Focus; Missile Defense and International Security

This morning, we will return to a topic we've discussed before on the show, but not in some time. That topic is National Ballistic Missile Defense. It's an idea that has been around for some time. President Ronald Reagan proposed building a system that would be able to defend against an attack, nuclear missile attack, by the Soviet Union. It proved to be a very difficult technically, and with the end of the Cold War, some of the urgency that informed that effort seemed to drain away. However, the idea did not go away. People said that there was still a need to have a system that would be able to defend against a limited attack from a hostile nation, or perhaps one that happened accidentally. And so, during the Clinton administration, the idea was taken up once again. A system was designed, tests were done, two of them unsuccessful, third, debatably so. And then, President Clinton decided rather than making a decision, he would leave that to whoever the next president would be. And last time we discussed it in this program last fall, we didn't know who the next president would be.

Now, we have a change of administration. The Bush administration says that it believes we need this system, and wants to go ahead with design, building, and implementation. So, we're taking up the topic once again this week. We'll be doing two shows, trying to, again, represent a couple of different perspectives. Later on this week, on Thursday, we'll be talking with Carl Grossman, he's professor of journalism at the State University of New York. He's written a lot on defense issues, including this one. Also, then this morning, we'll be talking with Baker Spring. He's a research fellow in National Security Policy at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and Ballistic Missile Defense, one of his areas of expertise. As we talk, of course, questions are welcome, as always. The only thing we ask in callers is the people just try to be brief in their comments, and we ask that. So, we can get in as many different folks as we'd like to call and keep things moving along, but anyone is welcome to join the conversation. If you're here in Champaign or Banta, where we are, the number to call 333-9455,

and if you match those numbers with letters on the phone, you get WILL. So, 333-WILL or 9455. We also have toll-free line, which means if you're listening in Chicago or Southern Illinois or Western Indiana, or anywhere the signal will travel, use the toll-free line and calls on us. That's 800-222-9455. Again, 333-WILL and toll-free 800-222-WILL. And, Mr. Spring, hello. Morning. Thanks for talking with us. I appreciate it very much. Maybe I'll ask this question to start. As I said, the last time we talked about this on this particular program, President Clinton was still in office, but it was near the end of his time in office. And the tests that had been carried out were not terribly successful. And actually, at the time that we last talked about it, we didn't know what he would do. There's a possibility he could have decided just to kill the program, or he could have decided as he did

to let whoever the next president would be make the decision and what would happen. There was, of course, the third option that he could have decided to go forward with the program. You're absolutely correct, yes, indeed. He did have those three choices. He could say, go ahead, he could say, kill it, he could say, well, we'll just put the whole thing on hold. Other than the fact that we now have a new administration, what has changed, do you think, from that time to this? As it relates to the program for missile defense, I think one thing that is critical that has changed, and that is the new administration has said that it's policy for developing and testing ballistic missile defenses will not be limited or restricted by policies that the prior administration had pursued in a diplomatic initiative to preserve a 1972 treaty with the former Soviet Union called the anti-ballistic missile treaty. That puts a whole wider variety of technologies on the table and allows for a much more robust and realistic testing program

than what was allowed by the earlier administration. Just to be clear, you're saying the Clinton administration was trying, in what they were doing, they were trying to stay within the bounds of the ABM treaty, the Bush administration, for a variety of reasons, which we can discuss, apparently, feels that the treaty really, it's been eclipsed by changes in geopolitics and that in fact that it's not something that is necessary for us to stick with. That's correct. Let's talk about that, because it is something that concerns a lot of people and concerns critics of the effort because they argue that, in fact, abrogating the ABM treaty and developing this system would lead to a renewed arms race on the global level. I think that we have to understand where we are with regard to the geopolitical circumstances, which we now find ourselves in. The ABM treaty was born of an era where the United States and the Soviet Union were essentially global ideological adversaries.

The purpose of the treaty, therefore, was to lock in and by doing so, stabilize that adversarial relationship. The fact of the matter is that the United States and Russia have no inherent need. There's not this ideological conflict that we had in the Cold War era to continue to be adversaries. There are other countries, for example, in the world that have significant strategic arsenals, Great Britain and France, for example, and the United States does not require some sort of codified arms control treaty to regulate the strategic relationship between the United States and those two countries. Now, I'm not saying that our relationship with Russia today has evolved to the point that we can treat them like Great Britain or France, but I think that it is certainly dramatically different than it was with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. The second issue with regard to the treaty is legal in terms of background.

