May 5, 1999
Does the ABM Treaty Still Serve U.S. Strategic and Arms Control
Objectives in A Changed World?
Biden, Hon. Joseph R., Jr., U.S. Senator from Delaware, prepared
statement...................................................... 149
Habiger, Gen. Eugene E., former Commander in Chief, U.S.
Strategic Command, Omaha, NE................................... 139
Lehman, Hon. Ronald F., former Director of the Arms Control and
Disarmament Agency............................................. 122
Prepared statement of........................................ 127
Remarks entitled ``Changing Realities,'' November 1992,
published 1993......................................... 129
Remarks entitled ``START II, Missile Non-Proliferation,
and Missile Defense--The Offense-Defense Relationship:
Past and Future.'' February 14, 1996, at Carnegie
Endowment Seminar...................................... 132
Payne, Dr. Keith B., president and director of research, National
Institute for Public Policy; and adjunct professor, Georgetown
University, Washington, DC..................................... 141
Prepared statement of........................................ 144
Woolsey, Hon. R. James, former Director of the Central
Intelligence Agency............................................ 116
Prepared statement of........................................ 120
S. Hrg. 106-339
BALLISTIC MISSILES: THREAT AND RESPONSE
=======================================================================
HEARINGS
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
APRIL 15 AND 20, MAY 4, 5, 13, 25, 26, AND SEPTEMBER 16, 1999
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Relations
<snowflake>
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
56-777 CC WASHINGTON : 2000
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
JESSE HELMS, North Carolina, Chairman
RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana JOSEPH R. BIDEN, Jr., Delaware
PAUL COVERDELL, Georgia PAUL S. SARBANES, Maryland
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut
GORDON H. SMITH, Oregon JOHN F. KERRY, Massachusetts
ROD GRAMS, Minnesota RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas PAUL D. WELLSTONE, Minnesota
CRAIG THOMAS, Wyoming BARBARA BOXER, California
JOHN ASHCROFT, Missouri ROBERT G. TORRICELLI, New Jersey
BILL FRIST, Tennessee
Stephen E. Biegun, Staff Director
Edwin K. Hall, Minority Staff Director
(ii)
DOES THE ABM TREATY STILL SERVE U.S. STRATEGIC AND ARMS CONTROL
OBJECTIVES IN A CHANGED WORLD?
----------
WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, 1999
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Foreign Relations,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:09 a.m., in
room SD-562, Dirksen Senate Office Building, the Hon. Chuck
Hagel presiding.
Present: Senators Hagel and Biden.
Senator Hagel. On behalf of the Foreign Relations
Committee, I welcome all of you to today's hearing, the fourth
in the Foreign Relations Committee series of hearings that have
focused on the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
This morning's distinguished witnesses are experts in the
fields of arms control and missile defense. They are the
Honorable Jim Woolsey, Director of Central Intelligence from
1993 to 1995; Honorable Ronald Lehman, Director for the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency from 1989 to 1993; Dr. Keith
Payne, a foremost scholar on arms control issues and president
and founding research director at the National Institute for
Public Policy; and my--not old, but long-time friend--Air Force
General Eugene Habiger, former Commander in Chief, United
States Strategic Command.
And we welcome you all here this morning, and we are
grateful that you would spend a little time to make the kind of
contributions that are important to this issue. And we
appreciate your presence because within each of you embodies a
number of insights that are very important to the perspective
on not only this issue, but the long-term issues that we are
dealing with relative to the consequences of what we do next,
and how we go about taking that action.
At the outset, let me say that I personally strongly
believe that the United States must begin the task of
immediately designing, building and deploying a national
missile defense system to protect the American people from the
growing threat of ballistic missile attack.
The Rumsfeld Commission has warned rather clearly that both
North Korea and Iran ``would be able to inflict major
destruction on the U.S. within about 5 years of a decision to
acquire such a capability.''
No one that watched North Korea's flight testing of the
Taepo Dong-I or Iran's launches of the Shahab-3 can reasonably
doubt that the decision has been made to go forward with their
technology. Both of these nations know that America cannot now
defend itself against missile attack, as does all of the world.
And yet this administration continues to stall and delay in
deploying such a defense. It is becoming very clear that over
the course of this committee's investigation that the true
source of the Clinton administration's opposition to ballistic
missile defense seems to be its devotion to what many of us
believe is an antiquated arms control agreement, the 1972 ABM
Treaty.
Like many of my colleagues, I am deeply troubled that this
country is being held hostage to an outdated concept of
strategic deterrence that has outlived its purpose. It is no
longer relevant, and most importantly has placed the United
States in a very dangerous and vulnerable position. Former
Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger put it best when he
recently wrote, and I quote, ``The end of the cold war has made
a strategy of mutually assured destruction largely irrelevant.
Barely plausible when there was only one strategic opponent,
the theory makes no sense in a multi-polar world of
proliferating nuclear powers.''
Gentlemen, again, we are grateful for your testimony, and
the committee looks forward to hearing your insights.
With that, let me now ask each of you to present your
testimony.
I will be joined by colleagues as votes occur and other
committees lighten their load and we would ask that each of you
give your statements and then we will come back with questions.
I would ask Mr. Woolsey to begin. Thank you.
STATEMENT OF HON. R. JAMES WOOLSEY, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Ambassador Woolsey. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I will, if it
is all right, ask for my statement to be inserted in the
record, and I will just speak informally from it for a few
minutes.
Senator Hagel. It will be.
Ambassador Woolsey. What I would like to suggest this
morning, Mr. Chairman, is that in the circumstances of today,
strong support for ballistic missile defense and a willingness
to amend substantially, even to withdraw from, the ABM Treaty
is a reasonable position.
And I want to suggest to the committee that it is a
reasonable position even for those who, like myself, have
historically emphasized the central importance of offensive
strategic systems, have seen some value in certain arms control
agreements, and did not initially welcome President Reagan's
Strategic Defense Initiative. The circumstances have changed,
and to my mind that calls for a substantial change in our
assumptions and policies.
I will skip the biographical points I made really to just
point out to the committee that I have been involved in this
issue for 30 years in one way or another, in a number of
different capacities.
And I mention that in 1987, immediately after the Reykjavik
summit, Brent Scowcroft and I co-authored an article in the New
York Times Magazine, which included the following statement in
criticism of the proposals to end all ballistic missiles that
President Reagan had made at Reykjavik and to rely,
essentially, completely on SDI.
We wrote, ``The official line has become a sort of a
strategic Manichaeanism: that there exists only the dawn of SDI
and the darkness of mutual assured destruction that went before
it. The concept of careful and stable deterrence, with
modernization of nuclear weapons to improve their
survivability, some militarily useful work on defensive systems
and moderate arms control was abandoned.''
Now, in the circumstances of the time, Mr. Chairman, I
think that that was at least a reasonable and defensible
position which we advanced.
But it is important to realize that for a number of those
of us who held that set of views, it was not desirable that the
world consisted of a strategic situation in which assured
destruction was mutual.
It was very far from being desirable from our point of view
that the Soviet Union was able to destroy the United States.
Quite a few of us never liked the mutual aspect of mutual
assured destruction at all.
But we persuaded ourselves that nonetheless the ABM Treaty
presented the lesser of two evils really for two reasons. First
of all, we were not convinced that the technologies that were
available or even foreseeable in the early seventies, when the
treaty was signed and even through much of the eighties, for
ballistic missile defense were going to spawn deployable
systems that were capable of defending us reliably against our
major concern, which was an all-out Soviet attack.
Threats of lesser magnitude, such as from rogue states,
were not really on the horizon at that point. And as far as
China was concerned, the central strategic reality with respect
to China for most of that period was that we were cooperating
with China in what began in the Nixon administration--I think a
rather clever triangulation effort to work cooperatively with
China against the much larger threat, the Soviet Union.
So for that set of reasons, ballistic missile defense was
not at the forefront of much of--for many of us--our thinking.
The second reason was a sort of belt and suspenders reason.
We felt that the massive Soviet lead in large ICBM's equipped
with MIRV's seriously threatened our own ICBM force,
particularly Minuteman. And that would force us, in a crisis--
particularly a crisis that might arise in Europe where the
Soviets had a huge conventional force, particularly the Group
of Soviet Forces in Germany that threatened Western Europe--in
which if nuclear war should come about, we might be thrown back
on relying very heavily on our own ballistic missile
submarines, the ICBM's and a major share of the bombers being
vulnerable.
In such a situation, Soviet deployment of an ABM system, we
felt, could lead Soviet advisors and the Politbureau to be too
optimistic.
We thus felt it was important to limit Soviet defenses to
the relatively small deployment around Moscow because they had
an extensive infrastructure of sophisticated radars and air
defense interceptors that in some circumstances might be
applicable to dealing with an American retaliatory strike.
And we felt that deterring the Soviets in a crisis depended
very heavily on our being able to clearly and under all
circumstances penetrate their defenses.
We believed that strategic stability required the Soviets
to have that degree of certainty, and we were willing to pay in
the coin of limiting American defensive systems in order that
the Soviets would not have effective defenses.
Now that thinking may seem dated today--and to some it was
not persuasive in 1972, and it came increasingly to be
questioned after President Reagan's famous 1983 SDI speech.
By the end of the cold war and in the nineties the
strategic changes are major: (a) the rise of the possibility of
an accidental or unauthorized launch by the increasingly
chaotic Russian military forces, even including the Strategic
Rocket Forces; (b) persistent work on longer range and more
flexible ballistic missiles and on weapons of mass destruction
by rogue states; and I would add, (c) China's increasingly
intransigent position with respect to Taiwan and its own
ballistic missile threat against the United States. For all of
these reasons, I believe that the ABM Treaty in today's world
really has to be seen in an entirely different light.
First, I would say there is common ground possible between
those of us who have been on different sides of the ABM Treaty
debate in the past. We may have both been somewhat right and
somewhat wrong. It does not matter. Together, we won the cold
war. It is time--indeed, it is past time--to go on to the next
set of problems.
Second, if we focus on the strategic realities of today,
there is, in my judgment, no strategic rationale for the ABM
Treaty. The old rationale of our wanting to limit Soviet
defenses as spelled out above does not apply to today's Russia
or to the Russia of the foreseeable future.
Even if that country turns more hostile to the United
States than it is today, Russia is no longer capable of
threatening Europe with many divisions of conventional forces,
so it would have no advantage in a crisis on that continent.
Moreover, Russian strategic nuclear forces do not threaten
a substantial share of our nuclear deterrent. The deterrent
that we do maintain is no longer heavily reliant on fixed land-
based ICBM's that might be vulnerable to Russian attack.
Hence, we have no particular reason to want to limit
Russian defenses to ensure that our retaliatory forces would be
able to penetrate those defenses.
The only rationale in my judgment for the ABM Treaty today
is one that is rooted in current foreign affairs concerns.
The Russians do not want us to withdraw from it, so doing
so would, presumably, upset them and perhaps lead them to do
other things that we do not want. For example, they may
threaten for the dozenth time or so to refuse to ratify the
START II Treaty.
But it seems to me there is a limit to the degree to which
we should let this sort of thing influence us. In the first
place, numbers of Russian warheads are not the principal threat
to strategic stability now. We are not worried particularly
about their launching an attack on our fixed land-based ICBM's.
It is better for the Russians to have more warheads if
those are controlled by a solid command and control system,
than fewer warheads in a chaotic situation.
Numbers of warheads were the currency back in the seventies
and even into the eighties because of the threat to our fixed
land-based ICBM's.
As far as I am concerned, that is not the currency any
more. That is not the measure, the figure of merit, that one
should focus on when dealing with the strategic balance.
It seems to me that it is worthwhile--because Russia is an
important nation and a country that we need to work with on a
number of matters--and important to propose changes to the
Russians with respect to the ABM Treaty, and to try to work
with them as we did in 1992.
President Yeltsin himself made a remarkable speech in
January 1992 and that led to the Ross-Mamedov talks in 1992-93,
in which the Bush administration tried to bring the Russian
Government around to support for substantial amendments to the
ABM Treaty and a reasonably substantial deployment of ballistic
missile defenses in the United States.
It is worth trying in my judgment to return to the days of
1992. I believe with the current Russian Government, success is
most unlikely, but I think the probability is not zero.
If such an approach proves fruitless, there are ample legal
and strategic grounds, in my view, for withdrawing from the
treaty.
We cannot perpetually let our security versus the likes of
North Korea, Iran, and Iraq be held hostage to Russia's not
wanting us to have defenses.
In the meantime, Mr. Chairman, I do not support, and I
urged the Senate nearly 2 years ago not to approve, the
delineation agreement that the administration has reached with
the Russians, which limits unnecessarily the effectiveness of
our theater defenses, nor the accompanying expansion of the
treaty to encompass Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
That expansion to include those countries is a step for
which, in my judgment, there is not even the tiniest shred of a
strategic rationale. We do not fear an attack from Belarus,
Ukraine or Kazakhstan with intercontinental ballistic missiles,
because they do not have any.
We do not need to limit their defenses in order to deter
them from attacking us; therefore, we do not care what kind of
defensive systems Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have. And
there is absolutely no reason for our giving someone such as
Mr. Lukashenko, who speaks for the most unreconstructed parts
of the reds and browns in the former Soviet Union, some sort of
veto over our ability to defend ourselves.
In my judgment, Mr. Chairman, only a very major
modification of or withdrawal from the treaty would meet our
strategic needs.
As interpreted by the administration, the treaty is even
undermining the effectiveness of our theater ballistic missile
defenses at the present time, systems that are not supposed to
be covered by the treaty.
A very limited one- or two-site defense of the United
States of the sort that might be compatible with a treaty that
has only been modestly amended would be essentially worthless
against some perfectly plausible threats such as ship-launched
ballistic missiles. That is one of the threats that we
identified during the deliberations of the Rumsfeld Commission
on which I served.
Indeed against some very plausible threats, such as
ballistic missiles carrying clusters of biological weapons that
might be released early in an ICBM's trajectory, only boost-
phase intercept from space is going to offer a possible
solution.
In short, Mr. Chairman, the world in which the ABM Treaty
was an imperfect but, in my view, a reasonable accommodation to
the strategic circumstances in which we found ourselves is gone
with the wind.
In the new world in which we live, we now require defenses
for our security. And our treaty obligations should be adjusted
to serve our strategic needs, not the other way around.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Hagel. Mr. Woolsey, thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ambassador Woolsey follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. R. James Woolsey
Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, it is an honor to be asked
to testify before you today on the topic of the Anti-Ballistic Missile
Treaty of 1972.
It is my purpose to suggest to you that, in the circumstances of
today, strong support for ballistic missile defense and a willingness
to amend substantially, even to withdraw from, the ABM Treaty is a
reasonable position--even for those who, like myself, have historically
emphasized the central importance of offensive strategic weapons, have
seen some value in certain arms control agreements, and did not
initially welcome President Reagans Strategic Defense Initiative. The
circumstances have changed, and that calls for a substantial change in
our assumptions and our policies.
In order to make this point, I believe it would be informative to
trouble you with a few biographical points. Thirty years ago this fall,
as a Captain in the U.S. Army, I was serving as an analyst of strategic
programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and in that
capacity I was assigned as an advisor on the U.S. delegation to the
first round of the SALT I talks in Helsinki. Thus I was a very junior
participant in the initial negotiations that led, three years later, to
the ABM Treaty. When the treaty was approved by the Senate in 1972 I
was the General Counsel of the Senate Armed Services Committee and
assisted Senator Stennis in the Committee's consideration of the treaty
and the floor debate. Then for three years in the late 1970's, as Under
Secretary of the Navy, I was heavily involved in the Navy's strategic
force planning, especially for the Trident program, some important
aspects of which were influenced by the existence of the treaty.
In 1983, I was a member of President Reagan's Commission on
Strategic Forces, the Scowcroft Commission (and the principal draftsman
of its report); we did not reject SDI when it was announced by the
President during the middle of our deliberations, but it is fair to say
that the Commission assigned SDI a decidedly secondary role to what we
felt to be the nation's central strategic objective: maintaining a
survivable and effective offensive deterrent. Following the Reykjavik
summit of 1986, I was the co-author of an article in the New York Times
Magazine that was highly critical of President Reagan's proposal there
to ban all ballistic missiles and rely principally on SDI for our
strategic protection. We wrote in the article:
``The official line has become a sort of strategic
Manichaeanism: that there exist only the dawn of S.D.I. and the
darkness of mutual assured destruction that went before it. The
concept of careful and stable deterrence, with modernization of
nuclear weapons to improve their survivability, some militarily
useful work on defensive systems and moderate arms control, was
abandoned.''
One aspect of the approach to strategic issues summarized by this
quotation, for many of us in the seventies and eighties, included
adherence to the ABM Treaty. But for an important share of the treaty's
supporters, acceptance of the treaty was not accompanied by any lapse
into revery about the beauty of the concept of mutual assured
destruction. It was very far from desirable, for many of us who
supported the treaty then, that by agreeing not to deploy nationwide
ballistic missile defenses we would thereby guarantee most Soviet
missiles a free ride to American targets--quite a few of us never liked
the mutual aspect of mutual assured destruction. But we persuaded
ourselves then that, nonetheless, the treaty presented the lesser of
two evils, for two reasons.
First, we were not convinced that the technologies foreseeable in
the early seventies, or even through much of the eighties, for
ballistic missile defenses were going to spawn deployable systems
capable of defending reliably against our major concern--an all-out
Soviet attack. Very little else with respect to threats was on anyone's
mind. Thus we felt that the U.S. was not giving up something that was
practically attainable when it signed on to the treaty. Threats of
lesser magnitude, other than the one that came to be posed by Chinese
ICBM's, were not apparent in those years. (And for most of this period
we were working cooperatively with China against the Soviet Union on a
range of issues.)
Second, we felt that the massive Soviet lead in large ICBM's
equipped with MIRV's, together with its reasonably capable ballistic
missile submarine force, put a large share of our own ICBM's and
bombers theoretically at risk if the Soviets should ever contemplate
launching a first strike in the midst of some crisis. This forced us in
our strategic planning to rely heavily on our own ballistic missile
submarines as the only truly survivable part of the American nuclear
deterrent. Soviet deployment of an early ABM system around Moscow,
together with their extensive infrastructure of sophisticated radars
and air defense interceptors throughout the country, led some of us to
join the you-need-both-a-belt-and-suspenders set. We wanted to ensure
that--even if U.S. offensive forces were heavily depleted by a Soviet
attack and Soviet defenses were upgraded--the United States' ability to
retaliate using submarine-launched missiles alone would be clear and
sufficient. We felt that checking Soviet recklessness in a crisis--most
likely one in which the Soviets would be able to count on superiority
of conventional forces in Europe--heavily depended on this clarity and
sufficiency, and that limiting Soviet deployment of even less-than-
perfect ABM defenses was extremely important to this end.
This thinking seems dated now--to some it was not persuasive even
in 1972--and it came to be increasingly questioned after President
Reagan's famous 1983 SDI speech. By the nineties it became outdated in
almost all of its assumptions due to the end of the cold war, the rise
in the possibility of an accidental or unauthorized launch of a
ballistic missile by increasingly chaotic Russian military forces, and
persistent work on both longer-range and more flexible ballistic
missiles and on weapons of mass destruction by rogue states such as
North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.
