[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 71 (Friday, June 9, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E960-E963]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
STAR WARS
______
HON. DENNIS J. KUCINICH
of ohio
in the house of representatives
Friday, June 9, 2000
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, I submit the following for the
Congressional Record.
Star Wars II
Here We Go Again
(By William D. Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca)
If you stopped worrying about the bomb when the cold war
ended, you were probably surprised to learn that two of the
hot-button issues of the eighties--arms control and missile
defense--will top the agenda at the Clinton/Putin summit on
June 4-5. A central issue in Moscow will be how to reconcile
Russian President Vladimir Putin's proposal for deep cuts in
US Russian nuclear arsenals with the Clinton Administration's
fixation on developing a National Missile Defense (NMD)
system.
Clinton has pledged to make a deployment decision this
fall, after the Pentagon and the White House analyze the
results of the next ``hit to kill'' test of the missile
defense system, slated for late June or early July. The
system failed its most recent test, conducted in January,
while an allegedly successful test conducted last October was
made possible only by the fact that the kill vehicle was
guided to the right spot by a large, easy-to-find decoy
balloon.
The Clinton/Gore proposal is a far cry from Ronald Reagan's
Star Wars scheme, which was designed to fend off thousands of
Soviet warheads at a cost estimated by former Wisconsin
Senator William Proximire at up to $1 trillion. In contrast,
this missile defense plan is meant to deal with a few dozen
incoming warheads launched by a ``rouge state'' like North
Korea, at a projected cost of $60 billion. But despite the
NMD's seemingly more modest goals, it is every bit as
dangerous and misguided as the Reagan scheme, threatening to
unravel thirty years of arms-control agreements and heighten
the danger of nuclear war.
NMD's surprising political revival is rooted in the three
Cs of contemporary US politics: conservative ideology,
Clintonian cowardice and corporate influence. These short-
term pressures are in turn reinforced by an ambitious long-
range military objective: the misguided quest for a state of
absolute military superiority.
The strongest push for missile defense has come from
Reaganite true believers in conservative think tanks,
especially the small but highly effective Center for Security
Policy. On Capitol Hill, the NMD lobby is spearheaded by new-
look conservatives like Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, who led
last fall's successful Republican effort to defeat the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Fresh from that victory, the
NMD lobby is now seeking to destroy the Anti-Ballistic
Missile treaty as the next target in its campaign to promote
``peace through strength rather than peace through paper,''
as Kyl put it in a recent speech.
The right-wing crusade for missile defense has received aid
and comfort from Bill Clinton and Al Gore, who have decided
that looking ``tough'' on defense is more important than
protecting the world from weapons of mass destruction.
Support has also come from the lumbering behemoths of the
military-industrial complex: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and
Boeing, which are desperately seeking a new infusion of
taxpayer funds to help them recover from a string of
technical failures and management fiascoes that have cut
their stock prices and drastically reduced their profit
margins.
NMD's military boosters see the system primarily as a way
to enhance the offensive capabilities of US forces, not as a
defensive measure. In its revealing ``Vision for 2020''
report, the US Space Command--a unified military command that
coordinates the space activities and assets of the Army, Navy
and Air Force--sings the praises of outer space as the ideal
platform for projecting US military dominance ``across the
full spectrum of conflict.'' Pentagon hard-liners have a more
immediate military goal: using NMD as a shield to protect US
forces in interventions against states like North Korea
(whose missile development effort, it is worth noting, has
been on hold for almost two years).
A growing number of moderate-to-conservative Democrats are
also supportive of a limited NMD system. Whether or not
missile defense is an effective response to alleged threats,
it seems to offer a sense of security to some members of
Congress, who lack the expertise and inclination to question
the fevered threat projections of the US military and
intelligence establishments.
While at least some of the motives of NMD advocates may be
understandable, they are also disastrously misguided: Even
Clinton and Gore's ``limited'' system is unnecessary,
unworkable and unaffordable. The mere pursuit of an NMD
system could pose the most serious threat to international
peace and stability since the height of the cold war. Russian
President Putin has emphatically stated that any US move to
withdraw from the ABM treaty will lead Moscow to treat all
existing US/Russian arms agreements as null and void. And
China's chief arms negotiator, Sha Zukang, has warned that if
Washington goes ahead with an NMD deployment designed to
intercept ``tens of warheads''--a figure suspiciously close
to the eighteen to twenty single-warhead ballistic missiles
that represent China's entire nuclear deterrent capability--
Beijing will not ``sit on its hands.''