That is, as the treaty itself was with a country that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. And contrary to much of the reporting that we've seen on this issue, even recently, is that Russia has never been recognized by the United States and is not today a part of that treaty. The Clinton administration signed a new treaty that would make Russia, and for that matter, three other states out of the former Soviet Union, born out of the former Soviet Union, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, parties to the treaty. But that requires Senate consent, and that agreement has not been forwarded to the Senate, and therefore has not been ratified or has not entered into fours. So that, at this particular point in time, I think there are both procedural and substantive reasons why we should really go back with Russia to the drawing board, starting essentially from scratch in terms of creating the kind of agreements that we think will reflect a new strategic environment and draw up a new strategic framework. That's the purpose of the talks that President Putin and President Bush have decided to launch as a result of the Genoa meeting a week or so ago.

That indeed was the next place I was going to go here. So it's your understanding, then, in fact, that is what the government of the United States and government of Russia are preparing to do. That's correct. National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was in Moscow last week for what I would describe as shape of the table discussions. That is what is going to be the process and the procedure for getting at these very important substantive issues. I believe that the White House has announced that so-called expert level meetings will occur in a week or so, and in about the middle of the month that there will be ministerial level meetings between the Russian and US defense ministers. Well, after this meeting, the initial stories that came out made it sound as if the Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin had come to some sort of an understanding that the issue of the ABM treaty was something that they could discuss. And that, in fact, some new kind of arms control structures should come about.

And, in fact, it made it sound as if maybe Mr. Putin had made his peace with the idea that the US was going to go ahead and develop the system. Then, very quickly, comments came out from the government of Russia saying that, no, in fact, we still think that it's important to stick by the ABM treaty. We haven't said anything and haven't said anything that would indicate the fact that we're fine with the idea of the United States going ahead and developing the system. Certainly on the surface of it does seem to be a contradictory position by various elements of the Russian government. When you dig deeper into it, I think that what is going on here is that the Russians have not decided exactly what it is that they will support substantively. They've agreed to enter into these talks on a procedural basis and that we'll have to see what comes of it in terms of substance. It is interesting that in the joint statement, it's only three sentences long that is going to establish these consultations between the US and the Russian governments, is that the two sides essentially hinted at substantive agreements as well, but we haven't seen anything about that.

So I don't know where we stand in terms of the substance. Certainly it was the view of the US government to get the procedural issues down first and then we'll move on to the substance. I think that the Russians here are essentially trying to determine what they can bargain for. Well, I guess it was my understanding that there was a suggestion that perhaps if what we were talking about here was a limited system, something that was designed to defend against a small number of missiles, not an attack that a nuclear power at the scale of Russia would be able to mount, but somebody who would be able to fire one or two, or three or four, perhaps, missiles at the United States. When we were talking about a limited system, one that the Russians would know that could be confident that they could overcome, if for some reason they decided they were going to attack the United States, that somehow that was something that the Russians could live with.

And in spite of what the Russian government has said, is it your feeling that maybe in fact that is the case that the Russians may say, well, first of all, they can't stop the United States from doing it. And secondly, perhaps if what we're really talking about here is a very limited system, then that is indeed something that they can learn to live with. I think that that is right. Now, the question is, is that, and aside from the procedures for the discussion, the substance of the talks, there's also the question of the form. It seems like the United States is looking at for some less formal agreement with Russia than what would be an ABM treaty style document that is subject to ratification and vice and consent and so forth and so on. If it is a more informal agreement, I think that it is both sides recognized that at the outset, just because of where we're starting from the United States, missile defense capabilities, even if they were not restrained by some formal treaty obligation, are likely to be very limited for at least several years into the future.

Our guest this morning in this first hour of focus, 580 is Baker Spring. He is Research Fellow and National Security Policy at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. This is the first of two shows that we're doing this week looking at the issue of missile defense and international security from different perspectives. Obviously, Mr. Spring is arguing in favor of the system. And questions, comments are welcome and I have somebody here ready to go in Champagne County. So let's speak with them online. One. Hello. Yeah, I think I'll actually just talk past the guest actually because he's very well well polished as all are the well endowed Heritage Foundation authorities on these kind of things. But one thing of just point of fact is that the ABM treaty includes language that says that this treaty would apply to different follow on countries as it were. I don't know how that actually got put in there, but it is the case that it has language that it does bind countries that make them out of the Soviet Union. So there's one point of fact there. I just think that's actually incorrect. The ABM treaty was designed, written, ratified and entered into force purely as a bilateral treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union.

