thinking”.

On missile defense, which is at the center of today’s START treaty concerns, the issue is more convoluted. A little background is needed. The Bush administration sought to protect Europe, US forces and our Middle East allies from Iranian short and medium range ballistic missiles through the expanded deployment of our Navy-based Aegis, and our Army-centric THAAD and Patriot missile defenses. Supplementing these forces were allied deployments such as the Iron Dome, David’s Sling and the Arrow in Israel.

But the inventory of Iranian ballistic missiles of all ranges and the increasing arsenal of such terror subsidiaries as Hezbollah and Hamas, was very large. As General Kevin Campbell, the Commander of our Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Alabama told me, we do not necessarily have to match the enemy inventory missile for missile. But we do have to have a sufficient inventory of interceptors to deflect any use of missiles by say, Iran, to protect our key assets, and then take whatever offensive action is needed and possible to take out the launch sites from where the threat emerges.

The Bush administration may not have been sufficiently explicit about its plans to deploy such defenses in the Persian Gulf. And one can argue the planned inventories needed expansion. So far, so good. But many of the rhetorical criticisms of the administration of the former missile defense policies were out of bounds.

For example, some made it appear that the deployment in Poland of ten ground-based interceptors—designed to defend not only central Europe but the east coast of the United States from Iranian long-range rockets—was going to be the sole US capability to defend against Iran.

But such claims were nonsensical. Iran’s arsenal of short range missiles threatens the entire Persian Gulf and no missile interceptor from Poland has either the time or the “legs” to intercept a missile launched from Iran at the western Gulf. Everyone understood that.

Today, however, those same critics, who never supported missile defense, are now prominent supporters of the START treaty. They have also now embraced missile defense as if they have found a long-lost child. For example, a former State Department official now with the Arms Control Association, complains no one should oppose START because missile defense is not restricted. But this same former official has long advocated that the US should never have withdrawn from the ABM treaty which of course made impossible the deployment of any effective missile defenses. But he now claims the new START treaty is so much better because the old START I treaty has expired and with it provisions in the treaty that prohibited the testing of ballistic missile defenses from certain platforms.

The next area of missile defense concerns involves the administration’s “new plan”.

The Aegis Navy-based systems being proposed as part of the NATO phase-adaptive system is not really new. The Bush administration accelerated the Navy program in 2001, and added billions to its funding. The idea of putting Navy ship-based missiles ashore, coupled with the THAAD radar which is far more capable than the ship board radars, was originally proposed during the last two budgets of the Bush administration. The new administration certainly deserves credit for the acceleration of the program although the initial purchase of standard missiles was actually less than previously planned while future acquisition is to be accelerated.

And the administration deserves credit for the work they have done with NATO to secure widespread support for further missile defense deployments. But the cost was high: we abandoned the planned deployment of interceptors in Poland which as the current Director of the Missile Defense Agency says actually “works”. We have, on the other hand, yet to produce a standard missile for the Aegis systems that have the speed—roughly 4-5 kilometers per second—necessary to defend against long-range Iranian nuclear-armed ballistic missiles that may emerge as soon as 2015.

In politics as in many endeavors it is always nice to see former opponents now change their minds and embrace what they previously opposed. But is the new courtship real or a subterfuge? Many supporters of missile defense believe the proposed future systems, relying as they do to such a large extent on future technology that has not yet been developed, is a risk that we should not take. They also believe many now claiming fealty to missile defense will propose to cut the same billions from missile defense later which they are pointing to now as a reason to trust them and their support for START.

And even if the current systems materialize, complementary or more near term systems should also be developed, but these systems were terminated in the first budget proposed by current administration.

So like Charlie Brown, those Senators with serious concerns with the START treaty are asking themselves to what extent the new administration is Lucy with the football. In the absence of any acknowledgment on the part of the administration that previous missile defense programs have actually worked, and without the Bush administration would not even exist, the distrust born in the past and nurtured by missile defense critics for a generation will continue to impede US efforts to secure START ratification.

Next and related to and exacerbating these concerns are the rhetoric and policy of the Kremlin. First the Russian leadership said in their view no further qualitative or quantitative US missile defense deployments beyond those already made would be allowed under START. To many Senators, that confirmed what many thought the Russian objectives were all along.

To be sure, some members of the Russian government then backtracked from such comments, but without explaining exactly what missile defense deployments made by the US would undermine the treaty. We may have gotten a hint of that when Bruce Blair and two former senior military officials of the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces argued in a Foreign Affairs article that US missile defense interceptors should be limited to no more than 100, including it appears the 30 we now have already deployed in Alaska and California.

Given Navy ship deployment rotations, such limits imply no more than 2 such Navy interceptors deployed at sea at any one time. If true, is this reflected in the negotiating record between the US and Russia over the START treaty which has not been made available to the Senate?