In short, the official Clinton/Gore Administration position
on NMD is that we should jeopardize the best change in a
generation to reduce the world's nuclear arsenals in order to
preserve the option to deploy a costly, technically dubious
scheme designed to defend against a Third World missile
threat that does not currently exist and may not ever
materialize. To understand how we got into this mess, we need
to take a look at the genesis, ``death'' and resurrection of
Reagan's Star Wars dream.
a smile and a shoeshine
When Reagan gave his March 1983 Star Wars speech, in which
he pledged to launch a program designed to render nuclear
weapons ``impotent and obsolete,'' he was acting primarily on
the advice of Edward Teller, the infamous ``father of the H-
bomb.'' In closed-door meetings organized by the conservative
businessmen in Reagan's kitchen Cabinet, Teller sold Reagan
on a new nuclear doctrine of ``assured survival'' based on
the alleged technical wonders of his latest brainchild, the
X-ray laser. As New York Times science writer William Broad
pointed out in his 1992 book, Teller's War, the X-ray laser
was largely a figment of Teller's imagination, composed of
scientific speculation, wishful thinking and outright
deception. But Reagan was buying into the concept of missile
defense, not the details, so he forged ahead unaware of these
inconvenient facts, his enthusiasm reinforced by his desire
to counter the nuclear freeze movement.
But, as Frances FitzGerald shows in her new book, Way Out
There in the Blue (the title derives from Arthur Miller's
line in Death of a Salesman in which he describes Willy Loman
as ``a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a
shoeshine''), Reagan's Star Wars proposal was more than just
a political con game; it was also a potent symbol that served
radically different purposes for the different factions
within his Administration. For hard-liners like Caspar
Weinberger, Richard Perle and Frank Gaffney--a Perle protege
who went on to found his own pro-Star Wars think tank, the
Center for Security Policy--Reagan's missile defense plan
offered a chance to promote their two main goals: sustaining
the Reagan military buildup and thwarting progress on US/
Soviet arms control. For White House political strategists,
the Star Wars plan was a way to boost Reagan's flagging
popularity ratings, which had plummeted in the face of
[[Page E961]]
the deepest recession since the thirties and a growing fear
that the President's aggressive anti-Soviet stance was moving
the world to the brink of a nuclear confrontation.
The most constructive response to the Star Wars speech
within Reagan's inner circle came from his Secretary of
State, George Shultz. Rather than trying to convince Reagan
of the manifold flaws in his pet project, Shultz treated the
Star Wars speech as an opportunity to press Reagan to engage
in his first serious discussions with Soviet leaders on
nuclear weapons issues. Shultz found an unlikely ally in Paul
Nitze, the old cold warrior who was appointed as a special
envoy to the US/Russian nuclear talks at Schultz's request.
Nitze honed in on the fatal flaw that has plagued all missile
defense schemes to date, which is that it is much cheaper to
overwhelm a defensive system with additional warheads or
decoys than it is to expand the defensive capability to meet
these new threats. As a result, Shultz and Nitze were able to
prevail over the Weinberger/Perle faction and persuade Reagan
to endorse historic agreements to eliminate medium-range
nuclear weapons from Europe and implement substantial cuts in
long-range weapons under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty
(START). Star Wars was a security blanket that allowed Reagan
to engage in serious negotiations with the ``evil empire''
without being perceived as some sort of weak-kneed liberal
arms controller among the conservatives who formed his core
constituency.
When George Bush took office in January 1989, Reagan's Star
Wars fantasy was rapidly overtaken by the reality of sharp
reductions in the US and Soviet nuclear forces. Both sides
ratified the START I arms reduction pact and followed up with
a START II deal that called for cutting US and Soviet
strategic arsenals to one-third their Reagan-era levels. On a
broader front, the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the
dissolution of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 made
spending billions on a high-tech scheme to defend against
Soviet missiles seem irrelevant and absurd. Despite the
decline of the Soviet ``threat,'' however, the Bush
Administration and Congress continued to cough up $3-$4
billion per year for missile defense. The project's new focus
was protection against an accidental nuclear attack.
Soon yet another rationale appeared in the form of the
``rouge state'' strategy, developed by Chairman of the Joint
Chief of Staff Gen. Colin Powell, and based on the notion
that the United States should be prepared to fight two
heavily armed regional powers like Iraq and North Korea
simultaneously. In the 1991 Gulf War Saddam Hussein came to
personify the rogue-state threat; Iraqi missile attacks on
Tel Aviv and a devastating direct hit on a U.S. military
barracks in Saudi Arabia prompted calls for more effective
defenses against medium-range ballistic missiles.
But even that was not enough to sustain enthusiasm for a
major new program. A few months after Clinton took office in
January 1993, Defense Secretary Les Aspin proclaimed the Star
Wars program dead (though the Pentagon continued to spend $3-
$4 billion per year on missile defense research).
Enter Newt
Newt Gingrich is gone from the political scene, but the
most dangerous plank of his 1994 Contract With America
remains: the section that calls for ``requiring the Defense
Department to deploy antiballistic missile systems capable of
defending the United States against ballistic missile
attacks.'' That plan was added to the contract by Gingrich
and his fellow Republican co-author Dick Armey at the urging
of Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy.
Efforts to turn the contract's rhetoric into viable
legislation proved unsuccessful in the short run, but in mid-
1996 the Clinton Administration decided to snatch defeat from
the jaws of victory by offering a missile defense compromise
known as the ``3+3'' plan--three years of research and
testing followed by a three-year crash program to deploy a
system--if the President decided it was necessary, feasible
and affordable. The ``3+3'' gambit allowed Clinton to push
off a politically controversial decision on missile defense
until a later date that fell well past the 1996 presidential
election. Unfortunately for Al Gore, that ``later date'' is
now smack in the middle of his second run for the White
House. As John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists
put it, ``This is a political decision driven by the need to
defend Al Gore from Republicans rather than defend America
against missiles.''
While Clinton was yielding ground, Capitol Hill Republicans
were regrouping for their next offensive--one result of which
was an amendment in the fiscal year 1997 defense
authorization bill calling for the establishment of a blue-
ribbon panel to ``assess the nature and magnitude of existing
and emerging ballistic missile threats to the United
States.'' The Republicans wanted their new commission to be
viewed as an authoritative and objective body, not just a
partisan project. Bearing that in mind, House Speaker
Gingrich and Senate majority leader Trent Lott, who were
empowered to nominate the majority of the panel's members,
chose former Ford Administration Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld to head the commission, in the hopes that they could
capitalize on his reputation as a moderate Republican with
pragmatic views on military matters. Rumsfeld proved worthy
of Gingrich's and Lott's confidence when he hammered out a
unanimous final report with the appropriate aura of
bipartisanship, complete with signatures from Democratic
appointees such as former Carter Administration arms-control
official Barry Blechman of the Henry L. Stimson Center and
eminent physicist and longtime missile defense critic Richard
Garwin. Just two weeks after the report came out, Garwin
placed an Op-Ed in the New York Times denouncing the misuse
of the report by missile defense boosters, asserting, ``I am
alarmed that some have interpreted our findings as providing
support for a new national defense system.''
The Rumsfeld Commission report was unveiled in July 1998
amid hysterical cries from Gingrich that it was the ``most
important warning about our national security system since
the end of the cold war.'' Hysteria aside, the report's
primary finding was that given enough foreign help, a rogue
state like North Korea could acquire a missile capable of
reaching the United States within five years of making a
decision to do so--one-third to one-half the warning time
projected in the CIA's official estimates. The Star Wars
lobby finally got what it needed: an official, government-
approved statement that could be interpreted as endorsing its
own exaggerated view of the Third World missile threat. While
the Rumsfeld report drew heavy editorial fire in papers like
the Chicago Tribune and the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Wall
Street Journal applauded it as a long-overdue clarion call
for missile defense, and Washington's newspaper of record,
the Post, published a measured response that endorsed the
panel's findings as ``useful and plausible.''
Inside the Missile Defense Lobby
Upon reflection, it is clear that the Rumsfeld report's
Republican backers had always intended to use the panel as a
tool to advance their pro-missile defense agenda. All the
report actually says is that if a country like North Korea
gets major foreign assistance--including the extremely
unlikely possibility that a country like China would simply
give Pyongyang a fully operational ballistic missile--it will
achieve the capability to hit the United States much more
quickly than if it had to build the missile without outside
help. As Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace demonstrated in Congressional testimony
delivered this past February, the Rumsfeld Commission's
conservative backers have used the report as a vehicle for
changing the intelligence community's traditional means of
assessing the ballistic missile threat, from one that
attempts to predict the likely pace of missile proliferation
in a given nation in the light of political, economic and
military factors, to a ``worst-case scenario'' approach that
asks how quickly a given nation could achieve a threatening
missile capability if it had no economic or political
impediments. As Cirincione also demonstrated, the ``sky is
falling'' approach has been used to obscure the underlying
reality that the ballistic missile threat to
Just as the Rumsfeld Commission turned out to be less
objective than it first appeared to be, so did its chairman.
Far from being a moderate, Donald Rumsfeld is a card-carrying
member of the missile defense lobby. Prior to his appointment
to head the commission that bears his name, he was publicly
singled out as a special friend in the annual report of the
pro-Star Wars think tank, the Center for Security Policy. As
a further sign of his commitment to the missile defense
cause, Rumsfeld has also given money to Frank Gaffney's
group. If Gaffney's organization were just an abstract
``study group,'' that would be one thing. But it is a highly
partisan advocacy organization that serves as the de facto
nerve center of the NMD lobby.
Gaffney's center, which now has an annual budget of $1.2
million, was started in 1988 with support from New Right
funders like Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph Coors. Since
that time, Gaffney has turned it into a sort of working
executive committee for the missile defense lobby. The
center's advisory board includes representatives of larger
conservative organizations, including Ed Feulner, president
of the Heritage Foundation; William Bennett, co-director of
Empower America; and Henry Cooper of High Frontier, the
original Star Wars think tank, which was launched during the
early years of the Reagan Administration. Other CSP advisory
board members include Charles Kupperman and Bruce Jackson,
who serve as vice president for Washington operations and
director of planning and analysis, respectively, at Lockheed
Martin; key members of Congress like Republicans Curt Weldon,
Christopher Cox, and Jon Kyl; and a who's who of Reagan-era
Star Warriors like Edward Teller and former Reagan science
adviser George Keyworth.
Unlike most think tanks concerned with military issues, the
Center for Security Policy receives a substantial portion of
its funding from weapons manufacturers. Three out of the top
four missile defense contractors--Boeing, Lockheed Martin and
TRW--are all major corporate contributors to CSP, which has
received more than $2 million in corporate donations since
its founding, accounting for roughly one-quarter of its total
budget.
Rumsfeld's link to CSP is not his only affiliation with the
Star Wars lobby. He's also on the board of Empower America,
which ran deceptive ads against anti-NMD Senator Harry Reid
of Nevada in the run-up to the November 1998 elections. In
recognition of
[[Page E962]]
his service to the missile defense lobby, in October 1998--
just three months after his ``objective'' assessment of the
missile threat was released--CSP awarded Rumsfeld its
``Keeper of the Flame'' award for 1998 at a gala dinner
attended by several hundred Star Wars boosters. In accepting
the award, Rumsfeld joined the company of Reagan, Gingrich
and several Congressional NMD boosters.
NMD Resurgent: Fast Track to Oblivion?
In a reprise of the political two-step that preceded the
1996 presidential elections (Republicans lead, Clintonites
follow), the Clinton Administration moved closer to the
Republican position on missile defense with a January 1999
announcement that the President would seek a six-year, $112
billion increase in Pentagon spending. The proposal included
$6.6 billion in new funding for procurement of missile
defense equipment before 2005, the new target date for NMD
deployment established by Defense Secretary William Cohen.
Clinton's decision to accelerate NMD funding was propelled
in part by the furor caused by North Korea's August 1998 test
of a two-stage ballistic missile, but the trump card in the
Republican-led effort to jack up both overall military
spending and NMD ``deployment readiness'' funding was the
backlash from the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Long before the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton decided that
throwing money at the Pentagon was the best way to shore up
his credentials as Commander in Chief and divert attention
from allegations that he had dodged the draft during the
Vietnam War. By the fall of 1998, the combination of a
growing federal budget surplus and the President's perceived
political weakness resulting from the Lewinsky matter
emboldened Congressional Republicans and Clinton's own Joint
Chiefs of Staff to press him for billions of dollars in
additional military funds.
In mid-September, the Joint Chiefs invited the President to
a closed-door briefing where they read Clinton their wish
lists on everything from boosting military pay and weapons
procurement to applying fresh coats of paint to underutilized
military bases. Within a week's time Clinton sent the Chief a
letter pledging a Pentagon budget increase that would insure
that ``the men and women of our armed forces will have the
resources they need to do their jobs.'' In October,
Congressional Republicans did the Joint Chiefs one better,
loading up Clinton's $1 billion Pentagon supplemental
appropriations bill aimed at addressing the military's
newfound ``readiness crisis'' with what analyst John Isaacs
of the Council for a Livable World has described as ``a $9
billion grab bag of pet projects'' that included an
additional $1 billion for National Missile Defense.
Clinton's apparent embrace of NMD prompted Helle Bering of
the conservative Washington Times to complain bitterly that
``Clinton has appropriated yet another set of Republican
issues.'' In mid-January Cohen took the Administration's NMD
commitment one step further when he made the highly
provocative statement that if the United States deemed it
necessary to withdraw from the ABM treaty in order to field
an effective defense against rogue-state missiles, it would
do so regardless of Russia's reaction.
Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill, NMD advocates were
rallying around Senator Thad Cochran's National Missile
Defense Act. In March 1999, aided by the votes of moderate
and conservative Democrats who had been persuaded in part by
the Rumsfeld Commission's official (albeit misleading)
depiction of the North Korean missile threat, the House and
Senate both passed bills calling for the deployment of a
national missile defense system ``as soon as it is
technologically feasible.''
Clinton signed the bill into law that July. Although his
signing message made it clear that the Administration will
consider economic, technical and arms-control factors before
deciding whether to deploy an NMD system, Star Wars boosters
in Congress have been portraying the legislation as a firm
national commitment come hell or high water.
THE NMD DECEPTION
From its inception in the Reagan White House to its
resurrection in the Clinton era, the marketing of missile
defense has been accompanied at every step by exaggerated
technical claims, misleading cost estimates and outright
lies. If experience is any guide, the missile defense test
scheduled for late June or early July will almost be
certainly be rigged. (In 1984, in an instance of fraud that
only came to light nine years later, a test of Lockheed's
Homing Overlay Experiment was rigged by placing a beacon in
the target missile so that it could literally signal its
location to the interceptor missile.)
But even if the next test misfires, the Pentagon's
Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) has already put
forward a rationale that Clinton could use to give the green
light for deployment, namely that two more ``hit to test''
tests could be squeezed in between now and next spring, when
construction will begin on the critical NMD radar site in
Shemya, Alaska, if Clinton decides to go full speed ahead on
deployment. Even one successful ``hit'' in any of these next
three tests--which will occur before BMDO contractors
actually break ground on the Alaska radar project but after
the Administration has committed funds to long-lead-time
materials and services that will be needed to meet the
starting date for construction--will be offered as proof of
the dubious proposition that the system will work under real-
world conditions.
Unfortunately, fraudulent testing of missile defense
components is far from ancient history. Nira Schwartz, a
computer software expert who worked on tests of the NMD
interceptor for TRW, filed a civil suit against the company
in April 1996 charging that it forced her to misreport her
findings on the critical question of whether the interceptor
missile can tell the difference between a real warhead and a
decoy. The documents in the case were unsealed earlier this
year and featured in a March 7 front-page New York Times
story. The company has denied Schwartz's allegations, but
another engineer who worked on the tests has backed her up.
