Missile Defense: A Failure to Defend - Alaska radar system is potential conflict between US and Russia - Brief Article

National Review, Sept 25, 2000

Vladimir Putin should crack a smile. The Kursk submarine disaster may have undermined his domestic political standing and sullied his image around the world. But in one place his fantasy of a Russia too muscular to be crossed is still honored, his word still enough to bend and break world leaders: the swath of Washington, D.C., from Foggy Bottom to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. President Clinton announced that he wouldn't even begin the groundbreaking for the Alaska-based radar that would be necessary to have a limited National Missile Defense system operational by 2005. His stated reason was that the technology isn't advanced enough, but administration officials confided to reporters another reason: Putin, our partner in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, wouldn't like it. And that was reason enough for the administration to drop an idea-defending American cities from missile attack-that it clearly regards as a bizarre leftover from the Reagan years. (Clinton reportedly has been reading Frances FitzGerald's book-length argument that missile defense has always been a "delusion.")

If there are still gaps in the technology, the Clinton administration bears much of the blame, as an exhaustive new report by Sen. Thad Cochran, Stubborn Things: A Decade of Facts About Ballistic Missile Defense, demonstrates. In 1992, the Bush administration had decided to pursue in earnest a ground-based interceptor and solicited proposals for contractors to begin developing it. But when the proposals arrived in February 1993, the Clinton administration sent them all back unopened. President Bush planned to request $4.2 billion for National Missile Defense in fiscal year 1995. Clinton scaled back that request to $226 million, and the Democratic Congress actually allocated $82 million-a meager sum, less than the cost of this year's most recent flight test. Only pressure from the Republican Congress, which passed a law last year mandating deployment as soon as technologically feasible, got Clinton to embrace missile defense, in one of the least passionate clutches of his administration.

Defense secretary Bill Cohen proposed an extensive ground-based system. The administration, with an anxious eye on Moscow, scaled that back too, developing a plan for just one interceptor and one missile-tracking radar-and putting the latter on an inhospitable Aleutian island (hence the long lead time). It turned out the Russians wouldn't go along with even the minor revisions to the ABM treaty necessary to accommodate its bargain-basement plan. So the administration had either to end its obeisance to the parchment gods of the ABM treaty (Never! Never!) or to hope for the failure of interceptor tests.

It got the latter, which made Clinton's decision easier politically. But that decision was still ill advised, even on his own terms. In his announcement, Clinton adverted to the "reasonable" chance that the technology will support a deployment by 2005. So why make it impossible by not starting to dig now? He acknowledged that the threat to the U.S. is "real and growing." So where's the sense of urgency? He said no country will have a veto over U.S. deployment. So what does he call Vladimir Putin's nyet?