In a spirited attack on President Bush's plans for national missile defense, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said yesterday the administration was risking a new arms race and draining money from other domestic and military programs for a porous system that would never add to U.S. security.
"Missile defense has to be weighed carefully against all other spending and all other military priorities," Biden said in a speech at the National Press Club. "And in truth, our real security needs are much more earthbound and far less costly than national missile defense."
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Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Ivo H. Daalder discussed the argument against President Bush's missile defense plan.
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Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis Senior Defense Analyst David Tanks discussed the argument in favor of President Bush's missile defense plan.
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National security analyst Anthony Cordesman discussed the possibilities of a national ballistic missile defense system.
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Reporter Bradley Graham discussed his Post magazine article on a failed test of the national missile defense system.
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Biden's speech was the latest effort by Democrats in Congress to undermine Bush's missile defense plans, as well as his image on foreign policy matters among American voters.
Moreover, congressional Democrats have been trying to use their legislative clout to scale back Bush's missile defense proposal, especially now that the budget surplus is decreasing. Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee succeeded Friday in cutting $1.3 billion from the administration's $8.3 billion request for missile defense for the fiscal year that begins next month, apportioning the money to other military needs.
"Particularly in a tough budget situation, the decision [to favor missile defense] is not free," a senior Democratic adviser said. "You have to decide: Do you want a pay raise for the troops or missile defense, close bases or missile defense?"
Democrats on the panel also fenced off missile defense funds for tests in the next fiscal year that would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. To spend the funds, such tests would need to be approved by the Senate and House. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday he would recommend that Bush veto the defense spending bill should the language remain as it makes its way through Congress.
By focusing on the possibility of the Bush administration withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, the vote of the committee's 13 Democrats united missile defense supporters, including Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), with missile defense skeptics. All 12 Republicans on the panel opposed the measures.
Biden said yesterday that the United States should be a country "that doesn't abandon arms control treaties with the excuse that they are relics of the Cold War," paraphrasing a Bush speech that criticized the ABM Treaty. "I think many of those uttering that phrase are in fact themselves the relics of the Cold War," Biden said.
"Are we willing to end four decades of arms control agreements to go it alone, a kind of bully nation . . . and the hell with our treaties, our commitments in the world?" Biden said. "I don't believe our national interests can be furthered, let alone achieved, in splendid indifference to the rest of the world's views of our policies."
Biden also sharply criticized administration officials who suggested that China might be encouraged to resume nuclear testing so it could safely expand its small nuclear arsenal. "It seems to me it's absolute lunacy for us to invite China to expand its arsenal and resume nuclear testing," he said.
He said an expanded Chinese nuclear arsenal would prompt new nuclear weapons in rival India, then in India's rival Pakistan, and possibly in Taiwan and Japan, both concerned about China's expanding power in Asia. Biden added that U.S. plans for missile defense could also jeopardize Chinese cooperation with efforts to extend the freeze on North Korea's nuclear and missile programs through diplomacy.
"Let's not now raise the starting gun on a new arms race," Biden said. "It is sure, I promise you, to make my children and my grandchildren . . . feel less secure than we feel today."
He said Bush had shown "almost theological allegiance to missile defense," despite the possibility that systems under consideration would not be reliable. Biden noted that Rumsfeld said in May that if the system worked 70 percent of the time, that would be "plenty" to justify deployment. "Folks, 30 percent failure for any national defense system could be called plenty of things, but plenty successful is not one of them," Biden said.
Biden took issue with Bush's assertion in a May 1 speech that "Cold War deterrence is no longer enough." Biden said, "Name me a time in the last 500 years when the leader of a nation state has said, 'I know I face virtual annihilation if I take the following action, but I'm going ahead and I'm going to do it anyway.' "
Biden said U.S. deterrence during the Persian Gulf War a decade ago prevented Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction when George H.W. Bush was president. "When George the first said to him, 'If you do, we will take you out,' what did he do with 500,000 forces marching on Baghdad?" Biden said. "He had those Scud missiles everybody talks about as a justification for building this system. He had chemical weapons. He had biological weapons. Why did he not use them if deterrence does not work?"
