NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE
(Senate - June 04, 1996)

[Page: S5748]

Mr. ROBB. Mr. President, I wasn't able to get to the floor during the time set aside during debate on the Defend America Act, but it's an important topic and I would like to address it now.

Mr. President, we all want to defend America and I yield to no one in my commitment to a strong national defense, but I believe the Defend America Act in its current form could actually reduce U.S. security. I reach this conclusion based on a review of four key aspects of a national missile defense system:

First, the nature of the threats that the United States faces today and will likely face 10 years from now.

Second, the technological implications of building a system today versus in the future.

Third, the question of affordability.

And fourth, the impact on existing arms reduction treaties.

On all counts, the available evidence weighs against deployment of a national missile defense system in the near term. Consider the threat. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have witnessed a remarkable reversal in the arms race and, as such, the nature of the nuclear threat to America. The Soviet nuclear arsenal, over 13,000 nuclear weapons strong at the height of the cold war, will be reduced to about 3,500 weapons under START II. By any measure, this adds up to a more secure America.

Today, instead, the ballistic missile threat can be summed up in three scenarios: An accidental attack by land-based ICBM's from Russia or China, an unauthorized attack by a Russian submarine, or a very limited attack by a rogue nation such as North Korea or Iraq. Note, since we are addressing missile defenses, that I am referring to missile threats. This is not to suggest that other means of delivery are any less threatening, whether trucks, ships, aircraft, or even suitcases. I also consider the threat of biological or chemical attack as more likely if not more devastating than nuclear attack.

The Russian and Chinese missile attack scenarios are nothing new--we have lived with such threats for decades. But the third threat is in my mind the most problematic in the long term. While worst-case United States intelligence estimates forecast that North Korea may be only a few years away from deploying ICBM's that can reach portions of Hawaii and Alaska, other potentially hostile nations are at least a decade away from such a capability. Although their direct purchase of long-range missile components or systems is always possible, the balance of evidence suggests that it would be premature to commit to a near-term defense capability when we're not even sure when, whether, and how the threat will develop.

The Defend America Act calls for deployment by 2003, or 8 years out. It may seem as though we're splitting hairs, but this is an important distinction between those trying to mandate a date certain for deployment, and those willing to invest responsibly and deploy after the technology has proven itself and the threat is closer to the horizon.

Consider the technological implications of building a system today versus at the turn of the century or later. I supported funding in the eighties for what was referred to as the strategic defense initiative. But then as now, in the absence of a new and compelling threat on the order of a reinvigorated Soviet Union, what is the driving force to lock into today's technology? My Republican colleagues seem to believe that we can set a completion date, spend huge sums of money on the problem, and magically achieve a fix. How easily we forget the optimistic projections for the performance of the Patriot missiles in the gulf war, and of the x-ray laser that was inaccurately touted in the eighties as the definitive solution for knocking down hundreds of missiles and warheads. The challenge for hitting a bullet with a bullet is not less daunting today than in the past. We cannot simply dictate a solution.

But even if we could achieve the technology in the near term, what are the costs over the long run if we buy today, discover that the technological window has again been broken through, and then turn around and buy anew in another 5 or 6 years? If we ever expect to achieve a balanced Federal budget, it won't be through impetuous, impulsive buying of an extremely expensive system.

Which leads me to the issue of affordability. A range of numbers are thrown around as estimates of the costs for a national missile defense. CBO recently came out with an estimate of $60 billion which has been widely reported in the press. But we all should acknowledge the great uncertainties in this type of estimation. A small change in the assumptions about the accuracy of our sensors, or the probability of kill of our interceptors, or whether the threat uses decoy or maneuvering warheads, can change the final cost estimates by an order of magnitude. I'm willing to put tens of billions into an effective, limited national missile defense. But I cannot condone pouring billions of the taxpayer dollars into an unproven capability whose costs could explode and needlessly drain other vital defense programs.

But for those Senators who believe the threat is imminent, and that the technology is achievable in the near term, and that the costs will be reasonable, I urge them to carefully consider what the Defend America Act would mean for existing and future arms control agreements. Many Senators today have pointed out that the act anticipates a breach of the ABM Treaty, and that it could undermine the START process. But we need to understand in more detail the value of these treaties and why their erosion or loss could actually decrease America's security. Mr. President, I would like to address this matter in some depth.

