SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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2000
[H.A.S.C. No. 106–33]
U.S. NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE POLICY AND THE ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
HEARING HELD
OCTOBER 13, 1999
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
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One Hundred Sixth Congress
FLOYD D. SPENCE, South Carolina, Chairman
BOB STUMP, Arizona
DUNCAN HUNTER, California
JOHN R. KASICH, Ohio
HERBERT H. BATEMAN, Virginia
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
STEVE BUYER, Indiana
TILLIE K. FOWLER, Florida
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
JAMES TALENT, Missouri
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
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JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
WALTER B. JONES, Jr., North Carolina
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
BOB RILEY, Alabama
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
MARY BONO, California
JOSEPH PITTS, Pennsylvania
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
STEVEN KUYKENDALL, California
DONALD SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
NORMAN SISISKY, Virginia
JOHN M. SPRATT, Jr., South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
OWEN PICKETT, Virginia
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
ROBERT A. UNDERWOOD, Guam
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
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TOM ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT BRADY, Pennsylvania
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
Andrew K. Ellis, Staff Director
David Trachtenberg, Professional Staff Member
Ashley Godwin, Staff Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
HEARING:
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Wednesday, October 13, 1999, U.S. National Missile Defense Policy and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty
APPENDIX:
Wednesday, October 13, 1999
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1999
U.S. NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE POLICY AND THE ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
Spence, Hon. Floyd D., a Representative from South Carolina, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
WITNESSES
Fischer, Lucas, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Affairs
Graham, Dr. William R., Former Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
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Krepon, Michael, President, The Henry L. Stimson Center
Payne, Dr. Keith, President, National Institute for Public Policy
Slocombe, Hon. Walter B., Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Woolsey, R. James, Former Director of Central Intelligence
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
[The Prepared Statements can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Fischer, Lucas
Graham, Dr. William R.
Krepon, Michael
Payne, Dr. Keith
Slocombe, Hon. Walter B.
Spence, Hon. Floyd D.
Woolsey, R. James
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DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Documents submitted for the Record can be viewed in the hard copy.]
Foreign Missile Developments and the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States Through 2015
Report on Russian Transfers That May Have Violated a Regime or Law.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
[The Questions and Answers submitted for the Record are pending.]
U.S. NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE POLICY AND THE ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE TREATY
House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, October 13, 1999.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:12 a.m. In room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Floyd D. Spence (chairman of the committee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FLOYD D. SPENCE, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please be in order. This morning the committee meets to consider the growing threat to our country posed by the global proliferation of ballistic missiles and the status of efforts being undertaken to protect Americans against this threat. It will not surprise anyone to learn that I believe that the deployment of a national missile defense must be a national priority. Currently, the United States has no defense against even a single ballistic missile launched in our direction, whether by accident or design. Unfortunately, poll after poll indicates that most Americans remain unaware of this fact.
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I believe that Americans have been lulled into a false sense of security by either a belief that we already have defenses or by assertions that a ballistic missile threat to our country is decades away. The reality is that America is vulnerable to this threat today. Yesterday the committee received a sobering briefing on the intelligence community's latest estimate of the ballistic missile threat to the United States. Unlike previous national intelligence estimates, this estimate painted a more troubling picture of a world in which ballistic missiles continue to proliferate, a world where rogue states like North Korea and Iran have the capability to strike not only at our forces, allies, and interests abroad, but to hold the American people at risk here at home.
For years the Administration downplayed this threat, leading this committee to mandate creation of a bipartisan commission to independently assess the ballistic missile threat to our country. That commission, headed by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, concluded that the threat to the United States is broader, more mature, and evolving more rapidly than the intelligence community had predicted. Significantly, the intelligence community's latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) confirms many of the Rumsfeld Commission's findings.
Last week the committee heard from the United States Commission on National Security/21st Century, a bipartisan group of experts who unanimously concluded that in the next 25 years, and I quote from their findings, ''America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland. Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers,''.
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Ballistic missiles carrying weapons of mass destruction are attractive weapons for states seeking to exploit this vulnerability. Congress has repeatedly expressed its support for a robust national missile defense program. We have increased funding for national missile defense and have encouraged the Administration to proceed with national missile defense development and deployment with all deliberate speed.
Earlier this year Congress passed the National Missile Defense Act of 1999, which declared it to be the policy of the United States to deploy a national missile defense, and I quote from that piece of legislation, ''as soon as is technologically possible.''
Although the President signed the National Missile Defense Act into law in July, the Administration's commitment to a policy of national missile defense deployment remains in doubt. Less than two weeks ago, the United States concluded a successful intercept of a long range ballistic missile target. This test was an important milestone that has been likened to hitting a bullet with a bullet. Along with other recent theater missile defense successes, it demonstrated that the technology to defend Americans can be made to work. Unfortunately, progress towards the timely deployment of effective missile defense is at risk due to the Administration's lack of commitment to a deployment decision and simultaneously a strong commitment to the continued United States adherence to the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, a treaty negotiated during the Cold War, signed with a country that no longer exists, and designed to perpetuate America's vulnerability to missile attack.
To address these important issues we are fortunate to have with us this morning a panel of experts on the issues of missile defense and the ABM Treaty. They are Dr. William Graham, the former Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a member of the Rumsfeld Commission; Dr. Keith Payne, President of the National Institute for Public Policy; Dr. R. James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Clinton and a member of the Rumsfeld Commission; and Mr. Michael Krepon, President of the Henry L. Stimson Center.
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Following our first panel, we will reconvene at 1:30 p.m. To hear from a panel of Administration witnesses. They will be Dr. Walter Slocombe, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Dr. Lucas Fischer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Affairs.
Gentlemen, I welcome all of you to this morning's hearing but before turning to your statements, I would like to recognize Mr. Skelton, the committee's ranking Democrat, for any remarks that he would like to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Spence can be found in the Appendix.]
STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, the hearing before us today could prove to be a very, very important one. The format and the distinguished witnesses that we have before us offer us an opportunity to explore whether the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, also known as the ABM Treaty, and a limited missile defense system are mutually exclusive, are complementary, or are interdependent. To me this issue is not just about arms control versus active defense by missile interceptors; rather it is how do we act on a potential threat missile over its entire life.
I believe that we should continue to give priority to our first line of defense-diplomacy, counterproliferation and arms control. Although not perfect, these programs work and are relatively cheap. More important, by reducing or preventing the number and sophistication of inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that might threaten us, they make an active defense by missile interceptors technologically feasible. Deterrence also works. And since these forces are already in existence, it is a logical second line of defense.
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Further, I believe that it is not only possible, but likely that a so-called rogue actor could threaten significant portions of the United States with ICBM delivered weapons of mass destruction by 2005. Therefore, I believe that a limited national missile defense is now advisable as it is inevitable as a third line of defense. At the same time, however, we must guard against a national missile defense program that is infective or one that undercuts the first and second lines of defense.
For my colleagues, I would note that during consideration of H.R. 4 earlier this year, we changed—I will say it again, we changed the partisan character of the missile defense debate and we placed it on a more constructive bipartisan footing, and that is good. Today we can continue to change the debate by moving towards the nonpartisan footing needed to ensure successful development and ultimate deployment of a limited national missile defense system. We need to do that.
For our witnesses, I say welcome. I look forward to your testimony as everyone on the committee does regarding whether the ABM Treaty and a limited national missile defense are mutually exclusive, complementary, or interdependent. We thank you for being with us today.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Skelton. Without objection the prepared remarks of all of our witnesses will be inserted in the record. I will ask Dr. Graham to begin followed in order by the other witnesses. Dr. Graham.
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[The prepared statement of Mr. Skelton can be found in the Appendix.]
STATEMENT OF HON. WILLIAM R. GRAHAM, FORMER DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY
Dr. GRAHAM. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for the invitation to appear here this morning before your distinguished committee. Lessons to be learned from the U.S. history of ballistic missile development are very straightforward. The acquisition of key technical experts can move a country rapidly forward in advancing ballistic missile capability, much as we did in drawing on the German skill at the end of the World War II and in fact in turn the Germans did on drawing on the work from Robert Goddard in the 1920s and 1930s. The range of existing ballistic missile systems can be rapidly increased as we learned by, for example, increasing the number of stages on the missile, a lesson the North Koreans are putting into practice today.
In the 1940s, designing and fabricating ballistic missiles was challenging, but with focus, determination, and national-level support it was done very rapidly even though new types of initial guidance instruments had to be developed, new rocket engines and missile structures fabricated, and new fuel produced. In stark contrast, as the Rumsfeld Commission, of which both I and Mr. Woolsey were members, learned and reported, countries seeking to develop missiles today do not have to overcome such hurdles. The West, U.S.'s and Europe's schools and universities are providing students from countries of concern with superior advanced education in science and technologies related to ballistic missiles and, for that matter, weapons of mass destruction development. While in the 1940s and 1950s, few individuals and nations understood and could produce ballistic missiles and related technologies; in today's world missile designs are well understood, missile components are available on the world market, and whole missile systems can be bought and delivered.
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History is replete with examples of transfers of ballistic missile technology: Egyptian SCUDs to North Korea; of course, Russian SCUDs to Egypt; Chinese M–11s to Pakistan, Chinese CSS–2s to Saudi Arabia; Russian engines to India, Russian guidance components to Iraq, and so on to name only a few. In addition, countries developing ballistic missiles are frequently trading technologies and hardware among themselves and use the synergy of cooperative projects to increase their ballistic missile capabilities. I would note that that probably applies to weapons of mass destruction as well.
Aside from hardware, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the stagnation of Russia have resulted in the availability of numerous scientists who are available for hire if the price is right and who can provide valuable ballistic missile design, development, testing expertise to a sponsoring nation. Since most of today's ballistic missiles are mobile, training and launching by a customer nation and its crews can take place in a missile's country of origin so that the first launch of a missile from a customer country may occur without any advance warning from that country.
By way of example, I would point out that North Korea is one of the smallest, poorest countries on earth and one of the most isolated geopolitically. Yet it has been able to maintain a robust and increasingly capable ballistic missile arsenal. Moreover, North Korea is able to export ballistic missiles along with related technologies and expertise to other nations like Iran and Iraq and Pakistan. If North Korea can accomplish this, then surely other nations with more robust, technical, financial and infrastructure capabilities are able to do so.
I would also point out that although the number of countries acquiring long-range ballistic missile capabilities is increasing, ballistic missiles do not need to have long ranges to threaten the United States. For example, in the 1950s, the U.S. launched several ballistic missiles from the decks of ships and sent them at high altitudes where their nuclear weapons payloads were detonated. Most of the population of the U.S. lives near the east and west coasts and thus is highly vulnerable to ship launched missiles that could be covertly deployed in merchant traffic several hundred miles to sea. The modifications to such a ship would not need to be obvious, if made at all, given that a missile transporter or mobile erector launcher could be driven into the hull of a sizeable cargo ship. Testing of a few missile launchers in such a configuration could be performed in remote sea locations to avoid detection by the U.S. As a result, the Nation's limited short range capability could be rapidly transformed into a mobile covert long-range capability that the U.S. today has no means to defend against.
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In view of the concerns discussed above and those explained at much greater detail in the Rumsfeld Commission report, there is every reason to believe that the U.S. could be threatened by ballistic missile attack today both at home and abroad by a determined adversary and that that threat is growing rapidly in time. Given the increase in the number of countries obtaining and seeking ballistic missiles of intercontinental range or otherwise able to attack the U.S., unless the Administration radically alters its wait-and-see approach, the lives of every American will continue to be at risk from ballistic missile attack for many, many years to come.
If the United States were to start the procurement process of a national missile defense immediately, a fully operational national missile defense would not be ready and in service until at least 2006, 2007. And to do that, Mr. Chairman, would require an effort comparable to the Manhattan Project, a major all out national commitment which does not exist today.
But I would like the members of this committee to ask themselves one question: how long do we have to wait until the United States decides that the threat is great enough to warrant the deployment of a national missile defense? Is it logical to wait until hundreds, thousand, or perhaps even millions of Americans die from a ballistic missile attack armed with weapons of mass destruction before we finally decide to deploy a national missile defense? Conventional wisdom tells us that waiting would be extremely illogical and also unethical since we know this attack can come. Furthermore, the fundamental basis of the United States Constitution is to preserve and defend the welfare of the American people. The American people need to be defended. The primary purpose of a national missile defense is to discourage countries from developing the offensive ballistic missiles and the chemical and biological and nuclear warheads that make them able to produce masses of casualties.
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It is essential to recognize that countries are most susceptible from being discouraged from developing offensive missiles before they have made a major national commitment to such programs when they are still considering the alternatives and when the maximum flexibility in their future course of action still exists. Therefore, the best opportunity for avoiding offensive ballistic missile threats is squarely before the U.S. today; not tomorrow, not next year, not 3 years from now or 15 years from now, but today.
The problem facing the U.S. is not to estimate the last possible time when the U.S. could deploy ballistic missile defenses. Historically the U.S. intelligence community has proven poor at making such intelligence estimates for many reasons. The intelligence community tends to focus as heavily on the intentions of foreign countries as opposed to their capabilities. However, estimating intentions is a very dangerous process. Intentions are very easy to conceal and intentions have essentially no inertia. They can change or turn on a dime. For example, the change in government or a change in government policies can cause the intentions to change while capabilities take somewhat longer to evolve and to change. But it is particularly important to be cautious of intelligence community estimates that on the one hand focus on capabilities and then on the other state that they do not consider major changes in the governments and alignments of governments and foreign countries. It is in fact those governments and alignments that cause the intentions to change.
India, with the change in political power and the resulting nuclear test series and Pakistan, as we are seeing today, play out for examples of how governments can change and the intentions of the governments can change instantaneously. This is a criticism that I have of the most recent national intelligence estimate and earlier National Intelligence Estimates on the ballistic missile threat to the U.S. While I think the recent estimate is a great improvement over previous ones, I believe it still puts far too much weight on intentions without trying to evaluate how they might change.
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Mr. Chairman, I believe national missile defense technology has evolved rapidly in the last two decades and is ready to be used for defensive system deployment today. We can discuss this more if you like in the questions, but I would mention just a few areas. The capabilities of our new radar systems has improved substantially both in the transmit/receive function, which is now being done with solid state elements, and even more importantly in the data processing. The whole data processing computing revolution has made enormous changes in our radars and in our missile capabilities. The miniaturized spacecraft and spacecraft optical systems have made great progress in the last two decades as has spacecraft infrared, visible, and ultraviolet sensors. Lasers based on aircraft and satellite platforms have made enormous progress and the progress is being used both in the airborne laser program being pursued by the Air Force today and in the space based laser that is being pursued by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization.
Small rockets which are used, among other things, for maneuvering and diverting kinetic interceptors, sometimes called rocket based interceptors, have improved greatly and we can now build small thrusters with thrust-to-weight ratios of greater than 1,000. Most important, the computing capability has increased greatly while the size of the computing hardware has actually decreased. These not only help the performance of the system against the actual warheads but has provided great help in dealing with counter-measures which are sometimes put forward as ways of defeating ballistic missile defense systems.
In fact, because we can now observe ballistic missile attack from the ground with sophisticated radar capable of great data processing to extract all of the information from the signals we receive and have the capability to have space based sensors, particularly embodied in the SBIRS-Low space based infrared (IR) system, low altitude constellation or an equivalent capability if we ever decide to deploy it, we can determine the characteristics of a target cluster coming at us with far greater precision and diversity than the attacker can understand that same target cluster. Basically to try to use countermeasures against our array of sensors, multispectral and data processing intensive, a hostile power would have to bet that his ground and space sensing capability is more sophisticated than ours and that he would be able to overcome that processing capability. This, in fact, is a very risky bet for any developing country or foreign power to make.
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Let me say a word about the ABM Treaty. The ABM Treaty is the major problem impeding U.S. efforts to build ballistic missile defenses and particular national missile defenses today. It masquerades as a solution to national security problems but it is in fact the major problem. 23 years ago the U.S. and the Soviet Union negotiated an armed control treaty, the SALT treaty in this case, in which the U.S. intended to limit the build-up of the Soviet ICBM force. In conjunction with that treaty, the two adversaries also negotiated the ABM Treaty which was specifically intended to ensure the continuing vulnerability of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union to ballistic missile attack. The SALT I agreement was a failure in limiting the Soviet ICBM force which was massively expanded in capability after the SALT I agreement went into effect. In fact, reductions in the Soviet ICBM force did not actually occur until the end of the decade of the 1980s, well after President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative had been in place. Even though the ABM Treaty assured the Soviets of continued vulnerability of the American people and country, the Soviet Union, unlike the U.S., continued to deploy ballistic missile defenses after the ABM Treaty was signed. And in fact they continued through today. The defenses—these defenses, that is the Soviet and now Russian defenses, were comprised of both the Moscow area ABM system which has nuclear-tipped missile interceptors, and widespread deployment of mobile nuclear tipped anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic missile defense systems, including the surface-to-air(SA)–5, SA–5, SA–10, SA–12 and a wide range of radar systems that support these, deployed throughout the Soviet Union by the thousands. Since these systems are armed with nuclear warheads or could be armed with nuclear warheads as well, they do not require sophisticated hit-to-kill fire control and guidance technology to defend against ballistic missiles. As more information on Soviet defensive capabilities has become open and available to us since the collapse of the Soviet Union, information on their command and control networks have come to light that make it clear that the Soviet Union and now Russia both intended and succeeded in building a national missile defense capability against both short and long-range ballistic missile defenses.
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That itself is an important fact, but even more important is the effect that the ABM Treaty has had on this. In fact, the ABM Treaty has had a perverse effect of our comprehension of what the Soviets and now the Russians have done. I have yet to see an analysis of this integrated defense capability. This is not an oversight but a systematic perverse effect of the ABM treaties. These treaties, and I have seen this from inside the government and out, once signed become the definition of truth and reality and analyses that might contradict the treaty and call it into question tend to be suppressed or not conducted.
From an ethical point of view, Mr. Chairman, I believe the ABM Treaty is appalling and makes hostages and potential future victims of all of the citizens of the United States to the ballistic missiles not only of the Soviet Union and now presumably some collection of some but not all of the former states of the Soviet Union, but in fact any power worldwide that wishes to attack the U.S.
Before any NMD deployment can take place, either the United States must withdraw from the ABM Treaty or the United States will have to negotiate major amendments to the treaty with the Russians who have to date shown only hostility to such negotiations. It is my belief that the United States should pursue the withdrawal option. By abrogating the ABM Treaty the United States would not be constrained to the deployment of limited, somewhat less effective land based national missile defenses. The withdrawal option would provide the United States with a flexible mission oriented, evolving national missile defense capability that could consist of a combination of land-based, sea-based, and space-based defenses.
In conclusion, the ballistic missile threat to the United States is real and continues to increase. Unless the United States takes measures to defend against such threats, the lives of every American will continue to be at risk to ballistic missile attack. The United States has the technological capability to construct and deploy a national missile defense system that is capable of overcoming any developing world ballistic missile force, including countermeasures, now and for the foreseeable future.
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I urge the Administration to get beyond assessing the threat. The threat is clear and present. I urge the Administration to make the commitment now to deploy a national missile defense in the immediate future and to make that commitment with a major national effort.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Graham can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Dr. Payne.
STATEMENT OF DR. KEITH PAYNE, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY
Dr. PAYNE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor and privilege to be here. I would like to summarize my prepared statement very briefly.