My point with respect to the ABM Treaty in today's world is really
twofold.
First, there is common ground possible, today, between those who
have been on different sides of the ABM Treaty debate in the past. Both
those who have opposed the treaty for many years (often in company with
early support of the more ambitious forms of SDI) and those, such as
myself, who supported the treaty during the same period and were
skeptical of ambitious SDI, need to realize that what matter, today,
are the decisions that now need to be made, not ancient jousts between
SDI supporters and ABM Treaty supporters during the era before the fall
of the Berlin wall. We may have both been somewhat right and somewhat
wrong. It doesn't matter. Together we won the cold war. It's time,
indeed past time, to go on to the next set of problems.
Second, if one focuses on the strategic realities of today, I would
submit that there is no strategic rationale for the ABM Treaty. The old
rationale for our wanting to limit Soviet defenses, as spelled out
above, does not apply to today's Russia or the Russia of the
foreseeable future, even if that nation turns more hostile to the U.S.
than it is today. Russia is no longer capable of threatening Europe
with many divisions of conventional forces so it would have no
advantage in a crisis on that continent. Consequently we do not need to
rely in any day-to-day sense on our strategic offensive nuclear forces
to protect our NATO allies from Russian conventional attack. Moreover,
Russian strategic nuclear forces do not threaten a substantial share of
our nuclear deterrent: the deterrent that we do maintain is no longer
heavily reliant on fixed land-based ICBM's that might be vulnerable to
Russian attack, and hence we have no reason to want to limit Russian
defenses to ensure that our retaliatory forces would be able to
penetrate Russian defenses.
The only rationale for the ABM Treaty today is one rooted in
current foreign relations concerns: the Russians do not want us to
withdraw from it, so doing so would, presumably, upset them and perhaps
lead them to do other things that we don't want. For example, for the
umpteenth time they may threaten to refuse to ratify the START II
Treaty. But it seems to me there is a limit to the degree to which we
should let this sort of thing influence us. The Russians were willing
in 1992, following President Yeltsin's remarkable speech in January of
that year, to consider substantial revisions to the ABM Treaty and to
discuss mutual work on ballistic missile defenses with us. Perhaps this
or the next Russian government will prove similarly reasonable in the
future. That doesn't look likely today, but it is still worth offering,
in my view, to work with the Russians in the way that we began in 1992
and abandoned in 1993. If that proves fruitless there are ample legal
and strategic grounds for withdrawing from the treaty. We cannot
perpetually let our security vis-a-vis the likes of North Korea, Iran,
and Iraq be held hostage to Russia's not wanting us to have defenses.
In the meantime, in my judgment, the Senate should not approve the
delineation agreement that the Administration has already reached with
the Russians, which limits unnecessarily the effectiveness of our
theater defenses, nor the accompanying expansion of the treaty to
encompass Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan--a step for which there is
not even the most remote strategic rationale. We don't have any reason
to want to limit these countries' ballistic missile defenses. Why
should we let them have a hand in limiting ours?
In my view only a very major modification of, or a withdrawal from,
the treaty would meet our strategic needs. Even if one believes that a
full defense against an all-out Russian attack is not attainable, the
treaty clearly hinders our ability to defend ourselves against a number
of lesser and plausible threats during this post-cold war era: rogue
states, an accidental launch from Russia, or a launch from China
provoked by, e.g., a crisis over Taiwan. As interpreted by,
particularly, this Administration, the treaty is even undermining the
effectiveness of our theater ballistic missile defenses, systems that
are not supposed to be covered by the treaty. A very limited one- or
two-site defense of the U.S. of the sort that might be compatible with
a treaty that has been only modestly amended, would be essentially
worthless against some perfectly plausible threats, such as ship-
launched ballistic missiles, that we identified during the
deliberations of the Rumsfeld Commission. Indeed against some very
plausible threats, such as ballistic missiles carrying clusters of
biological weapons that may be released early in the trajectory, only
boost-phase intercept from space offers a likely response.
In short, Mr. Chairman, the world in which the ABM Treaty was an
imperfect, but in my view reasonable, accommodation to the strategic
circumstances in which we found ourselves is gone with the wind. In the
new world in which we live we now require defenses for our security,
and our treaty obligations must be adjusted to serve our strategic
needs, not the other way around.
Senator Hagel. Mr. Lehman.
STATEMENT OF HON. RONALD F. LEHMAN, FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE ARMS
CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT AGENCY
Secretary Lehman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Biden. I
am honored that you have asked me to come back and appear
before the committee again.
In particular, I want to thank you and your staff for some
flexibility in accommodating my schedule. And in particular, I
would like to say that I am honored to be appearing with this
particular panel, because I know each of these individuals
personally and hold them in the highest regard.
I also should emphasize up front that I am only speaking
for myself. These are my personal views and are not necessarily
the views of any organizations I have been associated with or
any past or present administration. They are simply my views.
You have asked for my thoughts on the interaction of arms
control and ballistic missile defense including some
elaboration of how we have tried in the past to enhance the
relationship. Today, the importance of this issue is every bit
as significant as it was during the cold war, and a vast
literature on the subject exists.
In general, the public debate for and against ballistic
missile defenses, like that on arms control itself, has
experienced much oversimplification over the years by both
advocates and opponents.
Given the complexities involved, it should not be
surprising that there have been considerable differences among
thoughtful experts as well. Nevertheless, uncertainty has been
reduced, and trends are becoming ever more clear.
The spread of ballistic missiles has been more rapid than
had been widely understood. In this age of globalization and
increased cooperation among proliferant states, the missile
capabilities of many states, both potential aggressors and
those who feel increasingly threatened, is growing.
Likewise, the technologies which are at the heart of
ballistic missile defense--technologies such as high-
performance computing, micro-electronics and sensors--are also
advancing rapidly, bringing with them the prospect of more
effective defensive systems, especially for advanced post-
industrial states.
Even in the areas of military doctrine, deterrence theory,
and arms control policy, areas in which the residual heat of
past debates most often distorts a clearer vision of the
future, greater convergence can be detected.
Indeed, support for ballistic missile defenses has always
existed in some measure across party lines and left and right
across the ideological spectrum.
The passage of the National Missile Defense Act of 1999
gives hope, but not certainty, that a new consensus may be
possible.
A process of determining afresh the enduring principles and
new realities of arms control and ballistic missile defense is
needed. The hearings being held by this committee are an
important step in that process.
Much has changed, but some of the basics have not changed.
Both arms control and ballistic missile defense must be seen in
the context of broader national goals and national security
strategies.
Even within the realm of countering ballistic missile
threats, arms control and ballistic missile defenses are
themselves additional tools, but not the only tools for
enhancing our security.
These tools must be integrated with our military forces and
doctrine, our technological and industrial prowess, our
diplomacy and other components of a multifaceted effort to
enhance the Nation's security.
Properly integrated, arms control, ballistic missile
defenses and the other tools at our disposal all together
result in a strategy for which the total is greater than the
sum of its parts.
Unfortunately, incomplete, disjointed and unbalanced
approaches can have the opposite result. Bringing all the parts
together effectively is not easy given the complexities among
and within nations.
There is much that can be said about all of this, but in
the interest of providing time for discussion, let me highlight
several key judgments:
One, ballistic missile defenses, both strategic and
theater, can significantly enhance deterrence and crisis
stability, increase our military capabilities, protect allies,
friends and coalitions, strengthen nonproliferation, support
our diplomacy, improve the conditions for peace in troubled
regions, and expand the prospects for effective arms control
and reductions.
The proper balance between offensive and defensive
capabilities shifts over time, but the most significant, near-
term capabilities missing from our current national security
arsenal are defenses against ballistic missiles.
Missile defenses do not substitute for a multifaceted
national security strategy, but neither does even the most
effective multifaceted strategy eliminate the need for
deployment of ballistic missile defenses in today's world.
Ballistic missile defenses do not eliminate the need for a
continuum of military forces, both nuclear and conventional,
but they can enhance global and regional deterrence and support
our military forces in combat.
Deployment of significant ballistic missile defenses is
inevitable, but it is not at all inevitable that they will be
deployed in time to meet the needs of the United States and its
allies and friends.
The key to a timely deployment decision remains the early
demonstration of success, which in turn requires meaningful
program objectives and modern management with dynamic
exploitation of technology and competition.
That deployments will take longer and cost more than is
necessary may result from divisions within the policy community
over the proper role of defenses, but the most immediate
constraints appear to be those which deny technologists the
ability to demonstrate the best that is feasible.
The United States should develop its ballistic missile
programs primarily to address its own requirements and
timeframes, but a better way to proceed is cooperatively with
Russia, Israel, Japan and others, recognizing that specific
needs, urgency and feasibility differ among nations, and that
cooperation on early warning and other theater defenses may be
equally vital to many nations.
Appropriate treaties, agreements and joint efforts on
offensive and/or defensive arms can enhance security and
complement the deployment of missile defenses, but failure to
adjust to the changed realities that necessitate the deployment
of ballistic missile defenses may ultimately prove to be the
greatest threat to existing and future arms control agreements
as well as to our security.
An inability to exploit ballistic missile defenses for a
more cooperative approach to international security may deny
the United States opportunities for leadership and tension
reduction and may perpetuate the corrosive political effects of
international relationships too often rhetorically defined in
terms of mass mutual hostages.
Obviously, not everyone favors the deployment of ballistic
missile defense. A serious discussion of the issues will be
necessary to broaden support, and a more vigorous marketplace
of ideas will help ensure that the gains are maximized and
costs minimized.
Because such a process must adapt to a world in an
uncertain transition, I would be skeptical of any offers of a
single true path. Nevertheless, I believe it would be useful to
remind everyone that windows of opportunity do open, although
sometimes not clearly and not for long.
The situation as it played out in 1992 offers a number of
insights.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the cold war began to
wind down, leaving behind many legacy issues with which we are
still dealing. The political changes suggested opportunities
for Russia and the United States to work together to build a
stronger, safer basis for their common security.
Each recognized that the world had changed dramatically,
yet each was uncertain how much cooperation would be possible
and how much of the old relationship would or should remain.
As interactions with Russia improved and as both sides cut
back on their military preoccupation with the other, the United
States modified its planned ballistic missile defenses and,
interestingly, Russian showed greater interest in cooperating
on ballistic missile defense.
At the same time, the two nations continued with the most
comprehensive arms control accomplishments ever achieved.
I should add that Ambassador Woolsey was very helpful in
quite a number of those. We did not always agree on each and
every issue, but I still commend him. It took a bipartisan
effort to pull together that remarkable arms control
revolution.
Senator Biden. Mr. Secretary, it looks like you got him
now, though.
Secretary Lehman. We keep working on him. It is never easy.
In September 1991----
Senator Biden. He has gone over.
Secretary Lehman. In September 1991, soon after the Moscow
coup, President Bush had called for cooperation on defenses. A
month later, Soviet President Gorbachev announced his support
for discussions on such cooperation, a direction given greater
weight when, in January 1992, President Yeltsin proposed joint
United States-Russian cooperation on a ``global protective
system.''
Focusing on the effort to ensure that the dissolution of
the Soviet Union remained peaceful, joint decisions on defense
cooperation awaited the Moscow Summit of June 1992, which
created a group of experts to discuss cooperation on early
warning, cooperation on technologies, nonproliferation and the
legal basis for a Global Protection System, the United States
having adopted the name proposed by the Russians.
During those discussions, I presented the U.S. case for an
amended ABM Treaty, proposals that were subsequently presented
in greater detail in the Standing Consultative Commission.
The U.S. view was that circumstances had changed and that
an opportunity now presented itself for creating a security
relationship more suitable to friends. Central to this new
relationship was exploring cooperation in protecting both of
our populations from attack, rather than collaborating to
maximize their vulnerability to mass destruction.
Cooperation on early warning, missile defense and
nonproliferation seemed preferable to a preoccupation with mass
destruction rhetoric that would inevitably poison our political
relations. This did not involve the abandonment of deterrents
or the abolition of nuclear forces.
Instead, this approach was designed to promote
nonproliferation and enhance security and stability by
defending against small attacks, whatever the source.
In addition to the radical geopolitical changes taking
place, technological advances had blurred distinctions between
ABM systems on the one hand and early warning, command and
control, air defense missiles and theater ballistic missile
defenses on the other hand.
Advances in technology had already vastly complicated the
clarity of categories and confidence in compliance. Yet many of
the systems now in tension with the ABM Treaty were for other
vital missions not ABM related.
In particular, because sensors are so important to early
warning, national technical means of verification, and
conventional forces, we proposed that sensors run free, that we
agree not to make them an issue between our two countries.
The United States also proposed more extensive ABM
deployments than those permitted by the ABM Treaty as
originally signed in 1972.
Russia has 100 interceptors deployed around Moscow, but the
original treaty permitted 200 at two sites and additional
interceptors at several additional test sites.
The United States offered to forego a decision on space-
based interceptors in the context of an agreement to increase
the number of ground-based interceptors to cover the entire
United States to a planned level of effectiveness. Russia could
do the same.
In short, the American position held that the ABM Treaty
was broken, but the United States was prepared to fix it in the
context of changes that would increase the security of both
countries and others.
Given that threats already emerging were beyond the control
of either Russia or the United States, we were not prepared to
let considerations of the ABM Treaty ultimately require us to
sacrifice our security and that of our allies and friends,
including Russia, who might be threatened by ballistic
missiles.
Likewise, we sought the broadest cooperation and were
prepared to negotiate restraints, but we would not permit a
veto over necessary deployments.
Mr. Chairman, admittedly, this is a cursory coverage of
what are very complex issues. I have written on this and spoken
on this many times over the years.
There are two statements that I gave extemporaneously that
were subsequently punished that I might offer for the record,
if you wish, in which you----
Senator Biden. Published?
Secretary Lehman. What is that?
Senator Biden. Did you say punished or published?
Secretary Lehman. Published. Did I say punished?
Senator Biden. Oh, you said punished. Freudian slip.
Secretary Lehman. It is hard to punish.
They were subsequently published and as remarks that took
place in those times, so you can get a little flavor for what
was actually happening at the time. And I offer these for the
record, if you wish.
Senator Hagel. We will include those in the record.
[The material referred to follows Secretary Lehman's
prepared statement.]
Secretary Lehman. Then, Mr. Chairman, I will conclude my
remarks at that point.
Thank you.
Senator Hagel. Mr. Lehman, Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Secretary Lehman follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Ronald F. Lehman
Mr. Chairman, Distinguished Members of the Committee on Foreign
Relations:
I am honored that you have asked me to appear again before this
Committee to exchange ideas. I wish also to thank you for your kindness
in accommodating my schedule. Up front, let me make clear that these
are strictly my own views. I do not speak for any other person or for
any organization, program, or Administration with which I have been or
am now associated.
You have asked for my thoughts on the interaction of arms control
and ballistic missile defense including some elaboration of how we have
tried in the past to enhance the relationship. Today, the importance of
this issue is every bit as significant as it was during the Cold War
and a vast literature on the subject exists. In general, the public
debate for and against ballistic missile defenses, like that on arms
control itself, has experienced much oversimplification over the years
by both advocates and opponents. Given the complexities involved, it
should not be surprising that there have been considerable differences
among thoughtful experts as well. Nevertheless, uncertainty has been
reduced and trends are becoming ever more clear.
The spread of ballistic missiles has been more rapid than had been
widely understood. In this age of globalization and increased
cooperation among proliferant states, the missile capabilities of many
states--both potential aggressors and those who feel increasingly
threatened--is growing. Likewise, the technologies which are at the
heart of ballistic missile defense--technologies such as high
performance computing, microelectronics, and sensors--are also
advancing rapidly, bringing with them the prospect of more effective
defensive systems especially for advanced, post-industrial states.
Even in the areas of military doctrine, deterrence theory, and arms
control policy--areas in which the residual heat of past debates most
often distorts a clearer vision of the future--greater convergence can
be detected. Indeed, support for ballistic missile defenses has always
existed in some measure across party lines and left and right across
the ideological spectrum. The passage of the National Missile Defense
Act of 1999 gives hope, but not certainty, that a new consensus may be
possible.
A process of determining afresh the enduring principles and new
realities of arms control and ballistic missile defense is needed. The
hearings being held by this Committee are an important step in that
process. Much has changed, but some of the basics have not changed.
Both arms control and ballistic missile defense must be seen in the
context of broader national goals and national security strategies.
Even within the realm of countering ballistic missile threats, arms
control and ballistic missile defenses are themselves additional tools,
but not the only tools for enhancing our security. These tools must be
integrated with our military forces and doctrine, our technological and
industrial prowess, our diplomacy, and other components of a
multifaceted effort to enhance the nation's security.
Properly integrated, arms control, ballistic missile defenses, and
the other tools at our disposal all together result in a strategy for
which the total is greater than the sum of its parts. Unfortunately,
incomplete, disjointed, and unbalanced approaches can have the opposite
result. Bringing all of the parts together effectively is not easy
given the complexities among and within nations.
There is much that can be said about all of this, but in the
interest of providing time for discussion let me highlight several key
judgments:
(1) Ballistic missile defenses--both strategic and theater--
can significantly enhance deterrence and crisis stability,
increase our military capabilities, protect allies, friends,
and coalitions, strengthen nonproliferation, support our
diplomacy, improve the conditions for peace in troubled
regions, and expand the prospects for effective arms control
and reductions.
(2) The proper balance between offensive and defensive
capabilities shifts over time, but the most significant, near
term capabilities missing from our current national security
arsenal are defenses against ballistic missiles.
(3) Missile defenses do not substitute for a multifaceted
national security strategy, but, neither does even the most
effective multifaceted strategy eliminate the need for
deployment of missile defenses in today's world.
(4) Ballistic missile defenses do not eliminate the need for
a continuum of military forces, both nuclear and conventional,
but they can enhance global and regional deterrence and support
our military forces in combat.
(5) Deployment of significant ballistic missile defenses is
inevitable; but it is not at all inevitable that they will be
deployed in time to meet the needs of the United States and its
allies and friends.
(6) The key to a timely deployment decision remains the early
demonstration of success, which in turn requires meaningful
program objectives and modern management with dynamic
exploitation of technology and competition.
(7) That deployments will take longer and cost more than is
necessary may result from divisions within the policy community
over the proper role of missile defenses, but the most
immediate constraints appear to be those which deny
technologists the ability to demonstrate the best that is
feasible.
(8) The U.S. should develop its ballistic missile programs
primarily to address its own requirements and time frames, but
a better way to proceed is cooperatively with Russia, Israel,
Japan, and others, recognizing that specific needs, urgency,
and feasibility differ among nations and that cooperation on
early warning and other theater defenses may be equally vital
to many nations.
(9) Appropriate treaties, agreements, and joint efforts on
offensive and/or defensive arms can enhance security and
complement the deployment of missile defenses, but failure to
adjust to the changed realities that necessitate the deployment
of ballistic missile defenses may ultimately prove to be the
greatest threat to existing and future arms control agreements
as well as to our security.
(10) An inability to exploit ballistic missile defenses for a
more cooperative approach to international security may deny
the United States opportunities for leadership and tension
reduction and may perpetuate the corrosive political effects of
international relationships too often rhetorically defined in
terms of mass mutual hostages.