Let's first step back to the years before the 1972 ratification of the ABM Treaty, when the debate over missile defenses was in full force. Those opposed to any kind of limits on missile defense deployments were highly critical of those willing to deliberately constrain America's ability to defend its citizens against missile attack. But missile defense advocates needed to meet two tests: the first, generally referred to as arms race stability; the second, crisis stability.

Arms race stability refers to a situation between armed nations where there are few incentives for a vicious cycle of tit-for-tat weapons deployments. In an unstable setting, the deployment of a system by one side is met by the same or more deployments by the other side, which in turn is countered by more deployments by the first side, and so on ad infinitum.

Historically, the nation facing an expanded threat might respond with new offensive capabilities, better defenses, or both. But in the case of missile defenses, the technologies available in the sixties and seventies for intercepting incoming nuclear warheads with nonnuclear interceptors were proving very costly. And with the introduction of so-called MIRV'd ballistic missiles in the 1960's--where several nuclear warheads could be placed on a single missile and targeted independently--offensive nuclear forces became, by comparison, quite inexpensive. The cost to deploy one additional nuclear warhead on a MIRV'd ICBM was significantly less than the cost of the many interceptors and related sensors required to destroy that warhead.

By this dynamic, it was convincingly argued by ABM Treaty proponents, any United States attempts to deploy costly strategic defenses would be met by even less costly Russian deployments of more nuclear warheads that could simply overwhelm the defenses. This situation would have been highly unstable from an arms race perspective. Assisting the offense in this equation was the possibility of deploying on ICBM's hundreds of decoys and radar-reflecting chaff along with the nuclear warheads to confuse the U.S. interceptors and their sensors.

During the 1980's, technologies had advanced, improving the prospects for more cost-effective defenses. Particularly promising were space-based systems which could destroy ICBM's during their early flight before they deployed their warheads, and lasers which showed potential for engaging many targets in a short period. And yet despite over $35 billion in R&D expenditures since President Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983, it would still appear that--at least in the case of Russia and perhaps China--the incremental cost for the offense is lower than for the defense.

START II, still awaiting Russia's ratification, will not only reduce Russia's nuclear arsenal to about 3,500 warheads, but, of equal importance, the treaty requires the elimination of land-based MIRV'd systems. If the United States decides to deploy national missile defenses early in the next decade and the Russians want to maintain their ability to target the United States, they could simply deploy more MIRV'd ICBM's at a lower cost. Indeed, if the United States did decide to unilaterally deploy national defenses without first reaching an agreement with the Russians, it would be an entirely rational and appropriate response for Moscow to forgo START and retain or build more of its most cost-effective countermeasure--MIRV'd ICBM's. We could again face a Russian arsenal of over 11,000 warheads.

We could easily push the Russians to reverse course and hold onto or even produce more of their most formidable MIRV'd ICBM, the SS-18--a missile that we spent enormous diplomatic capital to have dismantled. The cold war SS-18 force of over 300 ICBM's housed roughly 3,000 large, highly accurate nuclear warheads. Its capability to devastate the United States ICBM force created much anxiety during the cold war, primarily because it gave the Soviets an incentive to launch a disarming first strike in the midst of a crisis with the United States or NATO.

The choice is a stark one: on the one hand, a United States national missile defense that could handle limited attacks from many potential threats, but would be incapable of defeating a major Russian attack because the Russians respond by maintaining a daunting arsenal of MIRV's; and on the other hand, a Russian devoid of its most devastating threat to our country--its large, MIRV'd, highly accurate ICBM's. On this point alone, I would oppose pushing legislation that would tell the Russians we plan to violate the ABM Treaty by the year 2003. This seems especially shortsighted since we're not even sure the technology will be available by then even if we double the national missile defense budget.

We used to also consider the issue of arms race stability in the context of other potential threats today. Here national missile defenses show more promise.

A single nuclear weapon can transform a minor nation into a serious regional power overnight. The most obvious example is Iraq. Initial margins of public and congressional support for the United States deployment to the gulf were slim. But if Saddam Hussein had possessed a working nuclear device when Iraq invaded Kuwait, some argue that the United States would have steered clear of the gulf.

