[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 150 (2004), Part 9]
[Senate]
[Pages 11919-11920]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          ENDING THE COLD WAR

  Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I, too, would like to comment on one of the 
legacies of our late President Ronald Reagan, the legacy of ensuring 
that the free world would prevail over the Soviet Union in the cold 
war.
  I thought it was interesting that in one of the comments about Reagan 
very recently made on National Public Radio, June 8 of this year, Mr. 
Gennady Gerasimov, spokesman for Mikhail Gorbachev, said this:

       I see President Reagan as a grave digger of the Soviet 
     Union and the spade that he used to prepare this grave was 
     SDI, a Strategic Defense Initiative, so-called ``Star Wars.'' 
     The trick was that the Soviet leadership believed that this 
     SDI defense is possible and then--because it's possible, we 
     must catch up with the Americans. And this was an invitation 
     to the arms race, and the Soviet economy could not really 
     afford it and this way Reagan really contributed to the 
     demise of the Soviet Union.

  Who better to know that than the spokesmen for Mikhail Gorbachev who 
have said similar things? Twenty-one years ago, President Reagan posed 
a very important question to the American people. He asked us to 
consider whether the free people of the world should continue to have 
to rely upon the threat of a massive retaliation of nuclear weapons to 
prevent an attack by the opposition. He asked: What would it take to 
free the world from this threat? He answered as follows:

       I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may 
     not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, 
     current technology has attained a level of sophistication 
     where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will 
     take years, probably decades of effort on many fronts. There 
     will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be 
     successes and breakthroughs. . . . But isn't it worth every 
     investment necessary to free the world from the threat of 
     nuclear war? We know it is.

  We began making that investment. It was one of the reasons we had a 
deficit during the Reagan years. It was part of the so-called defense 
buildup, to invest billions of dollars in the research--yes, there were 
failures, but there were many successes--to develop a Strategic Defense 
Initiative, an ability to defend ourselves against a ballistic missile 
attack from an enemy. A lot of Americans probably think we developed 
that strategic defense, that we have that capability today. They might 
remember that during the first Persian Gulf war Patriot missiles shot 
down some of the Scuds that were fired by Saddam Hussein.
  But the grim reality is strategic defense is still not a reality. We 
still don't have the ability to defend against a missile attack. What 
happened during the Persian Gulf war? We used an air defense system to 
shoot down airplanes, and in the field, literally, as we shipped it 
from the United States to Israel and to Saudi Arabia and to Kuwait, 
made modifications in it so that we hoped it might work to shoot down 
some of the missiles that Saddam Hussein shot toward Saudi Arabia and 
Kuwait. In fact, some of those missiles--roughly a third of them--were 
intercepted by the Patriot. It was a crude weapon that was modified in 
the field. It had never been tested against other missiles. Yet we used 
what we had at the time because of the threat that existed.
  Throughout the Clinton years and the first Bush administration, 
research continued. Every time we got close to, as they say, bending 
metal, actually building a missile, somebody would object and say we 
are not quite there yet. We haven't proven it can work. It is going to 
cost a lot of money, or the Russians--then the Soviets--might be 
unhappy with it.
  After the demise of the Soviet Union, we agreed to scrap the ABM 
Treaty, and both President Putin and President Bush agreed that there 
was no need for a treaty that would define how many missiles each 
country could have and how many nuclear warheads because, frankly, we 
didn't have the need for them anymore and they were costly to maintain. 
We would destroy as many of ours as we wanted to destroy, and they 
could destroy all of theirs that they wanted to destroy. It was too 
expensive to keep around. There are still some. There are still some in 
Russia, I might add, where some believe it still might be worth trying 
to develop this offensive capability because the U.S. has never 
deployed a ballistic missile defense. There are those in China who 
believe the same thing, and also in North Korea, who I suspect believe 
we are bluffing.
  Let me quote something from a high-ranking official in Iran, from 
Iran's clerical hierarchy, delivered at Tehran's Al-Hussein University 
very recently, and reported in the May 28 edition of a newspaper in 
London:

       We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-
     Saxon civilization and for the uprooting of the Americans and 
     the English. The global infidel front is a front against 
     Allah and the Muslims, and we must make use of everything we 
     have at hand to strike at this front, by means of our suicide 
     operations or by means of our missiles. There are 29 
     sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West. We have already 
     spied on these sites and we know how we are going to attack 
     them.

  There is more that we could bring to the information from the 
intelligence community, that is open material that we are all aware 
involve plans by leaders in North Korea, Iran, and other places to try 
to develop missile technology and nuclear technology to attack places 
such as the United States. The North Koreans already have the capacity 
to attack Hawaii and Alaska, and we don't yet have a missile defense 
system in place to stop it.
  Thanks to President Bush and the efforts of the Congress and the 
missile act that we passed, we have put into place a program to 
actually develop and deploy a missile defense system. It is not the be-
all and end-all. It would not destroy everything the Soviet Union used 
to be able to use against us, but it would stop the kinds of missiles 
that North Korea, Iran, and perhaps others might want to send our way.