Obviously, not everyone favors the deployment of ballistic missile
defenses. A serious discussion of the issues will be necessary to
broaden support, and a more vigorous marketplace of ideas will help
insure that the gains are maximized and costs minimized. Because such a
process must adapt to a world in uncertain transition, I would be
skeptical of any offers of a single, true path. Nevertheless, I believe
it would be useful to remind everyone that windows of opportunity do
open, although sometimes not clearly and not for long. The situation as
it played out in 1992 offers a number of insights.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Cold War began to wind
down leaving behind many legacy issues with which we are still dealing.
The political changes suggested opportunities for Russia and the United
States to work together to build a stronger, safer basis for their
common security. Each recognized that the world had changed
dramatically, yet each was uncertain how much cooperation would be
possible and how much of the old relationship would or should remain.
As interactions with Russia improved, and as both sides cut back on
their military preoccupation with the other, the United States modified
its planned ballistic missile defenses and, interestingly, Russia
showed greater interest in cooperating on ballistic missile defense. At
the same time, the two nations continued with the most comprehensive
arms control accomplishments ever achieved.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ During the period in which the Cold War was waning and the
United States was moving toward deployment of ballistic missile
defenses, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and Protocol (START I),
the U.S./Russian Joint Understanding and START II Treaty eliminating
multiple-warhead land-based missiles were signed. Agreements with the
Soviet Union were concluded on the Prevention of Dangerous Military
Activities; on a Bilateral Verification Experiment and Data Exchange
Related to the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons; on Destruction and Non-
production of Chemical Weapons; and on Implementing Trial Verification
and Stability Measures of the Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of
Strategic Offensive Arms. The verification Protocols to the Threshold
Test Ban Treaty and the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty were also
signed and the Treaties ratified during this period. Multilateral
agreements completed include the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in
Europe (CFE); the 1991 and 1992 Vienna Agreements on Confidence- and
Security-Building Measures (CSBMs); the Treaty on the Final Settlement
with Respect to Germany; the Open Skies Treaty, and Chemical Weapons
Convention (CWC).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In September of 1991, soon after the Moscow Coup, President Bush
had called for cooperation on defenses. A month later, Soviet President
Gorbachev announced his support for discussions on such cooperation, a
direction given greater weight when, in January of 1992, President
Yeltsin proposed joint U.S.-Russian cooperation on a ``global
protective system.''
Focusing on the effort to ensure that the dissolution of the Soviet
Union remained peaceful, joint decisions on defense cooperation awaited
the Moscow Summit of June, 1992, which created a group of experts to
discuss cooperation on early warning, cooperation on technologies,
nonproliferation, and the legal basis for a Global Protection System,
the U.S. having adopted the name proposed by the Russians. During those
discussions, I presented the U.S. case for an amended ABM Treaty,
proposals that were subsequently presented in greater detail in the
Standing Consultative Commission.
The U.S. view was that circumstances had changed and that an
opportunity now presented itself for creating a security relationship
more suitable to friends. Central to this new relationship was
exploring cooperation in protecting both of our populations from
attack, rather than collaborating to maximize their vulnerability to
mass destruction. Cooperation on early warning, missile defense, and
nonproliferation seemed preferable to a preoccupation with mass
destruction rhetoric that would inevitably poison our political
relations. This did not involve the abandonment of deterrence or the
abolition of nuclear forces. Instead, this approach was designed to
promote nonproliferation and enhance security and stability by
defending against small attacks, whatever the source.
In addition to the radical geopolitical changes taking place,
technological advances had blurred distinctions between ABM systems on
the one hand and early warning, command and control, air defense
missiles, and theater ballistic missile defenses on the other hand.
Advances in technology had already vastly complicated the clarity of
categories and confidence in compliance. Yet many of the systems now in
tension with the ABM Treaty were for other vital missions not ABM
related. In particular, because sensors are so important to early
warning, national technical means of verification, and conventional
forces, we proposed that sensors run free--that we agree not to make
them an issue between our two countries.
The United States also proposed more extensive ABM deployments than
those permitted by the ABM Treaty as originally signed in 1972. Russia
has 100 interceptors deployed around Moscow, but the original treaty
permitted 200 at two sites and additional interceptors at several
additional test sites. The United States offered to forego a decision
on space based interceptors in the context of an agreement to increase
the number of ground based interceptors to cover the entire United
States to a planned level of effectiveness. Russia could do the same.
In short, the American position held that the ABM Treaty was
broken, but the U.S. was prepared to fix it in the context of changes
that would increase the security of both countries and others. Given
that threats already emerging were beyond the control of either Russia
or the United States, we were not prepared to let considerations of the
ABM Treaty ultimately require us to sacrifice our security and that of
allies and friends, including Russia, who might be threatened by
ballistic missiles. Likewise, we sought the broadest cooperation and
were prepared to negotiate restraints, but we would not permit a veto
over necessary deployments.
Mr. Chairman, admittedly, this is a very cursory discussion of a
complex subject, and I have had time to address briefly only one
historic example of how the United States has proposed to harmonize
arms control and ballistic missile defenses in the interest of
international security. Elsewhere, I have discussed these issues in
greater detail. If you wish, I would be prepared to submit for the
record two publications that contain statements I made in 1992 and 1996
elaborating on exactly the questions you have asked me to address
today.
Again, I welcome this opportunity to explore with the Committee in
greater detail exactly why deployment of ballistic missile defenses has
become necessary to:
Enhance deterrence and crisis stability,
Increase our military capabilities,
Protect allies, friends, and coalitions,
Strengthen nonproliferation,
Support U.S. diplomacy,
Improve the conditions for peace in troubled regions, and
Expand the prospects for effective arms control and reductions.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
______
[Remarks, November 1992, published 1993]
Changing Realities
(Ronald F. Lehman II)
The development of a consensus for a strategic defense initiative
(SDI) is at the cutting edge of national security, foreign policy, and
arms control strategy. This is a time when we need to be probing and
engaging some of the difficult issues that we have faced over the
years. This article highlights where we have been going and discusses
specific events that have been taking place with respect to developing
a concept for defenses against ballistic missile attack.
Truly, the world is in transition. We are entering the post-cold
war era. Increasingly we have seen not only our foreign policy and
national security strategy move away from preoccupation with the East-
West military balance, but also we have seen this occur in arms
control. The coup attempt in Moscow in August 1991 in many ways
encapsulated and symbolized those trends. The coup's failure was
another sign that the cold war was over and the traditional military
threat to NATO in Western Europe was diminishing rapidly. And now, we
have the possibility of entering into a new world in which we may be
cooperating with the countries of Eastern Europe, and subsequently with
the countries that have emerged out of the Soviet Union, to enhance our
security, prosperity, and freedom together.
This has had a tremendous impact on how we think about arms
control. Before the August 1991 coup attempt, we looked at Soviet
military forces in terms of the traditional threat, and we had just
completed what some call a ``traditional arms control treaty''--START
(Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). At that time, there was intense
concern over the question of accidental or unauthorized launch of
ballistic missiles, and a preoccupation with the question of the
nonproliferation implications of the turmoil in Eurasia.
soviet dissolution raises security concerns
When the Soviet Union began to break up, we were faced with a
serious nonproliferation question: what happens when a nuclear weapons
state breaks up? Does that portend the emergence of additional nuclear
weapons states and, if so, what are the implications for our security?
We also saw another aspect of the problem. In the turmoil caused by
the Soviet breakup, we were increasingly concerned over the control of
nuclear weapons, technologies, and material, including fissile
material. We were concerned about the future of scientists, engineers,
and technicians, who might find, in the economic and political
difficulties they were experiencing in their own countries, an
opportunity to go abroad and become involved in the development of
nuclear, biological, chemical, or ballistic missile programs in other
countries that posed a proliferation threat. We quickly began to
address these issues with the former republics of the Soviet Union,
particularly with Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. We made
significant efforts to prevent proliferation overall, both through
export control and political policy.
Another effort dealt with the question of the traditional arms
control agreements as we had known them. For example, we all think of
START as dealing with offensive force reductions, but we took that
agreement and turned it into an important tool for nonproliferation. In
the context of the Lisbon Protocol, we were able to get agreement from
the three former republics, other than Russia, which have nuclear
weapons on their territory, to become non-nuclear weapon states under
the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). The Treaty on Conventional Armed
Forces in Europe (CFE), likewise, was turned from a treaty to deal with
offensive ground threats to NATO in the NATO/Warsaw Pact context into a
regional security structure. The treaty helped bring stability through
the reallocation of conventional forces within the former Soviet Union.
One area of cooperation that has not received much attention, but
which has important arms control dimensions, is U.S.-Russian
cooperation in ballistic missile defenses. President Mikhail Gorbachev
first talked about the possibility of cooperating in the area of early
warning in 1991. The United States had clearly stated for a number of
years, in the defense and space negotiations, in the Standing
Consultative Commission, and in all of our bilateral dealings with the
Soviet Union, that we saw an increased need for strategic ballistic
missile defenses. We saw the possibility of moving to a better, safer
world with greater reliance on defenses. We said we intended to do that
when the programs were available that would provide for that enhanced
security. However, we also always said we were prepared to consider a
cooperative approach, a cooperative transition.
From the outset of our negotiations with the Soviet Union in the
mid-1980s on strategic defenses, it was very difficult to find common
ground between our two countries. Now, in the post-cold war period, we
have the tremendous potential for developing common ground. In January
1992, President Boris Yeltsin talked about U.S.-Russian cooperation in
a global protection system. We viewed that as a very important step,
and we have sought to engage Russia to develop this concept, one that
deals not only with our two countries, but also with our NATO allies
and other allies and friends around the world.
As we have elaborated our own system for limited defenses--known as
``Global Protection Against Limited Strikes'' (GPALS) and consisting of
a number of approaches to interceptors, both anti-tactical ballistic
missiles (ATBMs), ground-based anti-ballistic missile (ABM)
interceptors and eventually space-based interceptors (SBIs), and a wide
variety of sensors, we have seen that there are increased areas where
we could cooperate. For example, we could cooperate in national
ballistic missile defense programs, and in the end many nations of the
world would gain the benefit of this technology for enhancing their
security as well as ours.
security talks underway
We have begun to engage Russia on this issue. The instrumental step
was taken at the June 1992 Summit in Washington when Presidents George
Bush and Boris Yeltsin agreed to begin a process through high-level
discussions to develop a cooperative approach to a Global Protection
System (GPS), highlighting not only early warning and cooperation in
the development of the technologies, but also establishing the legal
basis for GPS. This means that the question of the legal basis for such
a system has to take into account the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty.
The U.S.-Russian high-level group established by the two presidents
met in July and September 1992. That group is known informally as the
Ross-Mamedov Group. The two delegations established working groups to
deal with the overall GPS concept, with technical cooperation, and with
nonproliferation. The United States and Russia are also discussing the
legal basis for GPS.
The relationship between the ABM Treaty and the legal basis for GPS
has to be viewed in light of changing circumstances, particularly since
the ABM Treaty was negotiated in 1972. The great debates over offense/
defense relationships have been transformed by those developments.
Whereas, in earlier periods we spent much time debating overall
strategic stability and the question of the offense/defense
relationship, in today's cooperative world we are looking at limited
ballistic missile defense systems to deal with limited threats.
The U.S. concept for its GPALS system, which would contribute to an
overall GPS, is a limited system. What are the implications of the ABM
Treaty for a limited system? Over the years, largely because the United
States deactivated its own ABM system, which was deployed for only a
very short period, the impression has been left that the ABM Treaty
bans ABM interceptors and ABM systems. In fact, it permits them. The
ABM Treaty, as signed in 1972, actually permitted 200 interceptors in
addition to test and training launchers. As a result of the 1974
Protocol to the ABM Treaty, that number of permitted interceptors was
reduced to 100 at one deployed site, with a number of additional
launchers at test ranges. Russia has ABM interceptors deployed around
the Moscow area. Therefore, the treaty, as originally concluded in
1972, provided for additional numbers of ABM interceptors, exceeding
the number presently deployed by Russia and well above those of the
United States, because we have none.
The ABM Treaty approached defenses from the point of view of
managing limited systems. It also had a broader philosophical basis,
dealing with the question of area defenses, protecting retaliatory
capability. There was a fear that ABM systems might deny the
retaliatory capability of either of the two sides, which could be
destabilizing. However, in the new cooperative era of today, we believe
the time has come to look at the ABM Treaty from the point of view of
cooperating in the protection of our citizens, rather than
collaborating to maximize their vulnerability. The ABM Treaty has to
reflect this new political reality.
That is not to say that only the political reality is changing. The
technical reality has been changing as well. Increasingly it has become
more difficult to distinguish between surface-to-air missiles (SAMs)
against aircraft and anti-tactical ballistic missiles (ATBMs) and ABM
systems. Many of the SAM systems deployed today have certain
characteristics that would have thrilled ABM designers in the 1960s.
Technology is making it more difficult to distinguish between
interceptors' roles that once were believed to be clear cut. The same
is true for sensors. Modern electronics, communications, and sensor
technology make it more difficult to say what does and what does not
have an ABM capability.
A related issue illustrates how difficult this has become: the
controversy over the Krasnoyarsk large phased-array radar. We were
dealing with large phased-array radars in the ABM Treaty, saying they
should be on the periphery of national territory and oriented outward
to minimize their utility as ABM radars. The existence of the
Krasnoyarsk radar complicated the consideration of this issue, but it
was simple compared to the kinds of issues that will emerge when you
have modern data links of the type that exist today, which have already
begun to raise questions of compliance.
multilateral world increases threats
In addition to changes in technologies, and changes and
distinctions between interceptors and sensors, there are changes that
result from the political upheavals taking place. For example, in the
republics of the former Soviet Union, one finds that the former Soviet
ABM system is now spread among a number of independent sovereign
countries. The interceptors are in Russia, but not all the testing
sites, nor all development facilities, nor all the sensors. Indeed, not
all ABM facilities are even in the Commonwealth of Independent States.
Thus, we have been talking about the ABM Treaty as a bilateral treaty
existing in what is increasingly becoming a multilateral world. This
introduces additional complications. On the other hand, when you look
at the Global Protection System, which will ultimately develop in a
multilateral way, there are certain realities that can be seen
unfolding in the context of the ABM Treaty.
The bottom line really is that the ABM Treaty has to evolve to take
into account technical and political changes if it is to continue to be
of use to the United States, Russia, and the rest of the world. It has
to take into account the need, with the new proliferation threats, to
protect our citizens. How can it do that? From our point of view, it
has to permit the deployment of our GPALS system. That means it would
have to address a number of issues:
First is the question of deployments. The United States does not
have any deployed ABMs, but the ABM Treaty as originally signed would
have permitted 200 interceptors as well as 15 additional launchers at
test sites. Our GPALS would be several times that size in ground-based
interceptors, and we envisage space-based interceptors in the future.
We have to address those issues. However, to get there, we would have
to develop the systems and test them, and right now we have difficulty
with the ABM Treaty because it puts constraints on our testing program.
We need relief from the treaty so that we and others can, as part of
our efforts to move ahead and provide protection to our citizens, do
the testing required.
ABM Treaty relief involves the question of sensors. Many of the
compliance issues of the ABM Treaty have to do with the very difficult
issue of knowing what is or is not an ABM sensor. The time has come to
address this question in light of the newly cooperative world. We also
need to ensure that there are no doubts that the ABM Treaty does not
cover ATBM systems. And we need to ensure that ATBM systems are not
constrained or delayed because of debates over whether they are or are
not ABM systems. Finally, we also need to deal with the question of
technology transfer, because the ABM Treaty is a bilateral treaty and
it prohibits the transfer of ABM technology to other states. This
creates a fundamental tension with the concept of a cooperative global
protection system that involves a number of countries.
In summary, the time has come to cooperate in protecting our
citizens rather than collaborating in maximizing their vulnerability.
This is the reality of the new world. The technologies exist that would
permit us to do this, but under the ABM Treaty those technologies are
constrained and the process can be delayed. We need relief from those
constraints. Like our other arms control agreements, the ABM Treaty
needs to evolve to reflect new realities if it is to continue.
We must always remember that arms control is an important policy
tool, indeed a tool we must use in our interests and the interests of
our friends around the world, including our new friends. However, we
have to use arms control effectively, and that means it has to be
flexible enough to accommodate the realities of the new world.
______
[Proceedings, Carnegie Endowment, Seminar--February 14, 1996]
START II, Missile Non-Proliferation, and Missile Defense--The Offense-
Defense Relationship: Past and Future
(Remarks by the Honorable Ronald F. Lehman II)
As one who participated in the START negotiating process from
beginning to end. I am pleased to join with so many of you, both from
the United States and Russia, who helped make these historic agreements
possible. I see many familiar faces, but it is perhaps just as
important that I see so many new faces.
The negotiation of the START treaties took place not so many years
ago, but most of the original cast of these dramas has moved on to new
roles and others have taken their place. Unlike the quick action taken
on the INF Treaty, the entry into force of the START treaties was not
immediate. During many months of rapid change, this delay has
introduced to the contemporary stage a significant number of new
players. For that reason, I would like to concentrate my remarks less
on the debates in their current style than on the ideas which inspired
us in the past and the visions we had then of the future. My assigned
task of looking at the relationship of strategic offensive and
defensive weapons systems in the context both of further arms
reductions and of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is
actually facilitated by this distance from the current debate.
the early history of offense and defense
Just as arms control is inseparable from national security, so
offense and defense are inseparable in the consideration of military
strategy. This has always been so. Throughout the history of warfare,
one can see periods in which tactics or technology favored the offense
or favored the defense, but some optimal mix evolved in each era.
Offensive action could apply force for political gain, but it could
also be used for defense or for retribution against aggression.
Defenses could blunt an attack, but adopting defensive positions on
part of the battle front was also a means for both aggressor and victim
to concentrate their forces elsewhere. Along with this economy of force
role, defenses also provided early warning and attack assessment as
each sought to stage decisive action on its own terms.
Even in the age of great fortifications, when the defense was said
to be dominant, defensive operations served primarily to delay,
dissipate, and channel an attack to a time and location where the
advancing forces would be at a disadvantage. The successful defenders
of great castles may have, on a few occasions, actually engaged in
little combat from behind the protection of their ramparts before a
siege was lifted. Ultimately, however, they had to sally forth to
reclaim their land after exhaustion, attrition, or fear of diminished
prospects for victory had caused the attacker to fall back on its own
defenses. Indeed, aggression abroad was not often risked without secure
fortifications at home.
This is not to say that the balance between offense and defense has
no bearing on the likelihood and intensity of war. It does. During the
age of the great fortified cities in Europe warfare was still frequent,
but usually limited and highly ritualized with rules of engagement
which minimized casualties. As trench warfare demonstrated in World War
I, however, increased use of defensive tactics did not always mean that
the loss of life was minimized. Likewise, in the world's military
histories, bold offensive action is as much associated with limited
casualties as it is with massive slaughter and long periods of peace
were associated with powerful empires which tolerated no resistance.
In short, strong defenses could be both stabilizing and essential
to sound military doctrine, but the price of war was determined more by
the causes of conflict, the character of man, and the correlation of
forces than by the mere preference of offense or defense dominance.