And no language in here in the treaty with regard to situation. That is the case. I mean, I can't remember the fellow's name and where I read it, but there's a 1997 on the show and actually said it. So I think it was from the Union of Concerned Scientists actually, but be that as may we're not going to we're going to have to go to deck the tree language to prove that or just prove it. Sure. The the language I wanted to talk about was Dwight Eisenhower's perhaps a hero of yours. I'm not sure what the flavor exactly are, but his cautionary note about the military industrial complexes. I don't think this is merely very avaricious corporations. I think they have brought themselves up to see that this this strength of their economy is also the strength of this nation. And I think that all of this money can be much better spent on other ways of improving security.

And we should actually sign a bunch of treaties that the Bush administration is flicking off with a backhand chemical weapons notoriously the most recent biological weapons, I guess, and the kind of protocols that need to actually make that that mean something. But it's clearly that Lockheed and TRW and all these companies are having, I mean, and they've done a good job of selling it. We have still people who will say that the missile used in the feeder of the desert storm war was successful when we know that wasn't at all. And about a 2% and we're thinking that people are thinking that those actually might have been accidental hits. So I think that as a closing note, I'd suggest people go to the US Space Command and look for the Vision 2020 document, which actually lays out in really graphic detail. The kinds of things that this is really about, what Rumsfeld is really about with his commission report, that it's really domination of space at stake. It's not ballistic missile defense.

Of course, we want these forward-based missile systems too, which would be basically seen in ships and ringing China, that sort of thing. It's a really wrong-headed approach, and I commend people to Carl Grossman, which I'm really happy you're having him on, and I'll hang up and listen to the rest of the show. All right. Well, Mr. Spring, I don't know if you would want to reply specifically to any of the points that Carl raised. I don't think there's been particularly aggressive indeed. I can't point to really any aggressive public relations campaign by any of the defense contractors regarding the missile defense issues specifically. It is, of course, one of the programs that they would provide goods and services to the Department of Defense, but it is only one of several. As it relates to the economic burden, I acknowledge that our defense requirements do impose a burden on our economy, but that that burden set at a post-World War II low.

We're roughly in the neighborhood of 3% of GDP. I think that that is well within the realm of what the economy can bear, particularly when you recognize that it is the underlying security structure that the United States has built around the world that allows for a system of open and free trade that benefits both the United States, its friends and allies, indeed the world as a whole economically. So I think that some of the points would be legitimate, perhaps, in other circumstances, but as of where we are today, I don't think they are. I think that the final point with regard to missile defenses, we have to recognize that even within these relatively low, as related to the economy as a whole, defense budgets, we're talking about an investment in missile defense of between two and three percent of our defense budget, not our overall federal government budget, but just our defense budget. So that I think that we should go forward on that basis, as it relates to arms control, I think that we have to look at, I'm in favor of arms control, we'll really improve the security situation of the United States, but I think we have to look at those treaties one by one in detail and make a determination.

I think in the case of the biological weapons convention verification regime, it was clearly going to be an ineffective means for verifying what are, in fact, very difficult activities to verify, which is the production and possession of biological weapons. Let's talk with someone else. This is a call around cell phones. I want to get right to them on our line number four. Hello? Yes, I was concerned about one thing, I know that the missile defense people have advocated that this would stop the rogue nations, third world nations that have the missile capacity to make a small terrorist attack on us. I think one thing that we have to make something that I think we really have to think about is that if we perfect this system to short this, does this make the third world powers who are against this and want to use terrorist attacks, does this push them into more biological weapons, more cruise missiles or something that we don't have anything to guard against?

I think what you have to keep in consideration is the more you put up such a blockade than they're going to go into some other area that we haven't thought about before, and that's one point I want to bring out. The other point is that I'd be very interested in how the Republicans are getting funded from these defense companies, how much or even the Democrats who advocate this system, how much money does that get from them? Do you have any information on that because I think that's a valid point because the soft money is always an issue with special interests, and besides the word is the Heritage Foundation because it's money for what kind of views do they have, I'd be interested in hearing that, thank you. Well, I don't know how, and again, what are that you'd like to respond to? I can address each of those. I do not pretend to believe that missile defense is going to be the universal answer to all of our national security problems.