I 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. On the basis of that study, it is clear that the ABM Treaty was based on popular notions of arms control and deterrence circa 1972. Now, 27 years later, it is clear that those notions were thoroughly mistaken. Many are reluctant to acknowledge these mistakes perhaps because so much political and intellectual capital has been invested into the ABM Treaty, but we should cease to be influenced by ideas that have so little validity.
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The ABM Treaty is ratified on the premise that strictly limiting national missile defense would lead to stabilizing offensive force reductions. In short, the theory was without the ABM Treaty there would be no offensive force limitations, but with the ABM Treaty we would get stabilizing offensive force reductions. This became the primary rationale for the treaty. Unfortunately, the expected benefits never materialized. In fact, history unfolded in just the opposite direction.
For the two decades following the ABM Treaty, the Soviet Union pursued a massive buildup of destabilizing ICBMs. To be specific, the number of such deployed Soviet ICBMs increased from 308 in 1972 to over 650 16 years later with a related increase in the number of Soviet destabilizing warheads from roughly 300 to well over 5,000. As a result, the U.S. ICBMs became vulnerable to a Soviet preemptive strike. The reason that this history is important is this Soviet buildup was entirely contrary to the confident expectations that justified the ABM Treaty in the first place. Other related arms control plans 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, better known as MAD. The validity of that particular claim was critical to the ABM Treaty because if true it meant that neither side would seek to upset the supposed MAD deterrence balance established by the treaty. Former Soviet senior officials, however, have now explained repeatedly and at length that the ABM Treaty did not reflect Soviet acceptance of U.S. notions of mutual assured destruction. 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 a strategic offensive buildup.
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In complete contradiction to its rationale, the ABM Treaty actually facilitated the Soviet offensive missile buildup of the 1970s and 1980s. The optimistic expectations used to justify the treaty went unmet, I believe, because U.S. arms control theory ultimately was based on mirror imaging, which mistakenly attributed U.S. goals and hopes to the Soviets. Ironically when Russia under Boris Yeltsin finally did accept START offensive reduction in 1992, he simultaneously proposed the U.S.-Russian cooperation on a global ballistic missile defense system. That is, President Yeltsin proposed the offensive reductions and missile defense move forward together. And even now, key members of the Duma publicly and privately advocate cooperating with Washington on limited NMD deployment as the route necessary to preserve the START process.
With 27 years of hindsight, it is now possible to conclude based on abundant empirical evidence that the arms control rationale under 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, or MAD, would provide reliable protection against missile attack. Therefore, so the argument concluded, the U.S. should focus on offensive based 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. That view was just plausible in 1972. It now reflects a complete lack of familiarity of over two decades of research concerning the past. I can summarize those findings in one sentence: Deterrence is inherently unreliable for reasons that cannot humanly be fixed.
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In my research over the past two decades, I have closely examined numerous historical case studies of how deterrence does and does not work. My findings and those of similar studies are that deterrence fails frequently because flesh and blood leaders do not behave in the way required for mutual deterrence to work. Unlike the leaders who typically assumed in theory, real leaders can be uninformed, they can be misinformed, isolated and out of touch, they make terrible mistakes, they can behave woefully, they can behave foolishly, emotionally, unpredictably, unreasonably, and, yes, even irrationally. They may not prefer conflict but they see no acceptable alternative or they may have wartime goals for which they are willing to lead their societies into great sacrifice and enormous risk. Many leaders in the past have done just that. Unfortunately, there are no earthly developments that can reliably prevent these very human factors from undermining deterrence and we should recognize this reality.
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 in the ABM Treaty would be to thoroughly misunderstand what deterrence can and cannot accomplish.
In conclusion, the ABM Treaty was built on notions about arms control and deterrence that now can be demonstrated empirically to be mistaken. The ABM Treaty did not lead to the promised offensive force reductions contrary to comforting assurances and insurances, and deterrence is inherently unreliable. Its function cannot be ensured, not even by the ABM Treaty. Serious empirical research on the subject leads to no other set of conclusions. This fact alone in light of the pace of missile proliferation that Dr. Graham just referred to argues strongly for revision of the ABM Treaty or, if necessary, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty and the deployment of national missile defense.
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I have had the privilege of co-directing a five-year U.S.-Russian study on the potential for U.S.-Russian cooperation on national missile defense deployment and ABM Treaty revision. That study, that five-year-long study conducted with a senior group of Russians has pointed to five conclusions. 1) the Russians see U.S. NMD as anti-Russian. They do not believe that we seek national missile defense for limited goals.
2) The Russians prefer that we have no national missile defense. There is no NMD plan no matter how limited that will make the Russians happy.
3) Nevertheless, the Russians will negotiate seriously about AMB Treaty revision and NMD deployment if they believe we will deploy without them. The Russians' goal in this case will be to shape our deployment and our architecture as best they can.
4) Until very recently the Russians did not believe that we were so serious about national missile defense that the negotiation on the subject was necessary. The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 changed their minds somewhat.
5) Finally, we have a paradox. To the extent that we try to reassure Russia that we will not ever move forward on NMD unilaterally, we undercut the incentive that will move the Russians to negotiate seriously on the subject. This suggests to me that we should be prepared to move forward unilaterally while continuing to seek negotiations with Russia to solve the problem cooperatively if possible.
Thank you, sir.
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[The prepared statement of Dr. Payne can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Woolsey.
STATEMENT OF HON. R. JAMES WOOLSEY, FORMER DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
Mr. WOOLSEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor to again be asked to testify before you in this committee. If it is all right, I will summarize portions of my remarks and insert all into the record.
One of the most fundamental changes in the Nation's security posture in many decades is nearly upon us. I fear that we are sadly derelict in addressing it. This is partly the result of several years delay that has been embedded for the last four years by a very poor national intelligence estimate in late 1995. I suppose I should drop a footnote at that point and say that I resigned as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in early 1995. That estimate may have answered accurately the question that it asked itself.
The question was in essence, will in the next 15 years a potentially hostile nation other than Russia or China be able indigenously to design, test, and deploy an ICBM having safety and reliability standards approximating those of the United States and one that would be able to attack the lower 48 states. The estimate gave a negative answer to that question and President Clinton talked about that a good deal during the 1996 campaign, making the more general point that there was no ballistic missile threat to the United States for 15 years.
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A number of people were struck by the misleading nature of all of this, and criticized the estimate and its use. Congress convened the Rumsfeld Commission, of which Bill Graham and I were privileged to serve. It reported out a year ago last summer that essentially the 1995 estimates assumption of negligible international trade and assistance in ballistic missile technology was false; its mirror-image approach to assessing the safety and reliability requirements, and hence the testing program of such nations as North Korea was highly misleading; and its curious implicit assumption that Alaska and Hawaii were excluded from the Federal Government's constitutional duty to provide for the common defense was absurd.
The commission's view was that the eminence of the threat posed by rogue states' ballistic missile programs in particular was far greater than the 1995 estimate suggested. It stated that North Korea and Iran could have an ICBM within 5 years of beginning a program and Iraq within 10, and further, the commission stressed that we might well not know when a rogue state's programs began leaving us with considerably less than 5 years or in Iraq's case 10 years of warning.
As if to punctuate the commission's work, a few weeks after the report was filed a year ago July, North Korea tested a Taepo-Dong missile with a third stage, demonstrating substantial unexpected progress to an ICBM program that was unexpected by the U.S. intelligence community. Director Tenet has, in my judgment, done a good job of leading the intelligence community toward a reassessment of the ballistic missile threat in the aftermath of the Cold War. Perhaps not a perfect job, but I think a very good job.
The recently issued estimate which you were briefed on a classified version of, Mr. Chairman, and the committee, essentially says that within the next 15 years the U.S. will most likely face ICBM threats from North Korea as well as Russia and China, probably from Iran and possibly from Iraq. It says that North Korea could convert its existing Taepo-Dong 1 space launch vehicle to carry a biological weapon to the U.S., but it is more likely to design a larger Taepo-Dong 2 to be capable of carrying a nuclear weapon. It says that a test of such an ICBM could occur at any time unless it is delayed for political reasons; that Iran could test an ICBM capable of carrying a biological payload to the U.S. within the next few years and one with a larger nuclear payload capability sometime between 2005 and 2010; and finally, that Iraq could test an ICBM carrying a nuclear payload between 2005 and 2010 depending on the level of foreign assistance; and sooner, within a few years, Iraq could test one that could carry a biological payload to the U.S. if it began development now.
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The new estimate also contains far more realistic and troubling assessments about international trafficking in ballistic missile technology and components and the possibility of short range ballistic missiles being deployed unconventionally, for example, in surface ships. It also states that there is, ''an immediate serious and growing threat to U.S. forces, interests, and allies from proliferating medium range ballistic missiles,'' and I would add now, intermediate range, ''abroad.''
In light of all of this, Mr. Chairman, I would suggest to the committee that in the circumstances today, support for a strong ballistic missile defense and willingness to amend very substantially, to replace or even to withdraw from the ABM Treaty is a reasonable position. I say that even for those who like me have historically emphasized the importance of offensive strategic weapons have seen some value in certain arms control agreements and did not initially welcome President Reagan's strategic defense initiatives. The circumstances have changed and in my judgment that calls for a major national change in our assumptions and our policies.
I want to stress that with respect to support of the ABM Treaty in the early 1970s, I agree with most, if not all, of what Keith Payne said. But there are a number of us who never really liked the mutual aspect of mutual assured destruction. We persuaded ourselves nonetheless that the treaty in the early '70s presented the lesser of two evils for a couple of reasons. First of all, we were not convinced that the technologies available or foreseeable in the early 1970s were going to spawn a deployable system capable of defending reliably against our major concern which was an all out Soviet attack. And secondly, we felt that the massive Soviet lead in large ICBMs equipped with MIRVs put our land based ICBMs and to some extent our bombers at risk if the Soviets should ever contemplate launching a first strike in the midst of some crisis; for example, a conventional war in Europe.
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This forced us in our strategic planning to rely very heavily on our ballistic missile submarines in the pre-Trident era. This was the only truly survival part many of us felt of the American nuclear deterrent, and we were concerned about Soviet deployment of an ABM system around Moscow together with the internetting of radars and capabilities that Bill Graham has discussed. Therefore, we were willing in order to ensure that the United States' strategic forces would be able to penetrate any Soviet defenses, and be seen clearly to be able to do so, to pay essentially in the coin of limiting American defenses in order to be able to limit Soviet defenses.
That thinking seems dated now. To some it was not persuasive even in 1972. But the point is that in today's world, the ABM Treaty which came from that era is in my judgment strategically obsolete. I will come in a minute to the question of whether it is legally obsolete. There is a possibility, I hope a probability, for common ground today for those of us who have been on different sides of this ABM Treaty debate over the years. Some of us may have been partially right or partially wrong. It doesn't really matter now. Together we won the Cold War. It is past time to go on to the next set of problems.
I would suggest that the old rationale for being willing to limit our own defenses in order to limit Soviet or Russian defenses simply does not apply in today's world. Russia is no longer capable of threatening Europe with many divisions of conventional forces so it would have no advantages in a crisis on that continent. We do not need to rely in a day-to-day sense on our strategic offensive forces therefore to protect a NATO or our European allies, and moreover Russian strategic nuclear forces do not threaten a substantial share of our nuclear deterrence. We no longer maintain large numbers of fixed land-based ICBMs. So we have no major reason, really, to want to limit Russian defenses. We don't need to do that in order to ensure that our own retaliatory forces would be able to penetrate Russian defenses. The only rationale for the ABM Treaty today I would submit is one that is rooted in current foreign relations concerns. The Russians don't 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 have threatened to refuse to ratify the START II treaty. But it seems to me there is a limit to the degree that we should let this sort of thing influence us.
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The Russians were willing, President Yeltsin was willing in 1992 in his remarkable January speech of that year to consider substantial revisions to the ABM Treaty and discuss mutual work on ballistic missile defenses with us. Perhaps the next Russian government will prove similarly reasonable. It doesn't look real likely today, but it is still worth offering, in my view, to return to the days of 1992 and the approach that was abandoned in 1993. If that proves fruitless I believe there are ample strategic and legal grounds for no longer considering ourselves bound by the ABM 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.
I would submit to the committee that Washington attorney Douglass Fife and the University of Virginia's Robert Turner have both done excellent legal analyses of the ABM Treaty, and I would suggest that there is a very good legal position that the treaty is no longer in force and effect; not that it needs to be withdrawn from, but that it is no longer in force and effect. It was between the United States and a country that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. So the question is whether Russia is the successor state without something else occurring to this treaty.
Now, if both Russia and the United States reaffirm this treaty, then certainly Russia is the successor state and the obligations continue to exist. Russia presumably has reaffirmed it. Has the United States? I would suggest that we now move from the realm of international law to the dimension of American constitutional law. As both the Fife and Turner papers point out, there is an extremely good case to be made for the proposition that the treaty is no longer binding on the United States unless the restructured ABM Treaty is reaffirmed by a two-thirds vote of the United States Senate. In the meantime, as we are sorting this all out, in my judgment, the Senate should not approve the delineation agreement that the Administration has reached with the Russians which limits unnecessarily the effectiveness of our theater defenses nor should it approve the accompanying expansion of the treaty to encompass Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. This is a step for which there is not even the most remote strategic rationale. We have no reason at all to want to limit Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan's ballistic missile defenses. Why should we let them have any hand at all in limiting ours?
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In my view only a shift to a fundamentally different kind of treaty dealing with ballistic missile defenses would meet our strategic needs. I would call to the committee's attention that the long time strategic analyst Leon Schloss and a gentleman from the Department of Defense Benson Adams have pending a piece before the Naval Institute's ''Proceedings'' that suggests a different type of treaty which they call a reassurance treaty that would effectively ban only deployment of ballistic missile defenses by Russia and the United States, vis-a-vis one another, would have no limitation at all on sensors, theater defenses and the like.
There is also interesting work by Hank Cooper, the former head of the SDI program, by Greg Canovan of Los Alamos, and by Larry Goldmans, all of which point to the possibility of using space-based interceptors of the sort that Bill Graham was discussing, perhaps initially in orbits that would make them capable of intercepting missiles launched from North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, and for that matter China but not inclined at the polar latitudes in such a way as to intercept missiles from Russia. Such an approach might provide an initial bargaining position for which to approach a new and restructured relationship between Russia and the United States on ballistic missile defenses.
I do believe that as long as Russia is a democracy, however troubled a democracy, we have—and furthermore, a democracy that is in some degree of potential chaos and has ballistic missiles which can reach the United States, we should try to work with the Russian government. And it may not succeed, but that a fundamental restructuring of our strategic relationships sanctioned by some type of treaty with Russia is a reasonable first approach. If that does not work, if it proves impossible to carry out such a restructuring, then I believe we should and indeed must proceed to defend the country against all types of ballistic missile threats.
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In short, Mr. Chairman, the world into which the ABM Treaty came in 1972 was—and the treaty itself, I should say, was an imperfect but reasonable accommodation to that world. The strategic circumstances in which we find ourselves now mean that that world of 1972 and its underlying strategic assumptions are gone with the wind. In the period of time between the two world wars, President Roosevelt, himself a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy and the gentleman whose portrait hangs just up to your right (Carl Vinson), Mr. Chairman, were the two people in the country most responsible for building the two-ocean Navy. They did it in very difficult circumstances, during the Depression. They barely got it done in time.
In October of 1942, there was one operating carrier in the Pacific, but the new construction was coming. The two-ocean Navy that was built largely under the auspices of this committee had a huge impact on changing the course of history. I would submit to this committee that it is time again to take the lead in defending the country against the threats of the future.
With my great respect, Mr. Chairman, thank you for letting me testify.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Woolsey can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Krepon.
STATEMENT OF MICHAEL KREPON, PRESIDENT, THE HENRY L. STIMSON CENTER
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Mr. KREPON. Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, it is a great honor to be here. I spent three years in this room working for a member of this committee who is no longer with us. His name was Floyd Hicks and he represented Bremerton and taught me a great deal, including the utility of asking tough questions of witnesses.
You know, we are still thinking in outdated ways about how to reduce nuclear dangers. We are still relying on very old formulas that are no longer applicable. My colleagues on this panel have talked about only one aspect of this, the anti-ballistic missile treaty. The complex of formulas that we used during the Cold War, in my judgment, need to be thoroughly reevaluated. It is not just the anti-ballistic missile treaty. The old formula was lots of nuclear offense, very high states of launch readiness, and no defenses. I believe that in every aspect we need to rethink this.
My sense is that a new formula for reducing nuclear dangers today, a whole new set of circumstances out there, the new formula ought to be much reduced nuclear offenses, much reduced launch readiness and some defenses.
Mr. Skelton asked a very important question. He said, can we pull all of this together or do we have to say either/or? My conclusion is that we need a transition strategy to get to nuclear safety, not a demolition strategy. Demolition strategies have real problems in improving nuclear safety. I will try to lay out a few of them.
I believe that the challenge before you and before the next administration is to come up with a transition strategy that increases nuclear safety. We can't do a transition strategy if we continue to argue the same old debates. If on the one hand treaties are bad and on the other hand missile defense are destabilizing and there is absolutely no marriage between the two, if we are going to repeat that kind of argument and set up an either or proposition, we are going to lose. The country is not going to get safer. Nuclear dangers are going to grow.
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If we continue to set up an either/or proposition of missile defenses versus treaties, then we are going to badly impair our relations with Russia, we are going to badly impair our relations with China, we are going to badly impair our relations with our allies, our allies in Europe and in Asia, and we are going to badly impair the nonproliferation treaty regime on which we base quite a bit of our strategy to reduce nuclear dangers in troubled regions.
I believe that we need a cooperative transition to nuclear safety in a world in which Russia is facing severe domestic weaknesses, and that has ramifications for nuclear issues. A world of covert missile transfers, a world in which the most difficult proliferation cases are getting harder and more evident, and a world in which there are growing strains on treaties, which many countries have depended upon as an alternative to nuclear capabilities and missile capabilities. And if we go it alone, if we depend on defense technologies to solve this complex of problems, and we say we don't need the treaties, we don't need good relations with Russia or China, we can afford to stiff our allies on issues that are meaningful to them, that there is no correlation at all between vertical issues and proliferation and horizontal issues—which, by the way, is the fundamental intersection of the nonproliferation treaties—we are going to have a world of trouble. We are facing a world of trouble.
So I would encourage you to consider a transition strategy, not a demolition strategy, a transition strategy that looks at treaties and missile defenses as partners and not as adversaries like we did during the Cold War.
How do you get from here to there? How do you do a cooperative transition when Russia is in such great difficulty? And there are other problems as well. No easy answers. I agree with my friend, Keith Payne, that Russia, the next Russian government is likely to accept amendments to the ABM Treaty because the alternative is no treaty. What kind of amendments should we seek? What kind of tasks do you expect from missile defenses? How much faith do you have in these defense technologies? I would not ask of missile defense to perform tasks that they are not capable of performing. I would not ask you to write a blank check for missile defenses any more than I would ask you to write a blank check for other defense programs that are under your observation and oversight.
