Defense: Don't Start - arms control negotiations continue between the United States and Russia, with Russia conditionally ratifying START II - Brief Article

National Review, May 22, 2000

TALK about being stuck in a Cold War mindset. The Clinton administration is entertaining the idea of enticing Russia to accept a small revision in the ABM treaty, by agreeing to (further) massive reductions in offensive weapons in a new START III treaty. This is arms-control negotiation straight out of an episode of That '70s Show. The contemplated deal would limit U.S. efforts to counter today's real nuclear threat-which emanates not from Moscow, but from places like Pyongyang and Tehran-to one site in Alaska, with 100 antiballistic missiles (enough only to counter a limited attack from North Korea). It would do so while preserving intact the ABM treaty, which arguably is legally defunct and in any case has lost whatever purpose it had with the end of superpower competition. Indeed, the Russian economy is now doing the arms-controllers' work for them. A country where life expectancy is falling toward Bangladeshi levels can ill afford to maintain an up-to-date nuclear arsenal-which is why Russia is currently junking top-of-the-line SS-18s.

So, START III would be as meaningless as . . . START II. The Russians have just got around to ratifying START II after seven years. Even now, the treaty is unlikely ever to come into force because Russia has made its ratification conditional on U.S. acceptance of the 1997 "demarcation" and "succession"agreements between Moscow and Washington on the ABM treaty. The demarcation agreement would expand the treaty by prohibiting space-based theater missile defense; currently the treaty deals only with wider-ranging national missile defense. The succession agreement would make not just Russia, but also Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan officially the treaty's successors to the Soviet Union; if you liked one balky negotiating "partner," how about four! Since both agreements serve only to expand and further complicate the ABM treaty, they will deservedly be stuffed forever into some Senate Foreign Relations Committee broom closet.

Not that it matters. The flurry of Russian arms-control action is propaganda, aimed, like the 1980s campaign against the Pershing IIs, at America's allies and the appeasers in our midst, including those in the Old Executive Office Building. One reason there will probably be no revision of the ABM treaty anytime soon is that the Russians don't believe the administration is serious about missile defense. A reasonable conclusion, given that Clinton and his men are making every effort to evade the Cochran-Inouye law requiring deployment as soon as technologically feasible. That time is now, since the hit-to-kill technology that skeptics still call "impossible" has proven successful in six out of seven recent tests. (When two objects collide at a combined speed of 15,000 mph, 140 miles above the earth, it is no accident.) But the administration is stalling, hoping for anything to bail it out. A new Congressional Budget Office study heartened skeptics by estimating that a limited system would cost a daunting $60 billion. The methodology was dubious-for instance, the study included the full cost of satellites that would not be devoted exclusively to missile defense-but the proper response is: So what?

The value of defending Los Angeles should be, as they say in the MasterCard commercials, priceless.