Missile Defense Deployed in Russia

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 30, 2001 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Arms controllers call the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty the `cornerstone' of strategic nuclear stability. But new information reveals the Soviets have been cheating all along.

For most of the Cold War the United States based its survival on a theory of deterrence called "mutually assured destruction" (MAD). In a MAD world, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would launch its nuclear missiles because neither superpower would survive the encounter.

To ensure the mutual suicide pact, arms controllers in the late 1960s began to negotiate agreements to limit the number of offensive weapons and, in 1972, they inked the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that banned both countries from building national defenses against missile attacks.

Recent statements by top Russian military leaders and former Soviet officials, now available in the United States, are turning the neat certainties of the arms controllers into mush. In fact, according to former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst William T. Lee, the Russian statements prove beyond a doubt that the Soviet Union cheated massively and from the very start on the ABM Treaty.

"The Soviets realized they were in deep trouble in the mid-1960s as both sides began upgrading offensive systems with multiple independently targeted warheads" Lee Insight. "In 1968, they made a determination to significantly upgrade their existing anti-ballistic missile systems at the same time they entered into negotiations with the U.S. to ban these same systems through the ABM Treaty. There was clear, intentional deception from the start."

The U.S. intelligence community long has reported "gaps" in its knowledge of Soviet missile-defense plans that made it difficult to determine with certainty whether the Soviets were cheating on the ABM Treaty. But Lee and other former intelligence analysts interviewed by Insight contend that U.S. arms-control activists contributed to the deception by failing to recognize the evidence that was staring them in the face.

"It's like looking at an elephant," Lee says. "We could see three legs and a tail, but we couldn't tell for sure whether it had a trunk. The arms controllers kept saying that, because we couldn't see the trunk and the ears, we couldn't say with certainty that it was an elephant."

Making matters worse, Insight has found that many of the same career intelligence-community arms controllers who insisted there was no evidence the Soviets had violated the ABM Treaty during the Cold War were promoted during the Clinton years and may be advising the Bush administration today.

The most prominent of these analysts authored the controversial 1995 National Intelligence Estimate that concluded the United States faced no potential danger from foreign nuclear missiles before 2010 -- an estimate touted by the Clinton administration as a compelling reason for not pursuing a national missile-defense system.

Congressional protest of that estimate (known as NIE 95-19) led to the creation of a blue-ribbon commission headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld that concluded in July 1998 that serious threats did exist. Only weeks after the Rumsfeld commission published its report, North Korea test-fired a new missile that the CIA subsequently identified as a rudimentary intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

"We believed the CIA estimate was a political document drafted to support the Clinton administration's opposition to national missile defense," Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., tells Insight. "The Rumsfeld-commission report had a dramatic impact in turning around our perception of the threat and the need for missile defense."

Fears that the Soviets were cheating on the ABM Treaty are evident in a series of recently declassified intelligence estimates prepared by the CIA in the early 1980s, when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union had reached the razor's edge.

"The evidence shows clearly that Soviet leaders are attempting to prepare their military forces for the possibility of having to fight a nuclear war and are training to be able to maintain control over increasingly complex conflict situations," states a March 4,1984, estimate titled "Soviet Capabilities for Strategic Nuclear Conflict" (NIE 11-3-8-83). Stamped "Top Secret," it was declassified in part in 1996.

Earlier in that same estimate, the CIA noted developments in Soviet missile defense, including flight-tests of new missiles and new radars the CIA had observed through U.S. spy satellites. "We are particularly concerned about the growing Soviet potential for widespread deployment of defenses against ballistic missiles well beyond the limits of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty using ABM systems currently in development" says the estimate.

Determining whether the Soviets were cheating on the ABM Treaty was critical to understanding whether they intended to launch a nuclear war. And yet, as the authors of the estimates admitted, the United States could not know whether the Soviets were cheating because the difference between a national missile-defense system and a nationwide air-defense network hinged on capabilities invisible to U.S. spy satellites. These included the intent of Soviet planners, the type of computer software used by the large phased-array radars placed on the periphery of the empire and whether target data were being passed from those radars to the thousands of interceptors spread across Soviet territory.