And, finally, although defensive action always played some role, the
offense or threat of it brought hostilities to an end. This ``spirit of
the offense'' came to dominate military thinking in the age of
Clausewitz. As technology has made weapons more and more destructive,
this concept of war as an extension of rational political competition
was frequently combined with a more pacific notion that weapons had
become so horrible that rational war could not be contemplated. Nobel's
dynamite, artillery, the machine gun, the submarine, the Zeppelin, the
airplane, poison gas, however, all proved insufficiently horrible to
guarantee peace.
This reflection of the extension of violence as the heart of
warfare rather than as the basis for peace has inspired many
commentators to prefer defense dominance, indeed, to advocate worlds in
which all states would have a minimum of offensive force relative to
the defenses of their neighbors. In some cases, this distinction
between offensive and defensive force has been carried over into
distinctions among weapons. One can read of armies that went to war
with only swords. One does not read of armies going to war with only
shields. One can understand a logic for peace in which the former would
be banned and the latter become a safeguard against aggression.
The necessary distinction, however, has not stood the test of time
for a number of reasons. Certainly, few defensive weapons have no
offensive capability. The soldier with only a shield may sling it at
his enemy or use it as a bludgeon. Infantrymen even distinguish between
offensive and defensive hand grenades (actually, the offensive grenade
has less shrapnel because it is used by troops moving in the open
against troops confined in bunkers and foxholes). Second, defensive
arms like defense itself serve to complement the offense. Thus,
traditional military strategy has also required a mix of weapons which
were either predominantly offensive or defensive.
The coming of the thermonuclear age reopened this debate once more.
Early on, fear of the society-destroying capability of nuclear weapons
led to great investments in air defenses to defeat aircraft armed with
nuclear weapons. Defensive interceptors themselves were even armed with
nuclear weapons. Early declaratory nuclear policies stressed damage
limitation, but defenses against ballistic missiles fell well behind
the accumulation of huge arsenals of nuclear warheads on the
intercontinental ballistic missiles of the superpowers although perhaps
not behind those of lesser nuclear powers such as China. The absence of
large-scale defenses in the face of overwhelming offensive nuclear
capability highlighted the ultimate vulnerability of both sides. The
expense of nation-wide defenses to counter such large threats and the
certainty that they would not be leak proof increased pressures to
limit offensive arms. In this content, the United States and the Soviet
Union began their negotiations on strategic arms limitations (SALT).
The centerpiece of the SALT I package in 1972, however, was the
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, a treaty which itself limited
defensive not offensive arms. The ABM Treaty was justified through
argumentation that mutual vulnerability was stabilizing. Although the
original goal of a treaty capping the growth of offensive arms was not
achieved, an Interim Agreement on offensive arms did limit numbers of
silo launchers, submarine launch tubes, and even ballistic missile
submarines. It did not limit warheads, however, but the existence of
the new ABM Treaty was said to reduce incentives to deploy more
warheads. This incentive was sweetened when the 1974 Protocol to the
ABM Treaty halved the number of permitted defensive interceptors and
deployment sites and also when the United States closed its only ABM
site a few months after it had finally become operational.
Interestingly, during the initial SALT negotiations, it was the
Soviet Union, far more than the United States, that questioned why one
would want to limit defenses. And it was the United States which
stressed linkage between the future of the ABM Treaty and further
reductions in nuclear arms, albeit, in the opposite direction from that
Moscow has proposed in resent years. Yet, the consequent SALT II, like
SALT I, permitted and codified a massive increase in strategic warheads
despite the scarcity of ABM systems and despite the emergence of large
numbers of gray area theater nuclear weapons such as the Soviet SS-20
Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile and the Backfire bomber.
As NATO prepared to respond to the SS-20 with its own INF missiles,
the West became polarized over nuclear modernization. At the risk of
some oversimplification, one could say that one school believed that
enough was enough whatever the Soviet Union had. The other school
sought to redress the imbalance it perceived. The first school became
supportive of a freeze on modernization. The second group proposed a
dual track of modernization and the negotiations of reductions to
enhance stability. The debate was over offensive arms. Both sides
advocated fewer, although they disagreed on how to achieve their goal.
At the height of the nuclear freeze movement, I participated in a
debate in a church in San Antonio, Texas. The Speaker of the U.S. House
of Representatives at that time, himself a Texan, had just appeared and
announced his support for a nuclear freeze. I was a junior U.S.
government official defending the NATO deployments against the freeze
when my debate opponent, a retired U.S. Army major general, changed the
subject briefly. What the world really needed, he said, was defenses
against missiles. The audience, clearly in favor of the freeze, roared
in approval of strategic defenses. This was some weeks before President
Reagan announced his Strategic Defense Initiative in March, 1983. The
freeze debate faded away as the United States revisited the question of
the role of defenses. Political polarization did not disappear, but new
constellations of vociferous advocates and opponents did appear
including hawks together with doves on each side of the issue--Edward
Teller and Freeman Dyson favoring defenses, while mainstream thinkers
and even the uniformed military seemed split on the issue.
the debates in the 1980's
The debates of the 1980s were fascinating, although initially there
was confussion, misinformation, and rhetoric on both sides of the
question. Sometimes there was not much clear thinking even on the
theoretical level. Let me give you just one example, the debate over
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) versus Mutual Assured Survival (MAS),
again at the risk of oversimplification. If you took the people who
thought they favored each of those positions, set them down, and asked
what nuclear targeting doctrine was associated with their concept of
defenses, the most common answer for both sides was countervalue
targeting, or as some would say, city-busting. Absent absolutely leak
proof defenses, both sides were still talking about populations being
targeted with tremendous loss of life and destruction. Those who
favored defenses were arguing, in essence, that defenses might save
millions of lives. Those opposed to defenses favored greater certainty
of the most massive destruction to enhance deterrence. The bottomline
for both sides was an emphasis on the targeting of population per se.
For much of the national security community, however, the focus was
different. That community recognized the ultimate countervalue effects
of a strategic nuclear exchange, but this community focused more on its
own differences, differences concerning the impact of strategic
defenses on the military balance and thus stability. Here most experts
also fell into two schools. One school basically believed defenses
favor the aggressor. Here's why: He who launches his missiles first
will overwhelm an opponent's defense with numbers. If an aggressor
conducts a disarming first strike against an adversary's retaliatory
force, and the remnant of that retaliatory force then faces the alerted
defenses of the aggressor, the aggressor has gained leverage in both
offense and defense. Hundreds of computer runs were made based upon
this assumption. Thus, they often concluded that even if the offense
and defense were equal and symmetrical on both sides, defenses would be
destabilizing.
On the other side of this issue, experts were doing their computer
runs. And their approach was different: ``He who shoots first in order
to disarm has a harder targeting requirement than he who simply must
retaliate in order to inflict unacceptable pain.'' If the initiator of
the war must have high confidence of counterforce success in detail to
avoid unacceptable retribution, defenses can so complicate the
disarming first strike that under almost all calculations, they are
stabilizing.
In summary, the nuclear policy debate in the 1980s seemed bogged
down in debates over perfection. The primary public debate concerned
whether anything less than perfect defense was sufficient--that is,
whether to defend anyone if everyone could not be defended, and against
every threat. The primary debate among defense intellectuals was
whether even the most imperfect defenses might encourage too much
nuclear self confidence to be stabilizing.
compromise conceptualized
In the middle of this debate, the United States was confronted by
the Soviet Union in bilateral negotiations even as research and
development programs were going forward. When the nuclear arms talks
resumed in Geneva in 1985, the Soviet Union sought linkage between the
INF issue, the START issue, and the co-called Defense and Space issue.
The United States recognized that there were interrelationships, but
did not want any one negotiation held hostage to another. The United
States and the Soviet Union agreed to a format that covered both sides'
interpretations of what the proper relationship should be. This
resulted in odd shaped tables and strange protocols. The gist of the
Soviet Union's position was that there could be no START Treaty unless
the United States solved Soviet problems with INF and Defense and
Space. Early on, we were able to agree to proceed with the lNF Treaty,
and later we were able to work out a form of delinkage on START.
I want to remind everyone in the room, however, that the U.S.
position was always that everything was interrelated. The U.S. did not
think there ought to be any formal linkage of agreements, but in fact,
in the context of those negotiations, the Reagan Administration at
various times had conceptualized a number of compromises across
agreements. The U.S. position usually stressed delinkage of most
issues, but the U.S. position sometimes included variations of the so-
called ``grand compromise''--``you give us something on offense, and
we'll give you something on defense.'' Sometimes, the U.S. position
also had certain aspects of what I call the ``green light'' compromise,
according to which the United States would not accept certain
provisions in an offensive agreement unless is were given something
favoring defenses. One finds examples of all of these approaches in the
U.S. negotiating position, sometimes all at the same time.
gpals initiative in 1991
New political circumstances, geopolitical agreements, and strategic
calculations appeared rapidly at the end of the 1980s. In January 1991,
in the context of improved relations between the United States and the
Soviet Union, President Bush proposed a different, much more limited
approach to strategic defenses. This lead people to rethink what would
be needed in the post Cold War era to enhance security and still have a
stable relationship with the then Soviet Union. President Bush proposed
the so-called GPALS system (Global Protection Against Limited Strikes)
which was downscaled tremendously from the Phase I Joint Chiefs of
Staff requirements for the original Strategic Defense Initiative. Those
requirements, at least in their original absolute numbers, had already
been achieved by START I.
cooperation on defenses; abm revision talks--1992
The initiation of the GPALS program was followed by a series of
rapid and major international developments. The completion of START I
and a few weeks later the failed coup in Moscow suggested that
cooperation between Washington and Moscow should be enhanced. In
September 1991, President Bush called for cooperation on defenses. The
United States also announced that it would be eliminating all of its
tactical nuclear artillery and many other tactical nuclear weapons. ln
October of 1991, President Gorbachev announced that he too believed
cooperation on defenses should be discussed. By January of the next
year, President Yeltsin of Russia made a bold proposal that the United
States and Russia work together to bring about a cooperative, global
protective system. In that same positive environment, the United States
agreed to talk also about START II, a step Washington had believed was
premature prior to the recent political changes. START II began to
weigh very heavily upon everything we were doing. START II was seen as
a way of strenthening the foundation for a cooperative future both in
limiting offensive arms and cooperative defenses. Obviously some form
of interrelationship would emerge, given the history of the
negotiations and also the new opportunities for cooperation.
In the final statement of the June 1992 Summit, Russia and the
United States agreed that a group of experts, the so-called Ross-
Mamedov group, would discuss cooperation on early warning, cooperation
on technologies for defense, nonproliferation, and the legal basis for
a Global Protection System (GPS), including any changes which might be
necessary to retain the existing treaties, including the ABM Treaty.
(Note that the United States had decided to adopt the Russian name, or
GPS).
The most important Ross-Mamedov session was probably that of
September 1992. At that meeting, on behalf of the United States, I
presented the case to the Russian delegation for amending the ABM
Treaty. Ambassador Robert Joseph subsequently presented this proposal
in its detail at the Standing Consultative Commission. The U.S. view
was that circumstances have changed, politically and technologically,
and that we now have an opportunity for a new relationship. An
important part of this relationship is rethinking the question of
whether we should begin cooperating In defending both of our
populations, rather than collaborating to maximize their vulnerability.
We talked about what we thought needed to be done about early warning,
technology cooperation, and nonproliferation. We accepted and
emphasized a multifaceted approach to the problem.
We made clear that defenses would play an important role in thc
future, and we made specific proposals to amend the ABM Treaty. We
proposed that it permit more than the 200 interceptors that were
permitted by the original ABM Treaty. As I highlighted in my remarks at
the time, the ABM Treaty does not ban defenses. In fact, it explicitly
provides, as signed in 1972, for 200 interceptors, plus additional test
sites. Thus, in its original form it already envisioned as many as
perhaps four or more places where a country might have interceptors,
although only two of those were to be operational deployment sites.
We talked about the changes in technology which made it
increasingly difficult to maintain distinctions between early warning,
command and control, surface-to-air missiles and theater ATBMs on the
one hand and similar ABM systems on the other hand. We stressed the
need to look at the whole--at what a BMD system really is. The
inevitable increase in the capabilities of non-ABM systems was feeding
ever more contentious debates over distinctions that were also very
difficult to verify. The electronics revolution is radically altering
the meaning of many of the boundaries sought by the ABM Treaty. This
led the United States to propose that sensors run free--that we would
agree that with respect to sensors, since they're so important for so
may vital functions such as early warning, national technical means of
verification, and conventional forces, not to make them an issue
between us.
With respect to numbers, of course we had a position proposing
several hundred ground based interceptors. I should note that Russia
has 100 interceptors already while the United States has none. The
United States was willing to forego a decision on the question of
space-based interceptors, if we achieved an agreement for near term
ground-based systems along our line of several hundred--maybe six,
seven, eight hundred--not that far from the Russian number which was
100 and not far from the 200 permitted by the ABM Treaty in 1972. So in
a sense, we were haggling about the numbers, although we had in mind a
certain level of effectiveness that we wanted to achieve by the
technologies that we had available. That level of effectiveness seemed
compatible also with the Russian concept of a Global Protective System.
Discussion of amending the ABM Treaty was complicated also by the
changes in the political circumstances of that time. One signatory to
the bilateral treaty, the Soviet Union was gone, and the existing ABM
system of the former Soviet Union no longer was solely within the
sovereign bounds of a single country. There were a series of basic
fixes to the ABM Treaty that we thought would be necessary to make it
viable and effective, and our position was that we were prepared to do
this, in the context of getting an agreement on defenses that was in
the interest of both sides. This history demonstrates that the United
States did engage very specifically on how to work together with Russia
in the context of the ABM Treaty. Circumstances had changed. The ABM
Treaty was broken, but the United States was prepared to agree to fix
it if in the context of cooperation on defenses.
defenses and further offensive reductions: the legacy of reykjavik
Permit me now to jump to the future. Increasingly, as we approach
the millennium, in the context of the NFI extension, we are hearing
more and more about attempting to go to zero nuclear warheads, or to
very low numbers. And emerging again and again in the debate, and not
on a partisan or ideological basis, is the view that you cannot go to
deep reductions without defenses. This was actually one of the key
issues at Reykjavik, and what the debate over what was proposed at
Reykjavik was really all about.
We have already given much thought about the offense-defense
relationship, but we need to get beyond frozen positions. I have tried
to give you a sense of some of the key initiatives from the past which
were designed to get us beyond stalemate. Today, as we try to go beyond
linear thinking about how you safely move towards further reductions,
traditional patterns of partisan politics and ideological splits are
starting to fragment. So, perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone
engaged on the issue of the offense-defense relationship revisit the
question through a fresh process. We should revisit our assumptions,
determine the real constants and variables for our age, and think anew.
To do that, we will have to put aside our current mindsets, our current
coalitions, and our current interest groups to determine if there isn't
a path which brings us together.
current trends: four assertions
With this discussion of past and future as a foundation, let me
turn to the question of the present just briefly. It isn't my primary
focus, but I want to make four assertions about the present in reaction
to what I have heard here and in Moscow recently. These are four
assertions you can accept or reject.
First, if it were left to the U.S. and Russian military, START II
would have entered into force already.
Second, if available material resources, i.e., budgets, were
comparable on both sides, the ABM Treaty would not be as big an issue
as it is today. There is actually a strong latent view within Russia
that it ought to have defenses against ballistic missiles. In fact,
they do. They have 100 ABM interceptors.
Third, unfortunately--and I hope not increasingly, many of the
issues that are being raised about START II and the ABM Treaty are
really being used as vehicles for expressing uncertainty about the geo-
strategic future, uncertainty about where we, the United States and
Russia, are in our relationship to each other. This includes also
uncertainty about where we think we ought to be. We need to answer the
question of what it means to say the Cold War is over.
Fourth, the substantive uncertainties about the ABM Treaty or START
II are really being greatly amplified by contextual uncertainties, most
of them of a domestic political nature. We have important new or
reinvented players in Washington and Moscow. Some of them know these
issues well, but many do not. There is a tendency to see many decisions
made on the basis of a simple interrogation: ``If my domestic opponent
is in favor of it, I must be against it,'' or vice versa. We have a
similar problem on the international front to which I alluded earlier;
namely, that whatever you think of the arguments on their merits, the
legacy of the ABM Treaty and the legacy of Cold War deterrence debate
are giving us vocabulary that is not always helpful, as we try to
discuss a proper U.S.-Soviet relationship. In a way, our very words,
including words I've used today such as a ``mutual hostage
relationship,'' poison the water. We need fresh language reflecting our
real objectives, language which doesn't carry so much baggage.
We're experiencing manifestations of the ``Ifft rule.'' Ed Ifft is
famous for saying, ``it's not that our positions are different, its
that they're the same at different times.'' Some believe that this is a
description of a fickle or frivolous basis for negotiations. I don't
interpret the rule that way. Rather, it reflects the reality that as
circumstances change, what we should do can change.
If you go back to the mid-1980s, for example, the Soviet Union put
out many feelers to see if we would be willing to settle the ABM
dispute by agreeing to 200 ground based interceptors--or 300, or 400.
And it was in the United States that voices said, ``Wait a minute,
we'll never get an environmental impact statement through. Our future
is in space. This is a Soviet trap to get us to try to deploy some
missiles that we can't deploy politically while they build a large
ground based system. We will lose.'' Our positions have been the same
at different times, but there remains in the domestic debate today in
Russia and the United States, the Cold War remnant of, ``if it's good
for the other side, it must be bad for us.'' Again, we need to find a
way to break out of that mindset.
start ii compromises
When I first became active in arms control negotiations, the one
fundamental rule about domestic politics was that you never took a
treaty to Capitol Hill in election year. But in 1987, we broke the
rule. It wasn't all that easy, but it wasn't all that hard. We got the
INF Treaty ratified. Here we are again, in a much more difficult world,
in the middle of an election year in Russia as well as in the United
States. And friends of mine in Russia say to me, ``Well the problem is
that START II was negotiated from weakness, and our side gave too much
to you.'' I remember it a little differently, however. In fact, I
remember how much we gave to the Russian side that would have been
unthinkable in previous years. I think about the separate SLBM limit
that we'd never agreed to before, the bomber counting rules which
reversed a fundamental U.S. approach to stability. I think of the
intrusive inspection of bomber bases and special limits on bombers, and
how, again and again, on issues like the SS-19, silos dismantlement,
and simplified verification we allowed issues to be reopened in order
to address Russian concerns.
We used to say there could not be further reductions until after
START I had entered into force and after vast new improvements in
verification were achieved. Instead, at Russian insistence, we agreed
to act almost instantaneously on START II and, basically, to use the
START I verification rules. It was in the interests of both countries
for us to exhibit this flexibility, but these concessions, or
compromises, or flexibility by the United States, would not have taken
place in fact, if the situation had not changed in Russia. If the
previous regime had been in power in Moscow, we probably never would
have shown that flexibility. There probably would not have been a START
II Treaty.
