[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 124 (Friday, July 28, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10866-S10867]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            NATIONAL DEFENSE

  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I would like to address a defense subject, 
given the fact that the Senate is likely to take up the defense 
authorization bill next week. I am going to include in my remarks a 
reference to North Korea. So, in a sense, the comments of the Senator 
from Ohio and all of those who have remarked on the sacrifices of 
Americans in Korea now 40 years ago, 45 years ago in some cases, have a 
bearing on what we are doing with our national defenses today and some 
of the issues we will be debating in connection with the defense 
authorization bill.
  Specifically, what I wish to address for a few minutes today is the 
implication of a recent CIA report which warned us that about 20 
nations by the end of this century will have the capability to deliver 
a weapon of mass destruction far beyond their borders through the 
missile delivery system, a ballistic missile delivery system that is 
either being indigenously produced in these countries or is being 
acquired by purchase from another nation and that that threat is a very 
real one not only for U.S. forces deployed abroad but also for our 
allies and eventually, not too long after the turn of the century, for 
the continental United States itself.
  In the Persian Gulf war, fully 20 percent of the United States 
casualties were as a direct result of the Scud missile attacks by the 
Iraqis. As a matter of fact, the single largest number of American 
casualties was 28 in one Scud missile attack on a barracks in Saudi 
Arabia. So this is not a threat that is hypothetical or in the future. 
It has already occurred to American troops in this decade. And yet too 
many have been blind to the reality that this is an emerging threat, 
that the ballistic missile with a warhead of mass destruction, either 
nuclear, chemical, or biological or even high explosives, is the weapon 
of choice of the dictators and would-be aggressors around the world 
today. Fully half of those 20 nations that the CIA report refers to are 
either in the Middle East or in Southeast Asia, and clearly our 
interests and our allies' interests are implicated in those regions of 
the world.
  North Korea is a good case in point, particularly since our focus has 
been on Korea this week. One of the reasons that our policy with 
respect to North Korea has been so touchy, so tentative is because 
North Korea today possesses a very real threat to literally millions of 
South Koreans and several thousand Americans in Korea.
  Today, in just a matter of hours, North Korea could kill thousands of 
people in Seoul, Korea, because that is how close Seoul is to the reach 
of the North Korean guns, their long artillery. Ballistic missiles are 
simply a much more robust system than long artillery, and the impact 
can, of course, be much more devastating, but the analogy is very true.
  One of the reasons that we are not tougher on North Korea today, that 
we cannot dictate the terms to North Korea, that we cannot tell them to 
stop producing weapons grade plutonium for the development of nuclear 
weapons is because we do not have leverage over North Korea. We cannot 
threaten them militarily, and as a matter of fact we are susceptible to 
a North Korean attack. We have no means of stopping the artillery from 
North Korea, the kind of attack that would occur on Seoul and that 
would also cause casualties to American troops in South Korea.
  What it tells us is that in the conduct of foreign policy we cannot 
be held hostage to foreign powers. We cannot allow ourselves to be 
defenseless against the weapons they would deploy against us or else we 
are neutralized in the conduct of our foreign policy, and that is what 
has largely happened with respect to North Korea. It will be orders of 
magnitude worse if and when North Korea obtains the kind of long-range 
missiles and weapons of mass destruction it is working on today.
  North Korea is one of those nations that is indigenously producing 
longer range ballistic missiles, and public reports assert that shortly 
after the turn of the century one of those missiles will even be able 
to reach the continental United States, specifically the State of 
Alaska.
  It does not take any reach of the imagination to predict what would 
happen if North Korea threatened Anchorage, AK, let us say, or one of 
our military bases in Alaska with a nuclear weapon if we did not do a 
certain thing or forbear from doing something that 

