IP: U.S. to Pull Out of ABM Treaty, Clearing Path for Antimissile Tests

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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December 12, 2001




U.S. to Pull Out of ABM Treaty, Clearing Path for Antimissile Tests




By DAVID E. SANGER and ELISABETH BUMILLER

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ASHINGTON, Dec. 12 — President Bush is expected to announce before the 
weekend that Washington will withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile 
Treaty in six months, the first time in modern history that the United 
States has renounced a major international accord.

Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, said today that 
Mr. Bush had informed him and three other Congressional leaders of his 
decision at a breakfast meeting.

The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, noted today that "the president 
has said multiple times that he believes very strongly . . . the best way 
to promote the peace is to move beyond the A.B.M. treaty."

Mr. Fleischer offered no insight on the timing of an official announcement. 
"I expect you will hear from the president about that when the president is 
ready to say something," he said.

But he did nothing to discourage speculation that it is imminent, as other 
administration officials said on Tuesday.

The decision came after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, visiting Moscow 
in recent days, was unable to bridge differences with Russia's president, 
Vladimir V. Putin, on how to deal with an arms control accord that Mr. Bush 
has called a "relic" of the cold war, and "dangerous." But Mr. Bush 
concluded last week that Secretary Powell's last effort would likely fail, 
and it appears that he gave warning of his intentions in a phone 
conversation with Mr. Putin on Friday.

The decision ends a raging debate within the administration over the wisdom 
of withdrawing from the treaty, and marks a major policy defeat for 
Secretary Powell. He has long maintained that it was still possible to 
negotiate an agreement with Russia that would allow the Pentagon to move 
forward with the kind of tests it insists are necessary to develop an 
antiballistic missile system initially capable of handling the launch of a 
handful of nuclear weapons at the United States.

At the same time, Mr. Bush's decision was a major victory for Defense 
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, fresh from the success of the military 
campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Mr. Rumsfeld has countered that 
there is no technologically satisfying way to amend the accord that 
President Richard M. Nixon signed with the former Soviet Union nearly three 
decades ago.

In the end, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, sided 
with Mr. Rumsfeld, several administration and congressional officials said.

Mr. Bush made no mention of his decision when he gave a speech on the 
future of the American military on Tuesday at the the Citadel, the military 
college in Charleston, S.C. But he forcefully repeated his contention that 
the treaty is outdated, noting that last week the Pentagon conducted 
another "promising test" of missile defense technology.

"For the good of peace, we're moving forward with an active program to 
determine what works and what does not work," Mr. Bush told a cheering 
crowd of cadets. "In order to do so, we must move beyond the 1972 
Antiballistic Missile Treaty, a treaty that was written in a different era, 
for a different enemy."

The treaty allows either signatory to withdraw with six months' notice. If 
Mr. Bush goes ahead with his announcement this week, it would mean that the 
administration would be free to conduct any type of test it wants by 
mid-June. The Pentagon plans to start construction on silos and a missile 
defense command center at Fort Greely, Alaska, in late April or early May. 
The silos and center would initially be used for testing allowed by the 
treaty. But Russian officials note that part of the plan is for the "test 
bed" to become part of an operational missile-defense system. For that 
reason, some ABM experts contend that the work would violate the treaty.

Pentagon officials have also said they want to schedule tests in which 
ship-based radars track long-range missiles early next year. Such tests are 
not allowed under the treaty.

Aides say Mr. Bush hopes his announcement will prompt discussions with 
Russia on what kind of agreement should become the successor to the ABM 
treaty. Presumably that will be the focus of his expected trip to Moscow, 
his first, sometime next spring. Ms. Rice said after the last meeting 
between the two leaders, at Mr. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex., that the 
relationship between the two countries had been so strengthened that it 
could glide past the difference of opinion about the value of the treaty. 
"This is a smaller element of the U.S.-Russia relationship than it was 
several months ago and certainly than it was before Sept. 11," she said in 
Crawford.

At a meeting in Washington that preceded the Crawford summit by a day, Mr. 
Putin and his aides made it clear that while they were inclined to allow 
the United States to conduct antimissile tests despite the treaty, they 
wanted the right to approve each test of the system. "It was something we 
couldn't live with," a senior administration official said. "It would mean 
subjecting each test to separate scrutiny, and sooner or later they were 
going to say `no,' " one senior official said.

A senior administration official said on Tuesday that "the Russians won't 
like it, but the calculation is that they will learn to live with it, and 
they will quickly get beyond it. They've certainly known it's coming."

Another official later said, "In a way, the bigger question is how the 
Chinese will react." While China is not a signatory to the treaty, its 
arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons is so small — only 20 or so weapons 
can reach American shores — that Chinese officials fear that the arsenal 
would be neutralized by a modest American antimissile system built in 
Alaska or deployed on ships in the Pacific. That could prompt China to 
speed the modernization of its nuclear forces, something the White House 
believes it will do anyway.

In contrast, even when Russia reduces its nuclear arsenal to 1,500 or so 
weapons, a goal Mr. Putin has set, Russia would be able to overwhelm any 
antimissile system now on the Pentagon's drawing boards.

While White House officials maintain that strategic concerns, not politics, 
have always been at the heart of Mr. Bush's decision on the ABM treaty, it 
seems likely some major political calculations went into the timing.

Mr. Bush's approval ratings are as high as ever — nearly 9 out of 10 
Americans say they approve of how he is handling his job, a New York 
Times/CBS News poll released late Tuesday reports — and 75 percent say they 
approve of how he is handling foreign policy. In the spring, only about 
half of those polled said they approved.

Other polls show that since Sept. 11, more Americans believe in the need 
for missile defense, even though the attacks three months ago used 
airplanes, not missiles. Mr. Bush has argued that the next attack could 
well come in a missile attack from a rogue state or terrorists.

But the critics of his plan are not persuaded. Many say that Sept. 11 
proved that America's major vulnerabilities have little to do with missile 
attacks. And Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware and the chairman 
of the Foreign Relations Committee, issued a statement Tuesday evening 
warning that "unilaterally abandoning the ABM treaty would be a serious 
mistake. The administration has not offered any convincing rationale for 
why any missile defense test it may need to conduct would require walking 
away from a treaty that has helped keep the peace for the last 30 years."

European leaders have also criticized American discussion of abandoning the 
treaty, saying before Sept. 11 that the administration's treatment of the 
treaty was a prime example of a worrisome move toward unilateralism. But 
now administration officials appear to be calculating that the European 
reaction will be muted, especially if European leaders do not want cracks 
to appear in the coalition against terrorism.

Mr. Bush's speech at the Citadel on Tuesday was, in many ways, a reprise of 
a 1999 address on military policy that he delivered there as a presidential 
candidate. The remarks served as both a marker of the three-month 
anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and a call for a more agile, modern 
military.

The White House also used the event as a kind of "I told you so" about the 
threat of terrorism, a large theme of Mr. Bush's earlier speech. He warned 
Tuesday that "rogue states" were the most likely sources of nuclear, 
chemical or biological weapons, and said that they would be regarded as 
"hostile regimes" if they aided terrorists. "They have been warned, they 
are being watched, and they will be held to account," the president said.

Mr. Bush cited the American military campaign in Afghanistan as a model for 
future wars, and said the United States needed to further develop unmanned 
planes, like the Predator, and precision-guided bombs. Both have been used 
in Afghanistan.

He also called for rebuilding "our network of human intelligence" as well 
as new intelligence-gathering technology. "Every day I make decisions 
influenced by the intelligence briefing of that morning," Mr. Bush said. 
"The last several months have shown that there is no substitute for good 
intelligence officers, people on the ground."

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