So, when you think about the START II Treaty, remember that the
United States was actually very forthcming. We thought it was important
to a new, better relationship. And if we were wrong, that's going to
have tremendous impact at home and abroad. Yes, Russia is having an
electon, but so is the United States. In this election year, both sides
need to be very, very careful. To our Russia colleagues, I would say
don't ask our president to go to the Congress and to look as if he's
cutting deals with a foreign government blocking the aspirations of the
elected officials of the United States. The Congress expects the
president to come to them and to work out a united U.S. position. The
Congress expects him to work together during negotiation of that
position. Neither Russia nor the United States will gain from an end
run of their own political processes. At a minimum, there must be a
very close consultative process.
recommendations
What is my recommendation? I think we need to do some rethinking in
a less polarized way that brings all the player, including some new
players, to this process. There are certain things that our countries
have agreed already to do. Let's do them. START II is, I think,
essential. If we want to keep our relationship on track, moving in the
right direction, START II must enter into force. We can and should,
however, commit to a fresh look at the questions related to offenses
and defenses. This probably ought to be done after both countries'
elections.
This new process probably ought not be a negotiation initially, or
a formal government-to-government process by itself. It may require a
Track II process, and it should have a certain number of legislators
from the United States and Russia. An informal process--perhaps
initially off the record and anonymous--is necessary. Opinion leaders
with diverse views must rethink these questions of what we mean by
``the end of the Cold War'' and what we should do about offense and
defense after the Cold War. How do we think about balancing weapons if
the Cold War is really over, and how do we get beyond that? If we can't
do that, we're in for trouble.
a prediction
Now, let me make one prediction about the future. My own view is
that further defenses will be deployed. They're already deployed in
Russia. They will be deployed in the United States. Putting together
the coalition necessary will take longer than advocates recommend, and
this will continue to result in greater development costs. The
operational system itself, however, will inevitably cost less, not more
than has long been assumed. National missile defense will cost less
than what many people think because smaller threats are of increasing
urgency and because dual-use technologies which leverage defense are
advancing. The world of electronics is going in a direction that drives
many defense associated costs down.
The decision to deploy nationwide defenses, however, will not be
made in Moscow or Washington based upon an accountant's estimate of
affordability. It will be made when citizens demand that they be
defended. The event that will probably cause this to happen may not
even have anything to do with Russia, and it may not be based on an
initial threat against the United States. It may well be that theater
ballistic missiles, armed with a weapon of mass destruction, strikes
someone else's forces or cities. The world will suddenly change the way
it evaluates this equation. Much of the current debate will be washed
aside by the force of events.
Defenses are not an alternative to a multifaceted approach
including reductions, nonproliferation, and controlling smuggling, but
my own assessment is that we will be living for some time in a world in
which a multifaceted approach is not a substitute for defenses against
ballistic missiles. I believe that a new look undertaken without the
blinders of past political divisions will reveal that cooperating in
defending the people of Russia and the United States against ballistic
missiles will be seen as necessary for the security of both and a
powerful foundation upon which to build a more viably arms control and
non-proliferation regime.
Senator Hagel. General Habiger.
STATEMENT OF GENERAL EUGENE E. HABIGER, FORMER COMMANDER IN
CHIEF, U.S. STRATEGIC COMMAND, OMAHA, NE
General Habiger. Mr. Chairman, Senator Biden, thank you
very much for the opportunity to come to speak before this
committee.
First, let me tell you that in the 10 months that it has
been since I furled my flag and put on this civilian suit, my
views have not changed materially in this area.
The most significant change in my views has to do with the
deployment of the missile defense system.
I was always under the inclination that we needed the
system. It was not a matter of if we needed it but when we
needed it. But based upon the publication of the Rumsfeld
report since I retired, it has turned up certainly the wick in
my view that we ought to deploy that system sooner rather than
later.
I would like to make two points, if I could, sir. First,
regarding the cold war and the series of situations that we
have got ourselves into now as a result of that cold war and
how it ended: The cold war was a unique war. It lasted over 40
years. We had never experienced a conflict that lasted nearly
that long.
And the loser really did not lose. If you look at what we
did to the Germans after World War I, what we did to the
Germans and Japanese after World War II, we essentially
demilitarized them.
After the cold war ended, we essentially let the Russians
stay at their current--at then current nuclear levels of about
12,000 nuclear weapons.
So what we had at the end of the cold war was essentially
two eight-foot-tall boxers fully primed to beat the living
daylights out of each other, and they agreed to stand down.
Now, we have been on a very stable glide path with arms
control agreements to get down to new levels of nuclear
weapons, which is the right thing to do.
Hopefully, the Russians will, at some point in the not-too-
distant future, ratify START II, and we can get on with START
III. And I will tell you the Russians are very interested in
getting down to START IV levels.
The Russians have done the math, and they understand that
when you get to the START IV levels, whatever those levels are
going to be, it then must become a multilateral effort rather
than a bilateral effort, and that is going to be a much more
difficult situation.
With my experience with the Russians and the confidence
building over the past several years. I began my contacts with
the Russians back in 1992 when the chief of staff of the
Russian Air Force, came to Texas where I was stationed. I got
to know him very well.
The Russian military folks at the senior levels are very
professional. They are very serious about what they are doing.
They are also very paranoid about both our military
capabilities, and our technological capabilities. And if we
were to go out and walk away from the ABM Treaty, we would do
great harm in my view.
I agree with what Secretary Lehman said about pursuing
initiatives with the Russians. I think there is great potential
in this area.
The next point I would make, and my final point, is that we
will in fact need a ballistic missile defense system. But it
appears to me that we are myopic in our thinking if we assume
that it has to be a national system.
If you look back at how we have treated our allies, the
English, the Germans, the Japanese, I think we ought to--as
Secretary Lehman just described, be looking at more of a global
defensive system.
I have every confidence the Russians would step up to that
kind of an approach, and would also position us to not only
look at the three or four rogue nations that we see on the
horizon today, but the potential for other nations in the
future.
For example--I am not saying that India is a rogue nation,
but they are rapidly pursuing a capability. Pakistanis are
producing the capability. And--and who is to say that 50 years
from now that we might have to look to--to the south against
potential nations with these kinds of capabilities?
So, sir, it is with that that I make my opening statement.
I look forward to your questions.
Thank you.
Senator Hagel. General, thank you.
Dr. Payne.
STATEMENT OF DR. KEITH PAYNE, PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR OF
RESEARCH, NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY; AND ADJUNCT
PROFESSOR, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, DC
Dr. Payne. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a pleasure and a
great honor to be here, particularly serving with these
esteemed colleagues at the table.
I would like to summarize my opening statement and submit
the full statement for the record.
Senator Hagel. It will be included.
Dr. Payne. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I have spent several years closely examining
the Senate record to identify the rationale for the ABM Treaty
as it was presented to the Senate in 1972.
And it is on the basis of that study that one can conclude
that the treaty was built on particular arms control and
deterrence theories circa 1972.
Now, 27 years later it is clear that those theories were
thoroughly mistaken. Many are reluctant to acknowledge these
mistakes, perhaps because so much political and intellectual
capital has been invested in the ABM Treaty. Some are not
reluctant. But we should cease being influenced by theories
that have so little validity.
The ABM Treaty, for example, was ratified on the premise
that strictly limiting national missile defense would lead to
stabilizing offensive force reductions.
Arms control theory at the time posited that if national
missile defense was limited, reductions in Soviet ICBM's would
be forthcoming because the Soviet Union would not need to
penetrate U.S. defenses and, therefore, could agree to
reductions.
In short, the theory was: No ABM Treaty, no offensive force
reductions. But with the ABM Treaty, stabilizing offensive
force reductions.
While seeking the Senate's advice and consent on the ABM
Treaty, Nixon administration officials were specific about this
expected benefit of limiting national missile defense. Indeed,
it became the primary justification for the treaty.
For example, in 1972, Henry Kissinger testified before the
Senate that, and I quote, ``As long as the ABM Treaty lasts,
offensive missile forces have, in effect, a free ride to their
targets.''
That free ride for Soviet missiles was considered useful as
a necessary basis for negotiating offensive arms reductions.
Unfortunately, the expected benefit never was realized. In
fact, history unfolded in the opposite direction. For two
decades following the ABM Treaty, the Soviet Union pursued a
massive buildup of destabilizing ICBM's capable of threatening
U.S. strategic deterrent forces.
To be specific, the number of such deployed Soviet ICBM's
increased from 308 in 1972 to over 650 16 years later, with a
related increase in the number of Soviet countersilo warheads
from--from roughly 300 to well over 5,000. As a result, U.S.
ICBM's became vulnerable to a Soviet preemptive strike.
The Scowcroft Commission, on which Ambassador Woolsey
served, for example, judged U.S. ICBM silos to be vulnerable in
1983 as a result of this Soviet offensive buildup.
This Soviet buildup was precisely what arms control theory
predicted the ABM Treaty would preclude. It was entirely
contrary to the confident expectations that justified the
treaty. Such a confounding of expectations was predicted at the
time by very few prescient critics of the ABM Treaty.
Other related arms control claims for the ABM Treaty
similarly went unrealized. For example, during the Senate
hearings in 1972, senior officials claimed that the treaty
reflected Soviet acceptance of the U.S. concept of mutual
deterrence through mutual vulnerability.
The validity of that claim for the ABM Treaty was important
because it meant that neither side would seek to upset the
supposed deterrence balance established by the treaty.
Now, however, former senior Soviet officials have explained
repeatedly and at length that the ABM Treaty did not reflect
Soviet acceptance of our notions of deterrence through mutual
vulnerability. Far from it.
For the Soviet Union, the ABM Treaty represented a tactical
move to derail U.S. superiority in missile defense technology
and to permit the Soviet Union to concentrate its resources on
its strategic offensive buildup.
That is not my interpretation. That is the testimony of
senior Soviet officials.
In complete contradiction to arms control theory, the ABM
Treaty appears actually to have facilitated the Soviet
offensive missile buildup of the seventies and the eighties
that led to the vulnerability of our retaliatory forces.
The optimistic expectations used to justify the ABM Treaty
went unmet. I believe because the U.S. arms control theory
ultimately was based on ``mirror-imaging,'' it mistakenly
attributed U.S. goals and hopes to the Soviet Union.
Ironically, when Boris Yeltsin finally endorsed START
offensive reductions in 1992, he simultaneously proposed U.S.-
Russian cooperation on a global ballistic missile defense
system. That is, President Yeltsin proposed that offensive
reductions and missile defense move forward together.
And even now, key members of the Russian Duma publicly and
privately advocate cooperating with Washington on limited NMD
deployment as the route necessary to preserve the START
process.
In short, with 27 years of hindsight, it is now possible to
conclude, based on abundant empirical evidence, that the arms
control theory underlying the ABM Treaty was mistaken at its
foundation.
The deterrence theory underlying the ABM Treaty was
similarly mistaken. The deterrence argument justifying the
treaty in 1972 was that mutual deterrence would provide
reliable protection against missile attack, while missile
defense would undermine deterrence and not protect adequately.
Therefore, so the argument concluded, the United States should
focus on mutual deterrence as the preferred alternative to
national missile defense.
This line of reasoning was prevalent during the original
Senate ABM Treaty hearings and remains a commonly expressed
view.
It was plausible in 1972. To repeat it now reflects a
complete lack of familiarity with almost two decades of
scholarly research concerning deterrence.
I can summarize those findings in one sentence: Deterrence
is inherently unreliable for reasons that cannot humanly be
fixed.
Many U.S. officials and commentators continue to assert
otherwise. They typically express confidence that the absence
of a third world war proves that deterrence can be made
reliable.
Perhaps, it is enough to note in response to such hubris
that similar confidence in deterrence became popular during the
decades of peace following the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.
Unfortunately, such confidence came to a quick end with the
outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914.
I have closely examined actual historical cases of
deterrence and coercion over the course of many years--in fact,
going back 2,000 years.
My findings and those of similar empirical studies are that
deterrence fails with some frequency because flesh and blood
leaders do not consistently behave in the manner required by
deterrence theory.
Unlike the leaders typically assumed in theory, real
leaders can be uninformed and misinformed, isolated and out-of-
touch. They can make terrible mistakes. They can behave
willfully, foolishly, emotionally, unpredictably, unreasonably
and even irrationally.
They may not prefer a conflict, but they may see no
acceptable alternative; or they may have goals for which they
are willing to lead their societies into great sacrifice and
great risk.
Unfortunately, there are no earthly developments that can
reliably prevent these very real and very human factors from
undermining deterrence. And we should recognize this danger.
We were, for example, very fortunate to have made it
through the cold war, a conclusion now shared by former U.S.
officials who were involved in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis
and have had the opportunity to compare notes with their Cuban
and Russian counterparts.
The finding that a strategy of deterrence is inherently
unreliable does not mean that deterrence is useless. Far from
it.
But it does suggest strongly that to choose to remain
vulnerable to countries such as North Korea, on the basis of
confidence in deterrence, would be to thoroughly misunderstand
what deterrence can and cannot accomplish.
In conclusion, the ABM Treaty was built on arms control and
deterrence theories that now can be demonstrated empirically to
be mistaken.
The ABM Treaty did not facilitate the promised offensive
force reductions. And contrary to all comforting assurances,
deterrence is inherently unreliable. Its functioning cannot be
ensured or even predicted with any confidence. Serious
empirical research on the subject allows no other conclusion.
I believe that this fact alone, in light of the pace of
proliferation, argues strongly for NMD deployment if the
necessary technology is available.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Hagel. Dr. Payne, thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Payne follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Keith B. Payne
introduction
It is a great honor to address here two questions crucial to
consideration of national missile defense (NMD): First, how valid is
the arms control theory underlying the 1972 ABM Treaty?; and, second,
is the mutual vulnerability approach to deterrence in the U.S. national
interest?
The ABM Treaty was built on particular arms control and deterrence
theories. It now is clear that those theories were thoroughly mistaken.
Many are reluctant to acknowledge these flaws, perhaps because so much
political and intellectual capital has been invested in the ABM Treaty.
But we should cease being influenced by theories that have so little
validity.
the abm treaty and arms control theory
The ABM Treaty, for example, was ratified on the premise that
strictly limiting NMD would lead to ``stabilizing'' offensive force
reductions. Arms control theory at the time posited that if NMD was
limited, reductions in Soviet ICBMs would be forthcoming because the
Soviet Union would not need to penetrate U.S. defenses and therefore
could agree to reductions. In short, the theory was: no ABM Treaty, no
offensive force limitations; with the ABM Treaty, ``stabilizing''
offensive force reductions.
While seeking the Senate's advice and consent for the ABM Treaty.
Nixon administration officials were specific about this expected
benefit of limiting NMD; indeed, it became the primary justification
for the treaty. For example, in 1972 Henry Kissinger testified before
the Senate that, ``As long as [the ABM Treaty] lasts, offensive missile
forces have, in effect, a free ride to their targets.'' \1\ This ``free
ride'' for Soviet missiles was considered useful as the necessary basis
for negotiating offensive arms reductions. Unfortunately, the expected
benefit never was realized; in fact, history unfolded in the opposite
direction.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ Military Implication of the Treaty on the Limitations of Anti-
Ballistic Missile Systems and the Interim Agreement on Limitation of
Strategic Offensive Arms, Hearing Before the Committee on Armed Forces,
United States Senate, 92nd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. GPO, 1972), P. 121.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
For the two decades following the ABM Treaty, the Soviet Union
pursued a massive buildup of ``destabilizing'' ICBMs capable of
threatening U.S. strategic deterrent forces. To be specific, the number
of such deployed Soviet ICBMs increased from 308 in 1972 to over 650
sixteen years later, with a related increase in the number of Soviet
countersilo warheads from roughly 300 to well over 5,000. \2\ As a
result, U.S. ICBMs became vulnerable to a Soviet pre-emptive strike.
The ``Scowcroft Commission,'' for example, judged U.S. ICBM silos to be
vulnerable by 1983 as a result of this Soviet offensive buildup: ``The
Soviets nevertheless now probably possess the necessary combination of
ICBM numbers, reliability, accuracy, and warhead yield to destroy
almost all of the 1,047 U.S. ICBM silos, using only a portion of their
own ICBM force.'' \3\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ These statistics concerning Soviet strategic weapons are found
in John Collins and Bernard Victory, U.S/Soviet Military Balance,
Statistical Trends, 1980-1987, Report No. 88-425 S (Washington, D.C.:
Congressional Research Service, April 15, 1988); and John Collins and
Patrick Cronin, U.S./Soviet Military Balance, Assessments and
Statistic, Report No. 85-89 S (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research
Service, Spring 1985).
\3\ See Report of the President's Commission on Strategic Forces
(the Scowcroft Report) (Washington, D.C.: April 6, 1983), p. 4.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This Soviet buildup was precisely what arms control theory
predicted the ABM Treaty would preclude; it was entirely contrary to
the confident expectations that justified the treaty. Such a
confounding of expectations was predicted at the time by very few
prescient critics of the ABM Treaty.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ Several participants in the SALT I process were accurate in
their relatively pessimistic estimates of what would occur over the
next fifteen years. See, for example, William Van Cleave's testimony in
Military Implications, pp. 569-92. See also, Don Brennan, ``When the
SALT Hit the Fan,'' National Review, June 1972, pp. 685-92; and Mark
Schneider, ``Problems of SALT: 1972,'' Survive, July/August 1972, pp.
2-6.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Other related arms control claims for the ABM Treaty similarly went
unrealized. For example, during Senate hearings in 1972 senior
officials claimed that the treaty reflected Soviet acceptance of the
U.S. concept of mutual deterrence through mutual vulnerability. As
Secretary of State William Rogers stated before the Senate: ``This [ABM
Treaty] is a general undertaking of utmost significance. Without a
nationwide ABM defense, there can be no shield against retaliation.
Both nuclear powers have recognized, and in effect agreed to maintain
nuclear deterrence.'' \5\ The validity of this claim was critical for
the ABM Treaty because it meant that neither side would seek to upset
the supposed deterrence balance established by the treaty.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ Secretary of State William Rogers, Statement to Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, June 19, 1972, quoted in, SALT I Reconsidered
(Washington, D.C.: Institute of American Relations, 1979), p. 99.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Former senior Soviet officials, however, have since explained
repeatedly and at length that the ABM Treaty did not reflect Soviet
acceptance of U.S. notions of deterrence and mutual vulnerability. Far
from it. For the Soviet Union, the ABM Treaty represented a tactical
move to derail U.S. superiority in missile defense technology and to
permit the Soviet Union to concentrate its resources on its strategic
offensive buildup.\6\ In complete contradiction to arms control theory,
the ABM Treaty appears to have facilitated the Soviet offensive missile
buildup of the 1970s and 1980s.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\6\ See, for example, the discussion in, William E. Odom, The
Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998), pp. 71, 436.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The optimistic expectations used to justify the ABM Treaty went
unmet, I believe, because U.S. arms control theory ultimately was based
on ``mirror-imaging''; it mistakenly attributed U.S. goals and hopes to
the Soviet Union.
