THIS SEARCH     THIS DOCUMENT     THIS CR ISSUE     GO TO
Next Hit        Forward           Next Document     New CR Search
Prev Hit        Back              Prev Document     HomePage
Hit List        Best Sections     Daily Digest      Help
                Contents Display

[Page: S12998]  GPO's PDF
---

   Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise this morning to speak to a decision that I am told and have read is about to be made by the President--a very significant decision and, I think, an incredibly dangerous one--to serve notice that the United States of America is going to withdraw from the ABM Treaty.

   Under the treaty, as you know, a President is able to give notice 6 months in advance of the intention to withdraw.

   Mr. President, we live in tumultuous times. The transition from the old cold war alignments to new patterns of conflict and cooperation is picking up speed. This transition is not quiet, but noisy and violent. For 3 months now, it has been propelled by a new war.

   In the modern world, high technology and rapid communications and transportation put our own country and our own people on the front lines of that war. We are on the cutting edge of revolutionary developments in everything from medicine to military affairs.

   We are also on the receiving end of everything from anthrax to the attacks of September 11--and we will remain vulnerable in the years to come. The question is: how vulnerable?

   How shall we deal with this accelerated and violent transition? How well is the Administration dealing with it?

   And is their primary answer--withdrawing from ABM and building a star wars system--at all responsive to our vulnerabilities?

   We can find some answers in both the experience of the last 3 months and the President's speech yesterday at the Citadel.

   Wars are chaotic events, but they impose a discipline upon us.

   We must focus on the highest-priority challenges.

   We must use our resources wisely, rather than trying to satisfy every whim.

   We must seek out and work with allies, rather than pretending that we can be utterly self-reliant.

   How well have we done? In the short run, very well indeed.

   Our people and institutions rose to the occasion on September 11 and in the weeks that followed.

   We took care, and continue to take care, of our victims and their families.

   We resolved to rebuild.

   We brought force to bear in Afghanistan, and used diplomacy in neighboring states and among local factions, to prevail.

   We have also gained vital support from countries around the world, although we have been slow to involve them on the ground. We have shared intelligence and gained important law enforcement actions in Europe in the Middle East, and in Asia.

   We have begun to take action to combat bioterrorism. At home, we have learned some lessons the hard way and we have accepted the need to do more. We are stepping up vaccine production.

   But we have yet to take the major actions that are needed to improve our public health capabilities at home--or our disease surveillance capabilities overseas, to give us advance notice of epidemics or potential biological weapons.

   Neither have we moved decisively to find new, useful careers for the thousands of biological warfare specialists

[Page: S12999]  GPO's PDF

   This is no longer a matter for just those of us who have intelligence briefings to know--and we have known this for a long time. Now the world knows that rogue states and terrorists have, in fact, attempted to buy nuclear weapons, biological weapons, and chemical weapons.

   The President recognizes the problem of bioterrorism, and listed it in his speech yesterday. At the Crawford summit, President Putin and he promised more cooperation to combat bioterrorism. So far, however, there has been a great deal more talk than action. Al-Qaida's eager quest for weapons of mass destruction has, in my view, highlighted and brought home to every American the importance of nonproliferation, of closing down the candy store, so to speak, where all these radical wackos go to shop.

   The President understands this. In his speech yesterday, after talking about the need to modernize our military, he said:

   America's next priority to prevent mass terror is to protect against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them..... .

   Working with other countries, we will strengthen nonproliferation treaties and toughen export controls. Together we must keep the world's most dangerous technology out of the hands of the world's most dangerous people.

   That is correct and well-phrased rhetoric. It gives nonproliferation a high priority. It recognizes the importance of international treaties. But where, Mr. President, are the actions to match that rhetoric? The President offers only a new effort ``to develop a comprehensive strategy on proliferation,'' something he has been promising for over a year.

   Meanwhile, just last week, the United States of America singlehandedly brought to an abrupt and confusing halt the Biological Weapons Convention Review Conference that is held every 5 years. Why? Because the administration was determined not to allow any forum for the negotiation of an agreement to strengthen that convention.

   This was diplomacy as provocation, in my view, and it was and is a self-defeating approach. It undermined our efforts to achieve agreement on proposals we made earlier in the conference, such as to address the need for countries to enact legislation making Biological Weapons Convention violations a crime. We asked that it be made a crime to violate the convention. We proposed that, but then we shut down the conference, killing even our own proposal, because we did not want any further discussion or a possible new agreement.

   The President may understand the need to work with other countries, but some people under his authority do not seem to get it. For that matter, where are the actions to promote nonproliferation across the board?

