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Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues and citizens across our Nation to carefully consider the following statement by former Reagan defense official Richard Perle regarding our lack of ballistic missile defense. The ballistic missile threat is real, and the technology is readily available to deter and destroy incoming missiles and warheads. It will be unforgivable if another American soldier, sailor, airman, marine, or civilian is killed by a ballistic missile attack because Congress and the P resident failed to develop and deploy available missile defense technology.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the Committee for inviting me to appear before you as you consider the ballistic missile defense provisions of H.R. 7, the National Security Revitalization Act.

I first came to Washington nearly 24 years ago to work on precisely this issue--the defense of the United States against ballistic missiles--for Senator Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson.

Scoop was a committed Democrat. But he was also an ardent supporter of ballistic missile defenses. In those days the defense of the United States was not inevitably a partisan matter. And it is my great hope, Mr. Chairman, that with these hearings and wit h new Congressional management willing to reconsider old ideas and explore new ones, the urgent need to develop and deploy a defense against ballistic missiles will once more gain the bipartisan support that men like Scoop Jackson worked so hard to achiev e.

Looking back over the quarter century since Lyndon Johnson first proposed a limited deployment of strategic defenses, and looking forward to the proposals in H.R. 7, one is left with an eerie sense of deja vu. I say eerie because, as things stand today, we have no capacity whatsoever to intercept ballistic missiles that might be aimed at the United States. None. Zero. We are unable to stop even a single missile, even a missile fired accidentally, even a missile fired accidentally under circumstan ces in which the perpetrator of the accident did everything he could to help us avert a calamity. We are totally, completely, abjectly vulnerable.

Indeed, Mr. Chairman, one could reasonably argue that, despite breathtaking technological advances in sensors, propulsion, guidance and data processing, we are further than ever from the goal of developing a strategic defense. For despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sharp rise in concern about the extent to which its nuclear missiles are under absolute control, an American policy favorable to strategic defense is more remote than ever.

Despite the energetic effort of several hostile nations to acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; despite the difficulty of controlling the missile technologies that will inevitably spread; despite the reasonable expectation of the American peopl e that its elected government will act prudently to defend them against known threats--despite all this it is now the official policy of the Government of the United States that America shall remain undefended.

I urge you to change that policy quickly, unambiguously and unapologetically by adopting into law Title II of the Defense Revitalization Act.

The source of the current policy is difficult to understand, much less defend. It is, above all, an intensely ideological policy devised by the opponents of strategic defense. Opposition to defense is frequently emotional, although the depth of f eeling is often masked by claims to practical or budgetary or technical doubts about the feasibility or affordability or effectiveness of specific systems. It is based in part on the now irrelevant but passionately held Cold War belief that American strat egic defenses would elicit additional offensive deployments by the Soviet Union, thus fueling an arms race and exposing us to greater danger. This was the view of the opponents of strategic defenses when I came to Washington in 1969 in the midst of the Co ld War and, curiously, the opponents of those years remain the opponents of strategic defense to this very day.

Everything affecting this antiquated intellectual construct has changed: the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union no longer exists, the interaction of offensive and defensive forces (which was never as simple as the critics of strategic defense thought) is radically different today, the efficacy of classical deterrence in these changed circumstances is increasingly questionable, the technical feasibility of effective defenses is immeasurably greater (especially against less-sophisticated threats)--in short, everything is changed except the stubborn, unthinking, myopic opposition to any serious, national defense against ballistic missiles.

This is an opposition enshrined in an obsolete treaty concluded 22 years ago in a fundamentally different world. It is an opposition perpetuated by an Administration that can't bear the idea of picking up where Ronald Reagan left off or taking on the appa ratciki from Andrei Gromyko's foreign ministry who cling to their jobs by opposing sensible modifications to the ABM Treaty that would free us and Russia from constraints that leave us both defenseless in a dangerous world.