Ironically, when Boris Yeltsin finally endorsed START offensive
reductions in 1992, he simultaneously proposed U.S.-Russian cooperation
on a global ballistic missile defense system. That is, President
Yeltsin proposed that offensive reductions and missile defense move
forward together. And, even now, key members of the Duma advocate
cooperating with Washington on limited NMD deployment as the route
necessary to preserve the START process.\7\ With twenty-seven years of
hindsight, it now is possible to conclude, based on abundant empirical
evidence, that the arms control theory underlying the ABM Treaty was
mistaken at its foundation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\7\ See, ``Duma Member Alexei Arbatov on Joint NMD,'' Russian Arms
Control Digest, No. 36 (April 13, 1999). See also, ``Duma Advisors
Advocate Russian Accommodation on ABM Treaty to Preserve Some NMD
Limits and START Process,'' Russian Arms Control Digest, No. 39 (April
26, 1999).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
the abm treaty and deterrence theory
The deterrence theory underlying the ABM Treaty is similarly
mistaken. The deterrence argument justifying the treaty in 1972 was
that mutual deterrence would provide reliable protection against
missile attack, while missile defense would undermine deterrence and
not protect adequately. Therefore, so the argument concluded, the U.S.
should focus on mutual deterrence as the preferred alternative to NMD.
This line of reasoning was prevalent during the original Senate ABM
Treaty hearings and remains a commonly-expressed view. Unfortunately,
it reflects a complete lack of familiarity with almost two decades of
scholarly research concerning deterrence. I can summarize those
findings in one sentence: deterrence is inherently unreliable for
reasons that cannot humanly be ``fixed.''
Many U.S. officials and commentators continue to assert otherwise.
They typically express the notion that the absence of a Third World War
proves that deterrence can be made reliable. For example, in 1995,
then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs,
Joseph Nye said that ``if deterrence prevented 10,000 Soviet missiles
from reaching the United States, it baffles me as to why it wouldn't
prevent 20 Chinese missiles from reaching Alaska.'' \8\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ ``Word for Word,'' Defense News, October 23-29, p. 26.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Then-Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Jan
Lodal made the same point in even more definitive terms: ``Nuclear
deterrence worked throughout the Cold War, it continues to work now, it
will work into the future . . . The exact same kinds of nuclear
deterrence calculations that have always worked will continue to
work.'' \9\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\9\ Jan Lodal and Ashton Carter, News Conference Transcript, July
31, 1995. (mimeo).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
When discussing U.S. nuclear weapons then-Deputy Secretary of
Defense John Deutch stated in congressional testimony that,
``Deterrence is ensured by having a survivable capability to hold at
risk what potentially hostile leaders value, and we will maintain that
capability.'' \10\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ Testimony in U.S. House, Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S.
Nuclear Policy: Hearings, 103rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.:
USGPO, 1995), p. 36 (emphasis added).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps it is enough to note in response to such statements that
confidence in deterrence became popular during the decades of peace
following the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. That confidence came to a
quick end with the outbreak of World War I in the summer of 1914.
I have closely examined numerous actual historical cases of
deterrence and coercion occurring over the course of many centuries.
\11\ My findings, and those of similar empirical studies, are that
deterrence fails with some frequency because flesh and blood leaders do
not consistently behave in the manner required by deterrence theory.
Unlike the leaders typically assumed in theory, real leaders can be
uninformed and misinformed, isolated and out-of-touch; they can make
terrible mistakes, behave willfully, foolishly, emotionally,
unpredictably, unreasonably, and even irrationally. They may not prefer
conflict, but see no acceptable alternative; or, they may have goals
for which they are willing to lead their societies into great wartime
sacrifice and enormous risk.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\11\ Some of this work is summarized in, Keith B. Payne, Deterrence
In The Second Nuclear Age (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky,
1996).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unfortunately, there are no earthly developments that can reliably
prevent these very human factors from undermining deterrence, and we
should recognize this danger. We were, for example, very fortunate to
have made it through the Cold War--a conclusion now shared by former
U.S. officials who were involved in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and
have had the opportunity to compare notes with their Cuban and Russian
counterparts.
The finding that a strategy of deterrence is inherently unreliable
does not mean that deterrence is useless. Far from it. But it does
suggest strongly that to choose to remain vulnerable to countries such
as North Korea, on the basis of confidence in deterrence, would be to
thoroughly misunderstand what deterrence can and cannot accomplish.
conclusion
In conclusion, the ABM Treaty was built on arms control and
deterrence theories that now can be demonstrated empirically to be
mistaken. The ABM Treaty did not facilitate the promised offensive
force reductions and, contrary to all comforting assurances, deterrence
is inherently unreliable; its functioning cannot be ``ensured'' or even
predicted with any confidence. Serious empirical research on the
subject allows no other conclusion. In light of the pace of missile
proliferation, this fact alone argues strongly for NMD deployment if
the necessary technology is available.
Senator Hagel. And once again, to all four of our
witnesses, we are grateful.
Now, let me introduce the ranking minority member of the
Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Biden.
Senator Biden. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Gentlemen, I apologize for coming late. I am, like all of us,
on more than one committee. And I have a Juvenile Justice bill,
and Janet Reno is testifying before our Judiciary Committee
downstairs. As you all well know, the Nation has been gripped
by the violence that took place in Colorado, and that is the
subject of our discussion, so I apologize.
Quite frankly, nothing is of more consequence to this
Nation and its future than what we are talking about today.
I have an opening statement, and I would like to ask
unanimous consent that it be placed in the record in its
entirety, Mr. Chairman.
Senator Hagel. It will be.
Senator Biden. Mr. Chairman, yesterday we had the first
hearing on the issue that we have before us today. And the
hearing, I think it is fair to say, casts very strong doubt on
whether the thin missile defense system proposed by the
administration makes much sense, on whether--if we are going to
move toward a missile defense system--this is the wisest way to
move.
Most of our witnesses yesterday were not prepared to
support the proposed national missile defense system that we
are debating in the Congress in the Cochran bill, if it were
going to be the only system that were built; rather, the
supporters of national missile defense favored space-based and
sea-based systems, of a much greater capacity and capability.
I remember that if our only concern were North Korea's
ICBM's--and this is a question, General, that I am going to ask
you in a bit--it seemed to some that we could move readily to
address that threat by striking a deal with Moscow to station
boost-phase interceptors in the Vladivostok area. Quite
frankly, that would be the single most effective way to deal
with the North Korean threat, and the cheapest by a longshot.
Today's focus on the arms control value of the ABM Treaty
is timely and, if we were to accept Dr. Payne's assertions,
useless. Supporters of a national ballistic missile defense do
not wish merely to guard against rogue nations and rogue
strikes, despite the rhetoric that we--not you--use on the
floor of the U.S. Senate.
Rather, as Dr. Bill Graham said yesterday, they see mutual
deterrence as either a useless or an immoral strategy and argue
that we should just straight out abandon the ABM Treaty.
And the reason I respect Mr. Woolsey's comments is that he
has not fooled around with this. He just thinks we should flat
out get rid of the ABM Treaty and move on.
Today, we can address the question of whether the half
century of missile defense has produced a good result. Dr.
Payne concludes it has not.
Part of the problem is that we would not be building our
missile defense system in a vacuum here. We are not starting
from scratch. Despite the end of the cold war, as General
Habiger has pointed out, there are still thousands of nuclear
weapons in Russian hands.
It remains in our vital interest to manage our
relationship, it seems to me, with Russia, so that neither side
ever feels compelled to--to use those weapons. And one of the
best ways to further reduce the danger of a nuclear war with
Russia is to continue the process, regardless of how it came
about, of strategic arms reductions. I suspect we would all
think that it is useful for us, that it is in our interest,
that the Russians reduce the number of nuclear weapons they
have in their possession.
Whether it is through the START process or any other
process, we need to ensure that Russia finally ratifies, if we
are going to stay the course now, START II and that we move
quickly to START III. We need to be able to get to a START IV
if, in fact, such a treaty makes sense, assuming the underlying
proposition is correct, that it is in our interests that the
Russians--not a particularly stable government at this moment,
and the Lord only knows where they will be 10 years from now--
have fewer weapons, particularly MIRV'ed weapons, at the end of
the day.
It seems to me we also have to continue working with Russia
on such nonproliferation concerns as control and disposition of
fissile material, avoiding a Russian nuclear brain drain, and
stopping Russian assistance to other countries' nuclear or
long-range missile programs.
All those efforts, I think, will be put at risk--and one of
the questions I want to ask is whether you think those efforts
are meaningful and necessary, and likely to be put at risk--by
abrogation of the ABM Treaty, were we to decide to do that? For
many in the Senate share Mr. Woolsey's view that we should
abrogate the treaty.
Dr. Payne may be right regarding the fallibility of
deterrence, although I suspect you are not, Doctor. I would
wonder, however, whether your study of 2000 years shows that
those human factors you cited were any more or less relevant to
the defensive systems of the other side.
I think you have stated a universal truth that applies not
only to deterrence, but to defensive systems as well. Some
supporters of a national ballistic missile defense system
understand these risks. Dr. Schlesinger told this committee 2
weeks ago: ``We should not casually damage our political
relationship with Russian in a way that simultaneously would
damage Russian prestige and make Russians less cooperative with
us.''
And he was referring to many of the things I mentioned, the
things that you have been working on, Secretary Lehman, the
non-proliferation issues that you know so well.
When we get to the questions, which we are going to do in
about 10 seconds, Mr. Chairman, I would like to be able to have
a discussion when I ask some questions. I would like to invite
everyone to get involved in it. Especially when we have so few
members here, it is a useful thing, at least for me and I
suspect also for the chairman, if you all take on one another
when you disagree. Mind you, I am not trying to start a fight.
But you are a very knowledgeable panel; and to the extent
that you may disagree with each other, it would be useful for
us to understand those differences. It would enlighten us a
little bit.
So let me conclude by saying that as I have sort of peeled
back the onion here, it seems to me that at its root, the real
debate here is not about a thin missile defense system. Rather,
it is about whether or not we have a true national missile
defense system and the degree to which that impacts on our
relationships with the one outfit that still has a whole hell
of a lot of those big old missiles. For we are talking about
only three, four, five, seven, eight missiles that North Korea
may build--that might make it across the ocean, that probably
can make it to Hawaii but we are not sure--but we know there
are thousands that we have a high degree of confidence can make
it from Russian soil to United States soil.
You know, the chairman and I have worked a lot on matters
in the Balkans and on NATO. And we were both told of an
incident--I will not reveal the source, but it is fascinating:
I asked one of our negotiators on the NATO strategic
doctrine question, ``What kind of progress are you making with
the French?''
And he said, ``Well, we are making some good progress.''
But he said, ``The other day, my French counterpart looked at
me and said, `Yes, yes, it works in practice. But will it work
in theory?' ''
Now allegedly, that was actually said. So, Dr. Payne, I
want to know about practice, not theory.
Dr. Payne. All right.
Senator Biden. And if we were back in 1972, a guy like me
might reach a different conclusion than I may be willing to
reach about such a system in 1999, in light of the state of the
world being very different today.
And so I am looking for practice, not just theory here. But
I am not suggesting any of you are only talking about theory.
So hopefully, we can have a discussion.
I thank you for allowing me to make a statement, Mr.
Chairman, and I yield back the floor.
Senator Hagel. Senator Biden, thank you.
[The prepared statement of Senator Biden follows:]
Prepared Statement of Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you especially for chairing todays
hearing with a witness who is well known to you--General Eugene
Habiger, former Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Strategic Command. General
Habiger was one of the Pentagon's finest strategic thinkers, and I
think we will all benefit from his insights.
Actually, I look forward to hearing from all of today's witnesses.
Both Jim Woolsey and Keith Payne have studied the Russian leadership.
All of our witnesses, therefore, can speak to whether Russian officials
are merely posturing when they warn against abrogating the ABM Treaty.
All our witnesses can address the risk that U.S. action to deploy a
national missile defense might sacrifice START II and future strategic
arms reductions, and condemn us to face MIRV'ed ICBM's for decades to
come.
These questions will be crucial to the decision on whether to
deploy a national missile defense by 2005. To put this hearing into
context, the administration says that it will base its deployment
decision on four criteria:
(1) whether a threat exists to the United States;
(2) the cost-effectiveness of missile defenses;
(3) whether the necessary technology exists to build a
defensive system; and
(4) whether the benefits of deploying that system outweigh
any possible negative effects it might have on U.S.-Russian
relations.
The administration clearly recognizes that a missile threat exists
and will fund a very limited, National Missile Defense system. But the
jury is still out when it comes to the administration's final two
criteria, both of which were supported by the Senate in the amended
Cochran bill.
In my view, yesterday's hearing cast strong doubt on the
proposition that those criteria can be met in the near term. While our
panel of technical experts differed in their basic views on missile
defense, they all agreed that a limited ballistic missile defense
system would have to deal with ever more sophisticated countermeasures.
In addition, they all understood that the proposed National Missile
Defense is a ``high-risk'' program.
Most of our witnesses yesterday were not prepared to support the
proposed National Missile Defense system if that were the only system
to be built. Rather, the supporters of national missile defense favored
space-based and sea-based systems with much greater capabilities. If
our only concern were North Korean ICBM's, we could more readily
address that threat by striking a deal with Moscow to station a boost-
phase intercept system near Vladivostok, or on military cargo ships off
the coast there.
Today's focus on the arms control value of the ABM Treaty is thus
most timely. Supporters of a national ballistic missile defense do not
wish merely to guard against rogue-state missiles, despite the rhetoric
of the last year on that issue. Rather, like Dr. Bill Graham yesterday,
they see mutual deterrence as an immoral strategy--despite the fact
that it has given us more than half a century of strategic stability
without a single use of nuclear weapons or intercontinental missiles.
Today we can address the question of whether a half century of U.S.
missile defense will produce as good a result. Part of the problem is
that we would not be building our missile defense in a vacuum. Despite
the end of the Cold War, Russia still has thousands of nuclear weapons.
It remains in our vital strategic interest to manage our relationship
with Russia so that neither side ever feels compelled to use those
weapons.
One of the best ways to further reduce the danger of nuclear war
with Russia is to continue the strategic arms reduction process--the
START process. We need to ensure that Russia finally ratifies START II,
either by itself or in combination with a START III treaty that reduces
the strategic arms burden for both our countries. I am hard put to see
how that can be done, unless we conform any national missile defense we
may build to an amended ABM Treaty.
We must also continue working with Russia on such non-proliferation
concerns as: the control and disposition of fissile material; avoiding
a Russian nuclear ``brain drain;'' and stopping Russian assistance to
other countries' nuclear or long-range missile programs. All of those
efforts will be put at risk if Russia perceives the United States as
building missile defenses to make it safe to use nuclear weapons
without fear of retaliation.
Some supporters of a national ballistic missile defense understand
these risks. As Jim Schlesinger told this Committee two weeks ago, ``we
should not casually damage our political relationship with Russia in a
way that simultaneously would damage . . . Russian prestige and make
the Russians less cooperative with us.''
I share Secretary Schlesinger's concern to maintain that
relationship with Russia, and I look forward to hearing the views of
the witnesses on these important topics.
Senator Hagel. Let me get a couple of questions on the
record for Chairman Helms before we get into some of the give
and take that Senator Biden has suggested and that I think is a
good way to do this.
General Habiger, many have argued that ballistic missile
defenses are fundamentally inconsistent with strategic arms
reductions, but if that is the case, why does the SALT II
Treaty explicitly call upon parties to observe the joint
statement on a global protection system, which according to the
treaty's article-by-article analysis relates to START II and
the creation of a global system against ballistic missile
attack?
General Habiger. Interesting question. I do not see an
inconsistency. The ABM Treaty--the deployment of ABM systems
was almost immediately negated with the advent of multiple
independent reentry vehicles. And that is one of the reasons
why the Russians stopped at Moscow, and we stopped at the great
State of North Dakota.
The ABM Treaty and our adherence to it has given the
Russians some--some solace that we are not going to run away
technologically. That is a big deal for them, our technological
advantages.
And based upon those things, I will just stop right there,
sir.
Senator Hagel. Ambassador Woolsey, would you like to add
anything to that, or Secretary Lehman?
Ambassador Woolsey. I guess I would say that I think a
steady state of substantial defenses and low levels of offense
is not, even in theory or likely in practice, to be unstable.
It seems to me what most people have historically been
worried about is transition. One cannot deploy ballistic
missile defenses overnight.
And if you were in, let us say back, a cold war
environment, say in the early eighties, when there were at some
times very great tensions between the United States and Soviet
Union, and you had just barely embarked on deploying defenses,
and the other side, the Soviet Union, let us say, saw its
deterrent being degraded year by year, month by month, then
under those circumstances, I think, so the deterrence theory
ran, it might be more likely in a crisis for the Soviets to use
nuclear weapons, because they felt that over a long period of
time their deterrent was going to be seriously degraded.
I think--I think Keith put this right--deterrence is far
from historically reliable, but sometimes it is useful.
And I think deterrence in a number of circumstances during
the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union was
useful, in part because the Soviet Union was most of the time a
somewhat stodgy power.
It was not, in a lot of circumstances, all that
venturesome; and the people who ran it tended more to be
bureaucrats than madmen. I think the situation could be very
different with an Iraq or Iran or North Korea.
But to come back to Senator Helms's question, I think that
in a steady state and as an ultimate situation, either during
the cold war or especially today, substantial defenses are not
inconsistent with low levels of offense. The trick has always
been, and particularly back during the cold war, getting from
point A to point B.
Senator Hagel. And before I ask Secretary Lehman to
respond: Was not a good amount of the Bush administration's
1992 negotiations with the Russians based on the--the
assumption that defense was a very significant part of START
II?
Ambassador Woolsey. I----
Senator Hagel. Ambassador, do you want to respond to that--
I know Secretary Lehman does, but----
Ambassador Woolsey. You can----
Senator Hagel. Go ahead, Mr. Secretary.
Secretary Lehman. Yes. In fact, both in START I and START
II, well, going back to the SALT process, there was a very long
series of interactions on how offense should relate to defense,
and that is reflecting the historic reality that there has
always been an offense/defense relationship.
At various times in various negotiations, we sometimes
tried to leverage the defensive negotiations by emphasizing the
offensive; the offensive by emphasizing the defensive.
Sometimes, we wanted to de-link them. Sometimes we wanted to
link them. Both sides did this, depending on the circumstances.
One of the things I am most proud of in the arms control
field was the START II Treaty. I fought very hard to get that
treaty. There was a time when people thought that after START
I, there would be nothing. I think we surprised the world by
what we achieved.
The particular provisions that you are talking about, in
fact, I was very actively involved in negotiating. And we made
it very clear that it was our intent to proceed toward
deployment of defenses and it was in that context that we were
proceeding with START II.
I would like to come back at some point on this broader
question of Russian attitudes and the offense/defense
relationship.
But I think you had wanted me to address more specifically
this other question of the relationship between deterrence and
defense.
As I said, there has always been offense/defense in
history. And sometimes the offense plays a more predominant
role. Sometimes the defense plays a more predominant role.
But I have never viewed ballistic missile defenses as
always being a substitute for or an enemy of deterrence. You
put together a package that makes the world safer and supports
your national security interests.
I think there is a lot of oversimplification from both the
advocates and opponents of ballistic missile defense on that
relationship.
I believe that the United States needs to maintain a strong
deterrent, and I think that it will. But I think increasingly
the world is such that a component of the strategy that needs
to get greater emphasis is ballistic missile defense.
Senator Hagel. As a Nebraska Cornhusker, I appreciate the
difference between offense and defense.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Dr. Payne, would you care to add anything to the question?