Further related to this is concern among many Senators that while the START treaty doesn’t explicitly restrict planned US missile defenses, it does eliminate the opportunity to deploy such interceptors in our Minuteman silos and Trident submarines should we change our plans. Why should we be restricted? What is the threat such provisions are trying to deflect?

The question naturally arises, why were such restrictions placed in the treaty? Were they all part of a package of concessions to Moscow, including the elimination of the Poland-based deployments that were made to get Russian concurrence? And if so, what is next on the Russian agenda? And given Russian economic woes, it is widely understood Moscow needed the new START treaty a lot more than did the US. So why make such concessions?

This is not an idle concern. The Russians have claimed they wish to cooperate with us in deploying a missile defense for the European region, but then they claim there is no threat. They further claim because there is no threat from Iran, for example, they must be part of any future threat assessment. They’ll keep us honest! They then imply that left to their own devices, NATO will concur up an imaginary adversary in order to build unnecessary missile defenses, defenses which the Russians then will claim are aimed at “threatening Russia”, which they repeatedly have done so already.

To the extent these Russian views imply further Russian obstruction to US missile defense plans, it would be useful for the Administration to further explain where and when they have pushed back on such Russian concerns, especially in that some senior administration officials have in the past echoed exactly such Russian concerns!

And this brings us to the final Senate concern and that is the extent to which the Administration is pushing policies that it otherwise would not if it were not wedded to the idea of “global zero”. Some explanation is needed here. At its heart, this question involves an interesting postulate: if you were not pursuing the ultimate goal of zero nuclear weapons, would your current policies be different than if you were?

For example, would you be examining whether different nuclear warheads were needed to hold at risk North Korean or Iranian targets, so as to maintain whatever deterrent you needed with these prominent members of the axis of evil? Would you be delaying the adoption of a genuine roadmap for the modernization and replacement of our current three legs of our Triad?

As the current commander of the US Strategic Command explained at an NDUF-NDIA joint Congressional seminar on September 14, 2010, the replacement and modernization of our Minuteman missile force requires that work on such a force begin now given the 12-14 acquisition cycle within the Department of Defense. That Minuteman roadmap has not been completed. Yet it and a complementary bomber roadmap could be part of the FY2012 budget request due in February 2011.

So, too, with the Trident portion of the promised funding for our nuclear force structure. Nearly $60 billion of the promised funds over the next decade are for that alone, which puts into perspective the costs of doing this job right. While compared to the overall Federal budget such nuclear modernization funding is relatively small–$20 billion a year for the entire nuclear enterprise compared to $3.8 trillion Federal budget, or .5%. But the promised funding does not account for either a bomber or ICBM roadmap, thus the continued Senate skepticism over START.

Furthermore, no explicit, detailed—and public—modernization roadmap is available, and this has made it difficult for Senators to accept “trust me” as sufficient coin of the realm to secure their support.  The Administration has indeed laid out what it calls “An Enduring Commitment to the US Nuclear Deterrent” in a recent White Paper. And they recently added some $4 billion over the next five years to the nuclear infrastructure.

But they complicated matters by saying such funding will not be available should the START treaty not be ratified—implying that in the absence of a new treaty the maintenance and modernization of our nuclear enterprise will be placed in jeopardy because necessary funding will not be available.

Trust is indeed the glue that holds together a self-governing people. However, for thirty years, the US went through major fights on national security where as the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick warned us too many Americans were always ready to “blame America first”. In the eyes of many Senators, the Iranian, North Korean and other proliferation problems are being exacerbated by the very country with which we are now being asked to join on the START treaty—Moscow.

Russia says it will help us deliver NATO supplies to Afghanistan, as they promise to deliver $300 million in military weapons to Venezuela. They say they will help us deal with Iran, but they build and provide the fuel for Tehran’s nuclear reactor and support the mullah’s client state Syria with weapons and training. They say they wish to join with NATO in missile defense deployments, but then deploy missile and air-defenses on occupied Georgian-territory, a country that aspires to join NATO.

I am sure many of those who support this treaty do so because they trust the administration will be forthcoming with the funds necessary and the policy required to maintain a nuclear deterrent, second to none. Many in the Senate do not. Full transparency would be very helpful, including modernization plans and negotiating records.

Most importantly would be recognition that whatever the treaty does and does not do, American strength has not been the reason for either the terrorism we now face or the proliferation threats we see now and over the horizon. The emergence of a new alternative “strong horse” on the geo-strategic horizon is not necessarily good news for America. Unfortunately a nuclear free world or too hasty steps in that direction may indeed hasten that eventuality. That is at the heart of the question over START: do we pause, and vote on it early next year; start and then complete the process now; or stop things altogether.

 

Guest columns do not necessarily reflect the views of Accuracy in Media or its staff.

Share This

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

About the author

1 Comment for Stop, Pause or START?