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A common sense approach is needed, one that marries up limited missile defenses with deep cuts and with reduced launch readiness of our nuclear forces and for Russian nuclear forces. If we worry about a Russia that is facing increased centrifugal forces, as I know many of you do, and if we worry about a Russia whose command and control will be under increased stress in future years, then it seems to me we ought to rely on something more than just defense technologies to deal with this problem. I would feel a lot safer if Russian nuclear forces were reduced irreversibly. I would feel a lot safer if Russian nuclear forces were on reduced launch readiness just as I would feel safer with the phased deployment of missile defenses.
So again I would urge you to consider transition and not demolition. A demolition strategy is going to vastly reduce any degree of cooperation that we can get from Russia and from China, and we need the cooperation of Russia and China to reduce these nuclear threats and these nuclear dangers. Transition, not demolition. Demolition will be deeply disturbing to our closest allies in Europe and in Asia. When they see the United States going its own way they, too, will be more inclined to go their own way on matters that have serious consequences within their region.
Transition and not demolition. If you demolish treaties, especially the anti-ballistic missile treaty on top of what is recently transpiring on the Senate side with respect to the nuclear test ban treaty, you are going to see the nonproliferation treaty unravel or at best become a very hollow instrument. And that means that countries are going to go their own way. And the threats that we face as a country are going to grow. And the threats that our forces in the field will face are going to grow. That is not what you have in mind by supporting missile defenses.
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So please consider a common sense approach that incorporates missile defenses with treaties, a package arrangement that can be acceptable and negotiable, that can be reassuring to our friends and allies. Transition, not demolition.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Krepon can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Before we begin questions of the witnesses, I would like to point out that we have to get through this panel by 1:30 and go into another panel. In the meantime, we want to try to give everyone an opportunity to ask a question. So I think if we would adhere to the 5-minute rule, number one, in a strict way and if we would also restrict our questions to maybe one of the witnesses. In the past when we have a panel of this size and we expect each witness to answer each question that the individual has, we extend that time to about 20 minutes to get rid of just one person. So I think that we can get along a lot faster if we try to change our approach a little bit and maybe give other people an opportunity to ask some questions, too. With that in mind, I will forego my part of it and get right to Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, I also will help along that line and I pass.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Bateman.
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Mr. BATEMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think that I can conform with your exhortation about the time.
Mr. Krepon, you talked about reduced immediate launch capability. I am not concerned with any implications of that other than we know we could reduce ours. How would we ever verify that anybody else had ever reduced theirs, and certainly that is not only true as to a Russian reduced launch capability, how would we ever verify or know about the immediacy of someone else's launch capability? I am not sure that I find much that is reassuring to me in this notion of the way for us to be more secure is for us to agree that we will reduce our launch capability. Could you deal with that for me.
Mr. KREPON. Mr. Bateman, we are blessed with having a rather sizable nuclear capability at sea which other countries, including Russia, are not at this point. The issue for me, and I hope you would consider the issue as well, is how important is prompt response, prompt nuclear response. How much does that add to deterrence, how much does that require for our national security. We have always believed that during the Cold War that a very rapid response capability is absolutely essential, which is why we put our subs, as you well know, in forward positions and why we kept our land based missiles at such a high state of launch readiness. Unfortunately, other countries have picked up on our requirement for rapid response capability.
The government of India has just released a draft nuclear doctrine that on three very specific occasions, three very specific references, endorse this rapid punitive response requirement which is going to create all kinds of problems there. But let's go back to our forces. If we don't need a rapid response capability, we could move our subs back. How do we verify this? Good question. How do they verify it?
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Subs at sea, monitoring their status, there are technological arrangements that could be done, but they are very worrisome to our commanders who worry about survivability. How do we monitor our reduced launch readiness for missiles in silos or missiles in the field? It takes a lot of transparency. It takes a lot of cooperation. It takes spot visits of the kind that we have done for other treaties. Is it fail-safe? Is it perfect? No. Would it be hard to negotiate? Absolutely. At present, the Clinton Administration has concluded that the difficulties in verification and negotiation are so severe that we don't even want to talk about it with the Russians. I think that is a mistake. I am not sure that we can satisfactorily and greatly reduce launch readiness in Russia, but I know for sure that I can't do it as long as our forces maintain a ''Cold Warrish'' state of launch readiness.
I am willing to have a strategic dialogue with the Kremlin and with Russian nuclear commanders, U.S. nuclear commanders to talk about these issues. I think that we need to because I worry about all those Russian forces that are on high states of alert under projected circumstances.
Dr. GRAHAM. Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Bateman, I believe it is important to go back and review the reasons that we had and have some of our strategic forces at a high state of readiness. It wasn't just an exercise in military virtuosity. It was because those forces could become vulnerable to a preemptive attack if they weren't at a high state of readiness. The bombers were always in the situation because bombers on airfields are no more than 10 to 15 minutes from being attacked by a sub-launched ballistic missile and that was true in the days when the Soviets kept nuclear-tipped missiles in submarines just off our coast. That is certainly true today from land-based ballistic missiles with the possible addition of another 15 minutes or so of a warning time.
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Our bombers are in a very low state of readiness today and essentially completely vulnerable to any kind of preemptive attack on our bases. The land based missiles were always carried in a high state of readiness, but there is an important distinction in being able to launch them quickly, which they have always been, and needing to launch them quickly, which they became. It became needful of having them launched quickly when the silos of the land-based missiles became vulnerable to larger and more precise Soviet ballistic missile attack.
I believe it was a series of bad decisions that were made in the 1970s and early 1980s that led us to a land-based missile force that was vulnerable to a preemptive strike, but the approach taken to solve that was one of rapid launch of the missiles when an attack was perceived to be coming. I believe that to be a very bad policy and one that we should never have adopted. Nonetheless, that was the reason they were carried at a high state of alert.
Finally, the submarines, which were probably the most enduring part of our deterrence, had the ability to be launched somewhat quickly but not the necessity to. But I worry about these readiness reduction plans that might do things like weld the hatches of the missile launchers on submarines or take warheads off so they had to be put back on the missiles before they could be launched because that in itself, the ability to recover from that might make the sublaunch missiles and the submarines themselves more vulnerable.
So I think we have to go back and look at the vulnerability of our strategic nuclear forces when we look at these readiness reduction proposals. In my view, in that context the readiness reduction proposals do not make sense.
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The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Sisisky.
Mr. SISISKY. I yield my time to Mr. Spratt.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Spratt is recognized.
Mr. SPRATT. Thank you for your testimony. Let me make an observation I make frequently because I have been sitting here for a long time and in the 1980s shared a panel on SDI. Strategic defense hasn't suffered from much in this last 15-year period so much from a lack of funding as from a lack of focus. When we got off the ground we had multiple systems, five directed energy systems all of which have been debanded now, several different layers, and various variations. If we had stopped and frozen our position at any point in time and said we have got to deploy something, and that was advocated from time to time here, it was in 1991, for example, the system we deployed would be obsolete right now and we would be sorry we did it. I think we have benefitted and certainly spent a substantial sum of money, $50 billion. Not all of it has been wasted.
That has brought us to where we are with a system that within a week or so ago finally achieved its promise of taking out a missile in the mid-course intercept phase. The problem I get, Mr. Krepon, comes closer to me than any of the rest of you because I think he is right in saying this is a multi-varied equation. You can't solve it with just one value. One of the things that we want to do is figure out how to make the transition. I think the ABM Treaty has outlived its usefulness, also. But it continues to be useful in the eyes of the Russians. And if we want to get START II ratified, if we want to reduce offensive weapons, if we want to—Mr. Woolsey spent a couple of years, it seemed like a couple of years on the MX question, how to counter the SS–18. How do you get the Russians to seriously negotiate with us on the SS–18.
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We finally reached that point. We are rooting SS–18s and dismantling them and we want to safely store those components. That involves and requires cooperation. If we summarily, abruptly, unilaterally abrogate the ABM Treaty or go over and say you have got to have that amendment or this amendment or else, then we are, I think, going to rupture that relationship and cost us in other areas.
Do you disagree with me, Jim?
Mr. WOOLSEY. In part I do, Congressman Spratt, with some trepidation because your reputation and abilities in this area are legendary. I have a general view that offensive warheads are no longer really the coin of the realm as far as arms control is concerned. I think the reason we cared in 1968 when I first got into this business about the MIRVing of the SS–9 and the MIRVing of the SS–18 and we care about accuracy and numbers was because Minuteman was such an important part of our deterrent, we were trying to keep the Soviets from having the capability of taking out several Minutemans with one SS–18 launch. But now that we are not heavily invested in fixed land-based ICBMs anymore and clearly not as a dominant part of the deterrent. The dominant part of the deterrent, I think for the foreseeable future invulnerable, is at sea.
I really don't believe that we should go any particular extra mile to get the Russians to agree to 3,000 warheads versus 4,000, or 4,000 versus 5,000 or 1,000 versus 2,000. I care much more about whether the Russian warheads are well guarded, are being taken care of by a strategic rocket force that isn't spending its time out digging potatoes, that it is part of a Russia that is stable and strategic rocket forces that are stable with decent early warning and so on. I care much more about those issues than I do about warhead numbers now.
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Mr. SPRATT. I do, too. I agree with you. I think you are saying you are worried about proliferation, you are worried about missile components traded around the world being traded.
Mr. WOOLSEY. Absolutely.
Mr. SPRATT. So if we lose the kind of cooperation we have had with this cooperative reduction initiative in the last several years because we get unilateral and stroppy about the ABM Treaty, haven't we lost something potentially more valuable for the time being than what we can do for missile defense?
Mr. WOOLSEY. Yes, I think you would lose a good deal, and I am a strong supporter of Nunn-Lugar and all of that. The question is what makes Russians cooperative. And I believe that the Russian opposition to American ballistic missile defenses is a kind of a dog in a manger type approach. It is essentially if they can't have them and can't afford them and can't do it as well as we can, then from the point of view of their own national self-image, at least as far as some of the military people are concerned, they don't want us to be so capable. They don't really think we are going to attack them and eat up their retaliatory strike with ballistic missile defenses. It is a matter of kind of national honor and pride.
I believe that that is an important factor in Russian-American relations. I would try to get along with the Russians. I would try to enhance their national honor and pride. I believe that restructured or new, a different type of ballistic missile defense treaty all could be a reasonable part of all of this. I agree, perhaps with not all of the details that Mike Krepon said, but I agree with the thrust of what he said, about working for a transition. It just seems to me that the 1972 ABM Treaty provides very little, if any, of what we need for that transition. But working cooperatively with Russia, yes, I agree.
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The CHAIRMAN. We better break for this vote. We have a vote on the appropriations conference report and we will return shortly after that.
[recess.]
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please be in order. Mr. Weldon.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank our witnesses for coming. I want to take this moment to present what I would call a different perspective from that of Mr. Krepon, although I do respect his position as well as all of our witnesses here. In your statement, Mr. Krepon, you mention that oftentimes those who advocate missile defense are unwilling to accept arms control.
I don't dispute there are those of this city who are of that ilk. I don't consider myself to be one of those. But I would say this, that I have found in the 13 years that I have been in this city that the opposite is more true in my mind, where the arms control advocates have been totally unwilling to consider any type of missile defense options. I go back to my first amendment in the House which was the amendment on the floor to the ABM Treaty where the liberals and the arms control establishment pooh-poohed that amendment, said it wasn't useful, there was no substantive violation. It wasn't until Russia General Votensef in his memoirs four years later wrote that he was ordered to put Krasnoyarsk where it was, ordered by General Orgakov, who was ordered by the Politburo. It was in direct violation of the treaty, they knew it at the time, and it was meant for battle management purposes. Yet the arms control crowd in this city sent three liberal Democrat members of Congress over to Krasnoyarsk to hold a press conference to say, see, this big facility is nothing. The arms control crowd in my mind over the past 13 years has more often than not always gone the side of arms control is the answer.
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I am not against arms control, as you know. In fact, I supported many of our agreements. It is when we don't enforce arms control agreements that we get into trouble. I did a floor speech a year ago in June where I documented 17 violations of arms control treaties, including Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) by Russia. We failed to impose sanctions once. We caught the Russians transferring guidance systems to Iraq three times. In fact, those guidance systems were certified by one of the Russian agencies, so it was an official act. We did nothing about it because we didn't want to embarrass Boris Yeltsin.
My position is the arms control regime doesn't mean anything unless you are willing to back it up and enforce it and have transparency, to call the Russians when they are, in fact—I am going to call our companies, too, if they are violating the same types of agreements. I would make this case, that this Administration has done more to destabilize our relationship with Russia than anything I have seen certainly in the time I have been here.
Let me give you three examples. You talked about the need for cooperation and engagement with Russia, which I agree with. It was this Administration in 1992, 1993, that cancelled the Ross-Romanoff talks. The Administration was saying, well, we didn't cancel them. I can tell you what Kokoshin told me in the Kremlin when I was advocating with him the joint effort. He said, Curt, it was your side that canceled Ross-Romanoff. You are talking about joint working on missile defense. Why did you cancel those discussions?
Last year it was this Administration that canceled the RAMOS project, the only joint Russian-American missile defense program in existence. And this Administration, which talks a great game, canceled the program. Yet this Congress last week when the President signed our defense authorization bill had the program reinstated over our objections because Democrats and Republicans alike said you are going the wrong way. It was this Administration that almost canceled funding for Keith Payne's program which has been working with the Russians for the past three years in trying to find a common agenda.
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So the rhetoric doesn't match the substance of this Administration's approach where in my opinion it only embraced arms control and not really wanted to intelligently discuss including any type of limited missile defense in the equation.
In my opinion, the Russians are prepared to sit down with us. They understand the reality and we need to work with them. I agree that the ABM Treaty, I think, needs serious modifications but if you look at what this Administration has done, the negotiations in Geneva, I went over there to sit through those negotiations. I think I was the only Member of Congress to do so. The Administration still has yet to submit the two major substantive changes that they want for the treaty to the Congress for ratification, both demarcation and multilateralization. Why? Because they know that Congress will never accept them because they have never taken the time to explain the reasoning behind multi-lateralization and demarcation. In fact, I sat across from General Klutinov, the chief Russian negotiator. I said, why, general, do you want to multi-lateralize the ABM Treaty? Belarus and Ukraine and Kazahkstan are not ICBM countries anymore. He said, Congressman, you are asking that question of the wrong person. We didn't propose that, your side did.
My conclusion is the reason you want to multilateralize the treaty is to make it more difficult to amend it. Because then Belarus can be the bad guy; Lukashenko certainly is a bad guy. He can be the bad guy and Russia can say, we will accept that change, but Belarus won't go along with it. So we are making it more difficult to modify the very treaty that all of us says needs to be modified.
Then I could not for the life of me, Mr. Chairman, understand how they came up with this demarcation limitation, the difference between theater and national missile defense systems based on interpreter speed. Well, I finally found it out. I read an Israeli news article where the Russians were trying to sell Israel and Greece their newest missile defense, the NT–2500.
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So I went to the CIA and they came back and weren't really sure what the program was. From the bowels of the agency I got an analyst who gave me a brochure on Russia's newest missile defense system. It turns out that the technical summary of that system, that the capabilities of the NT–2500 are right below the threshold that was negotiated by our side with the Russians to allow that system to be sold, which meant for the past three years the Russians were negotiating with us a demarcation limitation that allowed them to sell a new system that they were not yet ready to market, and we bought that. That is not the way that we should be doing arms control negotiations.
For that reason, I like many of my colleagues, have no confidence in this Administration when it comes to arms control or working with the Russians. I say no confidence, that doesn't mean partisan. I trust my colleagues on the other side. Every one of our initiatives has been bipartisan. We understand the battle has been between the Congress and the White House.
So that is my little sermon, Mr. Chairman. I would like to ask some questions, but in five minutes, it is impossible to do that. So I gave my part of the sermon.
The CHAIRMAN. We could extend that since we lost most of our choir up here, if you want to go ahead.
Mr. WELDON. Just a couple of questions. I wasn't here and I apologize for Dr. Payne and Mr. Woolsey's testimony and Mr. Krepon's testimony. The term asymmetric deterrence is what I like to call the future in our relationship with Russia. Asymmetric deterrence allows for continued discussions on strategic offensive systems, but allows for the inclusion of strategic defensive systems at the same time. I would just like your response to whether or not you think that is a legitimate course to take. And again I would just say that in terms of the Russians I could recall meeting with a group of Russians when we went over to Moscow, Jim Woolsey, Bill Snyder and Don Rumsfeld, to brief the Russian Duma leaders on why we were pushing for the missile defense bill. And Vadima Lakeen said this to me, Mr. Chairman. He said, why are you, Curt, so interested in missile defense? I said, let me ask you a question. If you didn't believe in missile defense, why does Russia have two of the most capable missile defense systems on the market today? Your SA–10 and SA–12 are superior to any program we have. Some would even argue the SA–12 is more capable than our PAC–3 will be. And Vadima, if you don't believe in missile defense, why do you still have an ABM system around Moscow? You have upgraded three times. If you believe in deterrence, take that system down.
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He looked at me and he smiled, and he said, Curt, we have to work together.
Mr. Chairman, the one thing that we can't do is deal with the Russians from a position of weakness or lack of candor or lack of transparency. In my opinion, that has been the problem with this Administration throughout. They haven't negotiated with the Russians from a position of strength, consistency and candor. This Administration has asked Yeltsin, because of congressional pressure, about Yamantau Mountain. You want to talk about strategic destabilization? Yamantau Mountain, according to the CIA, could be the stabilizing site that the Russians believe could withstand a direct nuclear hit. If that is the case, that is a very destabilizing issue. This Administration has gotten no transparency on what has happened at Yamantau Mountain. So if any one of you want to respond to those points before I take any more time, I would be happy to open the gate up.
Mr. WOOLSEY. I will say a quick word about the asymmetric deterrence, Congressman Weldon. I think that is the right approach. One of the things that I mentioned in my remarks was an article forthcoming in the Naval Institute proceedings by Leon Schloss and Benson Adams which talks about replacing the ABM Treaty with something they call a reassurance treaty which essentially bars nothing except deployment of defenses vis-a-vis one another. It lets everything else runs free. It also actually provides some assistance to Russia to upgrade its early warning network as a part of this.
I think there are things like that that we could do together with Russia if we convince them from the beginning that we were serious about defending the United States. I think if we go to them with minimal ABM Treaty changes in order to permit a deployment in Alaska or Alaska and North Dakota, that I think will not be effective against early release submunitions, I think we have to get into boost phased intercept and that would require complete restructuring of the ABM Treaty relationship with Russia. If we go to them with these minimal changes and deploy something that is not going to be effective against early generation threats from places like North Korea, I think that we will lose both their respect and the ability to defend the country.
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Mr. KREPON. Mr. Weldon, first of all, I thank you for putting in such long hours on this set of problems. I am looking for a synthesis, not a division; a synthesis that has the arms control community accepting of defenses and that has your side of the aisle accepting of treaties. I think that is the synthesis that is required. A lot of tough problems in melding all of that together.
If I had my druthers, I would banish the words ''arms control'' from our lexicon. It is a 1970s term. President Reagan gave us a new term in the 1980s, ''arms reductions.'' that was much better than ''arms control.''
In the 1990s, the term of art that makes the most sense to me is ''cooperative threat reduction.'' That is where it is at. We had more progress on cooperative threat reduction than we have had through unilateral technical arrangements for sure and maybe even through treaties. But it is all supplementary. So I would like to stop using the words ''arms control.'' There is a better approach out there.