Dr. Payne. Well, just the point that when President Yeltsin
proposed the global protection system in January 1992, what he
did was to confound all of the previous arms control theory
that described earlier, because essentially what he said was:
We, in Russia, will accept and actually endorse the idea of
reducing offensive forces. At the same time, we would like to
go forward with missile defense.
That, in effect, was what arms control theory said could
not happen. And that theory was what the ABM Treaty was built
on.
Senator Hagel. A question to each of the four of you: In
your opinions, is it the economic pressures facing Russia today
that is driving their strategic evaluations and policies more
than any arms control agreements or ideas?
Are they mixed, or how would--how would you rate the
economic pressures on Russia as to how they are evaluating and
implementing their defense posture policy strategies?
Secretary Lehman.
Secretary Lehman. There is no doubt that Russia is going
through a very difficult economic time. And so some of the
projections of how low Russian forces will go primarily are
motivated by an economic analysis.
But let me make one additional point. If Russia really
believed the United States was a great Satan, the big enemy,
they would find the resources and they would find a way to
retain some level of forces.
But, in fact, it is fact that we are engaged with them. The
world has changed. That permits them to try to assess their
priorities and the United States is not, I think, their great
enemy.
Senator Hagel. Ambassador.
Ambassador Woolsey. Mr. Chairman, during the last 6 years,
the Russian economy declined by most measures by at least 50
percent, and during the deepest 6 years of the Great
Depression, ours declined by about a third, so they have had
more than the Great Depression and they do not look like they
are coming out of it.
The fact that they have not been able to pay their
international debts and continue to have to be bailed out is
undermining substantially any foreign investment, which is the
only thing, I think, that is going to lead them out of the
economic situation they are in. And so they are under very
great fiscal stress. Their economy is now smaller than the
Netherlands and headed down.
But they are still finding enough resources to work on a
new ICBM and to put the proportionately larger share of their
military resources into their strategic nuclear programs.
This has been combined with a shift in doctrine somewhat
similar to that which we undertook in the Eisenhower
administration--more bang for the buck, a shift toward heavier
reliance on nuclear forces.
And they clearly regard their nuclear forces as their trump
card. In a sense, it is the only thing really that makes them a
great power. Insofar as they are a great power at all, it is
only because of those.
Now, I think that they see the United States' flirtation
with ballistic missile defenses in a very straightforward way.
I do not think there is a lot of offense/defense theory here.
I do not think there is a lot other than, ``If the United
States gets these, they are going to be technologically
substantially ahead of us and ahead of us in deployed defensive
forces and that is bad because it is a zero sum game.''
I think Mr. Primakov very much believes that it is a zero
sum game and that is what is good for us is bad for Russia and
vice versa.
I think President Yeltsin is not necessarily of that view,
and he certainly was not of that view in 1992.
I think part of the difficulty here is finding a way to
appeal to and work with those Russians--such as Yavlinsky and
his Yabloko party, some parts of the foreign ministry,
President Yeltsin hopefully--that might be willing to work with
us in getting back into the mode we were in 1992.
I do think that is preferable to our withdrawing from the
treaty. A substantial change in the treaty negotiated with the
Russians is something I think we should definitely try, and I
think it is definitely preferable to withdrawing from the
treaty.
But at the present writing, I would see Mr. Primakov's zero
sum attitude as the thing which is really dominating Russian
thinking. And I think it is pretty simple and straightforward.
They think if it is high-tech and we are doing it and they
cannot, that is bad. Pretty much end of theory.
Senator Hagel. Thank you.
Dr. Payne.
Dr. Payne. The economic pressures in Russia, particularly
in the strategic field are enormous. I work on a fairly regular
basis with some key members of the Duma on exactly these
questions. Specifically, we have worked on a joint study that
has been ongoing since 1994.
Ambassador Vladimir Lukin, the chairman of the Duma's
Foreign Relations Committee has participated in this study, as
has Dr. Alexei Arbitov, the deputy chair of the Defense
Committee of the Duma.
So, we have some senior members of the Russian leadership
participating in this study, looking at exactly these
questions.
One of the points that has been consistent over the years
is that the Russian Federation expects that for economic
reasons, they will have to go down to 1,500 to 2,000 weapons,
perhaps even lower.
Consequently, the main argument for Duma ratification of
START II is that Russia will need to go down to those lower
force levels for economic reasons, and they would rather the
United States go down to those levels as well, even though the
United States is not necessarily so constrained by economic
pressure.
Interestingly, most recently Alexei Arbitov, the deputy
chair of the Defense Committee at the Duma, proposed
cooperation with the United States on deploying limited
national missile defense as what Russian ought to do to keep
the START arms control process going.
So it is not as if there is consistent and block-like
opposition to cooperation with the United States on going
forward with the limited national missile defense.
There is a good deal of support in the more progressive
circles in the Duma for moving forward with the United States,
not on the basis of any romantic, happy-face vision of our
relationship with Russia, but for very pragmatic pro-Russian
reasons.
Senator Hagel. Thank you.
General Habiger.
General Habiger. Yes, sir. There are two sectors of the
Russian military that are as fully funded as you can get. That
is their nuclear forces, which includes the 12th Directorate,
which handles the maintenance of their nuclear weapons; and
their special forces.
Their nuclear forces, I think for obvious reasons, are
fully funded, and I am including their--their Navy ballistic
missile submarines, their bomber force as well as their ICBM
force. Their special forces being as--about as fully funded as
you can get just because, in my view, of concerns over internal
control.
I know for a fact that the--the senior Russian military
folks have been pleading with the Duma to get on with START II,
absolutely pleading, because they want to get on with getting
rid of systems that are very costly to maintain.
So while economic pressures play a very large role in what
we are talking about, in the arena of arms control, it is
clearly, in my view, political pressures rather than economic
providing the primary motivation.
If the politicians in the Duma were to vote START II and
press on with START III, we would see some very rapid movement
on the part of the military establishment.
Senator Hagel. Thank you.
Senator Biden.
Senator Biden. Dr. Payne, I meet with those same fellows
you mentioned and have over the last several years, and let me
ask you a question.
What do you think their reaction would be if, by the next
time you interview them for your study, the President of the
United States has announced abrogation of the ABM Treaty?
Dr. Payne. I think we would have a very negative response.
Senator Biden. Yes. I think so too. I think that may be the
single greatest understatement I have heard in the last couple
of months, at least from witnesses.
And so it seems to me we got to figure out a way somewhere
between the extremes. Actually, I am beginning to get worried;
I am liking Lehman more and more every time he comes to
testify.
And we have been doing this--how long have we been doing
this, Mr. Secretary? I mean, years and years and years.
Secretary Lehman. Well, at least 20, I fear.
Senator Biden. That is right.
And all kidding aside, I think that, from my perspective
anyway, Mr. Chairman, Secretary Lehman has put his finger on
it.
And that is, what is the mix here? What is the balance?
There are so many overstatements made by arms controllers, as
well as by those who think arms control is fundamentally and
basically flawed and a bad idea.
Do any of you disagree with the proposition that it would
be better to amend the ABM Treaty with the Russians to
accommodate whatever you think need be done--and that varies
among you--than it would be to abrogate the ABM Treaty at this
moment?
Ambassador Woolsey. I agree with that.
General Habiger. I agree with that, too.
Dr. Payne. Better to amend.
Senator Biden. Amend?
Dr. Payne. Yes, sir.
Secretary Lehman. Well, I guess I would disagree.
Senator Biden. OK.
Secretary Lehman. But let me explain. Obviously, I am not
opposed to amending the ABM Treaty, because, in fact, I was
engaged in that process. But I think it would be better if we
could find a new vehicle.
But in the--you said, ``Be pragmatic. Be practical.''
I would have preferred a new vehicle. But if we cannot
negotiate a new vehicle, then I am prepared to work with a
vehicle that may be more desirable to the Russians.
Having said that, though, I want to emphasize that, when
you are trying to add onto something that already exists, it
complicates the elaboration of what you really want to do.
Senator Biden. That is a valid point. That is a valid
point. I think we would all agree, however, that it would be
better to end up in a circumstance where the Russians and we
agreed on how to proceed from this point on, whether it is
within the context of the existing ABM Treaty, as amended, or
whether it is a through replacement for the ABM Treaty. The
point is they should, basically, be in on the deal here.
Ambassador Woolsey. Senator Biden, I agree with that. But I
think there is an important point here.
I have been negotiating with the Russians off and on now
for 30 years come this fall, and I would say that it is not
always the case that the things that make them likely to work
with you are the things that they say will make them likely to
work with you.
Senator Biden. I agree with that.
Ambassador Woolsey. They got, I think, really rather
cordial after President Reagan's SDI speech in fear that the
United States might actually go ahead and do something in that
area. And I think that sometimes demeanor and approach is very
important with them.
They are a proud people and a proud country. And they do
not like being treated as second class international citizens.
It is important to show them respect. It is important to work
with them on all these things that you mentioned, Nunn-Lugar
and the brain drain and so forth.
And it is important to treat them in superficial matters,
as well as in basic ones, as important, in spite of the state
of their economy and so forth.
But I think that when they see the handwriting on the wall,
when they see that we are likely to move forward with defensive
systems, I think you will find that they will become more
accommodating to amending the treaty rather than less.
Senator Biden. I would generally agree with that, assuming
that I believed that there was somebody we were dealing with.
This is not 1993 or 1994. It is certainly not 1989.
And I see no center from which to deal. I see no place that
gives me any degree of certainty that there is some particular
leadership at this moment that I would have great confidence
would be likely to react in a rational way, in their own
rational best interest.
In talking about Soviet leaders, we used the phrase
``stodgy.'' We used the phrase ``conservative.'' We used the
phrase ``self interested.'' The point is: For 50 years, even
with the mistakes we have each made, Soviet leaders were
relatively cautious and generally did what was in their best
interest, because there has been--from an American
perspective--a dictatorial center, a place from which decisions
could be implemented and made. I do not see such a center at
this moment.
I do not disagree with the thrust of what you are saying. I
would just make the observation that it is a different playing
field right now.
But let me move to a specific question, if I may. It seems
to me that there is more than a shred of truth to what you have
all said here. And you all have picked slightly different
points of emphasis.
From the standpoint of a policymaker on a small scale--
because I have no illusions about the Senate's role in this--it
seems to me that we should be looking down the road and asking
what our relationship with Russia should look like in the next
10 to 15 years, as well as dealing with the immediate interests
that we have relating to the politically hot threat from rogue
states.
General, you had numerous conversations with Russia's last
two Strategic Rocket Force commanders, one of whom became
Minister of Defense, when you were Commander in Chief of U.S.
Strategic Command. I would like to ask you a few questions
about that.
General Habiger. Certainly.
Senator Biden. And I realize your information is arguably
dated, even though it is only months old.
How would you assess that your two counterparts feel about
the prospects of ratifying START II and making further
reductions in the absence--in the absence of a U.S. national
ballistic missile defense system? I think you have answered
this, but I want it clearly on the record.
General Habiger. I have discussed both issues at some
length. And let me just make it as simple as I can make it.
Both my counterparts were--General Sergeyev and General
Yakovlev--General Sergeyev, both when he was the Commander in
Chief Rocket Forces and in his current position as the Minister
of Defense--feel very strongly that we need to move out very
quickly with START II, move out equally as quickly with START
III. General Yakovlev feels exactly the same way. But every
time we then transition the discussion to ballistic missile
defenses, their--their comments to me were very, very
emotional.
Their concerns relate to the fact that the U.S. had an
opportunity to deploy a system, and we did not. They deployed a
system. And now you want to deploy a system that is outside
the--the treaty.
They did not use these words. These are my words. But they
considered that to be a ``technical foul.''
At this point in time they would probably say, from a
military perspective that ``If you went with--if you walked out
on the ABM Treaty, that we would not go forward with the arms
control agreements.''
My sensing is, based upon my conversations, that--that they
would be reluctant to go along with arms control if we walked
out of START II or the ABM Treaty. But----
Senator Biden. Well, let me ask you a sort of a takeoff on
that. One of the things that President Reagan talked about in
the grand style that he would do things--and I mean this in a
sincere complimentary way--was this notion of sharing missile
defense technology with the Russians.
Again today, in dealing with some of the same people whom
Dr. Payne and all of us have dealt with over the last years--
and it may sound strange to say this, and if I were brand new
to this place, you could assume this was Pollyanna-ish, but as
I said, like you, I have been doing this a long time--seems to
me that the political circumstances may be more ripe than
anyone is willing to acknowledge, or that we are allowing
ourselves to believe, to sit with our counterparts, even though
we are not certain as to who is calling the shots, and begin to
pursue in a serious way, in a concrete way, what President
Reagan spoke about in a hopeful way about sharing technology.
And the reason why I have become sort of fixated on
something that is, I acknowledge, not an answer to any of the
larger issues we have discussed here today, but on this notion
of an agreement with the Russians related to a boost-phase
defense system located on Russian soil or off the Russian
coast, is that to use a phrase that Secretary Lehman almost
invented--this would be not only in their interest, but
confidence building, as well.
My view is that it may be a place to begin. I am not
suggesting that there is anything automatic about their
acceptance of this. I am not suggesting that it is not a hard
sell. I am not suggesting that we are not going to have to go
through the 12 layers of paranoia that exists. And I mean that
sincerely.
I have found in my last three or four trips to Moscow,
dealing with all of the people you have mentioned from
Yavlinsky's party on down, that there is this incredible
feeling of isolation. It is almost as if we have hurt their
feelings in some way. There is this paranoia, in which--
although most people, Mr. Secretary, acknowledge that we are
not the great Satan--there are clearly some sectors of the
political establishment that, in fact, view this as a grand
scheme and plot to finally snuff out Russia.
And so, I am of the view that if this were done with a
concerted effort, we may be able to begin to both protect
against rogue states and repair U.S.-Russian relations. I
realize this is going to come across as incrementalism, which
is always seen as in and of itself bad, in the context of
foreign policy, in the minds of most people. But it seems to me
that we should go slowly here, in the sense that we should not
make any significant change that is not negotiated in an ABM
Treaty context, particularly since the system that is on the
table is something that does not work yet. And looking at this
``thin'' system my view is, let us either go to a robust
``thick'' system and do the whole deal, or wait for a little
better technology than we have been shown exists now.
Ambassador Woolsey said that in the seventies and in the
eighties, when there were real crises, real tensions, real
capacity and capability, it was awfully hard to figure how to
transition. It seems to me transition is still a big problem,
not because we are on a hair trigger now, but because we are
going to affect, in my view, or at least potentially affect,
what Russia looks like in the next 20 years. this is something
that we may come to rue if we do not do it right. This is a big
deal, a big piece.
And so my question is--and I would like each of you to
respond, if you can do it relatively briefly, so we do not take
all the chairman's time--give us some sense of whether you
would attempt now in negotiation to seriously try to engage
both pieces of this equation, offense and defense; deterrence
and offense here.
Secretary Lehman. Well, Senator Biden, I agree with, I
think, almost everything you have said. But now let me define
it. There is a bit of negotiating history.
I think it is very important, what you have just said about
President Reagan's statement in 1983. Speaking for myself, I
knew that a desire to deploy highly effective ballistic missile
defenses was a big challenge and a vision. But in many ways the
even greater challenge and the greater vision was this notion
that somehow we could cooperate with the Soviet Union in doing
that.
The world in which we could do that was going to have to be
very different. What I find so important and amazing to
understand is that what was Ronald Reagan's vision of
cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1983 became a reasonable,
pragmatic policy in 1992, and that is how we proceeded.
In fact, although I did not mention it in my testimony, one
of the proposals we had with respect to changing the ABM Treaty
had to do with cooperation on technology because it creates
some hurdles. I think that is important.
I think you are absolutely right that if we treat Russia,
as Jim has said, as a second-class citizen, we will get the
kind of resentment and behavior that that kind of approach will
always create.
Russia is on the ropes right now economically. But do not
underestimate this country. This is a great country. And it is
a country that in many ways would like to and can work with the
United States to create that better world.
I think we should approach them on technology cooperation.
I think we have to keep our feet on the ground. We have to be
careful, step by step. It has to be something we all work
together on. But, frankly, I am more forward-leaning than
almost anybody else I know in the willingness to explore this.
I believe that Russian science and technology in many areas
related to this is absolutely world class. I also believe that
in some of their deployed systems, for example, in theater
ballistic missile defense, I am not so sure we do not
underestimate their capabilities.
And maybe it is not that we would procure them for
ourselves, but maybe we ought to be a little more open-minded
about who else gets involved in using defenses. At least, I am
open to that. And I think that is important.
But I want to stress one thing, and I do not know whether I
should take my shoe off and pound it on the table or what, but
I want to emphasize something. I believe in the START II
Treaty. I fought hard for that treaty. I fought hard for some
of the provisions including the MIRV ban, which I think
transforms how we think about these things.
Senator Biden. I agree.
Secretary Lehman. So I think that is very important. At the
same time, though, I worry that every time people go to Moscow,
somebody says, ``Well, if you let Poland join NATO, we are
going to kill START II,'' or ``If you do not tolerate ethnic
cleansing in Kosovo, we are going to kill START II.''
At a certain point, we have to be careful that we are not
feeding exactly the behavior that is wrong. So I would like to
see us and more of the arms control community stand up for the
START II Treaty the way they stand up for the ABM Treaty.
I mean it does not help to be running over their saying,
``You have to demand more of the Americans for START II.'' That
is not helping.
Senator Biden. I happen to agree with you. And as you know,
I do not think there are any two people in this Congress who
have been more in the face of the Russians--on NATO expansion
as well as Bosnia, as well as Kosovo--than the two Members
here. And I happen to view myself as thinking arms control is a
very important component.
So I agree with you completely. I do not think we can allow
the START II Treaty to be used as a leverage when, in and of
itself, it is in their interests.
Secretary Lehman. Absolutely.
Senator Biden. So I have not, and I have never advised this
President or, when asked, the Secretary of State or the
Secretary of Defense to in any way yield on these other issues
which are of great consequence in my view, on the grounds that,
``Well, if we do not, then they will not ratify START II.''
So we are in even more agreement than you think.
Secretary Lehman. I--in fact, I want to emphasize, START II
is in their interests. It is in our interests. But we paid a
good price for it.
Senator Biden. Yes.
Secretary Lehman. For example, on how we dealt with
bombers, I had a long history of not liking that approach, but
even I supported making those moves for a new Russian
Government and a new relationship in the context of a treaty
that gave us the MIRV ban.
Senator Biden. I agree.
Ambassador Woolsey. Mr. Chairman--I mean, Senator Biden, I
agree with essentially what you said in the remarks that just
preceded what Ron Lehman said. I believe that it is a different
situation now with Russia, not as favorable as it was in 1992,
but certainly not as bad as it was in 1983 with the Soviet
Union.
And I think that there are some aspects of this technology
we can share, and there are some features of a global system
that we could work together with them on. I think it makes
sense to work with those portions of the Russian institutions
that are not engaged in proliferation, for example. The
portions that are not so engaged and are reasonable partners, I
think we can do things with. And there is no reason not to do
that.
Now, I think that this may not meet with immediate approval
mainly because Mr. Primakov is prime minister. But I think a
broad-gauged and rather generous approach toward this, along
the lines of what the Bush administration did in 1992, is a
perfectly reasonable approach under the current circumstances.
