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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 11:49am Jun 10, 2001 EST (#4684 of 4695)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Mr. Putin, Meet Mr. Bush: Who Needs Treaties? by THOM SHANKER http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/10/weekinreview/10SHAN.html

"WASHINGTON — TO speak about Russia, it has been said, is to discuss the future of the world. America resumes its historic dialogue with Russia on Saturday when President Bush sits down for his first meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin, and it is a broad future indeed that they will consider.

"To the extent that their afternoon discussion marks the formal start of negotiations between the two leaders on missile defense, the meeting holds the prospect of revising, for good or ill, the entire way the world will think about nuclear security for the next generation.

"Will it be based on the interwoven series of treaties written during the cold war — treaties that gave Americans and Soviets whatever sense of security they had that nobody would pull a nuclear trigger one night and blow the whole world up? The cold war is dead, and with it the terror in the night, but does that mean the treaties no longer make sense? And if they don't, what replaces them? Are there new understandings that can be reached to prevent the emergence of a new rivalry and a new arms race?

"All that will be potentially on the table next weekend in Ljubljana, Slovenia — an interesting place for such a discussion, lying as it does between the old East and West, in a country that didn't even exist during the cold war.

"Formally, the discussion will be about the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, from which the Bush dministration has repeatedly said the United States should release itself. The 1972 agreement enshrined vulnerability as a virtue by barring both superpowers from building a credible national defense, and administration officials now say it should have been allowed to fall with the Berlin Wall; it was, after all, based on the notion that the only way to control cold war animosities was to make nuclear war a synonym for mutual suicide.

"These days, President Bush is saying a missile defense would also allow America to make deep cuts in its nuclear arsenal, even perhaps unilaterally; this, at least is a goal welcomed by members of the arms control community who don't much like Mr. Bush's pursuit of missile defenses.

"But in framing these proposals, the president is asking some remarkably challenging — his critics might say dangerous — questions about nuclear theology. They go far beyond the ABM Treaty, or even the relationship with Russia. ... (more)

rshowalter - 11:51am Jun 10, 2001 EST (#4685 of 4695)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

"President Bush is imagining, and some of his senior officials are advocating, a new kind of security relationship with Russia, and other countries like China. Built not on a foundation of concrete arms control treaties, it would radically restructure how Washington and Moscow traditionally guaranteed stability and predictability and peace itself.

"Arms control pacts, the administration argues, have inherent flaws: they freeze time from the day they are signed — or from the moment negotiations begin. Many of President Bush's senior appointees have negotiated treaties for previous presidents, and believe the process is bulky, slow, prone to problems in the Senate and not responsive to America's current security needs.

"These days, the officials say, arms treaties with Russia bring insecurity instead of certainty, because they seem to confirm a reality — the balance of terror — that no longer exists; because they don't let either side take advantage of new technologies to defend against missiles; and because they don't take account of emerging new threats to both signatories.

"That's the intellectual's argument, anyway. A brawnier complaint — against allowing virtually any treaties, not just the old cold war ones, to frame America's security architecture — is also heard in administration corridors and in Senate confirmation hearings. It says that in a world of proliferating weapons of mass destruction, and of the means to deliver them great distances, treaties only bind those who intend to keep them and offer legal cover to cheaters.

"But critics of the administration's long- term strategy say those comments are disingenuous, that they shift attention from a campaign to create a world in which America is unbound from its line-by-line obligations, free to pursue its self-interests unfettered by treaty law.

"These advocates of a treaty-based security regime point to decades in which arms agreements spelled out rights and responsibilities clearly enough to guarantee stable relations. Even if those laws now need updating, this argument goes, living under them is far safer than living in a world without any laws.

"When they hear the Bush brief, the Russians and Europeans of course want to know: What would replace this aging arms control architecture? No administration official can say for sure, beyond a promise that it will be the subject of serious consultations in Moscow and NATO's capitals.

"The administration, it seems, is imagining not negotiations on discrete arms control treaties, but separate meetings over months and years, bilateral and multilateral, on a range of security issues to lay down broad new rules of international relations.

"IN a way, the meeting on Saturday will be the first test of that way of doing things, because a general understanding about missile defenses is the matter at hand. (more)

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