| WASHINGTON -- Thirty years after taking effect
as a
bulwark of Cold War deterrence,
the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty expired Thursday,
freeing the United States to pursue
aggressively its goal of a multibillion-dollar defense
system against enemy missiles.
U.S. President George W. Bush planned to seize the
opportunity, with the Pentagon
set to break ground on Friday at Fort Greely, Alaska, on
the previously prohibited
construction of six underground silos for missile
interceptors.
The Pentagon was also pressing ahead with existing
programs, saying it would
conduct a sea-based test on Thursday in which the Aegis
guided missile cruiser USS
Erie would try to shoot down a missile launched from the
Pacific Missile Range Facility
in Kuauai, Hawaii.
Bush would mark the withdrawal from the ABM Treaty by
issuing a statement
Thursday calling for an aggressive U.S. effort to develop
missile defenses against
so-called rogue nations and new post-Sept. 11 threats,
White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer told reporters.
"The president is committed to deploying a missile defense
system as soon as possible
to protect the American people and our deployed forces
from the growing risks of
terrorist nations or terrorists possessing weapons of mass
destruction," Fleischer said
Thursday.
Despite this activity, it remains a matter of debate
whether effective U.S. defensive
systems against missiles launched by extremists and
"rogue" states could ever be
deployed.
"The president, to his great credit, has created the
conditions under which we can do
what he said he was determined to do back when he ran for
office -- deploy missile
defense," said national security analyst Frank Gaffney, a
conservative Republican and
leading missile defense advocate.
But missile defense critic Joe Cirincione of the Carnegie
Endowment for International
Peace countered: "The president is not any time this
decade going to be able to deploy
an effective system that will alter the regional or global
military balance. ... Nothing
materially is going to change."
Adding to critics' concerns, the administration decided to
classify as secret details of
targets and countermeasures to be used in future missile
defense flight tests, thus
making it harder to evaluate the system's progress,
according to published reports.
A small group of Democrats in the U.S. House of
Representatives made a last minute
stab at preserving the ABM pact, which for most of three
decades was regarded a
cornerstone of nuclear arms control but which Bush derided
as a Cold War relic.
They filed a lawsuit on Tuesday saying Bush failed to
consult Congress before
ordering a unilateral withdrawal from the treaty.
Fleischer said the lawsuit was "highly likely heading
toward dismissal," saying the
president had the right to end treaties as long as their
termination was in accordance
with the treaty's provisions.
In general the ABM's demise looked likely to pass with
little of the outrage and none of
the dire consequences missile defense critics had long
predicted.
Russia, China and America's European allies initially
protested Bush's decision,
announced last Dec. 13, to pull out of the ABM Treaty in
six months.
But their opposition has now been muted, if not turned
into outright support, and there
is talk of Europeans and Russians participating in
lucrative missile defense-related
contracts.
Cirincione said opposition to Bush's policy faded away
because few states were willing
to cross the United States when it was determined to do
something, when it was at war
against terrorism and when the country most affected by
the ABM decision -- Russia --
eventually acquiesced.
The ABM Treaty was signed by President Richard Nixon and
Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev on May 26, 1972, in Moscow and entered into force
the following October.
It prohibited the two nations from putting into place
systems capable of defending
their entire territories from intercontinental ballistic
missile attacks.
It also banned development, testing or deployment of
mobile land-based, sea-based,
air-based or space-based anti-ballistic missile systems.
Buoyed by four successful missile tests in a row, senior
Pentagon officials have said
they are on schedule to open a rudimentary missile shield
in Alaska by the fall of 2004.
While the Pentagon claims new interceptors planned for
that location will be for testing
purposes, officials also say they could be used to shoot
down enemy missiles in an
emergency.
But Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's former director of
weapons testing, said expectations
for developing the ground-based mid-course program, which
involves striking down a
missile with a missile midway through its flight, are
wildly optimistic.
Some 20 developmental tests, each costing $100 million,
will be needed before the
program moves to the next step -- realistic operational
testing, he wrote in The
Washington Post on Tuesday.
"It may be the end of this decade before such testing with
'real-world' decoys can
begin," said Coyle.
John Rhinelander, legal adviser to the U.S. delegation
that negotiated the ABM Treaty,
called the Alaska project a "Potemkin Village ... a face
without substance."
See also:
ABM
Treaty | 