   The White House review of our programs in the former Soviet Union has been limping along for over 10 months. But when the fiscal year 2002 budget was presented, we were told the funds for Nunn-Lugar were being reduced. Those are the funds we use to send American personnel to Russia to dismantle their nuclear weapons delivery systems their strategic bombers and missiles.

   We were told that the cut was not permanent, that the reason was they were reviewing whether or not the money was being well spent. While they are reviewing, those nuclear-tipped missiles sit there, and the inability of the Russians to dismantle them because of lack of money or capability still exists. Thus, we got promises of new efforts, but in the fiscal year 2002 budget there is actually a cut in these programs. The Department of Defense has left so many funds unspent that the

   appropriators tried to cut the Nunn-Lugar program just to get the Pentagon's attention.

   Nonproliferation is, thus, our No. 2 priority, but the engine is still in first gear. The same is true of our supposed top priority: modernizing our military. The vaunted rethinking process in the Defense Department has yet to produce much that is new, and the fine performance of our forces in Afghanistan owes more to strategy and equipment developed in the Gulf War and the ``revolution in military affairs'' of the last decade than it does to anything new this year.

   If you want action with your rhetoric, go down to the No. 3 priority in the President's speech: missile defense. Even there, however, the action is more diplomatic, or rather undiplomatic. If news reports are correct--and I know they are, based on my conversation today with the Secretary of State--the President will shortly announce his intention to withdraw in 6 months' time from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

   Russia will not like that. Some here will say: So what? What does it matter what Russia likes or does not like? But none of our allies likes it either. And China, I predict, will respond with an arms buildup, increasing tensions in South Asia, causing India and Pakistan to reconsider whether to increase their nuclear capability and, as strong as it sounds, in the near term--meaning in the next several years--this will cause the Japanese to begin a debate about whether or not they should be a nuclear power in an increasingly dangerous neighborhood. All of that is against our national interest.

   But the President will invoke Article XV of the ABM Treaty, which allows a party to withdraw ``if it decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of this Treaty have jeopardized its supreme interest.'' In my view, invoking this clause is a bit of a stretch, to say the least. No new enemy has fielded an ICBM missile, which is the only missile our national missile defense is intended to stop. Tactical missile defense is not barred by the ABM Treaty, and Russia has said it would even amend the treaty to permit an expanded United States testing program. So where is the jeopardy to our supreme interest?

   The administration has said it wants to conduct tests that would breach the ABM Treaty, but the head of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization in the Pentagon told Congress earlier this year that no breach was needed to do all the tests that were needed and scheduled.

   Informed scientists say the features added to the test program that might breach the treaty, which the Defense Department presented to the Armed Services Committee several months ago, are far from necessary, especially at this time. Phil Coyle, the former chief of testing for the Pentagon, says we can conduct several years of needed testing without having to breach the treaty's terms.

   The administration wants to build an Alaska test bed with several missile silos at Fort Greely that it says could be used for an emergency deployment. But the new interceptor missile for the missile defense will not be ready yet. The so-called ``kill vehicle,'' the thing that separates from the interceptor missile and hits the incoming warhead, will not have been tested against realistic targets yet. And the radars supporting this system, the battle management capabilities, are pointed at Russia, so they will not even see a North Korean missile as it flies into southern California, following the scenario cited by those who try to justify building a limited missile defense system.

   So where is the real action on missile defense? Is the announcement of our intent to withdraw from the ABM Treaty a real action, or is it a White House Christmas present for the right wing, who dislike arms control under any circumstances and see this season of success in Afghanistan, unity on foreign policy, and Christmas as a propitious moment to make this announcement?

   Is now the time for unilateral moves--now, while we are still building coalitions for a changed world in which old enemies can reduce their differences, at a minimum on the margins, and maybe even work together out of their own self-interest?

   We are in a time of great risk. But there is also great opportunity. Despite the horrors visited upon us on September 11, the truth is we were attacked by the weakest of enemies. Al-Qaida is a group that no civilized state can tolerate. It was sheltered by a regime with almost no international legitimacy and little support, even in its own land. Its goals and methods were so extreme as to be an object lesson to the world on why we must oppose all international terrorism. Many of its

[Page: 
S13000]  GPO's PDF

   Meanwhile, the vast majority of countries, including some longtime adversaries, have lined on up on our side. Their cooperation has been and will remain important in our war effort, in the war against terrorism. The war has also opened doors that have been shut for many years. Opportunities have expanded for cooperation on issues of mutual concern. As the President said yesterday at the Citadel:

   All at once, a new threat to civilization is erasing old lines of rivalry and resentment between nations. Russia and America are building a new cooperative relationship.