Dr. PAYNE. If I might add just a point, I agree wholeheartedly with Congressman Weldon's idea of trying to establish a cooperative approach to ABM Treaty provision to allow an offensive deterrent to maintain security while we move cooperatively toward limited missile defenses. That clearly is the approach that the Russian team that I have been working with also advocates. So there is some U.S.-Russian concurrence on the concept, but I should add this is not a new concept. It is certainly not a partisan concept.
Harold Brown in 1969, Harold Brown, the Secretary of Defense during the Carter Administration, advocated exactly this approach in 1969, that we should move cooperatively with the Russians to deploy a limited missile defense to protect against limited missile threats, a limited missile defense system that would not provoke the Russians but would allow defenses against other threats.
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Mr. WELDON. Didn't Presidents Reagan and Bush propose the same thing?
Dr. PAYNE. Indeed, sir. It is not a partisan issue. In fact, it is not even a new issue. As I said, Harold Brown proposed the same thing in 1969. The problem we get into is when we believe that presenting the Russians with our NMD goals is somehow going to provoke them in a way that is intolerable or will prevent us from moving forward cooperatively. The Russians have told us that if we want cooperative negotiations, then we must give them the incentive that will be necessary to motivate their cooperation. That incentive is obvious, serious U.S. interest in going forward with national missile defense.
The minimalist approach has two problems, 1) it doesn't look serious and 2) it means that we are going to have to pay two or three times to get the missile defense system that we would likely need. I think the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) example is a better example. In this case it was the Russians coming to us. Ambassador Woolsey in long experience with CFE must have struck close to his heart when the Russians came to us and said, the CFE treaty no longer suits the strategic environment, we need changes on the CFE treaty. If you won't change it, you are going to lose the treaty.
What they wanted the United States to do, we said, we understand the strategic environment has changed. We will change the CFE treaty.
Now, the Russians have come back to us again and said, we need to change the CFE treaty again, we are not going to withdraw but we may have to engage in an infraction. We need some relief on the CFE treaty.
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The Russians have come to us and we didn't go apoplectic about it. Just as that happened, if we go to the Russians, I am convinced with the serious plan for AMD deployment, they are going to take it seriously and understand that engagement in a cooperative negotiation is better than a stone wall.
A good example is NATO expansion. We proposed NATO expansion, the Russian side told us repeatedly that if we went forward with NATO expansion that the world was going to end. We went ahead with NATO expansion, and just days after it is completed, the expansion, the Russian press was full of statements by the Russians saying, well, we guess that really wasn't so bad after all.
We need to understand the difference between essentially rhetoric designed to move us off course and the fact that they do understand reality. When they have told us that what we need as an incentive to negotiate with you seriously on ABM Treaty is that you are serious about deployment, we should believe that.
Dr. GRAHAM. Mr. Chairman, in the first term of President Reagan, I chaired his general advisory committee on arms control and became very familiar with the activities of the Soviet Union under their arms control restraints throughout the whole post World War II period. In fact, we submitted a highly classified study to him and the Congress in 1984 on that subject. And Mr. Weldon's remarks about continuing Russian violations of arms controls dovetails perfectly with what we determined a decade before that.
In fact, it goes back further because, for example, the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the Biological Weapons Convention in the early 1970s. After that convention was signed, we saw a continuous increase in the Soviet biological weapons program from that day forward. They still have a massive program under way still in violation of that agreement after nearly 30 years.
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I believe that the arms control enthusiasts have had 30 years to demonstrate the effectiveness of arms control and have failed completely at that process. In fact, the arms limitations that have occurred have occurred for other reasons almost entirely. Therefore, I would say and I will be the lightning rod for this, we should absolutely abrogate and withdraw from the ABM Treaty.
Of course, we should continue to talk to the Russians and tell them what we are doing and why, just as they talk to us when they say they are going to violate the conventional forces in Europe agreement which they have done twice now.
But we should move resolutely in our own interests. If you like it reduced to bumper stickers, I will even call it demolishing the ABM treaty. I think it is important that we demolish the ABM treaty, rather than inviting hostile countries of the world to demolish U.S. cities.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Allen.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
This has been a provocative panel, and I want to thank you all for being here today. I usually try to reserve most of my time for questions—brief questions and long answers. I am not going to do that today because you have been so provocative, not the least, Dr. Graham just now, although I couldn't disagree more.
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But I do want to go over a few things, the topics that have come up and of are concern to me. I will try to get in a question for Mr. Krepon at the end.
Mr. Woolsey, in looking at your testimony and looking at the National Intelligence Estimate, the authors of the estimate were very careful to separate what could happen from what was likely or highly likely or not likely to happen, and that whole difference hasn't been brought up here at all. And it has been my fear that we will start to treat what could happen, even if it is a one percent chance in the next 10 years, as being worthy of a substantial response.
It seems to me that thinking has sort of colored a lot of the debate in this area. So my pitch to all of us is to, you know, when we say that Iran could—when the report says that Iran could test an ICBM capable of carrying a biological payload to the U.S. in the next few years, that is not saying that it is likely, and we need to make those differentiations.
Dr. Payne said deterrence is inherently unreliable. Well, that provokes in me the response, so are arms races; and the human factor is always present in every debate. What I think we are looking for—and it is reflected in some of your recent comments of all members of the panel, is how do you go at this issue in a way to make the changes appropriate for this period of time, not the 1970s, without, I would argue, Mr. Graham, simply saying treaties that no longer serve our interests, or in the private sector, contracts we no longer like, we just throw out. I think that is probably not the way we should go.
The third point, Mr. Woolsey made the suggestion that we should protect U.S. versus all kinds of missile threats. I would submit if that is the goal, we are not going to get there. Mr. Graham was talking about surface short-range missiles launched from commercial ships off the coast of our—off either coast. You know, at least in many instances, I would imagine that those kinds of missiles will not be able to be defended by some national missile defense system based wherever.
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So you have surface ships. You have countermeasures that are going to be a factor. I start to believe that a national missile defense is the most oversold national policy since NAFTA. And what I am hearing today really does confirm that view.
We live in a world where chemical and biological threats are immediate and serious, in my opinion; and we live in a world where the threat from missiles to our forces around the globe are immediate and serious. Contrast that with a threat of, you know, that some foreign power is going to launch a missile at the United States and that, to me—you know, however you get to it, however you think about it, that has got to be a far lower level of likelihood.
So I think what we are trying to do is figure out how we adapt for the modern and for the contemporary time. And those are just some random thoughts.
But I did want to use whatever time I have left to go to Mr. Krepon and talk a little bit about consequences, if you would. You touched on the consequences. It seems to me that we—in theory, the Administration's NMD deployment decision is based on three factors—threat, technology, and real-world consequences. We tend to talk in this committee all the time about the threat, not so much about the technology. We just assume we will have three tests, they work and we will all be happy; I don't really buy it.
We now must never talk about the consequences. We almost never talk about what happens in Europe, what happens in Asia, not just what happens to Russia, how they respond, but how the rest of the world responds. You mentioned the Nonproliferation Treaty, and I would just like you to elaborate a little bit on those real-world consequences that you see from an abrupt pullout and an abrupt renunciation of the ADM treaty and that kind of thinking.
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Mr. KREPON. You are right. We are talking about low-probability, high-consequence events. We are asking ourselves how much of an insurance policy is it wise to purchase for low-probability, high-consequence events.
I have a paragraph in my testimony that, with your indulgence, I would like to read. I didn't—I have been taught never to read testimony before a congressional committee.
''As with any other military program, missile defenses should not be asked to perform missions that are not achievable and taxpayers should not be asked to write a blank check for an ambitious program beyond its reach. Missile defense programs must therefore have a clearly defined, achievable mission. Oversight is needed to ensure that missile defense technologies are proven under repeated rigorous testing and that mission creep, such as we have heard today, does not raise the bar for defenses, beyond which their effectiveness has been proven.''
I am totally okay with test failures for missile defense systems because I want those systems to be stressed in flight testing. I want people to learn from failures and I want the system to be improved. How does the rest of the world look at the United States in missile defense debates? I think the rest of the world is genuinely puzzled by congressional sentiment. Puzzled because it is divided, but also puzzled because the majority view seems to be very antitreaty treaties that they rely upon as part of the fabric of their protection.
A nonproliferation treaty was indefinitely extended by a near unanimous view just four years ago. In doing that, an outcome that the United States Government and Members of Congress worked really hard for—it was a good outcome for us—the international community said, by the way, this treaty is about reducing nuclear threats among those states that already have the capability, as well as general forbearance among states that don't. And we will indefinitely extend this treaty if you, the nuclear powers, do your part.
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What did the non-nuclear weapons states ask for? Very specifically, they asked for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. One could argue—.
Mr. ALLEN. If I could just make a point, that is being challenged in the Senate because some say you can't get 100 percent guaranteed reliability that a test may not be conducted somewhere by some country, and yet I don't think there is anyone here—correct me if I am wrong—who would say that if we deploy a national missile defense after three tests, we make the decision after three and deploy after twenty, that you will have a guarantee of 100 percent reliability for that system.
Mr. KREPON. I can guarantee you, Mr. Allen, that this treaty is reviewed every five years by the international community. Some will argue breach of contract; some may consider walking out of this treaty. A more likely outcome in my judgment is that the treaty becomes hollow. If you can't rely on treaties which Members of Congress oppose, which are not ratified, which do not enter into effect, then what do you rely upon? You rely upon your own needs. If the Nonproliferation Treaty isn't effective, go your own way. This is going to be a big problem for us.
The CHAIRMAN. Yes, Dr. Payne.
Dr. PAYNE. If I can just make one comment, Congressman Allen, on your point that the missile threat to the United States is a low likelihood or a lower likelihood, I think that it is very difficult for us to identify probabilities in this matter. We don't know whether the probability is 1 percent or whether the probability is 100 percent over the next 10 years.
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Let me give you a little historical context as to why I am very skeptical that we can identify probabilities. Chamberlain said in 1938 we had peace in our time. Dean Acheson said in 1941 that the Japanese will never attack. Stalin said in 1941 that the Germans would never attack. The CIA and MacArthur said in 1950 that the Chinese would never attack in Korea. The CIA in 1973 said the Arabs would never attack Israel for another war. The British said in 1982 that the Argentinians would not invade the Malvinas or the Falklands.
The Bush Administration in 1990 said Saddam Hussein will never invade Kuwait because it is unreasonable. And most recently Washington was shocked last year when the Indians tested nuclear weapons.
The only point I am trying to show here is that in international relations very shocking things happen very regularly. And for us to be able to say this has a one percent probability chance of happening, there is no empirical evidence to support that, and it is impossible for any of us to sit here and identify the probability.
So I would say that the probability is somewhere between 0 and 100 percent, which in my mind means we should probably have missile defense to protect against the disaster that could happen if a biological weapon or a nuclear weapon were to land on or—near or on an American city.
Mr. ALLEN. I understand the point. But I think as human beings we have to make judgments about likelihood in most of our decisions, so that we are forced into making those decisions. You come out a certain way, and I might not even disagree ultimately if the system is the right size and the right shape. But I worry very much that we will—we are marching down a road faster than the facts warrant or the technology warrants.
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Dr. GRAHAM. Mr. Allen, I would just like to emphasize the issue of likelihood versus capabilities. You come down on the side of trying to evaluate the likelihood. Even the National Intelligence Estimate that just came out tries to avoid that issue, and doesn't unfortunately, and the only way it can be done, which is inconsistent internally, when they talk about assuming the likelihood, they go on in the same paragraph to say—and this is the unclassified summary of the NIE on the ballistic missile threat to the U.S.—it says, they say we did not attempt to address all the potential political, economic and social changes that could occur; rather we analyzed the level of success the pace countries have experienced in their developmental efforts. Fine, that is capability, international technology transfers, more capability. Political motives, intention again, no inertia. Military incentives, again very little inertia. And economic resources, which we have seen from North Korea are highly fungible.
From that basis, we projected possible and likely missile developments to 2015, independent of significant political and economic changes. Mr. Allen, I believe doing that independent of these changes is like trying to do a book report on Moby Dick, but not mentioning the whale motive anywhere in it. Those are the things that drive the changes in the estimate.
Mr. ALLEN. Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Hunter.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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Mr. Chairman, just to go over the comments of my colleague and reflect on them a little bit, on what this panel has told us. I can remember Jim Woolsey, I think it was 1987 when we put together a letter that I drafted up, that I know Curt Weldon signed and a number of the members of this committee signed, and we sent to the Israeli defense minister, to the effect that everybody in the world made fighter aircraft and they were then concentrating on the Lavi fighter aircraft as the centerpiece of the U.S./Israeli production in weapons development, and we said everybody makes those.
You are not going to go into—you are not going to staunch any vulnerabilities by making those; however, if a neighboring Arab country using Russia-made missiles fired missiles at Tel Aviv, every single one of them would explode without being defended against. And we sent that, I believe, in 1986 and/or —1986 or 1987, and I think we predicted that would probably come from Syria. But in the end it did happen. And the point is that you develop to defend against vulnerabilities, and the one major vulnerability that we have today is against incoming missiles.
One thing that has bothered me and that I have tried to work against in the last 15 years with respect to missile defense is this attempt to—is the fiction that we have imposed on the argument and the division between national missile defense and theater missile defense, as if you can't kill troops in theater with fast missiles.
We are basically talking about fast missiles and slow missiles. And you can take a Taepo Dong 2 up to a high trajectory and kill troops in theater with Taepo Dong 2s. And as a result of that logic, I think it makes no sense that the Administration has unilaterally sought to codify what I think was called the ''Foster box''; that was the demarcation that Johnny Foster put in place as kind of an informal demarcation between theater missile defense and national missile defense with respect to velocities.
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And the idea that we wanted to put that into law and thereby limit ourselves against protecting our troops in theater against fast missiles was absolutely crazy, and yet it was a position that the Administration adopted, and as I recall, it was the Administration, not the Russians that wanted to lock that demarcation in.
And I know—Jim Woolsey, I want to compliment you, because you worked early on with this committee during the Aspin days to—and, I think, did a lot to persuade Les Aspin that theater missile defense was a course we should pursue and to initiate that development. But one thing that struck me throughout the debate over national missile defense, and ultimately theater, is that there has been a momentum or there has been a strong argument made by anti-missile defense folks that has compelled confusion. It has compelled diffusion. It has argued against deployment. It has argued against non-focus.
The whole idea with SDI with respect to the anti-SDI guys was to keep us from ever doing anything. And if you never have to build anything, if the system that you are looking at never has to work, then everybody's blueprint is a good blueprint.
So I heard Mr. Spratt criticize the lack of focus. There was a deliberate attempt to have no focus. Every time you tried to focus on something that would get us there that was practical, that we should actually put in place, and the terrible words or the term ''build something,'' actually build something came up.
The congressional opponents of missile defense went crazy as did, later on, Administration opponents. So the whole idea was anybody who had an idea was as good as the next guy who had an idea, so we were going to pursue lots of stuff and we weren't going to focus on anything. And to have a lot of the folks that criticized deployment of missile defenses come up now and say, well, you know, we never really focused on anything and we never built anything is somewhat ludicrous, because that was the plan.
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The plan was not to have a plan; it was not to build anything, it was not to focus on anything. And it was to spend lots of money on laboratories and programs that would never go anywhere. We have gone over, hopefully, that era, gone past that era, and I think even the opponents now realize that missiles can hurt people, that even though that may be a low-level probability on somebody's scale, conventional war is low-level too, but yet we maintain 10 Army divisions, and we maintain 24 fighter air wings, and we have a little Navy of 324 ships, and we don't do—we do that because there is a probability with, as Mr. Krepon said, high consequences if you are not prepared.
Just one other reflection. I was reflecting, Dr. Payne, on your statement that lots of things happen that aren't anticipated. The Chinese did attack when we had what I think you could call ''total deterrence.'' We had the nuclear monopoly, and that didn't keep the Chinese from sending about a million south into the peninsula. The Japanese warlords refused to stop the war, even after the first bomb had taken out a Japanese city; after a nuclear weapon had been demonstrated against their population, they didn't want to stop the war.
So if you look at the array of personalities that we have come up against in this century who had lots of war-making equipment on the other side, none of them fit the fictional government leaders that we have constructed in order to justify mutually assured destruction in the absolute effectiveness of the deterrent strategy.
I guess my question here, Jim—I know we all make nice speeches; this has been a great forum for speech-making incidentally for Members of Congress. But I wanted to ask all of you, but I will start out with Jim Woolsey, because he was an early guy with this committee with respect to missile defense, how do we move effectively in this day and age when tests are few and far between because we made these tests, the political system has made failures—Mr. Krepon says you have got to accept some failures—we made failures extremely difficult to handle politically.
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So we are like the trapshooters who have to become All-American trap and skeetshooters, but we never go to the trap and skeet range because we never want to see anybody—have anybody see us miss a target, so we do very few tests. And yet we have to move into a regimen, I think, of high testing, especially with theater missile defense systems that enable us to take on a faster and faster target.
Practically speaking, how are we going to be able to do that?
Mr. WOOLSEY. Congressman, I have only gotten back into this issue in recent months and been doing some reading, and although I think that there is some utility in moving ahead in theater defense with some of the existing systems, particularly AEGIS, I do believe that whether you are at a theater level or a national level trying to hit a bullet with a bullet from the surface is the wrong way to go about solving this problem. It is inherently—and I would defer to Dr. Graham on anything about the technologies here, but I will just give you my understanding. It is inherently much harder to intercept from the surface, even with a full panoply of sensors that we can now deploy, than to shoot something down in boost phase when it is big and slow and hot and easily found.
And the technology that I think is far more advanced now, for an interesting reason, than it was just a few years ago is whether they are brilliant or not, I don't know that they need to be, they can maybe be less than brilliant, but what was called Brilliant Pebbles back during the Bush Administration is a first cousin to a technology that is now being deployed by some of the lower orbit communication satellite companies such as Iridium and Teledesic.
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It is essentially, and it relies on some of the things that Dr. Graham talked about, the ability to maneuver lower, smaller satellites relatively easily and getting in the way of even a SCUD or certainly a medium- or intermediate-range ballistic missiles or an intercontinental missile taking off out of North Korea or Iraq or Iran with a lower-orbiting small satellite is inherently, I believe, a much easier task and one that will prove out far more readily and with fewer failures in tests than this very difficult job we have gotten ourselves into in national missile defense, and to some extent, with theater defense of hitting a bullet with a bullet from the surface of the Earth.
So I think that we need to start thinking seriously, very seriously, about moving to boost-phase intercept for not only national missile defense, but also for theater.
Mr. HUNTER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Abercrombie.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Krepon, I appreciate your reading your paragraph from your testimony, regardless of past experience causing some trepidation, as to whether you should do that or not because if you hadn't read it, I was about to. So we kind of zeroed in on that.
Did you have occasion to see the—or go over the NIC attachment? Have you folks seen this at all? It is part of our materials. It is called—or did you submit that?
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Mr. WOOLSEY. This is from the new National Intelligence Estimate?
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Yes, the National Intelligence Council Foreign Missile Developments —.
Mr. WOOLSEY. Yes.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. —and Ballistic Missile Threat.
Mr. Krepon, or anybody, if you go to the last page under Immediate Theater Missile Threats to U.S. Interests and Allies, what I would draw out of the testimony and out of all of this summary—by the way, I think this is an excellent summary for us—is that the likelihood of utilization of missiles is—let me start over.
The utilization of a missile in an offensive way is much more likely to be taking place in, say, what we refer to as the Middle East or South Asia between or among a China, Pakistan, India, et cetera, Iran, Iraq, Israel, than it is towards the United States as such.
The question I have in trying to set aside some of the—I don't want to say ''hyperbole'' exactly, but some of the heated discussion that takes place about what the United States should deploy or not deploy, what the United States should do about—by way of investment in missile defense, et cetera, I am not precisely sure what the United States can do one way or the other with respect to the likelihood of missiles being utilized in those contexts under circumstances that, by definition of the testimony I have heard here today, is going to take place by individuals, groups, countries, regions, nations that we have very little to say about anyway, and it is unlikely to involve us unless we insert ourselves, if you will.
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So it is not so much that I am confused, so much as I am—I am, in a sense, withdrawing or observing that there is not—I don't see a whole hell of a lot that we can do in any of this or what we can usefully be experimenting with or spending money on with respect to how these likely activities are to be thwarted or intercepted or dealt with by the United States.
Mr. KREPON. Mr. Abercrombie, are you as surprised, as I am, as to how many times that we are surprised of late?
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Only because we don't pay attention. I don't mean to give you a smart aleck answer, but I am one of the people that, for example, has been, I consider, a voice in the wilderness around here saying why don't we pay attention to India? Why are we always falling down in a faint every time dictators in Beijing do what Stalinist-type dictators always do, as opposed to paying attention to the world's largest democracy in India, who can only get our attention apparently when they go into firing missiles and test nuclear weapons.
Mr. KREPON. I pay some attention to India. Ten days ago I was at the line of control in Kashmir that divides that place between Indian and Pakistani forces.
But I was making a different point. There is so much information out there now and yet we find ourselves surprised at developments, even people who follow a country or a region very, very hard. It is not surprising anymore to us that we are surprised.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Yes.
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Mr. KREPON. And there could be surprises in store again, both with respect to missile developments, which this committee, I know, focuses on a lot. But there also could be surprises, unpleasant surprises, if we go ahead and tear up treaties that we didn't want—.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. My reference right now is, if we go ahead and develop some defenses, say, against short- and medium-range missiles—let us just suppose it can be done. We spend the money, we do the testing, we do all of the things that need to be done, we take all the heat that comes from it when it doesn't work every time, so on and so forth, is the idea then to deploy these defenses in India or Pakistan?
Do we—because you want to talk about treaties not having long-term application or having some difficulty in understanding whether a treaty is forever, just try and figure out who the hell you are going to have an alliance with on any given day.
Mr. KREPON. We do have allies in East Asia. We have friends and allies in the Middle East. The situation in South Asia is very fluid. What really impressed me a lot about that document that you pointed to was the discussion about the political utility of missiles, which in many cases can be as great or greater than the military utility.
So countries that we don't trust, countries that we worry about have missiles, and they can use those missiles as instruments of political coercion against their neighbors. They can use those missiles to dissuade the United States from coming to the aid of friends and allies in rough neighborhoods. They can use those missiles to dissuade coalitions from forming to protect friends and allies and to push back aggression. Missiles can have political utility.
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Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Yes, I agree with that. And I guess my focus is—and I will just conclude with this, and I appreciate the time, Mr. Chairman—is I am much more concerned with short- and medium-range missiles being utilized for chemical and biological purposes, as opposed to the nuclear weapons threat. You know, again I guess on a scale of my fears and anxieties and concerns, I have got to put that down lower, because I think for most things that we are likely to deal with, say, over the next 25 years, short- and medium-range missiles involving chemical and/or biological weapons I think are, from a political standpoint, much more likely to be utilized, that is to say, put up against what you term the ''threat mode'' or ''political threat mode'' than anything else.
And I am not precisely sure how we are going to be able to cope with that in terms of missile defense. Maybe political defense is something we need to pay some more attention to, as well.
Mr. WOOLSEY. Congressman Abercrombie, can I make one short sentiment then?
First of all, I think you are absolutely correct, it is really impossible to predict exactly where these things are going to be used, or as Mike Krepon says, essentially—if not actually used, at least threatened to be used for blackmail purposes.
If we had to defend an ally such as Saudi Arabia or a friend or ally such as Saudi Arabia or Israel—let us say Iraq again—against a short- or medium-range ballistic missile and we had the defensive capability, there would be two ways to do it. One would be to put the defenses in the country, such as THAAD, let us say; another one would be in a number of these countries that one wants to protect, they are near the sea. So an AEGIS cruiser, for example, off of Israel or in the Persian Gulf could presumably be quite effective, assuming the system worked well, in being able to defend a friend or an ally against a threat from a hostile country.
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There are other circumstances of that sort where we might not get involved, let us say India versus Pakistan.
The thing I want to stress is that the types of space-based defenses I was describing are not only defenses against intercontinental ballistic missiles. Anything—and Bill Graham can correct me if I am wrong here—anything over about 100 kilometers or so has to go up into the region of space that is high enough, unless its trajectory is artificially altered in some way; but as a general rule, most short- and medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles have to go up into space enough that they can be intercepted by a kinetic energy interceptor in lower orbit.
So one does not have to choose today if you are going to defend India from Pakistan, or Pakistan from India, or Saudi Arabia, with a different government sometime in the future, from Iraq or not; we don't know. But if we had the capability and it was space-based, we would be able to make that decision at the time without having to have planned years and years ahead about how something would be deployed.
Mr. ABERCROMBIE. Okay. I will just conclude by saying there is just one unfortunate aspect of this, and which I would like to emphasize, Mr. Chairman. I do think we have to reorient—this is not 1970 anymore, there have been lots of changes that have taken place, and we shouldn't see that as unusual. But I hope that we can dampen down a little bit that there is—there is a tendency, and I don't say it is necessarily that you folks are fostering this, but there is a little bit of a tendency to pile on here as if there was some kind of nefarious or evil intent by putting together the treaties in the first place.
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I think they were the product of goodwill and good intentions and the clearest thinking at the time that could be put together. So I would rather say that we should talk about whether we need to modify, and I think the idea about reduction, as opposed to control, is probably a good, rhetorical way of addressing the thing. But to get a little bit of the pejorative sense of this out of it, there is a little bit, almost a revenge-taking kind of atmosphere being established. And I merely bring that up, Mr. Chairman, because I don't think it is a good atmosphere for trying to accomplish what we are setting out to do here.
I think we need to exercise some goodwill and forbearance with one another and try to come to grips with the realities of today and put our best thinking forward again.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
Mr. Saxton.
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Chairman, I wasn't going to ask a question, but let me just pursue a subject that my friend from Hawaii just touched on with regard to missile use.
I guess the missiles—the purpose of a delivery system for nuclear is pretty well understood and the effects of nuclear attack are pretty well established, as horrific as they may be. But I am not sure the same is true of chemical and biological with regard to this.
Let me just throw out a couple of things and then just ask you to comment.
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It seems to me that with regard to chemical weapons, certainly the damage that could be done by a single chemical weapon attack would be quite—you know, could be defined as a finite amount of damage that could be done depending on conditions, et cetera, et cetera. With regard to biological and chemical, however, there is one thing that is certain and that is that we would know from whence the attack came.
Now, with regard to biological specifically, my understanding of the weapons that are available to attack one's enemies, one of the characteristics is that there is an incubation period, so the attack comes, the agent, whether it is anthrax or smallpox or ebola or whatever they decide to use, my understanding is that there would be some period of time before you see any effects of it, which defeats the purpose in a way of a secret attack, that is, if you use a missile.
So it seems to me that while it is scary to think about, and certainly chemical and biological weapons can be used for purposes of terror and political—convince somebody to do something that they would not want to do politically, but it seems to me that there is a whole different level of threat there and a whole different scenario that would develop. And I question whether those types of weaponized biological or chemical stuff are really the kind of threat that we think they might be because of the alternate means of delivery which are much more superior.
Mr. WOOLSEY. I will try that, if you want, Congressman.
First of all, I think one does have to protect against terrorist threats with chemical and bacteriological, as you were suggesting, at the end. Dealing with the ballistic missile or a cruise missile threat doesn't obviate the need to deal with terrorism. And it does inhibit, I think, the role of nuclear or chemical or bacteriological weapon use, that a ballistic missile typically has an address unless it is launched from something like a freighter in an open ocean or something of that sort.
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So I really think the principal utility of a horror weapon such as a ballistic missile carrying biological munitions is principally as blackmail, but I think that, for example, our ability to put together the coalition that won the Gulf War would have been very different if all of our allies were in reach of Saddam Hussein-owned ballistic missiles carrying bacteriological weapons. Even though there is a period for a lot of biological agents during which—the onset of the disease takes some time.
I mean, with anthrax, I think it is 24 to 48 hours before you are symptomatic. Once you are symptomatic, you are very likely to be dead, but people can get antibiotics if the right kind are available within, say, that 24-hour period, and that is an interesting and different feature of biological weapons compared with either chemical or nuclear.
But nonetheless, the ability to target an ally of the United States or the United States with a ballistic missile armed with biologicals, seems to me to be a very potent blackmail threat, particularly in the hands of someone who is of known unpredictability. It is one thing to be facing a stodgy kind of conservative leader like Leonid Brezhnev; it is another to be dealing with someone like Kim Jung-il, who is sort of a cross between Caligula and Baby Doc Duvalier; and under those circumstances, a deterrence might be even less likely to work than in some of the other cases that Dr. Payne so ably described as deterrence having—failing in the past.
Mr. KREPON. Mr. Saxton, I agree with your analysis that a ballistic missile attack on U.S. soil to deliver a chemical or a biological weapon is very, very remote. Very remote.
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The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Skelton.
Mr. SKELTON. I just have one question. Is there any member of the panel that disagrees with attempting to negotiate with the Russians, disagrees with that?
Mr. WOOLSEY. No, I don't.
Mr. KREPON. No.
Dr. GRAHAM. Mr. Skelton, I would say that depends on what you mean by ''negotiation.'' There has been some suggestion that the Administration may take the view that it requires the permission of the Russians to allow us to proceed with ballistic missile defense; if that is what is meant by ''negotiation,'' then I would certainly object to it.
If, on the other hand, you mean talking to the Russians and telling them what we are doing and telling them why and reflecting on their behavior toward arms control, why I think all of that has merit; and I believe at least some of that is in fact being done. But I would not give them a veto on our actions.
Mr. KREPON. Mr. Skelton, a cooperative transition to nuclear safety, such as the one I have outlined, requires negotiation and cooperation, rather than dictation.
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Payne.
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Dr. PAYNE. I agree with the point that Dr. Graham just made. If we approach negotiations in a way that allows the Russian Federation to have a veto over our going forward, they will use that veto.
Mr. SKELTON. I practiced law for some 20 years before I came to Congress, and you settle most of your cases, you do it by negotiations. I never run into—I have never found the definition as set forth by Dr. Graham. Negotiation means just that. That is my question.
Does anyone disagree with that?
Mr. WOOLSEY. The way I see it, Congressman Skelton, is that the way we ought to start out with the Russians in these circumstances is to say, look, the Cold War is over, this treaty was with a different country, we are going to have effective defenses, but we are not trying to undermine your status or position in the world, which in part you identify with having strategic offensive forces; and we are willing to talk to you about how we are going to go about that, and we are even willing to go about it in such a way as to recognize your interests. But you should have no doubt that we are going to defend the country effectively, and we are not going to let the ABM treaty stand in the way.
I would—we could call it ''tough love,'' I suppose, but I would be willing to be very friendly with the Russians and even to help them financially in having an effective early warning system, for example. It is not in our interests for the Russian early warning system to be deteriorated the way it is; that is a bad thing, not a good thing.
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There are a number of things that I think we can and should do with them, and I think we ought to deal with them as equals and fairly and honorably and recognize their position and their pride. But I think we ought to make it clear from the beginning that we do mean to deploy defenses that would be effective against rogue states in particular. And we are going to do it in the most cost-effective way.
Dr. PAYNE. May I just add the comment that negotiations, I suspect, can be a very good idea if we take Churchill's advice about negotiations. Churchill said never sit down unless you are willing to stand up. If we follow that advice, I suspect it can turn out okay.
Mr. SKELTON. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. It has been a very good hearing, and I appreciate all of you and your contribution.
One question that some people have posed relative to deterrence that we talked about here a good bit today: The people who are opposed to national missile defense a lot of times say, look, we have been involved now for a long time, and it hasn't happened and deterrence works. If anyone in the world wants to launch at us, they know we can detect it and obliterate them, and so they aren't going to do it.
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How do you answer that kind of an analysis?
Dr. PAYNE. I would answer that analysis with a historical example. After the war of 1871, the Franco-Prussian War, there was a long period of peace, about 40 years, and people began to say—particularly academics—see, we figured out how to solve the problem of war. Around 1914, that thesis got a little shaky.
The difficulty with thinking that deterrence always holds is that you are assuming that the other side will be reasonable as you define ''reasonable,'' and what we find out is that very frequently opposing leaderships aren't reasonable as we define ''reasonable,'' and to count on deterrence working reliably forever, which is essentially the scenario that you lay out, is simply to ignore the reality of how people behave.
The CHAIRMAN. You made that point earlier, and I agree with you.
Mr. SAXTON. Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, would you yield to me on that point?
The CHAIRMAN. Yes.
Mr. SAXTON. I would just like to—I have been—this has been going around in my mind here this morning, this very point on deterrence. And let me just ask you this question and see if you can react.
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It seems to me that when we started out on the policy of deterrence during the Cold War, we thought we understood—and maybe we understood more than we really thought we understood—but we thought we had a reasonable foe, a foe that we could easily identify and a foe whose arsenal, to a large extent, we understood, and a foe who had—which had many of the same—society had many of the same values that we do, family-wise, wanting to do well, et cetera.
It seems to me that our foe has been significantly altered, not only in terms of proliferation, but in societies that we don't understand very well with perhaps some different religious beliefs, that perhaps place a different value on life. And therefore, it would seem to me that the notion of deterrence, as we think of it today as a result of our history during the Cold War, is much different.
And in addition to that, I would suggest that there may be some ways that people could launch something at us where we might be confused for one reason or another about from whence it came.
Dr. PAYNE. The best analytic studies, sir, show that the less familiar you are with the opponent, the less likely you are to be able to anticipate how it will behave and the more likely you are to be surprised.
With the Soviet Union, there were probably the best conditions for deterrence to work. It was a very cautious and—generally cautious leadership that weighed costs and benefits fairly clearly; and even in that case, deterrence almost failed. It came very close to failing on a number of occasions, some of which aren't widely known.
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So my point is that even in that context, where deterrence was most likely to operate, the world came very close to nuclear war on a number of occasions.
In the future, we are going to face opponents and challengers who we are very unfamiliar with; and to think that we can structure a deterrent that is reliable when we know so very little about the opponent is heroically optimistic.
Mr. KREPON. We don't know if deterrence really worked; all we can say with assurance is that it didn't fail during the Cold War, at least the kind of deterrence that related to a central exchange by nuclear forces. Deterrence did not work in stopping conventional wars, or preventing them or unconventional wars; we know that.
And so even if you accept the proposition that deterrence worked and didn't fail, there are still reasons for missile defenses, the other reasons.
The CHAIRMAN. Okay.
Again, thank you very much, all of you. We apologize for keeping you over. But we are going to take a break for about half an hour, and then reconvene with the other folks on the next panel.
Again, thank you for your contribution. You made our work a lot more difficult by giving us all the information that we need. We still haven't arrived at the point yet that we are going to be able to convince the Administration to make that decision, to use that word ''deploy,'' and that is what we are all about, trying to work on that.
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So thank you again for all of your help in that respect.
Mr. WOOLSEY. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[Recess.]
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please be in order. For the benefit of our guests, I had an opening statement in the beginning of the earlier session this morning, and I won't go through that again and put you through that.
We have with us the Honorable Walter B. Slocombe, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and Mr. Lucas Fischer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Affairs. As I told the other panel, I will put your prepared remarks in the record and they will be accepted for the record and you can proceed as you would like. We will start with you, Mr. Slocombe.
STATEMENT OF WALTER B. SLOCOMBE, UNDER SECRETARY OF DEFENSE FOR POLICY
Secretary SLOCOMBE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee. It is, as always, an honor to represent the Department of Defense, to appear before this committee today and to discuss with you our planning for a national missile defense system and the implications of these plans for the ABM Treaty.
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As you know, it has for several years been the policy of the Department of Defense to be in a position technologically to make a decision by the year 2000 to deploy an effective national missile defense system capable of defending the territory of the all of the 50 United States against limited ballistic missile attack from rogue states, if the development of a threat makes such deployment appropriate.
With respect to the threat, recent developments in foreign ballistic missile programs, most immediately but by no means limited to North Korea, make it apparent that the threat is growing rapidly. I believe that the committee was briefed yesterday evening by Mr. Walpole from the CIA about the most recent analysis of the threat situation. At the same time, our national missile defense development program is proceeding successfully, especially considering the accelerated timetable that we are on. This was highlighted by the October 2 intercept by an exo-atmospheric kill vehicle, EKV, of a target launched by a modified Minuteman missile.
While the President has not made a decision to proceed with the deployment of a national missile defense he will make that decision next summer at the earliest— but meanwhile, he has made decisions as to the basic architecture for planning purposes, and we are taking prudent steps both in technology and in diplomacy to facilitate deployment in the event that next year the President does decide to proceed.
These programs proceed, of course, against the backdrop of the ABM Treaty. This Administration, like all of its predecessors since President Nixon signed the treaty in 1972, is committed by both law and policy to the treaty as a critical element in sustaining strategic stability. It is our policy and desire and expectation that our limited NMD program can proceed without destroying the ABM Treaty. We have begun discussions with the Russian Government to that end. Nevertheless, we will not permit any other country to have a veto in actions that may be needed for the defense of our Nation.
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With this summary, there are three broad variables that shape our planning for an NMD system: the state of the threat; our technological capability and the affordability of proposed deployment; and arms control. In my statement, I address each in turn.
With respect to the threat, I will be brief. We have long geared our NMD program to the emerging danger posed by rogue states such as North Korea and Iran. With respect to these emerging threats, the new NIE released last month and on which the committee was briefed yesterday, has reached the following judgment. We project that during the next 15 years, the United States most likely will face ICBM threats from North Korea, probably from Iran, and possibly from Iraq.
That analysis forms the basis of our approach to the NMD issue. My statement summarizes some of the details which are in any case available to the committee from the agency. In order to protect ourselves from these and other ballistic missile threats, the United States seeks to prevent and reduce the threat through a whole range of means: export control measures such as the Missile Technology Control Regime; arms reduction agreements such as START I and II; international nonproliferation arrangements such as the Nonproliferation Treaty; and cooperative nonproliferation efforts such as the Cooperative Threat Reduction program.
We also maintain an active program of bilateral diplomacy to discourage the transfer and indeed the acquisition of missiles and capabilities which would threaten the United States or key allies. We also deter the threat by maintaining powerful nuclear and conventional forces. Those that threaten America or its allies should have no doubt, any attack on us would meet an overwhelming response.