Are there biological threats, of course? Are there cruise missile threats? Yes. Are there terrorist threats? Yes. But the fact of the matter is that there is only one category of weapon which the United States has decided not to field any defense whatsoever, even though it would have the capacity to do so technically, and that is the long range ballistic missile. And to the extent that the United States would continue that policy, then it seems to mean that there's an open invitation for other countries to look at that kind of delivery system as the one they can use to blackmail the United States and whatever the security issue is. And indeed, they're doing so. We've seen a proliferation of ballistic missiles going on for years now with longer ranges increased accuracy. And one of the things that I think that motivates countries to move in that direction is that there is this policy to the United States says that it will not defend itself against this category of weapon. We have cruise missile defenses. You may see that they're not as effective as they should be, but we have them. We have defenses against biological weapons, and clearly I believe that we could probably improve in there.

We have some vulnerabilities to terrorism, but we also have very extensive defensive mechanisms for that. So that what I'm saying is that ballistic missile defense in the array of threats that we face should assume its proper role of at least having some level of defenses. As it relates to defense companies, I do not have information as exactly what kind of political contributions those companies have made in the soft money area, whether it be to to partisan entities on either side, Republican or Democratic. But I suspect that it's not a particularly large number if we could dig it out, but that's really speculation on my part. As relates to the Heritage Foundation, most of our money comes from individuals who agree with the Heritage Foundation's agenda for limited government low taxes, free market economic policies, strong national defense. We do have a number of corporate contributors, but I believe that as of last year's fund raising that they were in the neighborhood of 10% or less of our total fund.

We are about at the midpoint of this part of focus 580 and we have some other callers and again our guest this morning is Baker Spring. He is a research fellow in national security policy at the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC. And by the way, if you have access to the internet, the Heritage Foundation does have a website where they have position papers and a lot of information about the issues that concern them. So if you're interested in their perspective and learning what it is and clearly it is a conservative perspective, there's lots of material there available, including stuff that our guest this morning has written on this issue. And also we are going to be talking again later this week with a different guest with a different perspective. We'll talk with Carl Grossman, he's professor of journalism at the State University of New York who's written a lot about defense and security issues. And that will be on the program on Thursday in the 11 o'clock hour. And of course questions here. Welcome.

3333 WILL toll free 800 222 WILL. Just real quick, I want to ask a question and then I have several people I want to get on to. I think there are people who will make the argument that the reason that the United States and the Soviet Union never went to war with one another, or at least directly toe to toe nuclear war, was that both sides knew this was a no-win proposition. That even with launching a first strike that the other side could retaliate significantly so that nobody could win a war like that, mutually assured destruction. Why is it that now that that still wouldn't work? That is that we would say that any nation, particularly if they were talking about only being able to launch a small attack against the United States, would know that we would be in a position to retaliate so massively that no rational person and maybe here that's the key, that no rational person would think of making such an attack.

That would make the issue of missile defense moot because no reasonable leader would launch an attack like that. I think that's a very complex answer. Let me just get into parts of it. Basically in the cold war we talked about stability in two contexts. One was so-called arms race stability and the other was crisis stability. I think it is primarily to the latter that you're addressing your question. But I want to address arms race stability because there's this notion that the ABM treaty facilitated restrictions on the growth of offensive nuclear arsenals. I think that just the opposite occurred and I think that history shows that I'm right on that. That is the time that the treaty was signed, the ABM treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, on the basis that we would not get into some sort of so-called leapfrogging offense defense arms race, the arsenals on each side were in the neighborhood of 2,000 warheads each.

By the time that the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the ABM treaty was discharged as a matter of international law, the both sides had well and excess of 10,000 deliverable warheads. If this was a treaty for preserving arms race stability then it was a colossal failure. My judgment is the reason that we ended up with that is that the Soviet Union got the idea that because the United States was defenseless to this kind of attack, that they were going to try and build an offensive arsenal that they could achieve a first strike capability. Now the United States responded by increasing its own offensive capabilities to thwart the Soviet Union ever arriving reliably at the level that they could execute that kind of first strike. But one of the things that helped facilitate that notion in the Soviet mind in my judgment was the ABM treaty. As it relates to crisis stability it is true that offensive deterrence has a very strong negative impact on any country that would want to attack the United States. But we need to understand that that is a key element but not the totality of our or should not be a totality of our deterrence policy.

