[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 52 (Wednesday, May 4, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 4, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
      DEFENSELESSNESS LIMITS OUR ABILITY TO ACT AGAINST NORTH KOREA

                                 ______


                           HON. HENRY J. HYDE

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                         Wednesday, May 4, 1994

  Mr. HYDE. Mr. Speaker, North Korea stands firm in its resolve to 
develop nuclear weapons despite the Clinton administration's diplomacy 
and exhortation. The administration's current strategy of looking to 
the U.N. Security Council promises to be equally ineffective. 
Meanwhile, it has limited our ability to act by not funding the most 
effective defense against North Korea's nuclear threat--missile defense 
technology. The following article by Richard Perle in the May 3, 1994, 
edition of the Wall Street Journal reveals the dangerous course the 
administration has put us on by letting our defenses down while North 
Korea's threat has been building. I commend to my colleagues' attention 
the following:

               [From the Wall Street Journal May 3, 1994]

                  The Best Defense Against North Korea

                           (By Richard Perle)

       There are few things one can be certain about in 
     international affairs these days, but I can think of two: (1) 
     With or without international inspections, the North Koreans 
     will not give up their nuclear weapons program; and (2) when 
     they eventually get many nuclear weapons--and they will--we 
     will wish we had a reliable ballistic missile defense, and we 
     won't.
       These expectations are not shared by the Clinton 
     administration, which is facing important decisions regarding 
     North Korea, as well as the future of the ballistic missile 
     defense program started by Ronald Reagan more than a decade 
     ago.
       On the evidence to date, the Clinton administration is 
     working harder, and much more effectively, to halt the 
     development of our own missile defense system than it is to 
     halt Kim Il Sung's nuclear weapons program. There is no other 
     way to comprehend the administration's dithering on North 
     Korea while devoting its meager ration of decisiveness to 
     killing what remains of the Strategic Defense Initiative and 
     cutting back sharply on other defensive systems.


                       ruthless and monomaniacal

       Despite its worsening poverty and post-Cold War isolation, 
     North Korea still considers the development of nuclear 
     weapons its highest priority. The North Korean ``Manhattan 
     Project'' is run by Kim Il Sung's son and heir apparent, Kim 
     Jong Il, who, if it can be imagined, is even more ruthless 
     and monomaniacal than his father. Together they have 
     relentlessly borne a huge financial burden, brushed aside 
     American admonitions and scorned near-global opprobrium as 
     they work to accumulate nuclear weapons.
       There is not the slightest reason to suppose, or even hope, 
     that North Korea will quit before it achieves success, which 
     is now within reach. It is particularly foolish to believe 
     that North Korea will be talked out of the nuclear weapons it 
     is sacrificing so much to acquire. Kim Il Sung believes 
     nuclear weapons are essential for his security and his 
     ambitions to reunify Korea on his terms. He may also believe 
     that there are billions of dollars to be earned by selling 
     nuclear weapons in a market that until now has had no willing 
     suppliers to satisfy a queue of eager potential buyers.
       That diplomacy and exhortation alone will not suffice is 
     hard to accept for an administration that tries to get by 
     with words rather than deeds, redefinition rather than 
     resolve. President Clinton's firm autumn stand, ``North Korea 
     cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb,'' has gone the 
     way of last winter's snow. In is place is a new objective--
     International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of those 
     nuclear facilities that North Korea volunteers to identify. 
     Such an inspection regime cannot reliably reveal, much less 
     halt, the North Korean nuclear weapons program. And to 
     accomplish even this modest purpose, the White House is 
     looking again to its preferred diplomatic instrument--the 
     United Nations Security Council, that engine of will and 
     determination (ask any Serb).
       But far worse than words without deeds is a dangerous 
     pattern of words contradicted by deeds, as when U.S.-South 
     Korean military exercises are called off or postponed as a 
     concession to Kim Il Sung or when defensive Patriot missiles 
     dispatched prudently--and vociferously--to protect American 
     troops in South Korea are deliberately sent by slow ship.
       After months of North Korean maneuvering and American 
     backing and filling, we have failed to gain Kim Il Sung's 
     consent to inspections that would not, in any case, prevent 
     the covert continuation of the North Korean program or its 
     quick resumption if it were temporarily halted.
       Contemplating North Korea's potential bang with an American 
     whimper, Under- secretary of State Lynn Davis last month 
     summarized the administration's thinking: ``Through 
     diplomacy, we have made a serious effort to find out 
     whether North Korea is willing to accept a nuclear-free 
     Korean peninsula. . . . Our strategy if diplomacy fails 
     takes us back to the U.N. Security council.''
       Whatever else the Security Council can do, it is not very 
     good at stopping bombs or missiles (ask any Bosnian). That is 
     a task for our armed forces. But this task is, unhappily, one 
     they cannot now carry out.
       It is not unreasonable to suppose that the specter of a 
     nuclear-armed North Korea--to say nothing of its likely 
     customers, Iran, Iraq and Libya--would cause the 
     administration to think again about how we might defend 
     against the missiles that Kim Il Sung or someone like him 
     might someday aim at us, our allies or our troops abroad.
       The wise decision to send Patriot missiles to South Korea 
     proves again an important lesson of the Gulf War: In crisis 
     as in war, missile defenses are much to be preferred to the 
     abject vulnerability favored by the administration. That this 
     lesson is so dimly perceived by the very team that ordered 
     the Patriots to the rescue is striking commentary on the 
     administration's failure to see the interconnections that 
     distinguish a deliberate policy from a collection of 
     unrelated reactions.
       While decrying its lack of options for dealing with a 
     nuclear-armed North Korea, the administration is out to 
     throttle some of the most promising technologies for missile 
     defense. Yet it is precisely this defenselessness that limits 
     our freedom of action.
       With help from its friends in Congress, the administration 
     has decimated the missile defense budget while 
     straitjacketing the development of promising defensive 
     technologies on the grounds that they are not allowed under a 
     narrow and controversial interpretation of the antiballistic 
     missile treaty of 1972. It has reduced by 80% the amount of 
     money projected by the Bush administration for work on a 
     nationwide defense system. More recently, it has proposed 
     extending the ABM treaty, by now an artifact of the Cold War, 
     to all of the former Soviet republics, thus diminishing 
     greatly the possibility that it might one day be revised to 
     allow us (and the Russians) to build nationwide defenses 
     against emerging nuclear powers.
       When it comes to killing missile defenses, an 
     administration given to drift and vacillation has found an 
     uncharacteristic sense of purpose.
       The extraordinary thing about the opposition to an American 
     strategic defense is its resilience. The now obsolete (and 
     perhaps always misplaced) concern that the development of an 
     American missile defense would deepen a U.S.-Soviet arms race 
     has managed to survive the end of the Cold War and the 
     dissolution of the Soviet Union with no loss of fervor.


                          Unconvincing Threats

       Administration success in ruling out the use of space-based 
     components capable of intercepting missiles early in their 
     flight will guarantee that we face future Kim Il Sungs 
     without effective means of defense. It will also sacrifice 
     some of the most promising options for theater defense. This 
     will force us to rely on threats to use nuclear weapons in 
     retaliation, as President Clinton has hinted we would do. But 
     in nearly all contingencies such threats are unlikely to be 
     convincing.
       In the end, nuclear coercion, especially as part of a 
     politico-military strategy, is bound to triumph over 
     deterrence. For in the end, coercive threats coming from a 
     Kim Il Sung who defied the world and managed to get a bomb 
     are more likely to be believed than deterrent threats coming 
     from an American president who decided we should not develop 
     the means to intercept it.

                          ____________________