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In addition to these preventive measures, defenses, active defenses, can play an important role in strengthening and complementing our overall deterrence policy. There is no contradiction between defenses and deterrence. At the core of deterrence is convincing an adversary that the assured negative consequences of an action greatly outweigh any potential positive results of that action. Thus, there are two sides to deterrence. The threat of retaliation drives home that the negative consequences would be huge. But it is also valuable for deterrence to reduce the chance that an attack would succeed in the first place; that is, to reduce the prospect of positive results. And missile defenses can do that.
Missile defenses further complement deterrence by enhancing the United States' ability to fulfill its global security commitments to allies and friends. This is because defenses, particularly in the context of defense against rogue state attacks, render less credible any possible attempts by an adversary to coerce the United States with ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction in failing to carry out the actions that its interest would otherwise require with respect to threats to allies and friends. The defenses can therefore reinforce the commitment of the United States to support our allies and friends from NATO to Israel to the Persian Gulf to Northeast Asia in the event they face a threat from a rogue state.
In 1996, in recognition of the growing potential for the rogue state threat, our policy at the Defense Department shifted from pursuing a technology readiness program, whose goal was to develop the technology of NMD system elements, to a deployment readiness program, and has sought to aggressively develop the components for an integrated system that could be deployed a few years into the next decade.
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In so doing, we deliberately set the stage to make an NMD deployment decision when it is now scheduled in the year 2000. Our initial intent was to be able to deploy a system as early as 2003 if the threat warranted. In January of this year Secretary Cohen assessed the pace of the development program and reached the conclusion on the basis of the recommendation from the technological experts in the Department that the plan to have an initial NMD deployment in place by the year 2003 was simply too aggressive and too high-risk to succeed.
Secretary Cohen did not want to rush to failure, a phrase coined in a recent Defense Science Board study of our programs. He therefore put the program on a still aggressive but much more feasible pace to reach initial operational capability in the 2005–2006 period.
I should emphasize that from a technology and development standpoint, our NMD development program is still very ambitious. The technological challenges remain significant, but it should be attainable. The technological experts at Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and the Department of Defense generally have a sound basis for thinking that this accelerated timetable is achievable.
No new technology is required for the proposed system. We are in the process of taking technologies that we have already developed, integrating them into a system, and demonstrating their ability to perform the mission. The NMD program actually has a very mature technology base from which to build an operationally effective system.
With respect to funding, in January of this year the President approved the addition of $6.6 billion to the BMDO six-year budget. This has the effect of raising funding levels for NMD to $10.5 billion through fiscal year 2005. In our ongoing budget preparation for the coming five-year plan from FY 2001 through 2005, we are examining what adjustments may be necessary to ensure that the funding is available to deploy the initial architecture, which I will describe shortly. If that requires additional funding, the budget for the year 2001 and the outyears will be adjusted accordingly.
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It is our policy in the Department of Defense to ensure that the funding is available so that the budget is properly set should a deployment decision be made.
With regard to the program itself, over the past year and a half there have been a number of major decisions and the passage of a number of significant milestones. In April of 1998, BMDO selected Boeing as an NMD lead system integrater. Potential interceptor deployment locations in Alaska and North Dakota have been selected. We are proceeding with the environmental impact process and, in addition, we are engaged in site surveys, facility design efforts, and planning for construction and site activation. We are developing and testing the upgrades required for the existing early warning radars that would support an NMD system and we are testing a prototype X-Band radar which would be a key element in the system.
Further, SPACECOM is developing a concept of operations for the NMD system that follows existing missile warning command relationships and defines strict rules of engagement. Over the past weekend, I had the opportunity to be briefed out at Cheyenne Mountain on that work on the concept of operations. One of the most challenging technological hurdles to be overcome is perfecting the exo-atmospheric kill vehicle. As I noted earlier, the first interceptor flight test, a major success involving a hit-to-kill, body-to-body impact, took place earlier this month. A second intercept test is scheduled for next January, and there will be an integrated system test of all NMD components scheduled for next May.
Shortly thereafter the Department of Defense will conduct a deployment readiness review to examine the technological status of the NMD program and its costs. After receiving the results of that review and making his own judgment about the relevant policy issues, the Secretary of Defense will make a recommendation to the President, on which of course he will consult with relevant commanders and the Joint Chiefs of Staff regarding whether or not to deploy the NMD system.
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How well we are able through the schedule test to establish the technological readiness for an NMD deployment will, of course, be a major factor in that recommendation and the President's deployment decision next summer. But that decision will also take into account the status of the threat to the United States, which, quite frankly, we have no reason to expect to change from what we assess it to be now, and the status of arms reduction efforts and negotiations with Russia.
As I said earlier, no deployment decision has yet been made. That will depend on the review that I just described. But the President has, however, based on the recommendation of his national security team, decided on an architecture to be used for planning and negotiating purposes now for a system.
The deployment, if approved, would proceed in three phases. The immediate goal is to meet early threats, and we would deploy by 2005 or 2006 an initial NMD system that would be optimized for the most immediate threat, that from North Korea. It would be capable of defending all parts of all 50 States against a launch of a few tens of warheads accompanied by basic penetration aids. For planning purposes, this NMD architecture would include 100 ground-based interceptors based in Alaska, an X-Band radar at Shemyain Island in Alaska, upgrades to five existing ballistic missile early warning radars, and it would use for purposes of initial detection missile launches aimed at the United States, the SBIRS system which is being developed to supplement and eventually replace the defense support program satellite system. This system would provide a 50-State defense against limited attack of a few warheads launched from the Middle East.
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In order to achieve an initial operating capability in 2005, construction of this system would need to begin in 2001, following a decision to proceed during the summer of next year.
The President also identified beyond this initial architecture, a longer-term goal to deploy, possibly in further phases, by the 2010 to 2011 time frame, a limited NMD system with the capability to negate up to a few tens of ICBM warheads with complex penetration aids launched either from North Korea or the various countries in the Middle East which might constitute a threat. Further development of the system architecture would include an additional interceptor site, additional interceptors, several more X-Band radars, and SBIRS low satellite constellation to provide an important tool in distinguishing enemy warheads from sophisticated penetration aids.
This, then, is the national missile defense program and the threat that it addresses. Our work on this subject must take into account the broader political and strategic context. President Clinton and this Administration are committed both to protecting the American people from rogue state ballistic missile threats and to maintaining the ABM Treaty as a cornerstone of strategic stability. Our NMD development program has been and will continue to be carried out in compliance with the ABM Treaty. That compliance in the development phase has not slowed or curtailed the effort.
It is, however, clear that deployment would require treaty modifications. We have made clear to Russia that we will seek to negotiate such modifications, proceeding in good faith. The goal of both preserving the treaty and having the option to deploy an effective defense is a wholly reasonable one. We should not find ourselves in the position of having to choose between having the capability of defending against rogue state ballistic missile attack on one hand and jeopardizing our common interest in strategic stability, a sound relationship with Russia, and further reductions in American and Russian strategic offensive arms on the other.
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There are several reason why we should not have to face that choice. First and most important, the system we would deploy would not in any way threaten Russia's deterrent. Whatever the merits of the prior SDI plans, which I think were discussed in some of the testimony this morning, the fact is that the system we would deploy is completely different from the large-scale territorial defense against each other that greatly concerned the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Second, the ABM Treaty already allows a limited ballistic missile defense system, though to be sure not a nationwide one. Indeed, the ABM Treaty from its inception in 1972 has permitted such deployment, and Russia has long maintained such an ABM system around Moscow.
Third, the AMB Treaty, even when modified to permit deployment of a limited defense system, will remain fully viable and a key element in our broad strategy to reduce further the nuclear threat.
The limited defense system that we have in mind is fully consistent with the fundamental purpose of the ABM Treaty, which is not to ban defenses altogether, since it does not do that, but to ensure that each party's strategic deterrent is not threatened by the missile defenses of the other party.
We believe that the treaty can be limited to permit the deployment of a limited national missile defense while preserving that fundamental principle. Indeed, the real threat to the treaty comes not from efforts to modify to reflect current realties, namely, the threat from rogue missiles, but from a fixed refusal to modify it, to permit the United States and, for that matter, Russia, which potentially faces the same problem, to build effective defenses against those threats. Neither the ABM nor any other international treaty can remain viable if it fails to reflect contemporary realties, in this case the problem of rogue state ballistic missile proliferation.
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Over the past years we have kept Russia fully informed of our NMD policy, of our progress toward working on an NMD system such as our initiation earlier this year of the analysis of the environmental impact of an interceptor deployment in Alaska. More recently, we have begun detailed discussions with the Russians about our possible deployment and the necessity of adapting the ABM Treaty to permit it.
Specifically in June, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin agreed to begin discussions on both NMD and the ABM Treaty and on further reduction in strategic offensive arms. Since late August, we have been talking in detail with Russia at senior levels about the system we have in mind and its implications for the treaty. Finally, over the past several months, we have closely consulted with allies regarding both our policy and our approach to Russia. We are now seeking Russia's agreement to those changes to the ABM Treaty required to permit us to meet our initial goal.
We judged it right to leave to President Clinton's successor and to the successor of President Yeltsin the longer-term issue of follow-on negotiations on further changes to the treaty required to meet larger, more complex threats. But we have made clear that we expect such negotiations would be necessary and indeed that we would expect these follow-on negotiations to need to begin in 2001, which would be necessary to ensure that the United States could begin the needed construction of additional components, possibly including foreign-based ABM radars to provide a defense against emergence of a more sophisticated threat.
Central to this issue is that both the United States and Russia face the potential of rogue state ballistic missile threats. The President has told President Yeltsin and Secretary of Defense Cohen has told Russian Defense Minister Sergeyev on his recent visit to Moscow that we want to work cooperatively with Russia on these matters. In this regard, we have recently proposed a number of specific projects for cooperation with the Russian Government. Through these cooperative programs, both the United States and Russia would be able to acquire tangible benefits to their security that would help both nations demonstrate that a cooperative approach to ballistic missile defense is in our common interest.
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As has been clear so far from Russian public statements, the Russian Government reaction has so far been negative. That said, however, the Russians agreed that it is important to discuss this matter.
As to the prospects of eventual Russian agreements to the necessary modifications to the treaty, Secretary Cohen has said we will negotiate with the Russians and try to persuade them it is in our interest and their interest to remain within the framework of modifying the treaty to accommodate us. I believe that we can persuade them that we are serious about holding onto the structure of the ABM Treaty, but that it needs to be modified to give us this protection for our own country.
I beg the committee's indulgence in my belief that it is not appropriate to say more about the state of the negotiations in an open hearing, since those negotiations are ongoing. If in the end we are unsuccessful in these negotiations, the President would have to decide whether to withdraw from the ABM Treaty under the supreme national interest clause. We will make every effort to secure what we think to be the right outcome in our national interests and that of Russia and the rest of the world, which is modification of the ABM Treaty so that our planned NMD system can go forward while preserving the treaty as a key component for strategic stability for the future.
In summary, Mr. Chairman, our planning and development and technological work for an NMD system is well advanced. It seeks to anticipate future rogue state threats and to develop systems that can defend against such threats, which I have to say appear very close on the horizon.
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Our NMD program remains on a highly accelerated track to make sure that we are in a position to respond to this threat in a timely fashion. The Department and the administration as a whole have worked closely with this committee over the years to ensure that the United States possesses the necessary means to defend its people and its forces, and we look forward to continuing these efforts, particularly in this highly important and highly controversial area of national missile defense.
After Mr. Fischer's statement, I look forward to the opportunity to respond to your questions and hear your views. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Secretary Slocombe can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Fischer.
STATEMENT OF LUCAS FISCHER, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR STRATEGIC AFFAIRS
Mr. FISCHER. Mr. Chairman, I do thank you for the opportunity to discuss the Administration's approach to the ABM Treaty and national missile defense. The Administration shares with Congress a commitment to developing effective protection for the American people against the emerging long-range missile threat from rogue nations. I believe we also share a common goal of achieving success in negotiating necessary modifications of the ABM Treaty, of securing the hard-won bipartisan gains of START, and of maintaining cooperation with Russia.
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Today I would like to elaborate our policy on the ABM Treaty and NMD, as well as outline our approach to the ongoing discussions with Russia.
The original purpose of the ABM Treaty in 1972 was to head off a defensive arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States, thereby creating a durable stable strategic balance that would serve as the foundation for progress in the reduction of strategic offensive arms. Although the Cold War has ended, the need for strategic ability has not. Both the United States and Russia continue to rely on nuclear weapons to safeguard their basic security. Some contend that the ABM Treaty is of little relevance today, but we should remember that Russia remains the only nation with the capability to destroy U.S. society in a matter of minutes. Good relations with Russia and stability and transparency in our respective strategic deterrence, therefore, remain a matter of critical security interest to the United States.
Specifically, the continuing role of the ABM Treaty, of helping preserve continuing confidence on both sides in the stability of our respective strategic deterrents, means that the ABM Treaty remains fundamental to achieving our objectives for START II and START III and maintaining cooperation with Russia. Through START II and START III, the United States can realize the removal of additional Russian strategic nuclear warheads, reducing our own burden similarly. These treaties are clearly in our national security interest.
Nevertheless, we recognize that the international environment has changed dramatically since 1972. The threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and an advanced delivery means is real, it is growing, and it is increasingly unpredictable. Acquisition of these capabilities by what we call rogue states, regimes whose policies are dominated by animus against the United States and the West but whose strategic and tactical calculations are hard to understand and influence, calls into question sole reliance on the bilateral structures of strategic deterrence we developed through the Cold War. Against this reality, it is important to remember that Russia in fact faces many of the same threats that the United States faces. We are committed to working cooperatively with Russia to prevent transfer of such capabilities to rogue states and to respond to the threats that nevertheless do develop.
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I won't recapitulate the Administration's efforts undertaken with the support of Congress to control these threats of proliferation. We have had substantial achievements, and these efforts are an initial line of defense against rogue and terrorist threats to the United States and its friends and allies. Indeed, we have made great strides in working cooperatively to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation and advancing U.S.-Russian nuclear security. Since 1992, U.S. support has helped to deactivate almost 5,000 nuclear warheads in the former Soviet Union, eliminate nuclear weapons from three former Soviet republics, and strengthen the security of more than 60 tons of highly enriched uranium that could have been used by terrorists or outlaw states to build nuclear weapons. We have done this with the bipartisan support of Congress.
Despite these steps, the job of preventing loose nukes and missiles is far from complete. Though we have had a number of successes in slowing and in some cases stopping foreign missile programs and strengthening export controls—and we continue to press Russia to act similarly to curtail the control of missile technologies to countries such as Iran—we recognize that countries such as North Korea and Iran and Iraq present an ongoing threat.
Our second line of defense against the emerging threat of these weapons of mass destruction and advanced delivery proliferation is thus our strategic deterrent. There should be no doubt that any use of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery against the United States would be met with an overwhelming and devastating response. Similarly for our allies, U.S. security commitments to them are backed up by that deterrent and by our regional force capabilities. That deterrent and those capabilities saw us through the Cold War and they continue to play a key role against all potential opponents, including rogue states. Deterrence has held, for example, in places like the Korean peninsula and even preventing the Iraqi use of WMD against coalition forces in the Gulf War.
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Nevertheless, because it is clear that there is an emerging ballistic missile threat from the rogue states, we are also moving forward as quickly as we can with our NMD development program designed to counter these threats. As Under Secretary Slocombe has described, the Administration has set aside funding for deployment of NMD against a missile threat we would expect to first appear, has made decisions on the main features of the NMD architecture appropriate for that threat, and expects to make a decision on NMD deployment next summer, consistent with considerations of program readiness, the development of the threat, and affordability.
That decision, as the Administration has also made clear, will take into account our discussions with Russia and our allies of such an NMD with the ABM Treaty.
As I noted earlier, we believe that the ABM Treaty plays a critical continuing role in our strategic relationship with Russia, and that maintenance of that relationship in good health in both its political and security dimensions is an essential element of U.S. national security. On the other hand, critics of the Administration's commitment to the ABM Treaty believe that it impedes the U.S. national missile defense and have sincerely, although I believe mistakenly, locked onto the treaty as the stumbling block to NMD which must be overcome. The Department of Defense has testified to Congress that our NMD development program is not being constrained by the ABM Treaty. The treaty permits us to test and evolve an NMD system. And we are doing that as fast as possible.
The treaty compliance has not hindered or slowed us down in any aspect of our NMD development program. We do, however, believe that deployment of the NMD we envision would require changes in the ABM Treaty regime. The Administration believes that such changes permitting an NMD fully effective against the rogue state threat we see emerging could be made without undermining Russia's confidence in its own strategic deterrence and without abandoning the original core objectives of the ABM Treaty. If we are correct and we bring Russia to agree, we can achieve both an effective defense capability against the small threats rogue states might acquire and also preserve the mutual strategic confidence between the U.S. and Russia that is the basis for further efforts to reduce nuclear weapons to even lower levels through ratification and implementation of START II and through negotiations of START III.
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We have amended the treaty before. We should be able to work cooperatively with Russia to amend the ABM Treaty now to permit deployment of a limited NMD in a way that preserves the essential purposes of the treaty; that is, strategic stability and strategic offensive weapons reductions while providing for the limited defense that we need against the rogue state missile threats to the homeland. Indeed, Article XIII of the ABM Treaty itself anticipates the need for such a dialogue.
On June 20 in Cologne, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin jointly expressed U.S. and Russian concern about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery, including missiles and missile technology. In this regard, they both affirmed their existing obligations under the ABM Treaty to consider possible changes in the strategic situation that have a bearing on the treaty and, as appropriate, to consider possible proposals for further increasing the viability of the treaty. Thus, the United States and the Russian Federation are continuing high-level discussions on START III and on modification of the ABM Treaty.
So we are following two tracks. The Department of Defense is continuing development of the components of an NMD effective against rogue state threats, aiming at having a deployable program ready for the President's review next summer. And we are aiming the discussions with Russia at achieving Russian agreement that such an NMD, undertaken in the spirit of cooperation against a threat that we both face, can be consistent with the original goals of the treaty and with current requirements for mutual strategic stability and aiming also at identification of specific adaptation of the ABM Treaty's provisions so as to make those provisions consistent with such an NMD.
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As Secretary of State Albright has stated, we have made it clear that we are willing to cooperate with Russia on strategic defense. We have no intention of undermining Russia's nuclear deterrence. Our limited NMD capability would be designed primarily to counter the threat posed by emerging rogue state long-range missile programs. Moreover, we are suggesting further reductions in strategic nuclear forces, a step Moscow welcomes because of the high cost of maintaining nuclear weapons. In short, we seek an agreement that will give us the early protection we need to safeguard our security without undermining Russia's.
Russia, in turn, should give us credit for the good faith behind our statements. We recognize Russian sensitivity to the U.S. technological capabilities which Russia worries could undermine the Russian deterrent. As I made clear, we put full value on the political and strategic benefits of the ABM Treaty as a key element of our relationship, but we believe that Russia's concerns are misconceived or could be resolved through transparency and cooperation. We believe Russia's own interest in the preservation of the treaty and its core objectives should prevent it from asserting that the treaty cannot be adapted to allow the President to protect the American people from new threats.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Fischer can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Skelton, I didn't give you a chance a while ago.
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Mr. SKELTON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, it is a pleasure to welcome an old friend, Walt Slocombe, to testify again. And Mr. Fischer, thank you for joining us today.