There is an argument that says defense is in fact incompatible with the kind of offensive deterrence that we built during the Cold War. That's not my judgment. I think that we can have offensive elements to a deterrence policy as well as defensive. And the reason why I think we need that particular, that kind of balance in the new era is because of the kind of multi-polar world that we're entering into. It is one thing to talk about managing strategic stability and the relative lack of complexities associated with it when you're talking about a bilateral world. That is to put it in rather blunt terms is that the Soviet Union and the United States were two scorpions in a bottle. The question is is that how complex does that kind of offensive deterrence policy become to manage if instead of having two scorpions in a bottle you have five or ten. And I think that what you need to do is look at the fact that different countries have different ways of thinking about deterrence.

It's not necessarily irrational in the sense of somebody who's speaking gibberish on a street corner, but rather that their notions of deterrence and what they want to achieve are fundamentally different than what the United States and the Soviet Union understood them to be. And let's use a real world example. The deterrence theory said that Iraq would never attack Israel with ballistic missiles because Israel presumably a nuclear power could retaliate massively against the Iraqis. But the Iraqis got it in their head in the Persian Gulf War that they wanted Israel to intervene as a way of essentially breaking apart the coalition that the United States had put together. And that is not an example of the kind of deterrence policy that the United States and the Soviet Union fashioned during the Cold War. It's not irrational on its face, but it certainly is different from the underlying fundamentals of how deterrence policy is supposed to work at least in that era. Well, several calls, in fact, the lines are full.

So let's continue to talk with people who are listening and our next caller is in champagne on line one. Hello. Wow, great discussion. I'd like to thank your guest for not engaging in demagoguery, which I think is a real problem in politics recently. And I want to applaud you for speaking well in perhaps in a direction I don't agree with, but at least being very clearly spoken. The question I would like to pose is, you know, I don't understand why this is being put in terms of a strategic defense. It sounds like to me, at least in the marketing. And I, or your guests can say there's no marketing, but three of the biggest events in the space news media have been these military deterrent, you know, counter missile tests. And they were very well marketed whether or not, you know, we're going to say yes, they hired Madison Avenue and company. But what I don't understand is why not be talking about this in terms of the Iraqi situation where we're talking about a battlefield operational system that probably has limited range. We're not talking about something that's going to be, you know, I mean, certainly in the Star Wars phase, you know, of development, you can be looking at ground-based missiles that are intercontinental.

But I don't understand is it just hard to get people excited about battlefield missiles because obviously cruise missiles and battlefield missiles and rockets are just an incredibly dangerous weapon in the hands of whoever they're in. And so I'm curious why, why does it have to be this strategic outlook instead of just saying, look, rockets are here on the battlefield. This is a technology that goes back to World War II and the Germans were, you know, making buzz bombs and V2s. And we just need a very good operational weapon that will allow us to deal with this. So I'm just curious about that dichotomy. Why isn't this being talked about as a battlefield necessity because missiles, whether they're intercontinental or not, are still missiles. So I'll just listen to them. Absolutely. I think that that's a very good point.

And I think that there's two reasons for why the debate here is evolved in the way that it has in favor of the strategic over the regional. And then I'm going to come back and talk about what the Bush administration is doing. The two reasons the debate is evolved in the way that it has is that the debate over shorter range battlefield tactical and theater missile defense systems was essentially concluded in this country following the Persian Gulf War. There's not anybody in of note in Congress or the executive branch that disagrees with the need for the United States to have tactical theater battlefield ballistic missile defense systems. So that one of the reasons why you don't see that discussed more fully is that at least in political terms here in Washington is that most people agree that that debate is pretty much over. The second reason why there's this tilt in favor of the discussion over the strategic is that my judgment is is that at bottom this debate between proponents and opponents of missile defense is not about the systems per se, but really about competing notions of arms control. And it is in the strategic realm that the arms control debate is most clearly applicable and therefore that you have this tilt.

The Bush administration for its part has said that well we don't see the reason why and I agree with them to distinguish between the two in terms of getting the most capable missile defenses that we can if we can use theater missile defense systems to provide stronger defenses against or more capable defenses against long range missiles. We should do that and on the other hand if we can use strategic defense technology to enhance the capabilities of our short and theater range missile defense systems then we should do that. And what we really need to do is combine those into a global missile defense capability and that's exactly what the administration announced it intends to do. All right, let's go next to align number four in Belgium. