[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 7]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 10295-10299]
[From the U.S. 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

[[Page 10296]]

     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 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''

[[Page 10297]]

     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 the United 
     States has decreased in the last decades, not increased.
       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 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

[[Page 10298]]

     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 
     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.

[[Page 10299]]

       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.

     

                          ____________________