For those rogue nations considering entry into the nuclear club, the existence of even a limited but effective U.S. missile defense capability, whether for theater or national defense, creates a disincentive for embarking on the economically and diplomatically costly path of nuclear development. Granted, missile defenses will not stop the rogue leader from delivering a weapon via truck, ship, aircraft, cruise missile, or even a suitcase, but his inability to deliver a rapid missile strike against the United States or allied forces in the theater or U.S. civilians in North America helps dampen his enthusiasm for nuclear development, or for that matter biological or chemical weapons development.

Next, examine the nation with a fledgling or modest nuclear arsenal, or biological or chemical weapons. Many of these nations, such as North Korea or China, not only have weapons of mass destruction, but have or will soon have the means for delivering them to United States territory. A U.S. national missile defense could help deter such nations from pursuing and producing more longer-range ballistic missiles.

As the Russian and United States nuclear inventories shrink dramatically under START, China could see an opportunity to become a peer in the nuclear superpower league by deploying a hundred or so MIRVed ICBM's, each with 10 or so MIRV's. The technology and costs to do so would not be prohibitive. But with a capable national missile defense, the United States could, in part, deter Beijing from pursuing superpower nuclear status.

Well what about crisis stability?

Crisis stability refers to a situation where the antagonists in a crisis do not have powerful military motivations--quite independent of their political and diplomatic incentives--to launch a preemptive attack. Imagine two warships sailing side by side--guns trained on each other--tensely anticipating the initiation of a battle. If each captain knows he can fire a first shot and sink the other ship before his opponent can even get off a shot, then the situation is unstable.

On first inspection, missile defenses would seem to have lent stability to the United States-Soviet nuclear standoff during the cold war. Like the two warships, one side would be less inclined to attack the other knowing that the first attack would be diluted by defensive systems and then met by a destructive counterattack. But proponents of the ABM Treaty saw things differently. What if during that first strike, the attacker could not only overwhelm the opponent's defenses and destroy most of them, but also destroy much of his offensive arsenal in the process?

In this scenario, the attacker still has his defenses in place and many offensive weapons that allow him to hold the opponent's cities hostage, while his opponent can only respond with a handful of surviving weapons. ABM Treaty proponents concluded that, by creating an inviting incentive to strike first, national missile defenses could in fact increase the odds for nuclear conflagration.

Today, the advent of more capable defensive technologies suitable for deployment in space could only exacerbate the advantage for the first striker, simply because many of the large and vulnerable defensive assets in space would be easier to detect and destroy than the warheads they're meant to intercept. As long as defensive systems are vulnerable themselves to attack, we will incur a crisis stability problem if we and an opponent deploy extensive national missile defenses.

We are now less concerned, of course, about a tense United States-Soviet standoff, which hopefully will remain in the ashheap of history--assuming Yeltsin fends off a Communist revival. Other nuclear powers are a different story. Clearly U.S. missile defenses would play a useful role in controlling escalation in a crisis or conflict with a lesser nuclear power, who could not confidently hold a U.S. city hostage in the face of U.S. missile defenses.

Another component of crisis stability involves dynamics that are beyond the control of rational leaders, such as an accidental or unauthorized launch, or an attack whose origins are unclear, or a minor attack that is misinterpreted as a major one. Here, too, missile defenses can add to crisis stability by providing the option to defeat these limited attacks before a commitment is made to launching a major counterstrike.

On balance, the Defend America Act gets a mixed review from an arms race and crisis stability standpoint. My overriding concern, however, is that the advantages of a national system--even in the context of a rogue nation, accidental, or unauthorized attack--do not outweigh the consequences of undermining START and engendering extensive Russian MIRVed ICBM redeployments.

The Russians have made it very clear that unilateral United States abrogation of the ABM Treaty, as anticipated by the Defend America Act, will force Moscow to forgo START II ratification. This is not mere rhetoric. Russia's heavy MIRVed ICBMs give Moscow its best `bang for the buck.' The Russian military is strapped for cash and can barely afford modernization of its strategic nuclear forces. If Russia's strategic position vis-a-vis the United States is undermined, it would be perfectly rational as I stated earlier for Moscow to renege on START.

In light of these concerns, I cannot support the Defend America Act in its current form. We should not pass legislation which mandates deployment of a national missile defense by 2003, and requires the President to renegotiate the ABM Treaty to ease its restrictions on the development of such a system. As my Democratic colleague from Ohio has noted, we can no more dictate the development of an unproven technology than to mandate a cure for cancer. And we cannot unilaterally renegotiate a major treaty.