[[Page S 10867]]
was in the interest of North Korea. And yet the question is what would 
we do about it, because we have no means of stopping that kind of 
attack.
  It used to be that the threat of mutual assured destruction with the 
former Soviet Union was enough to deter attack by either nation because 
the thought of either nation sending everything it had against the 
other nation was simply too horrible to contemplate and neither nation 
was foolish enough to do that. But today the threat of mutual assured 
destruction does not work against these tinhorn dictators in countries 
like Iraq or Iran or Syria or North Korea and similar places, Libya--I 
will not extend the list--because of the characterized kind of 
leadership of those countries. But the fact is they have not been 
friends of the United States; they have been antagonistic in the past. 
They have either now or are developing these systems and therefore are 
likely troublemakers in the near future. To be defenseless against them 
is to deny our responsibility.
  Fortunately, we have it in our capability to begin developing the 
kind of defenses that would render these threats essentially 
meaningless and prevent us from being subjected to the blackmail that 
those threats certainly will entail in the future and hopefully deter 
attacks that, of course, would cause casualties either to our allies or 
our forces deployed abroad and eventually to the continental United 
States.
  Both the House and Senate Defense authorization bills begin to get us 
back on track to the development and deployment of effective theater 
ballistic missile systems and do the work that will eventually enable 
us to deploy an effective national defense system, that is, a system 
that would prevent attacks on the United States.
  And so it is important for us, as we begin to debate this subject 
next week, to focus on what the Armed Services Committee will be 
recommending and why we should not adopt some of the amendments that we 
know are going to be proposed that would weaken what the Armed Services 
Committee has recommended with respect to the development and 
deployment of these theater ballistic missile systems.
  In the past, Mr. President, there have been attempts to reduce the 
funding. Well, this year's funding level, I will note, is less than the 
Clinton administration's recommendation for this year in the 5-year 
plan that was submitted last year. So I hope we will not see attempts 
to decrease the funding for ballistic missile defenses.
  There is also a question about dumbing down our systems. The Patriot 
missile was not as effective as it might have been in the Persian Gulf 
because it had earlier been dumbed down. We did not make it as 
effective as we could have. There is a belief today that because the 
Russians would not like to see a robust defense, a defense that might 
even prepare the way for an effective defense against missiles they 
might send our way someday, therefore we are going to arbitrarily limit 
ourselves so that the systems will not be as effective as they might 
be.
  One of the arguments will be, if we make them as effective as they 
could be, they might violate the ABM Treaty.
  This bill which will come to the floor next week has definitions 
built into it that clearly permit us to test in a certain mode, and if 
we test beyond that mode, it would be deemed testing against a 
strategic system, which presumably would be in violation of the ABM 
Treaty, and so we will not do that. But if we try to add additional 
requirements such as speed limits on American missiles, making them not 
as effective as they might otherwise be, we will be dumbing down our 
system, making it less capable than it should be, than it needs to be.
  Therefore, I urge my colleagues to reject any amendments along that 
line.
  Finally, what we have done, since eventually there could be questions 
about whether a national system should have one or more sites to 
protect the continental United States, we have established a committee 
which will advise the Senate and the administration on what areas of 
the ABM Treaty we may wish to modify in order to deploy an effective 
system to defend the United States. The treaty only allows for one 
system today. We may need to deploy in more than one place. Surely, if 
that is in the United States national interest, we would seek to modify 
the treaty and ask the Russians to agree to that with us.
  We are not violating the treaty; we are simply preparing for the day 
when we may ask for changes to be made. The treaty is almost 25 years 
old and clearly was developed at a time when the Cold War was at its 
height and when the United States and Russia, or the Soviet Union, I 
should say, were depending on the doctrine of mutual assured 
destruction. That does not exist today. As so many of our colleagues 
are fond of reminding us, the Cold War is over. Of course, it is over.
  We have to begin to think about the kind of defense we will need in 
the next century rather than focusing on a treaty that may have served 
us well in the past, though that is subject to some debate, but 
certainly does not provide all the things that we need or the only 
things that we need to protect us in the future.
  So I hope that our colleagues will be agreeable to going forward with 
the study committee that is established in the Armed Services Committee 
mark that will come to the floor. I hope that they will believe that is 
a good idea and will go forward with that study.
  Let me conclude by saying that I believe what the Armed Services 
Committee will be recommending to us will make a lot of sense; that it 
will begin to put us on the path to developing and ultimately deploying 
an effective theater ballistic missile defense, a system that will 
protect us if we have troops deployed in Korea or in Saudi Arabia or 
anywhere else in the world, a system that will protect our allies to 
the extent they wish to be protected. That is something the United 
States wants to cooperate in and ultimately a system that can be added 
to and modified to protect even the continental United States.
  Surveys show that Americans today overwhelmingly believe that if a 
missile were launched against the United States, that we would be able 
to somehow intercept it either by some airplane-fired missile or some 
other missile we could fire or something in space. We know, of course, 
that is not true. We have absolutely no defense against a missile fired 
against us, whether by accident or in anger, whether by a terrorist 
nation that only has one or two missiles, or whether as in an attack by 
a country like the former Soviet Union.
  It is time to start thinking how to deal with that threat today. It 
takes a long time to develop the systems to meet that kind of threat. 
That is why this bill begins to put us on the track that will enable us 
to defend ourselves, as well as our interests abroad, and it is a bill 
which will be deserving of our support.
  I will be talking more about the bill and its specifics as we come to 
the floor to debate it, but I wanted to at least outline those concerns 
to my colleagues today.
  Mr. President, those conclude my remarks about the defense bill 
before us next week.

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