It is a rather interesting situation in which our country finds itself. In order to adequately defend ourselves from rogue states and their ballistic missile threats, we must negotiate ourselves over a hurdle with another state called Russia. In other words, we have in order to defend ourselves against B, we have to strike a deal with A. It is a bit unusual.
In the last panel, we had an extensive discussion on the word ''negotiate.'' Mr. Slocombe, I am pleased to hear your words that no country will have a veto on our actions.
My only question is this: Why do we think that we can negotiate an appropriate series of modifications of the ABM Treaty with Russia to permit our deployment of a limited National Missile Defense system?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I am by no means certain that we can. As I said, so far the Russian position has been resolutely negative. They say they would prefer to see the treaty stay in its exact current form. The reason that I think Secretary Cohen is right when he says he believes that he will be able to persuade them to take a different view has several elements. First of all, I think the Russian concern about the technological possibility is not wholly misplaced, but it is wrong, that this is, in fact, a threat to their deterrent.
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I think as we continue this dialogue, as we explain to them in more detail what the system consists of, they will come to understand that that part of their concern is misplaced. That is, there is a certain genuine effort of persuasion and explanation.
Second, I think the Russians, like the rest of the world, took note of the fact that after, what, almost 20 years of intense controversy—I guess 30 years of intense controversy over the subject of ballistic missile defense, the U.S. Congress last spring passed by an overwhelming vote and the President signed an expression of determination to deploy a defense against limited attacks. And I think the Russians will come to recognize that in an important sense, that concern in the United States is a very real and a very broadly felt one, that it is in their interest—indeed, in the long run, it is in their interest to be able to deploy such a defense, too, and that it is very much in our interest to be able to do it. And that it would be better for both sides, but specifically for the Russians, since we are talking about the incentives for the Russians to agree—it would be better for the Russians to have that in the framework of some kind of agreed process for how that development and deployment would go forward, rather than entirely outside the framework.
I think also the kinds of cooperative activities which we are talking about with the Russians in parallel with these negotiations will be an important—will be of interest to them and will be of interest to them in two respects:
One, the programs are useful in themselves. It may contribute to the Russian confidence that they could deal with a rogue state threat. And, two, they will increase transparency and confidence, and in fact, this is not some shadow American conspiracy to get at the Russian deterrent.
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On the issue of negotiation, I don't believe you can ever go into a negotiation unless you are prepared to see the negotiation fail. This is not a situation in which, as I said in the statement, we will just go into the Russians saying no, they will have to live with the consequences of doing that. We are not prepared to compromise basic principles in the negotiations.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. This might be a good chance for me to ask you, since I respect the way that you answer these questions, Walt, you are one of the best. The way this thing is worded in your second paragraph, developing a national missile defense and so forth, ''if the development of a threat makes such a deployment appropriate,'' does that mean that a threat is not here now?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. No, sir. I am glad I had the opportunity to explain that. In that paragraph I am explaining what has been our policy for the last several years prior to the most recent events and the most recent analyses in which we have said consistently that there are, if you will, three factors:
Is the threat there, or will it be there by the time that we could deploy the system? I agree with you, sir, as a result of the recent events and based on the analysis in the NIE, I think there is no question that, if you will, that gate has been passed. We believe the threat is such that we need a defense by the time it could be built.
The second factor, of course: Is the system technologically ready? I don't think that the most enthusiastic advocate of defense is in favor of building something that doesn't work. We have got to make sure before you make the final decision in the sense of saying yes, let's cut metal, let's commit to build the system, you want confidence that it will work.
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Third, we do have to take into account the broader context of arms control and the effect on our relations with Russia and our allies. There is no question in my mind or of anybody in the Administration that, as the NIE puts it, we are going to face a threat from North Korea. We will probably face a threat from Iran and depending largely on what happens with sanctions, we may face a threat from Iraq, all within the next decade or so.
The CHAIRMAN. I notice that you don't refer to China or Russia being a threat.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. That is an important point. Obviously, on a day-to-day basis, there is a potential, a theoretical threat from Russia and China. The system is not designed to deal with that threat. It would have some inherent capability to deal with an accidental or unauthorized launch. That is a side benefit. I don't think that we would go forward with a system simply on that basis.
If I could add another point about Russia and China, our relations with China, awkward as they are in some respects, are fundamentally different than with countries like Korea, Iran, and Iraq.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Bateman.
Mr. BATEMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. There are also British and French missiles in the world, too.
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Mr. BATEMAN. I react very positively, of course, to the rhetorical statement that we are not giving to Russia or to anyone a veto power over our decisions respecting our national security. But I would feel much more comfortable with that rhetorical phrase if you could give me an answer to this part of this problem. I don't understand the technology of any ballistic missile system, theater, national, or otherwise. I am led to believe, however, that because of constraints of the ABM Treaty that we are not even seeking to avoid, we have constrained the architecture and the design of what might be the most capable ballistic missile defense, to resort to a temporizing with the ABM Treaty to permit us to go forward with a lesser ballistic missile system.
Am I right that we have constrained ourselves by not saying this treaty no longer has any validity legally, and even if it did, it is in our supreme national security interest to abrogate it, just as the Russians have asked us to abrogate the Conventional Forces-Europe Treaty on two occasions in their supreme national interests?
Mr. WELDON. If the gentleman would yield for further clarification, would the gentlemen also clarify that these substantive changes in the ABM Treaty were agreed to over two years ago by the Administration, which have not yet been submitted to the Senate for their advice and consent which is required? Would you answer that question, why they haven't been submitted to the Senate after almost two years?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. It has been our position from the time they were signed that they would be submitted after the Russian ratification of START II and in conjunction with the modifications of some of the START II deadlines. Can I go back to the question of—.
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Mr. BATEMAN. I am afraid that the red light is going to come on.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I am sorry. As the statement says, if we are not successful in reaching an agreement with the Russians on modification, the President would have to consider exercising the very power that you referred to, the supreme national interest clause. That will not be an easy decision because it is not costless, but it is a right that we have under the treaty. We have emphasized both in this form and with the Russians that we have that right under the treaty.
Now, with respect to—obviously, I don't speak for the President as to decisions he would make at some point in the future and in the context that we hope and expect to not have to face, but that option is very much an open one.
As to whether or not the program has been constrained by the ABM Treaty itself, all I can say, sir, with respect, is that the technologists who have designed this program have been told, design the program that you think will be best to meet the requirement. Now, there are some things that you could—and the development has been entirely consistent with the ABM Treaty, but the people that do that assure us that it has not constrained their choices as how they have done— there are certainly things that the ABM Treaty prohibits development of, for example, sea-based systems. Like you, I am not an expert on the technology, but I have pressed the technologists on this and they say for a national missile defense system, they would be deployable as quickly as we want to do it. We want to use a ground-based system. We want to use the kind of radar and sensor concepts which we are using. And that is the reason that they have chosen this approach.
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Mr. BATEMAN. Well—.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. In other words, the way that we have done it has been consistent with the ABM Treaty with respect to the limits on developments. Obviously, the deployment is not consistent because Alaska is not North Dakota. There are other reasons, too, but that is the simplest one. The architecture has not been constrained by the requirements of the ABM Treaty and the development process and particularly the focus on ground-based interceptors is their judgment of what we will be able to deploy most quickly, with the highest confidence, to meet an emerging or arguably an emerged threat.
Mr. BATEMAN. I hear what you are saying, but I guess what I need is a level of confidence that if we had chosen to be very forthright, which I think it serves our national interests and Russia's as well in our approach to the ABM Treaty, we might be down a different technology path that we have precluded ourselves from traveling. I would like some assurance on that.
The red light is on, let me just comment on the START II. From the latest National Intelligence Estimate, I don't understand all of the emphasis that we are placing on Russian ratification of START II, because the National Intelligence Estimate says that they are unlikely to even keep in their nuclear arsenal half of what they would be permitted even if START II were in effect. It also mystifies me how much we put into our arms control agreements with Russia, which Russia over the last 30 years has consistently and persistently violated. So I don't understand this connect with what we do with ballistic missile defense and Russia's agreement on arms control which are more academic than real.
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Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Weldon.
Mr. WELDON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank you both for coming in. But I must say, just sitting here, my head is spinning with the tone of what I am hearing about support for missile defense. I don't know where I have been for the last six years. I guess I must have been on a different planet as this Congress in a bipartisan vote each year put a billion dollars more into missile defense than what you asked for. You wouldn't be in the position where you are right now, with these NMD or the theater programs—if we hadn't put in extra money in each year. You fought us every step of the way on it for five years in a row.
Each of our defense authorization appropriation bills gave you a billion dollars a year more, and now you say you have a plan, that it has been well thought out. It hasn't changed since NIE 9519. The President used NIE 9519 as the basis for vetoing the defense bill because he said the NIE says we won't have a threat for 15 years. It took us three years to change that. We had to first of all say it was criticized because of the way that the document was released publicly, the first time ever for an NIE, on the floor of the Senate, in the middle of the Senate to vote to support the President's position.
Then we had to approve the General Accounting Office, under the Chairman's leadership, to say that the CIA had violated the process that had been used in the past, and then we had the mandatory—requiring the Rumsfeld Commission which went into great detail and certified that that entire estimate that you based your policy for five years on was flawed. And three years later the CIA agreed with what we had said and reversed themselves and said, yes, the threat is here today.
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Now they certify that North Korea's Taepo-Dong I three-stage missile could launch a capability that could reach the U.S. That is three years after we were told through the NIE and the President's position of vetoing our defense bill that there was not going to be a threat for at least 15 years.
And to say that you are committed to missile defense, you just took $240 million out of the back end of our NMD budget to fund the Wye River Agreement. What does the Wye River Agreement have to do with the National Missile Defense, if you are committed to that?
I just met with General Kadish in the outer office and he is worried about funding. If the Administration is for NMD, why would you take $240 million out of the back end of that bill? That doesn't indicate to me a support level.
Now, let's talk about Russian confidence. This Administration is telling us that they are working with the Russians. I asked why in 1993 was one of the first actions you took the ending of the talks to bring the Russians in, accepting the challenge of Boris Yeltsin. When I have asked your people that—and State said, ''Well, we didn't really stop them, we kept them going at a different level. Well, talk to Kokoshin, who was Yeltsin's chief defense advisor,'' as I did repeatedly. He said, Congressman, your country stopped the talks on missile defense, not ours.
If this Administration, Mr. Slocombe, has been so supportive of this joint effort of missile defense, then why in the world did you cancel the RAMUS program last year? Do you know what the RAMUS is, either of you?
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. Oh, yes.
Mr. WELDON. Why did you cancel it last year, Mr. Slocombe?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. Quite frankly, because we looked at it and came to the conclusion that the cost, which is high, was not justified by the benefit to the United States. However, partly, if I may say so, sir, because of your interest and because of the importance we attached to genuine cooperative efforts with Russia, we are perfectly prepared to discuss that as a part of the—two satellite RAMUS program as a part of the cooperation program.
Mr. WELDON. Let me finish my questions, first. First of all, it is not just my interest. You have had 30 minutes to talk, give me a chance—.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. Calm down for a second.
Mr. WELDON. I wish I had the same time to respond to you that you had to give us your version of the facts. Senator Levin has been supportive of RAMUS, as have I. In fact, In support of the defense bill the President signed last week, you were mandated to move that program forward. It was the most destabilizing decision you made in terms of Russian confidence, just as destabilizing as when you attempted to cut the funding for Keith Payne's program that has been working with the Russians cooperatively for three years on finding alternatives to the current discussion over the ABM Treaty.
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You proposed, not you personally, the Administration, cutting back on the funding for Keith Payne's programs. I don't think the rhetoric in terms of reaching out to Russia matches the substance of what really should be done and what needs to be done.
In terms of support for missile defense, it has been this Congress who has dragged this Administration along for five years, scraping and clawing and scratching every bit of the way against us. In fact, your interpretation of the bill that passed this year is entirely wrong. If you decide that you want to run for Congress when you leave the Administration, that is fine. That was my bill. I introduced it. So you can't interpret my bill. When I brought the bill up on the floor, I said some very simple things to the Members because the President had issued a veto threat or an opposition letter the day of the vote.
I said, you agree with the President's policy and want to wait a year to make a deployment decision, then oppose the bill. If you agree with me that we need to make that decision today, then support the bill.
Three hundred seventeen Members of the House voted against the President. And it was clearly discussed that way. There was no ambiguity about it because I put the President's letter in the record. In fact, 103 Democrats voted yes, 102 voted no. It was only because you got the Senate, in I think a cowardly move, to put some language on their bill that has nothing to do with the substance, to try to give you some cover to say that next year we will make a deployment decision.
Mr. Slocombe, we made the deployment decision. We didn't tell you what type of architecture, we didn't tell you how much to spend, but we made a policy decision that this President signed into law and can't spin away, that this country's policy is to deploy a national missile defense system, not putting any mandates on it. The threat is not going to change, except to get worse. And the technology is never going to be perfect. You would make the case here, next year we will know if it is going to be successful. We are not going to know whether or not the program will work next year. It is going to take us four or five years to determine that. The only reason in my opinion you have made the statement that you will do it next year is to give the President a political advantage in making that decision in the middle of a Presidential election.
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Let me say that I disagree very fundamentally with what has been characterized here, but it has been the practice of the Administration for the past five years on this issue. It has been the practice in terms of our relations with Russia, in terms of technology, in terms of funding requests, in terms of the treaty.
I went to Geneva, I don't think that any other member of Congress went to Geneva, and sat across from General Klutinov because I couldn't understand why you were trying to limit the ABM Treaty. I sat across from Klutinov and I said, Why do you on the Russian side want to allow former Soviet states like Kazahkstan, Belarus, and Ukraine to have an equal say in the ABM Treaty? He said, Congressman, you are asking that question of the wrong person. We didn't propose multilateralizing the treaty; you did.
Now, you did that without the advice and consent of the Senate. Then you issued the demarcation limitations. For the life of me, I could never understand how you arrived at this artificial distinction between the theater and national missile defense system based on interceptor speed. Well, I finally found out when the CIA gave me the documentation of a new Russian system that was just marketed last year called the NT-2500. The capability of that system is exactly under the threshold of the demarcation limit that you negotiated. For you to say that you have been holding off these substantive changes to the treaty until START II is ratified is hogwash.
I will tell you what you have done. You needed Clinton to get the Senate to ratify either of those two substantive changes so you convinced the Soviets, the Russians, to include those in a narrow interpretation of the treaty as a part of START II, so they ratified that first. You boxed the Senate into a position of either being for or against START II when substantive changes of the ABM Treaty have nothing to do with START II ratification, and you know it.
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So my opinion all along—Mr. Chairman, I know I am taking time. I am going to sit around until we get through all of this in detail, but I can tell you I have no confidence in what you have said, and I don't think that the Congress does as well, or we wouldn't have passed in a bipartisan vote of 395 House Members and 96 Senators, overwhelmingly, the Iran sanctions bill because you weren't enforcing arms control agreements.
For the record, I will submit 16 violations of arms control agreements by the Russians from 1993 to 1997.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. WELDON. You imposed sanctions no times. You say you didn't have the evidence. Well, here is some evidence for you. Here is a Russian guidance system, an accelerometer and a gyroscope, that you know over a 100 sets of these were transferred to Iraq three times and what did you do? You did nothing. You did nothing. And you expect us to have confidence in your proliferation activities, in your interpretation of treaties? I have no confidence in this Administration's arms control capabilities or its arms controls efforts.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Saxton.
Mr. SAXTON. I have no questions.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Kuykendall. Mr. Reyes.
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Mr. BATEMAN. Mr. Chairman, would the witnesses like some time to respond? I think we should let them respond.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. There are a lot of issues there and I can't match your passion, sir, on this issue.
Mr. WELDON. Just match the substance.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. What I am saying is that I think the question was why are the Russians—why would the Russians agree? I think what is significant about that overwhelming vote, and you are right, it was a very overwhelming vote—was it was a strong signal to the Russians that there is a very, very strong determination in the Congress and in the country and in the Administration that we are going to have to deal with this rogue state threat, and that that is a powerful reason for them to think seriously about whether they want to persist in their position of refusing to entertain any modifications to the treaty.
With respect to the NIE, the one in 1995, whatever the merits of that NIE, the fact is that we in the Defense Department did not rely on the 15-year period as the basis for our planning, but instead set in motion, using the funds that Congress provided, and it is always the case that we are only able to do things when Congress provides the money and that when Congress indicates an interest in going forward in a particular area at a faster pace, we take that very seriously.
What Secretary Perry did, with the support of the Administration and the President and then Secretary Cohen, was to put in place the so-called 3 Plus 3 program, so that we are now or will be in the year 2000 in a position to make—it is not absolute knowledge that everything will work perfectly, but we will have gone through some significant technological milestones so we can deploy the system rapidly.
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I think it probably is a waste of everybody's time to rehearse arguments. We have all heard a million times about the demarcation.
Mr. WELDON. I would like to hear your justification of the demarcation—.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. The short answer is the demarcation agreement provides safe harbor for some activities that we want to take on.
Mr. WELDON. Were you aware that the Russians were back in marketing a system that came under that threshold, almost exactly? Were you aware of that?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. The threshold also matches things that we want to do.
Mr. WELDON. We are not there yet, the Russians are. Were you aware they had that system ready to be marketed to both Greece and the Israelis? Were you aware of that? Was the State Department aware of that when they negotiated that limit?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I would have to find out when the exact date that we had knowledge of particular things was. But your implication is that the demarcation was written around it. As far as I know, it was written in our systems.
Mr. WELDON. We have no system even close to that. This is an enhanced version of the SC–12, the NT—we are not anywhere near that. Maybe the State Department can answer. What is the basis of your numbers, did you pull them out of the air?
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Mr. FISCHER. Sir, when we designed the provisions of the demarcation agreement, they were as Under Secretary Slocombe said, designed to protect U.S. systems, including a number of U.S. systems in development for which the relevant departments wanted to ensure that they would be protected.
Mr. WELDON. So you are telling me that that number came from our systems, even though it was right above the system the Russians marketed that same year to both the Greeks and the Israelis as the NT–2500? Is that what you are telling me?
Mr. FISCHER. Yes, sir.
Mr. WELDON. And we still don't have a system even close to what that capability may be. That is amazing.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Slocombe, thank you for being here, and Mr. Fischer. We pretty well got to hear all of the members, but there is a nagging question that I am quite often asked back home. And that is in the real world where we have only so many dollars, because we are trying to deal with a real deficit, has that $52 billion, approximately $52 billion that we spent on national defense since 1983, has that been the optimum way to have spent that money, or would we have been better off building another 10 carriers or another 65 Aegis Class destroyers or another 650 F–18 E/Fs? Comparisons or analysts, everybody has got a niche that they think needs filling.
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Has it been about the right mix, has it been too little, too much? What would you have done different and what should we be doing, if anything, differently?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I am certainly not here to defend or for that matter to attack every dollar that has been spent on ballistic missiles. Even going back before President Reagan's speech in, what, March of '83, because there was a lot of money spent on ballistic missile defense before that. As everybody who works on these at a technological level has told the committee, and told you as they have told me, it is a very hard job. It is a hard task. There have been a fair number of false starts and things that didn't work out right and ideas that seemed good at the time but were abandoned for one reason or another.