I believe a more measured approach is needed. First, we need to continue basic research on national missile defenses at the requested level and in compliance with the ABM Treaty. This means no space-based systems or space-based tracking in an ABM mode.

Second, we should continue to vigorously pursue programs, such as Nunn-Lugar, that will reduce the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and related technologies. The return on the dollar of these programs is self-evident and I will not advocate them further here. Let me just add that we should not lose sight of an equally troubling delivery system, such as a truck, ship, aircraft or suitcase, that could be used to transport a nuclear, biological or chemical weapon to or near our territory or military forces. If we are not balanced in our responses to all means of delivering weapons of mass destruction, we invite a hostile regime to take the path of least resistance and simply bypass our multibillion dollar missile defenses. I applaud Senator Nunn's initiative to broaden the scope of the national missile defense legislation to consider all strategic weapons and means of delivery.

Third, we need to continue to achieve a theater missile defense capability quickly, but avoid spreading ourselves too thinly. We're spending a great deal of money on several theater systems when in reality nothing will be fielded for years, and we're uncertain if one or more approaches will ever fully work or be highly cost-effective. I was skeptical of the optimistic estimates of Patriot performance prior to the gulf war, and not surprised when we learned that early news reports had grossly overstated its performance during the war.

My fourth recommendation, therefore, is to expend considerable resources on the most mature theater system, PAC-3, to demonstrate that we can achieve a basic capability against a moderate threat. By moderate threat I mean a limited attack by missiles that were not specifically designed to defeat our defenses with decoys, maneuvering reentry vehicles, and the like. If we successfully conclude this mini-Manhattan Project, we can accelerate the other technologies to achieve the kind of layered defenses that would greatly improve overall missile defense performance.

Fifth, we should create an architecture that could be expanded into space at a later date if merited by the threat, but stick to ground and airborne systems for now. This means that as we make decisions on the optimal technologies for national defense interceptors, sensors, and communications systems, we ensure that they are compatible with future, more robust technologies and systems.

Sixth, we need to work with the Russians to amend the ABM Treaty to allow for mutual tiered expansion of missile defense systems. In other words, after we've proven a basic system that fits within the treaty's constraints, and after we've achieved key research milestones on a more expansive system, we should then be able to approach the Russians for joint approval of testing or deployment of the next tier of defenses.

The Russians might decide to go along with the next phase even if they have not reached the same capability, or ask for a delay in the joint approval to give them time to reach some sort of parity in defensive capability. We might even want to permit asymmetries in a modified ABM Treaty or START III, where the Russians would be allowed relatively more offensive capabilities as the United States deploys national defenses.

At each step, we could consider any requests by the Russians for assistance to improve their own defenses. Although I am not convinced such assistance would be in our best interests, this might be a small price to pay if we want to deploy national defenses and keep the ABM and START Treaties alive.

A good initial step, as proposed by Senator Nunn in the context of his substitute amendment, is for both sides to agree to rescind the 1974 Protocol to the ABM Treaty, which reduced the number of national missile defense sites allowed by the original treaty from two to one. If we try to deploy a ground-based national defense system constrained to one site, we are looking at an inordinate inefficient and therefore expensive system.

Allowing for space-based tracking in an ABM mode also makes sense if each side is interested in a more capable and cost-effective limited national defense. Another area that could prove win-win for both sides is construction of jointly manned, ground-based missile launch detection centers near each other's ICBM fields.

Finally, we have to engage the Chinese sooner rather than later on their growing nuclear arsenal. According to press accounts, China has deployed CSS-3 and CSS-4 ICBMs, the latter of which are capable of reaching most of the continental United States. China has also reportedly tested the CSS-4 missile armed with MIRVs. Most recently, the Washington Times reports that the Chinese are acquiring technology from the Russian SS-18. It would not require an inordinate amount of resources for China to deploy dozens of additional ICBMs with MIRVs, meaning possibly hundreds of new warheads that could rain down on United States cities.

Now is the time to discourage the Chinese from embarking on an ambitious, and highly destabilizing, nuclear arms build-up. That is why, Mr. President, it is crucial that the United States pursue trilateral negotiations with Russia and the People's Republic of China on MIRVed ICBMs. I have drafted a Sense of the Senate resolution related to this matter, and may offer it during consideration of the fiscal year 1997 Defense Authorization Act.

With that, Mr. President, I reiterate my opposition to the Defend America Act, urge a more measured approach and yield the floor.