Another source of opposition to strategic defense is the idea that only a perfect defense is worth having. When the issue was a defense against the massive Soviet missile force, the opposition argued that because even the best possible defense could be pe netrated (`Some missiles will always get through') there was no point in attempting any defense at all. Now that the threat is much smaller--perhaps a handful of missiles or even a single missile fired accidentally--the idea of a partial defense capable o f dealing with modest threats ought to appeal to those critics who once claimed to be daunted by the task of defending against thousands of missiles. But they remain unmoved, mired in opposition to any defense, frozen in time, say around 1970.

In the seriously mistaken belief that we must now agree on a line separating theater defense systems, which are not limited under the ABM Treaty, from national territorial systems which are, the Administration has embarked on a negotiation with th e Russians that threatens to throttle effective theater defenses in their infancy.

I note that the House leadership has written to the President to ask that he allow the Congress to examine with care the many issues this negotiation raises. This seems to me a reasonable request, one that a President interested in bipartisanship on defen se matters would readily grant. I hope he agrees. But if he does not I would urge the Congress to legislate against the use of appropriated funds for the purpose of defining lines of demarkation between theater and strategic defenses. A negotiation on thi s subject is bound to become a quagmire--and that would be true even if there were not plenty of opponents of strategic defense within the Administration who are eager to see theater defenses submerged in a quagmire and who will do nothing to steer clear of it.

On this matter our position should be clear and simple. Theater defenses are not limited by the ABM Treaty and for this reason we are not obliged to discuss our theater defense program with the Russians or anyone else. If the Russians wish to asse rt that we are developing a nationwide defense in the guise of a theater defense, let them charge us with a violation of the ABM Treaty. If and when they do make such an allegation we will discuss and allay their concerns in the forum provided for in the ABM Treaty.

What we would be most foolish to do is try to gain Russian approval for the performance parameters of theater defenses. Yet that has been the Administration's approach until now, and you should know that it threatens our ability to field theater systems c apable of defending our men and women on distant battlefields. We owe it to our troops to provide them with the best possible defense against the battlefield missiles that may be aimed at them. To constrain our program in order to `strengthen' the ABM< /B> Treaty by broadening its scope would be foolish in the extreme and the Congress should act if necessary to prevent this happening.

Opponents of strategic and theater defense are not at all troubled by the additional constraints on our freedom to develop technically optimal systems that are bound to result from negotiations with the Russians. On the contrary, I believe they view these negotiations as another device by which the prospects of a cost-effective defense might be further diminished.

Mr. Chairman, there is already a wide range of opinion as to the sort of architecture we should adopt in devising systems of national and theater defense. If anything, controversy on this question is likely to increase over time as the technical community debates the relative merits of space-based interceptors or lasers or land-based missiles or space-based sensors, and the like. Competing technologies have their adherents and as technology develops opinions will change. This is all to the good. No one no w enjoys a monopoly of wisdom as to the most effective systems or the lowest technical risk or the least-cost solutions to the problems of theater and national defense.

But it is not necessary for the Committee to come to conclusions on these and other technical issues in order to go forward confidently to require the Secretary of Defense to tell you how he plans to carry out Title II's mandate to end the policy of delib erate vulnerability by developing theater and strategic ballistic missile defenses.

In developing his plans, the Secretary of Defense should consider that, insofar as the ABM Treaty is an obstacle to implementing Title II, he should recommend the ways in which the Treaty ought to be changed. There are, after all, provisions for a mendment in the terms of the ABM Treaty. They were presumably placed there by men who realized that future circumstances might require new approaches. In this they were surely right. We should approach the Russians at the highest levels with a vie w to cooperatively amending the Treaty to take account of the strikingly different world in which we are now living.

But if the Russians, for whatever reason, should oppose reasonable revisions to the Treaty and insist on blocking us from defending ourselves against the North Koreas, Libyas, Iraqs and the like, we should make clear our readiness to withdraw from the Tre aty under the appropriate article and after the appropriate notice. If we are prepared to withdraw, we should find it unnecessary to do so.

Mr. Chairman, the Congress has it within its power to force a reconsideration of the opposition to ballistic missile defense that prevailed during the last decades of the Cold War. It is a new Congress. I believe it is up to the task of new thinking about defense, and your hearing this morning encourages me to believe that antiquated ideas that cannot be made persuasive as we face the new millennium should be relegated to the history of the one we will leave behind.