I think we do have a window of time here before the Duma
and the Presidential elections coming up within the next couple
of years in Russia. We have a very hostile reaction in Russia
today, of course, because of NATO's actions in former
Yugoslavia piled upon other problems of their own making, such
as their economy and the like. But insofar as we can help turn
things in these next few months toward a cooperative approach
on something like resuscitating 1992, to use a shorthand
formulation, I think it would be a very good move.
Now, it may not work. I am not as confident as General
Habiger, who said that he was, I think, pretty sure that the
Russians would step up to a global defense. I would put the
probabilities considerably lower than that, but they are
certainly not zero. There is a chance. And I think it is worth
trying.
And I certainly agree with both you and Ron Lehman that we
should not let them continue to sell the horse of START II
ratification to us. I have had that up to here. They have tried
to sell that horse as many times as Yasir Arafat has tried to
sell revising the Palestinian Charter so it will not call for
the destruction of Israel. I think each of those horses has
been sold far too many times.
Senator Biden. Thank you.
Dr. Payne. Senator Biden, let me preface my answer by going
back to an earlier point that you made about mutual deterrence
because it is an important piece of this. I did not say that
mutual deterrence or that deterrence is useless, far from it.
Mutual deterrence can be very, very useful.
What I did say is that deterrence is far from reliable. And
that is based not on theory, but a study of deterrence
practice.
Senator Biden. I agree.
Dr. Payne. What that means to my mind, and I believe this
goes back to something Ambassador Lehman said, is that we
should establish a balance between deterrence and defense. We
do not have that balance now. We have not had it for a long
time. And, that imbalance was codified by the ABM Treaty.
In pursuit of establishing a balance between offense and
defense, which means that we need to move forward on the
defense, seeking a cooperative arrangement with the Russians is
an idea whose time has come. In fact, the time came back with
the Ross-Mamedov talks in 1992. Unfortunately, we, not the
Russians, discontinued the Ross-Mamedov talks. We pulled our
position off the table. We discontinued the talks, not the
Russians.
And, in fact, in the U.S.-Russian study that I mentioned
earlier, and in other similar studies, a Russian recommendation
has been to reestablish something like the Ross-Mamedov talks.
It does not necessarily have to be Dennis Ross and Mamedov, but
we should seek to reestablish a special high-level venue, a
forum to look at how we can cooperate on national missile
defense.
Senator Biden. Does that makes sense to you guys?
Ambassador Woolsey. Absolutely.
Secretary Lehman. Absolutely.
Dr. Payne. I am fairly optimistic that this could go
somewhere, based on the work that I have done with the
Russians. As Ambassador Woolsey said, the prospects are lower
than they were 5 years ago to be sure. But I am a little more
optimistic, given Primakov's position, than not, because
Primakov--and here I am reflecting what my Russian colleagues,
have told me--Primakov could actually deliver this. Much as
Nixon could deliver the U.S. opening to China, Primakov could
actually deliver cooperation, where a more liberal Russian
leader probably could not.
So in many ways, the time is right for us to move back to
Ross-Mamedov. The Russians have been asking to reestablish it;
and again, we were the ones to walk away from it. In fact,
Russians systematically and continually have reminded me, ``You
were the ones who walked away from Ross-Mamedov. This annoyed
us to no end.''
Senator Biden. Thank you.
General Habiger. To answer your question specifically, yes,
I agree. We ought to integrate the offense and defense. Now
having said that--and what I am about to say, I am glad I am at
the opposite end of the table of my good friend, Secretary
Lehman--as we go forward with future arms control initiatives,
I very strongly believe--and I included this in the report I
sent to the Secretary last year--that operators ought to be
involved in the negotiation process, rather than the
professional arms control wonks, as I will call them, with all
due respect.
Secretary Lehman. Never have I been more proud to renounce
my ``wonkhood'' and support 100 percent General Habiger. I
think that getting the operators involved, especially because
there are early warning aspects, there are very serious issues
involved. I think that that is an excellent proposal, and I
support it.
Senator Hagel. Thank you. Let me----
Senator Biden. We have settled everything now.
Senator Hagel. Well done, Senator.
Let me move away from the Soviet dynamic here, because we
know that there are now other players in this game. And we know
that obviously we have to deal with the Russians, and for all
the reasons that Senator Biden has laid out.
But I want to move, start with you, Mr. Ambassador, to the
Rumsfeld Commission report. How do we now deal with the overall
universe of the nuclear players here, as we factor in the
Russian dynamic? And let us start with North Korea.
For example, according to the Rumsfeld Commission report, 5
years is not an unrealistic time line here. As the Russians
then continue to drag this out, well, we have to factor this
in, or if you do not do this, no START II; if you do this,
maybe; up, down. And all that time the clock is ticking and
ticking. And then we are at a year, we are at 2 years.
And if you agree, obviously you co-authored that report,
that 5 years is realistic, well, what are we doing here? Are we
not squandering time? Are we not squandering time that we will
never, ever get back here? And so therefore, how do we deal
with these other nuclear nations?
Ambassador Woolsey. Mr. Chairman, I think that is right.
And indeed, it is a little worse than that, because we said in
the Rumsfeld Commission report that the 5 years may have
already started. We may not know when it starts.
So given the fact that last August, the North Koreans had a
partially successful three-stage test that overflew Japan for
the Taepo Dong, there is at least some reasonable chance they
could be a year or two or three away from a ballistic missile
carrying a weapon of mass destruction capable of, for example,
holding at risk an Alaskan city. It might be a biological
weapon, rather than nuclear, but the blackmail threat is
possibly closer than 5 years.
I think that it would be a very sound approach for us to
begin now with respect to funding and the research and
development steps that would be necessary for us to have a
thoroughly effective theater defense. And I said earlier I do
not agree with the limitations on theater defense that are
implicit in the delineation agreement the administration
negotiated in 1997.
I think it would be quite reasonable for us to begin to
pick up whatever vigorous work in R&D we are not now doing that
is constrained by the ABM Treaty. And certain systems, such as,
I guess, SBIRS(low), which used to be called Brilliant Eyes,
that would be necessary for a very effective theater defense
ought to move out smartly instead of being stalled in budgetary
scrapes in the Pentagon.
I think that those types of steps will help concentrate our
Russian friends' minds. I think they will be more likely to
deal with us realistically in a resuscitation of something like
the Ross-Mamedov talks than if we wait and see whether or not
they believe it is acceptable.
I think we have some months, perhaps a year or two or more,
of work in a number of these areas ahead of us before we quite
squarely and clearly violate any interpretation of the ABM
Treaty. The timing of budget and approvals and scheduling tests
and bending metal and the like takes time.
So to answer your question, I would move out smartly now.
But I think that that still gives us time before and perhaps
even immediately after the Duma and Presidential elections that
are coming up in Russia to see whether or not that approach can
be combined with working with Russia on a substantial set of
changes to the ABM Treaty, together with technology sharing and
the like along the lines of 1992. I think those can all go
forward pretty much in step with one another.
Senator Hagel. Thank you.
Secretary Lehman.
Secretary Lehman. I agree pretty much with that assessment.
I think obviously it is an interactive process. We will have to
keep our eyes open. I do not think we want to get ourselves in
a situation where we give up our rights to do what we have to
do. But at the same time, clearly, the cooperative approach is
the better approach. We ought to give it a try.
I think Senator Biden's comment where we want to be 10
years from now, well, if you look at how Russians think about
ballistic missile defense, I think it is important to remember
that it is not just the so-called liberals and progressives who
have an interest in this. In fact, a lot of hard-nosed Russian
nationalists do not understand why what they have around Moscow
is not covering more of the country. And in many ways, they
live in a more dangerous world than we do.
So we ought to keep in mind that it is not going to be an
easy process, that there are a lot of spoilers in the political
process in both sides. It is going to be difficult. But in the
long run, I think a consensus is emerging here. And the basis
for such a consensus probably is latent in Russia for a
cooperative approach that will create a sounder basis over the
long term for our relations with Russia.
Senator Biden. Mr. Chairman, if we are worried about 30
Chinese ICBM's, I wonder why those who sit in the Duma and
watch thousands and thousands of Chinese moving into Russian
territory to take it over to live in it, why they are not
worried. It seems to me the confluence of interests here is
overwhelming.
Ambassador Woolsey. I agree. I do not think Mr. Primakov
sees it that way, but I certainly agree with you, Senator
Biden.
Senator Hagel. Dr. Payne.
Dr. Payne. With regard to cooperatively negotiating changes
to the ABM Treaty, it sounds like everyone at the table concurs
with that. And I certainly do. Let me add only two caveats. And
the two caveats come from statements that have been made by a
number of Russians, and they are exactly to this point.
The first one was--and this point was made by Russians
fairly repeatedly--we will accommodate only when we know the
U.S. is serious about NMD deployment. That is when we will
become willing to accommodate. Because until we know you are
serious, we do not need to engage in accommodation. Once we
know you are serious about NMD deployment, then you will see us
become willing to accommodate. That is the first point.
The second point that Russians have made, interestingly
enough, is that once negotiations have begun--and here I have a
quote--``we will dissipate much of your energy to deploy NMD
through negotiations.''
And I think for those of us who are concerned about
beginning a negotiation process, it is simply because we are
worried that that this second point is true. Much of our energy
to deploy NMD will be dissipated by the negotiations. And
again, that point that was made to me by the Russians: We will
dissipate much of your energy for deployment.
So as long as we guard against being less than serious, and
as long as we guard against having our energy for deployment
dissipated by the negotiations, it seems to me that moving
ahead in a cooperative route clearly is the way to go.
Senator Hagel. General.
General Habiger. I agree. I have nothing further to add,
sir.
Senator Hagel. I am sorry?
General Habiger. I have nothing further to add. I agree.
Senator Hagel. Agree with what Dr. Payne just said?
General Habiger. Yes, sir.
Senator Hagel. Thank you, General.
Let me shift to what Senator Biden just mentioned, that we
have not devoted any attention this morning to China. And we
all are acutely aware of the recent developments and debate
going on up here, especially in this town, regarding Los Alamos
and technology that may have, did, maybe drift to the Chinese
and who was involved and all the currents that are surging
through that particular time.
Where do you see China rolling out on all of this? Should
we be focusing more attention with the Chinese on this overall
missile defense issue, the same way we are working with the
Russians or not? Let us start with you, Mr. Secretary.
Secretary Lehman. I think there are some important
similarities, both with respect to engaging China, not making
what does not have to be a bad situation become a bad
situation. We do have to engage. I think engagement should not
be business as usual. It ought to be targeted and focused and
hard-nosed. But I think it is important to engage, and I think
specifically on the question of ballistic missile defense.
It will not help our future relations with China if we
continue to emphasize a sort of mutual hostage climate as the
basis for our future relationship. We have opportunities to do
much better than that. And we ought not to feed that type of
reaction.
China is going to grow economically. It is a big and
powerful country in a very important and troubled part of the
world. And I think that engaging with China is going to be
important. We do not have quite the sophisticated interactions
with the Chinese that we were able to develop over the years
ultimately with the Russians, but we ought to be trying to
develop them.
Senator Hagel. Thank you.
Ambassador Woolsey.
Ambassador Woolsey. I do not know, Mr. Chairman, how to say
``chutzpa'' in Chinese, but the Chinese have shown a great deal
of it by not being a signatory to the ABM Treaty and then
pushing us very hard not to deploy ballistic missile defenses,
and the Japanese not to protect themselves against North Korea
and the like. China has invested heavily in ballistic missiles,
not only short-range ones to threaten Taiwan, but ICBM's, of
course, to threaten us. And we now know that through espionage,
as well as some of the other technology transfers, they are
going to be able to modernize their forces considerably and
probably are moving to a submarine launched missile as well.
I think we are not likely to see the kind of chaos in the
Chinese control of their military forces that threatens in
Russia. And I am not particularly worried about an unauthorized
launch and so forth from them, partially because of their
doctrine, partially in their practices, but also partially just
because I do not think their military is going to go that way.
But I do think we need to worry about their ability to,
essentially, blackmail us in the event of a future crisis in
the Taiwan Strait to hinder our being able to do what we did in
1996, send aircraft carriers and essentially insist on a
peaceful settlement of any resolution of any dispute between
them and Taiwan.
Back in 1996, my former counterpart, the head of Chinese
military intelligence, General Tscong Guang Kai, is the one who
said to Chas Freeman that the United States probably would not
risk Los Angeles in order to defend Taipei. I think that is
what they are really interested in. They are interested in
putting us enough at risk and reliably at risk that they can
try to have a free hand with Taiwan in any future crisis.
And I think it is very much not only in the Taiwanese'
interest, but in our interest, to keep them from having that
free hand. I think we are more likely to be able to insist on a
peaceful resolution of the issue between them and Taiwan if we
are not vulnerable to them.
I think that a missile defense of affordable and reasonable
scope that would help us deal with North Korea and the like
would also help us have a reasonable degree of confidence in
being able to defend against a Chinese attack. And I think that
would strengthen our hand in the future in dealing with China
in something like a crisis over Taiwan.
So I think the situation with China offers an added
rationale for our being able to tell General Tscong Guang Kai
that the next time he threatens Los Angeles that he will not be
able to do so successfully.
Senator Hagel. Thank you.
Dr. Payne.
Dr. Payne. Just to agree with Ambassadors Lehman and
Woolsey. My hope is that we would not seek to establish mutual
vulnerability as a basis for our relations with the PRC because
of the potential for deterrence and coercion of us that such
vulnerability would possibly entail; that is, Chinese
deterrence and coercion of us when trying to support our Asian
allies and friends.
A second point that is a little bit different, concerns the
connection between China and Japan with regard to our
cooperation with Japan on TMD. China has been very forceful in
telling us that Japan should not have TMD, and we should not
cooperate with Japan for theater missile defense. If you get to
the basis of the Chinese argument it is that it would be a bad
thing if China could not target Japan.
It seems to me that we ought to accord the level of respect
to that argument as it deserves, and essentially ignore it. It
is part of the Chinese ``friendship offensive,'' which is an
amazing offensive to begin with. But you see these types of
statements and arguments over and over again, because the
Chinese know how influential such rhetoric can be on the
Japanese perception of threat and the need for TMD.
Senator Hagel. Thank you.
General.
General Habiger. By all means, I think we ought to bring
China into the equation. I would caveat that by saying we are
talking about relatively small numbers of systems, about 18,
that can hit the United States, very large warheads, relatively
inaccurate systems. They would be city busters, as compared to
having any kind of military value.
The Chinese deployed a sea-launched ballistic missile
submarine in the mid-eighties. It went on one cruise and has
been essentially in dry dock ever since. They are building a
new sea-launch ballistic missile, which tells me that they in
the future need to come on our radar scopes.
But I will tell you, Mr. Chairman, there is another country
I think we need to think about, if we are thinking about in the
20, 25 years into the future, and that is the Indians. India,
as you well know, a couple years ago exploded a device or two.
They have a very sophisticated space launch capability, which
can be turned into an ICBM program very quickly.
The Indians also, in cooperations with the Russians, in
accordance with the agreements, are developing a sea-launch
ballistic missile with ranges less than 500 kilometers, which
fits into the arms control accords. I see that as a stepping
stone. And the Indians have also indicated they are going to
build a research submarine that will allow them to launch these
test objects.
So China for sure, and in addition we need to keep India on
our horizon.
Senator Hagel. Senator Biden, any last thoughts?
Senator Biden. I hesitate to even say it, but only if I can
get a commitment that Secretary Lehman will not speak. I am
only joking.
Secretary Lehman. You have it.
Senator Biden. Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty: does it fit
anywhere in this? Bad idea? Good idea? It seems to me, when you
are talking about India, when you are talking about Pakistan,
it has a place. When you are talking about North Korea, maybe
it's less applicable. Where does it fit? Bad idea?
Ambassador Woolsey. Well, Senator Biden, I do not believe
that the zero level is verifiable. Not only because it is so
low. Partially because of the capability that a country has if
it is willing to cheat on such a treaty, of decoupling its
nuclear tests from the ground by setting them off in caverns or
caves and the like.
I think I might have felt differently about a comprehensive
test ban that was at a level of a kiloton, or even a few
kilotons perhaps. That I think we had a reasonable chance of
verifying. But I think the level of zero is, in my judgment,
not verifiable. That makes it a treaty that we have to observe
because of our open society, and the countries like China
probably will not. And to my mind, that makes it worse than a
weak read on which to rely.
Senator Biden. Secretary Lehman, there are a lot of
rumors--I do not know if this true--that the Appropriations
Committee plans to cut the Energy Department's nonproliferation
programs in Russia, you know, the IPP, the Nuclear Cities
Initiative, et cetera. Is that a good idea?
Secretary Lehman. No. I think if we are going to engage, we
have to engage effectively. I am saying this as a private
citizen.
Senator Biden. Of course. I understand that. And by the
way, I truly appreciate, Mr. Chairman, you having this hearing,
and the chairman having it, and the testimony of all of you. I
think I walk away from it more optimistic than pessimistic
about how we should proceed and about the prospects of 10 years
from now being more secure, rather than less secure.
I thank you all, and I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for giving
me so much time.
Senator Hagel. Senator Biden, thank you.
We have a vote in 10 or 12 minutes, but since we have a
couple of minutes, if I might get back to Senator Biden's
question on CTBT. Any of the rest of you have a thought on
that? Secretary Lehman, we will start with you. Good idea? Bad
idea?
Secretary Lehman. I share Jim Woolsey's concerns about the
verifiability of the treaty. I am concerned about the ability
to maintain our deterrent without testing. Clearly in the past,
when I was in government, we viewed this as a long-term
objective. But the conditions were considerably different than
what we experience today. There have been some positive
developments, but there have also been some negative
developments.
With respect to the specific question that Senator Biden
mentioned, India, I do not know of any area in arms control and
non-proliferation that I have found more frustrating than South
Asia. It has been a slow motion train wreck coming. We have all
seen it. We have all known it. We have all known it would be
difficult to turn this ship around, and it would be a slow
process.
But we--maybe just because it is so far away and so
different, we just never figured out how to pull together a
coalition of people within the American foreign policy
community to do it.
So in many ways I view it as a great disappointment. And I
hold all of us together responsible, including myself that we
did not have a better way to deal with it?
But I have to say that in many ways, the way in which we
handled the CTBT did not help. India had already become a
country that could not take yes for an answer. Their domestic
political situation was so complex that you had spoilers who
would take almost anything and turn it negative.
And here is a case where India, long the advocate of the
CTBT, in essence decided to test, because it was feeling the
heat of this kind of pressure on them. It was not the sole
cause. It may not have even been the primary cause, but it
certainly was a factor in their calculations.
Senator Hagel. Thank you.
General Habiger, do you have a thought on CTBT?
General Habiger. Yes, sir. I think we ought to continue
with it, continue to support it, recognizing its limitations.
Senator Hagel. Dr. Payne.
Dr. Payne. I agree with the points made by both Jim and
Ron.
Senator Hagel. Well, gentlemen, thank you. This has been
very helpful to the committee, and we are grateful.
Senator Biden, thank you.
[Whereupon, at 12:10 p.m., the committee adjourned, to
reconvene at 10 a.m., May 13, 1999.]
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