[[Page 11920]]

  Yet today we are at a crossroads. We begin debating today the Defense 
Authorization Act and expect amendments to be offered once again to cut 
the heart out of the missile defense program, prevent it from being 
deployed to actually be able to shoot down the missiles of an attacking 
country. It is interesting what is at work here. I say cut the heart 
out. They want to cut out over half a billion dollars--$515.5 million--
from the missile defense program. Why? They claim it hasn't yet been 
operationally tested. What does operational testing mean? It means you 
take it out of the laboratory kind of testing and put it into the 
ground; put the missile into the silo, and you run against it a real 
test with an offensive missile like the one you want to be able to 
defend against and see if you can knock it down. That is real 
operational testing, battlefield conditions.
  Sometimes you cannot afford to do that kind of testing, and you have 
to go with what you have just as we did in the first Persian Gulf war. 
There are other examples. The JSTAR is a program that had never been 
operationally tested, but we found that we needed it and, as a result--
it is the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System, which is 
an aircraft that played an important role in the 1991 Persian Gulf war 
by providing warning to forces on the ground when the Iraqi military 
was on the move. This had never been tested. JSTAR was in 
preproduction; it was a preproduction aircraft. They literally had to 
outfit it on the way to the theater. We used it and it worked.
  The Predator is another example, and the Global Hawk. Unmanned aerial 
vehicles have been valuable assets on the war on terrorism. They were 
not operationally tested. They were hardly ready for use, but we needed 
something that could do what they did. That is the way it is with 
missile defense today. We need to have the ability to shoot down a 
missile aimed at us by, for example, Iran or North Korea or some other 
enemy that might think we are bluffing.
  What about this claim that it hasn't been operationally tested? Mr. 
President, this is how we operationally test it. We put it into the 
silo, erect the radars, send a target missile against it, and see if it 
will work. We have had many tests--something like 18 tests, and all of 
the most recent tests have been successful. We are quite confident it 
will work. It needs to be tested in battlefield conditions, and this is 
the way to get it done. But the cuts that are being proposed would 
prevent us from buying the number of missiles we need in order to 
conduct this testing and still have enough left in the ground to 
prevent an attack should there be one launched against us.
  There is a basic catch-22 being imposed against us. That catch-22 is 
that you cannot deploy it until you can operationally test it, and you 
cannot test it until you deploy it.
  It would be folly for us to support an amendment that would prevent 
us from fielding these missiles. Eventually, we are only talking about 
20 interceptors based at Fort Greeley in Alaska and Vandenberg Air 
Force Base. The money that has been set aside for the first tranche of 
these missiles is already now producing the missiles to put in the 
first set of silos. We are now talking about the downpayment on the 
additional interceptors, No. 21 through No. 30. We have already cut the 
long lead procurement funding for interceptors No. 31 through 40. So we 
have already delayed that, which will make it much more costly.
  The bottom line is, as we have been told by General Kadish--the 
general who runs this program--it will be much more time-consuming and 
expensive if we cut the money out of the budget this year to prevent 
the production of these missiles that are going to be needed both for 
operational testing, as well as to be prepared to defend against an 
enemy attack should it come.
  The point I want to make today is this: The Soviet Union was brought 
to its knees because it believed President Reagan when he said we are 
going to develop a means of countering your most effective weapon, so 
you might as well not even try to spend the money and the effort and 
the time to create this program because we will be able to defeat you; 
we are not kidding.
  It has been over 20 years since President Reagan made that 
announcement, and we still do not have the missiles in the ground. I am 
afraid some of our potential enemies are going to conclude that we were 
bluffing all along, that we do not have the will to spend the money and 
to put the program in place to provide this kind of defense.
  The point of this defense is not just to be able to operationally 
test it and have it in the ground to stop a missile should one be 
launched against us, but to deter nations that might believe we are 
bluffing, to deter nations from spending the money to build these 
offensive weapons in the first place, to deter these leaders, these 
people in places such as North Korea and Iran, from concluding that if 
they will simply spend the money it will take to build the nuclear 
weaponry and the missiles to fire them, that we will somehow forget 
about developing missile defenses or conclude that it is too expensive, 
and the richest Nation on Earth, the Nation that has the financial 
capability of providing this kind of defense, will decide not to do it.
  The point of our exercise today is to move forward with the bill that 
the committee has put before us. It is a good bill. The bill has an 
authorization for enough money to buy the next group of missiles we 
need to put in the silos for testing purposes, for the purpose of 
shooting down a missile should one be launched against us--we do not 
have that ability today--and third, to deter countries that might be 
thinking they can go ahead with the development of this kind of a 
system because the United States will never get around to deploying an 
effective missile defense system.
  Now is the time for us to act. It is not the time for us to blink in 
the face of these dictatorial countries. Should we support the 
amendment that would cut the heart out of missile defense funding for 
this year, it would send a signal to these countries that the United 
States has been bluffing all along. We were not bluffing when Ronald 
Reagan made that important announcement. The Soviet Union understood 
that. Can we do any less today than to make it crystal clear to our 
would-be enemies that we are not bluffing, that we mean what we say, 
that we intend to protect America, that we intend to protect others who 
are our allies, and that we will not permit an offensive ballistic 
missile to strike our land and kill our people? To do anything else 
would be morally irresponsible.
  As President Reagan said, if we have the capability of defending 
ourselves and preventing this kind of conflagration, should we not take 
advantage of that wonderful capability? I am optimistic about our 
ability, and I am confident about the American people, and I am sure 
they want us to confirm to the world that we mean what we say, just as 
Ronald Reagan meant what he said.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas is recognized.
  Mr. PRYOR. I thank the Chair.
  (The remarks of Mr. Pryor pertaining to the introduction of S. 2516 
are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma is recognized.

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