Since Schwartz' claims became public earlier this year, MIT
missile defense expert Theodore Postol had conducted an
independent analysis of the data generated by the test in
question, and he has concluded that the results raise
fundamental questions about the ability of any currently
available technology to discriminate between warheads and
decoys. Since this capability is essential for even a modest
NMD system to have any chance of intercepting a handful of
incoming warheads, TRW and the Pentagon have gone to great
lengths to cover up this embarrassing fact. When Postol sent
a letter to the White House outlining his findings, the
Pentagon responded by ruling that the contents of Postol's
letter should be classified on the grounds that they
contained top-secret material. On May 25 the BMDO released a
cursory letter charging that Postol's findings were
``incomplete'' and his conclusions ``wrong'' because ``Dr.
Postol is not considering all the capabilities of our system
of systems.'' Postol fired back the same day at a DC press
conference organized by the Global Research/Action Center on
the Environment, presenting his technical critique of the NMD
system in detail and slamming the Administration for ``foot-
dragging and playing politics with an important decision that
directly affects the security of the nation'' rather than
appointing an impartial panel to investigate seriously his
charges of fraud in the test program.
In addition to the evidence of outright fraud, the NMD
program has recently been subjected to a flurry of questions
from critics within the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence
community. On May 19, a few days after Postol sent his letter
to the White House, the Los Angeles Times published an
interview with a high-level U.S. intelligence official who
flatly contradicted the Clinton Administration's contention
that China has nothing to fear from a limited U.S. NMD
system. The official also noted that the North Korean and
Iranian missile threats have not been moving along as rapidly
as expected, and he asserted that the concept of the ``rogue
state'' was in itself an impediment to objective analysis of
the missile threat.
Meanwhile, a blue-ribbon panel chaired by former Reagan
Administration Secretary of the Air Force Gen. Larry Welch
has issued two scathing critiques of NMD program management,
the first of which pointed out that the NMD system was on a
far tighter testing schedule than any recent weapons
development program of comparable scale. It went on to charge
that the program was on a headlong ``rush to failure.'' The
second Welch report, released this past November, strongly
encouraged the Administration to push back its NMD deployment
decision to avoid ``regressing to a very high risk
schedule.'' In February a report by Philip Coyle, the
Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation,
charged that the Pentagon was facing heavy pressure to ``meet
an artificial decision point in the development process.''
There is one final element distorting the NMD testing
program: corporate greed. The major corporate players in the
NMD testing program--Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon--
all have serious and direct conflicts of interest, since the
results of the tests they are helping to carry out will
determine whether they start reaping multibillion-dollar
missile defense contracts over the next few years. Pentagon
spokesman Kenneth Bacon has tried to wave off charges of
fraud involving TRW's NMD ``hit to kill'' vehicle by arguing
that TRW's version has not been chosen for inclusion in the
final NMD system. However, Bacon fails to mention that
Boeing, which is now in charge of overall systems integration
for the entire NMD project, designed the interceptor vehicle
that has been the subject of the fraud allegations. Whether
Boeing colluded with TRW's manipulation of test results or
merely overlooked them, it doesn't bode well for its role as
the principal monitoring agent for subcontractors. The fox is
guarding the chicken coop: If Boeing is able to orchestrate a
series of seemingly credible tests, it stands to make
billions of dollars in production contracts for decades to
come. This inherent conflict of interest at the heart of the
NMD testing programs is one of the factors that have led
missile defense experts at MIT and the Union of Concerned
Scientists to call for the appointment of an independent
panel to assess the feasibility of missile defense before the
President makes a deployment decision.
Boeing is not the only company with an interest in helping
the Pentagon put the best face on the NMD program. Lockheed
Martin, whose ``legacy'' company, Lockheed Aircraft, was in
charge of the 1984 Homing Overlay Experiment, which was later
exposed as fraudulent, brags in a recent edition of its
[[Page E963]]
company newsletter, Lockheed Martin Today, that it produces
the rockets used to propel both the mock warhead and the
``kill vehicle'' involved in NMD ``hit to kill'' tests. This
is certainly a convenient setup if the company and the BMDO
are thinking of stacking the deck on the next intercept test
to insure a successful result.