For that reason there have been some dead ends. There are a lot more enthusiastic defenders of the SDI program than me, but I have to say that one of the reasons that we are now in a position virtually to within a few months look at a decision on deployment is we did in fact learn a lot about how to do this job from the work which has gone on. So that when I talk about a mature technology, most of that, virtually all of that, came out of prior programs.
Mr. TAYLOR. If I may, since you are in that line of thought, would we in the real world, since there is only so much money allocated to defense, have been better canceling a carrier here or there or a submarine here or there? The point that I am trying to make, did we spend too little—.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. In the last seven years, which is the time that I have been involved in it directly, this program has been reasonably well funded, partly because of the efforts of the Congress to add additional funding to it. It certainly has been the policy of Secretary Perry and Secretary Cohen during the time that I have been involved in it directly that the program not be funds-limited, that it be schedule- and technology-driven, rather than funds-limited.
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That is not so true on the theater missile side where there are lots of different programs. But on the national missile defense program side, I personally think some of the money spent in the early years of the SDI program was not very well spent or well conceived, but I also acknowledge that there has been some benefit from it. I don't think adding lots more money to this program one way or the other over the last decade would have made—would have brought us a whole lot closer to building a system. There is always the danger that we would have deployed a system that didn't work either in the sense that it didn't work absolutely, which is possible, or that it wasn't able to meet the threat. Fifty billion dollars is a lot of money. I am not disputing that. Over the period since 1983 it is a very small percentage of the total amount we have spent on defense. I think broadly, it has been well spent.
Mr. TAYLOR. Had we spent another $15 billion, would we have been any closer to solving the problem than we are now? In your opinion, that is all I can ask.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I suppose if you had perfect clairvoyance 20 years ago, you would have spent it differently. I think it is more that you would have spent—you would not have gone down through some of the dead ends.
Mr. TAYLOR. Let's don't talk 15 years. The six or seven that you have been—.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. It certainly has been our objective, at least since the 3 Plus 3 decision in 1996, that the program should be technology-limited and not funds-limited. That is, that adding more money would make a little difference on some of the scheduled stuff and something like that, but not in terms of having a technologically ready program.
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Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Spratt.
Mr. SPRATT. Thank you both for your testimony. You talk generally about seeking modifications and you ended with a caveat that you couldn't get into details. But could you tell us what areas of the treaty need to be negotiated? We know that you need to discuss sites. Is SBIRS low a problem, X–Band radar, just the notion of having territory effectiveness, are these things problems that have to be resolved in negotiations?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. Obviously, to some degree. I am just getting a list of elements here. To some degree, given that you are going to negotiate at all, you might as well cover all of the points. Obviously as I said, Alaska is not in North Dakota. If you are going to build it in Alaska, you have got to change that premise of the treaty. It has certainly been the position of the law offices of the government that even if you could design a National Missile Defense that didn't violate any of the particular, so to speak, the technological provisions of he ABM Treaty, if it was a national missile defense, it wouldn't be consistent with the treaty so you have got to modify that provision.
The X–Band radars are within the meaning of the treaty. The one at Shemyain is more than the permitted distance from where the interceptors are going to be in Alaska, so you need to modify that provision as well.
With respect to the space-based sensors, we are certainly going to take the position that this is simply a substitute for a launch detection system which already exists and which is consistent with the treaty, although—.
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Mr. SPRATT. Do they take the position in adjunct —.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. That is the kind of thing—I would be happy to discuss in detail the ''who struck John'' or who said what to who.
Mr. SPRATT. What about the whole concept of having a system that has territorial reach? Is that by itself, if it is not a complete national defense, a problem?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. It has been the position of the law offices of the government—it is Article I, whatever—prohibits a national missile defense even if you could do it within the other provisions of the treaty, and therefore that you would need to modify Article I. On the other hand, the fundamental decision the Russians are going to have to make is are we going to modify the treaty to let the Americans do what they say they need to do? It is not a question of easy to modify if it is only one article or two articles. It is a decision to agree to modify the treaty and therefore keep the framework going, and then it becomes an essentially technical question of what provisions you have to change and how you want to change those provisions. My personal view is that if the technologists had come up with a plan which worked within the four corners of the treaty, we would have looked long and hard at the Article I provision. Given that you are going to have to modify the treaty anyway, you might as well take care of the strain about that issue.
Mr. FISCHER. Mr. Spratt, if I could add a thought, which is that it would not necessarily be the optimum way to change individual provisions because that changes them in a general respect. What we want of Russia is to present them with the architecture to deploy and for them to agree that this is okay. The way that you do that in a legal format is you have a number of options.
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. One of the things that I want to be absolutely clear about is we have made very clear to the Russians that this is not let us have one site in Alaska and we will never bother you again; that we anticipate, given what we know about the emergence of the threat, that we are going to have to have more than just this initial architecture that I described and we need a resolution that will allow us to go forward with that, not just write something around this exact architecture for the initial deployment that I have described.
Mr. SPRATT. Going back to Mr. Bateman's question about this treaty constraining the design capability of the system. Basically, this is a system with ground-based interceptors. Anything of the design, velocity, fuel, has that been in any way constrained by the treaty?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. No.
Mr. SPRATT. The X–Band radar?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. No.
Mr. SPRATT. The space-based infrared sensors?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. No.
Mr. SPRATT. So these three components are essentially designed—.
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. The Commission list has also upgraded early warning radar, which is an element of that which has not been constrained either.
Mr. SPRATT. With respect to theater missile defense and the demarcation that you have proposed as to the speed of the incoming RV, is there anything in there that has constrained the development of Navy theater-wide or the THAAD missile or PAC–3?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I think in the end, the answer to that is no. I have certainly gone to a lot of agonizing meetings about what complies and what doesn't comply. I will get you a detailed answer but I think the end result is that there has not been any constraint. There has been an awful lot of argument, I don't want to dispute that.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Mr. SPRATT. Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Both of you have mentioned the need to negotiate START II and START III with the Russians. I am having trouble understanding why that has any relevance, since it is my understanding that because of economic constraints, the Russians won't be able to maintain even the lowest numbers that we could possibly negotiate with them. Why would we want to hold up other developments and other negotiations waiting for a negotiation which is totally meaningless?
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. With respect, sir, I don't think the negotiation is meaningless.
Mr. BARTLETT. Then the NIE was wrong in saying that the Russians would not be able to maintain even these many weapons; is that correct?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. There are a lot of things included in the arms control agreements other than the crude numbers, although in some sense I suppose the crude numbers are the most important. One of the most important is we now have at work a vastly more developed system of verification and knowing what is actually going on in Russia with respect to the Russian strategic nuclear forces than I would have ever dreamed possible.
You heard this morning from my good friend and longtime colleague, Jim Woolsey, who talked about when he was a captain in the Army and worked on the initial SALT negotiations. I worked in President Nixon's National Security Council staff under Dr. Kissinger at the same time. Neither of us would have believed in a million years you would have gotten that kind of verification, that kind of transparency into what was going on on the Soviet side. We would lose that if we lost the process.
Second, I have to say—I don't like to be in a position of arguing with an NIE, but I wonder if the Russians really said we are going to keep up—at least the apparent numbers as opposed to maybe the real numbers—we are going to keep up the apparent numbers, they wouldn't find ways to do it.
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Furthermore, it is in our interests to see reductions that are verified and that we really know are happening, that work out in the ways that we think are important. For example, getting rid of MIRV missiles which have an independent problem even apart from the absolute numbers of them. The Russians would certainly keep MIRV missiles if there weren't—to give us a reason for START II, because they said they want it. There is the capability to do that.
I think it is very much in our interests just within the four corners of the strategic relationship to go ahead with that.
Second, it is the fact that progress in what most of the world still regards as superpowers arms control, it is extremely important to keeping the NPT going, a lot of multinational antiproliferation efforts going. I am not enamored of this theory personally, but there is this theory that in some sense the START, ABM, CTBT process is what the nuclear powers do and the NPT process is what the rest of the world does and in some sense it is a trade-off. I agree with you. One of the reasons that—one of the facts about this is the Russians, at least in the short term, are going to have a lot of difficulty maintaining their force levels. That is one of the reasons they should get around to ratifying the START II agreement. But it would not be at all in our interests to see this process break down entirely. It would certainly not be in our interest for us to be seen as responsible for the process breaking down entirely.
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you for your response. I just would not want to see the goal of negotiating START II and START III delay us from doing our things that we clearly need to do.
Let me yield the rest of my time to my colleague. I want to identify myself with the comments of Mr. Weldon. I went to Russia with him to brief members of the Duma that we were going to have that debate and not misunderstand why we were doing it. Let me closely identify myself with his remarks and yield the rest of my time to him.
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Mr. WELDON. I thank my colleague for yielding. Let me just talk for a moment about START II. The Administration has changed its position on this issue. When you first negotiated the demarcation and the multilateralization of the ABM Treaty two years ago, the Administration made public statements to the Senate that they in fact were substantive changes and they would be submitted to the Senate for their consideration and approval. But you saw, unfortunately, the Senate would never ratify them because Members on both sides of the aisle did not understand fundamentally what you were doing and why you were doing it.
It then became in your best interests to have the Russians include their narrow interpretation of the ABM Treaty as a part of the ratification of START II because then you put the Senate in a box. Because then when START II comes to the U.S., when the Senate has to consider START II, all of a sudden those two changes to the ABM Treaty you have included as a part of START II. It is a clever ploy, but that's not the way they should be dealt with. You negotiated substantive changes to the ABM Treaty. They should have been submitted to the Senate for their advice and consent and had a separate debate on that. But instead you have hidden them and convinced the Russians to include that. Because I know the Duma—I talk to Lukin all the time. You suggested that he include them as an interpretation of START II so when they ratify START II with them in there, then you force the Senate not to be able to differentiate but to be either for it or against START II. It is a clever ploy, but not being honest with the American people.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I think, sir, you greatly exaggerate our ability to influence the actions of the Russian Duma.
Mr. WELDON. I don't. I get my word from the Russians, not your side. I trust the Russians in this case just like I trusted them when I asked them why we were multilateralizing the treaty, and Klutinov looked at me, he was sitting just along side of me, and he said, ''Ask him, he proposed it.'' Rivalis didn't challenge that. So let me ask you, was the Russian wrong? Did General Klutinov lie?
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Mr. FISCHER. Yes, he was.
Mr. WELDON. So when he said that Rivalis was the one, Rivalis should have chimed in and said, no—.
Mr. FISCHER. Sir, I remember in 1992 when the issue of multilateralizing the issue of the ABM Treaty first arose, I was on a number of groups to try to talk the Russians out of that position and didn't succeed in doing so.
Mr. WELDON. What you are saying is when Rivalis is sitting alongside of me with Klutinov across the table, and Klotunoff said it was Rivalis who suggested that that be a change that we agree with, you are saying that Rivalis should have spoken up and said something?
Mr. FISCHER. He may not have been involved in those discussions in—.
Mr. WELDON. He was our chief negotiator in Geneva.
Mr. FISCHER. Not in 1992.
Mr. WELDON. Well, I assume you know the history of the negotiation of the treaty. If that is not a clear lack of one hand knowing what the other is doing, I don't know what is. There is a record of the discussion that I had there because it was taken down and transcribed. I would just ask the committee to review that record to compare it to what I am hearing here today. This is the first time, by the way, that I heard that because the Russians are convinced that we wanted—so you are telling me then that the official position of this Administration is that we want the multilateralization. If the Russians would agree with that, then you are telling me that you agree with that?
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Mr. FISCHER. No, I am not. I am telling you the history of the issue. The issue of the issue was the initial proposal for making this multilateral came from the Russian side.
Mr. WELDON. If the Russians sit back down and say they don't want it, are you telling me we will agree?
Mr. FISCHER. I can't tell you that.
Mr. WELDON. Why can't you? You just told me that was our position.
Mr. FISCHER. Because we reached an agreement based on both sides' positions on four years' history.
Mr. BATEMAN. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman would yield, very briefly, I would just like to make a suggestion. It has been indicated by Mr. Weldon that in our negotiations of the multilateralization, if that is the right word, of the ABM Treaty, that it was done at our initiative rather than the Russian initiative; and that in the demarcation agreement, we accepted a Russian position to safeguard a system that they were ready to deploy and which we were not.
It would serve the Department and the Administration's interests mightily if you would give us a detailed memorandum respecting the history, evolution, devolution, and conclusion of these points.
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. I think that is a very good suggestion and we will do it.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Pitts.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. My guess is it will prove that the story is very complicated.
Mr. PITTS. Mr. Chairman, I will yield my time to Mr. Weldon.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Weldon.
Mr. WELDON. Mr. Chairman, let me get the issue of the administration's position that we should not do anything to undermine Russia's confidence of our intentions; is that correct? That we are not trying to take advantage over Russia?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. It is certainly true that our national missile defense is not designed to score a strategic advantage over Russia.
Mr. WELDON. That is our position, right? We don't want to have Russia feel as if we are backing them into a corner?
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. Yes. But we also want to be in a position to deploy the system. If the Russians insist that this program is unacceptable to them, then the President will have to face some very difficult decisions.
Mr. WELDON. If there were a development on the Russian side that we felt was destabilizing, shouldn't we pursue that as aggressively as we are trying to raise an issue with them on missile defense?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. Yes.
Mr. WELDON. Let me talk about Yamantau Mountain.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. Go ahead.
Mr. WELDON. Are you familiar with Yamantau Mountain?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. Yes.
Mr. WELDON. You are aware that the President has raised this issue with President Yeltsin on at least one occasion directly that I know of?
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I am sure that is the case.
Mr. WELDON. Are you aware that today we have no additional information of the importance or why Russia is continuing to invest hundreds of millions of dollars more into Yamantau Mountain than we were five years ago and yet we don't raise this issue in the negotiations? And if you look at the CIA analysis, they have said on the record and actually acknowledged publicly that this site, in fact, would be capable of withstanding a direct hit by the U.S. which means that the Russian strategic strategy could be to withstand—.
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. Congressman, I was at Cheyenne Mountain last week—.
Mr. WELDON. I am not talking about Cheyenne Mountain. I am talking about Yamantau Mountain. Let's talk about Kosvinsky Mountain. Come on, you are brighter than that, Mr. Slocombe. You know the Russians have a command and control facility equal to our Cheyenne Mountain and it is not Yamantau.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. My point is, sir, that the fact that the Russians are trying to build facilities which are underground and will withstand nuclear attack is not either particularly surprising or—all that said, it is our position that we are concerned about what it is and they should give us information about it. There is no known agreement that limits it.
Mr. WELDON. No, but it is a strategic destabilizing—.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I agree with you, sir.
Mr. WELDON. You have transparency from Russia on Yamantau Mountain. In fact, I have here a letter from your boss, the President, where he shares my concern about the major Russian facility at Yamantau Mountain. ''At this moment of deep economic crisis certainly inside Russia, it is troubling that the Russian Government is devoting significant resources to a defense-related project such as—'' this is over a year ago and we don't know any more information today. My point is this: You are going out of your way to talk about our efforts to reassure Russia on the ABM Treaty. I don't know who you are talking about concerning the Russian side—.
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. I guess that illustrates my point with Mr. Bartlett. When we have a framework of an agreement as we have with START, that does give us a right to ask these questions and get answers. We are a lot better off than if it is just our saying we are concerned about it, please tell us about your military secrets.
Mr. WELDON. The START agreement is not going to give you anymore transparency on Yamantau.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. No, but it is going to give us transparency on things that are important, since we care a lot more about—.
Mr. WELDON. Mr. Slocombe, the problem with Russia is this. To deal with the Russians you need to understand three things: strength, consistency and candor. In my opinion, my humble opinion, you have done none of those. What is the answer to this, if we are so adamant about arms control agreements, this is a violation of the NTCR?
Mr. Fischer, you are the State Department's spokesman.
Mr. FISCHER. I am not in a position to speak to that issue to which you are referring. It is not my responsibility. We will certainly try to get you a response.
Mr. WELDON. Let me refresh your memory. Mr. Slocombe, you are aware of this incident?
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. I don't recognize the physical objects, but I think I know what you are talking about.
Mr. WELDON. We have evidence—it was on the first page of the Washington Post, in fact the year Yeltsin was running for reelection, that these transfers occurred three times from Russia to Iraq. Now, everyone acknowledges this was a clear violation of an arms control regime. You are talking arms control regime, the missile technology control regime. My question is what did we do? Did we demarche the Russians? Did we get an explanation or did we impose sanctions?
Mr. FISCHER. I don't mean to be narrow here, but it is a nonproliferation issue, and I actually have no responsibility for nonproliferation issues. I will get you a response.
[The information referred to can be found in the Appendix.]
Secretary SLOCOMBE. I would like to take up Mr. Bateman's suggestion that we will give you a detailed answer as to what we did and indeed what our general effort with the Russians on this whole front had been. Let me say that whether you believe us or not, sir, we in the Department of Defense and the Administration care just as much as anybody about these foolish and totally improper Russian technology transfers to Iran. We have been working very hard to try to get them stopped, with some degree of success. But there are still very serious problems that we are working on on a daily basis.
Mr. WELDON. This was to Iraq, not Iran. But I agree with your concern about the cooperation issue with Iran. Let me just say this, Mr. Chairman. Let the record reflect, again, I would put this in the record, 16 violations of arms control regimes by Russian entities, 16. Sanctions were not imposed one time. It is not me. The Congress voted, 395 members in the House, 96 members in the Senate, to force you to do what you are supposed to do, and that is to enforce the sanctions. Do we have confidence in your ability? I would say that that vote speaks for itself.
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If you think that you can come up here and talk to us about arms control regime, that we are supposed to buy off what you are doing in our best interests because of your track record, I have to tell you, you haven't convinced me of a thing. Yet I have supported you, the Administration, on every engagement with Russia that you have had: on Nuun-Lugar, on cooperative threat reduction, on programs to engage Russia through the Commerce Department. Every one of them, you have come to me. Al Smith has come to me and asked me to get Republican votes.
I can tell you I have no confidence in this Administration's ability. The policy has been if it is going to offend Yeltsin or somehow embarrass him, we can't let it happen. Like that famous cable that was sent in 1996 during the Presidential election which has now become public, that President Clinton said to Boris Yeltsin, we will do everything in our power to make sure you are not embarrassed and reelected. We will not do anything to embarrass you.
That has been our policy. That is why many of us don't have the confidence that what you want to do with the ABM Treaty and your commitment to missile defense is not substantive and real.
Secretary SLOCOMBE. Mr. Weldon, you won't be surprised to know that I do not accept that characterization of the record of this Administration.
The CHAIRMAN. Anybody else have any questions? If not, we appreciate your contribution here today. We are supposed to be airing all sides of this. I think that we have done a lot of airing here today. I would appreciate it if you would supply us with the information that you have volunteered.
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Secretary SLOCOMBE. Could I say, Mr. Chairman, and this very much includes Mr. Weldon, this is an issue that people feel very strongly about and is extremely important. Over the course of the next several months, we will be deeply engaged with the Russians, with our allies who have a role to play in this as well, and on the technological side, and we look forward to continuing to keep the committee fully informed about what is going on.
I would ask that as—I understand the great importance of public hearings and it is also advantageous in many ways if we could do this to a considerable degree on a classified basis while we are in the middle of an ongoing negotiation.
The CHAIRMAN. Well, thank you again for appearing here today. The meeting will be adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 3:30 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
October 13, 1999
[The Appendix is pending.]