   We must seize the opportunity that this war has afforded us. Clausewitz long ago explained that triumph in war lies not so much in winning battles, but in following up on your victories. The same is true in the broader arena of international politics. We must follow up on the cooperation of the moment and turn it into a realignment of forces for decades to come--so that our grandchildren and great-grandchildren can look back on the 21st century and say that it did not replicate the carnage of the 20th century.

   How many Presidents get that opportunity? How many times does a nation have that potential?

   Withdrawal from the ABM Treaty will not make nonproliferation, which should be our highest priority and which combats our clearest danger, any easier to achieve. I find that especially worrisome.

   A year ago we were on the verge of a deal with North Korea to end that country's long-range ballistic missile program and its sales of missiles and missile technology. Now we seem far away from such a deal, pursuing instead a missile defense that will be lucky to defend against a first-generation attack, let alone one with simple countermeasures, until the year 2010 or much later. What good will a missile defense in Alaska do, if North Korea threatens Japan or sells to countries that would attack our allies in Europe, or sells to terrorist groups that would put a nuclear weapon in the hull of a rusty tanker coming up the Delaware River or into New York Harbor or San Francisco Bay? How does withdrawal from the ABM Treaty help defend against those much more realistic, near-term threats?

   What expenditures of money are we going to engage in? How are we going to deal with what Senator Baker, our Ambassador to Japan and former Republican leader, said is the single most urgent unmet threat that America faces, made real by the knowledge that al-Qaida was trying to purchase a nuclear capability?

   We must corral the fissile material and nuclear material in

   Russia as well as their chemical weapons. The Baker-Cutler report laid out clearly for us a specific program that would cost $30 billion over the next 8 to 10 years, to shut down one department--the nuclear department--of the candy store that everyone is shopping in.

   Senator Lugar actually went to a facility with the Russian military that housed chemical weapons. He describes it as a clapboard building with windows and a padlock on the door, although its security has been improved with our help. He could fit three Howitzer shells in his briefcase. Those shells could do incredible damage to America.

   How does withdrawal from the ABM Treaty defend against any of that? Which is more likely--an ICBM attack from a nation that does not now possess the capability, with a return address on it, knowing that certain annihilation would follow if one engaged in the attack; or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction technology and weaponry, so it can be used surreptitiously?

   If you walk away from a treaty with Russia, will that make Russia more inclined to stop its assistance to the Iranian missile program? Or will Russia be more attempted to continue that assistance? Russia has now stated, in a change from what they implied would happen after Crawford, that expansion of NATO, particularly to include the Baltic States, is not something they can likely tolerate--not that we should let that influence our decisions on NATO enlargement. Which do we gain more by--expanding NATO to the Baltic States, or scuttling the ABM Treaty with no immediate promises of gaining a real ability to protect against any of our genuine and immediate threats? If we end the ABM Treaty, will Russia stop nuclear deals of the sort that led us to sanction Russian institutions, or will it cozy up to Iran's illegal nuclear weapons program?

   The President made nonproliferation the No. 2 priority yesterday and missile defense No. 3. I truly fear, however, that his impending actions on that third priority will torpedo his actions on his No. 2 priority. If that should occur, we and our allies will surely be the losers.

   So far, the administration's conduct in the war on terrorism has shown discipline, perseverance, the ability to forge international consensus, and the flexibility to assume roles in the Middle East and in Afghanistan that the administration had hoped it could avoid. In this regard, the American people have been well served, and I compliment the President.

   The war is only 3 months old, however, and the new patterns of cooperation and support are young and fragile. We should nourish them and build on them. This is not the time to throw brickbats in Geneva or to thumb our noses at treaties.

   We read in Ecclesiastes: A time to tear down and a time to build up. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, we are rightfully and wonderfully tearing down the Taliban and al-Qaida. But if our victories are to be lasting and give lasting benefit, we must simultaneously build up the structures of international cooperation and nonproliferation. The opportunities afforded by a war will not last forever. Today the doors to international cooperation and American leadership are wide open. But if we slam them shut too often, we will lose our chance to restructure the world and we will be condemned to repeat the experience of the last century, rather than move beyond it.

   I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.

   The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.

   Mr. REID. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be dispensed with.

   The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

THIS SEARCH     THIS DOCUMENT     THIS CR ISSUE     GO TO
Next Hit        Forward           Next Document     New CR Search
Prev Hit        Back              Prev Document     HomePage
Hit List        Best Sections     Daily Digest      Help
                Contents Display