Of the four largest NMD contractors (the others are Boeing,
Raytheon and TRW), Lockheed Martin has the most to gain. If
US/Russian arms-reduction talks are stymied by US
stubbornness on NMD, Lockheed Martin will be able to sustain
its key nuclear weapons programs. And if NMD deployment moves
forward, Lockheed Martin will receive billions in additional
funding for production of numerous components and
subcomponents of the national missile defense system.
Given what's at stake, the companies have decided to leave
nothing to chance. Since Republicans took control of both
houses of Congress in January 1995, weapons industry PAC's
have given twice as much to Republican Congressional
candidates as they have to Democrats, a far higher margin
than prevailed when the Democrats ruled Capitol Hill, when
they receive about 55 percent of defense industry PAC funds,
compared with 45 percent for Republicans. Hard-line Star
Warriors have gotten the bulk of this industry largesse. A
World Policy Institute analysis of two recent pro-Star Wars
letters to President Clinton--one from twenty-five senators
organized by Jesse Helms stating that they would kill any
arms-control deal with the Russians that attempted to put any
limits on the scope of future NMD deployments, the other from
thirty-one Republican senators pushing the Center for
Security Policy's pet project, a sea-based missile defense
system-reveals that the signatories of these pro-Star Wars
missives have received a total of nearly $2 million in PAC
contributions from missile defense contractors in this
election cycle.
Lockheed Martin has not neglected the presidential
candidates. On the Republican side Lockheed Martin vice
president Bruce Jackson, who served as chairman of the US
Committee to Expand NATO, was overheard by one of the authors
at an industry gathering last year bragging about how the
industry's troubles will be over if George W. Bush is
elected, since Jackson would be personally writing the
defense plank of the Republican platform. And Loral CEO
Bernard Schwartz, who has longstanding ties to Lockheed
Martin dating from when Lockheed absorbed Loral's defense
unit in 1996, was the top individual donor of soft money to
the Democratic Party in the 1996 presidential cycle; Loral
employees gave $601,000 to Democratic Party committees.
Schwartz has nearly doubled that amount in the run-up to the
November 2000 elections, with $1.1 million in soft-money
contributions to Democratic committees to date. He was
briefly in the spotlight last year when he was accused of
lobbying the Clinton Administration to ease the standards for
the export of satellite technology to China.
NMD and Beyond
The continued pursuit of NMD will have far-reaching
consequences for the future of arms control and goal of
nuclear abolition. It will mean a false sense of security for
Americans and an increased threat of nuclear war for the
world.
Instead of going down the road, the US government should
focus its energy and resources on preventative measures. When
Clinton meets with Putin on June 4, he could pledge to get
US/Russian nuclear reductions back on track through steps
that include seeking increased funding for the Cooperative
Threat Reduction program--which has helped finance the
destruction of thousands of Russian nuclear warhead and
weapons facilities--and working toward continued reductions
in US and Russian nuclear forces under START agreements.
Clinton could also pledge to work for ratification of the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was defeated last fall
by the Senate despite overwhelming public support. Above all,
Clinton could assure Russia that the United States has no
intention of withdrawing from the ABM treaty. That would put
Al Gore in a much stronger position to criticize George W.
Bush's misleading proposal to pursue unilateral cuts in US
nuclear forces in combination with an ambitious NMD plan that
would usher in an era of instability by demolishing what's
left of the global nuclear arms control regime.
The newly resurgent peace and arms-control movement, led by
organizations like Peace Action, the Union of Concerned
Scientists, the Global Network Against Nuclear Weapons and
Power in Space, and the Fourth Freedom Forum, is trying to
generate a large-enough outcry for ``arms reductions, not
missile defense'' over this summer to beat back missile
defense hysteria. But stopping NMD is just one step toward a
sane nuclear policy; ultimately only the abolition of all
nuclear weapons can provide the safety and security that
Reagan and his latter-day disciples have pledged to provide
through the false promise of missile defense.
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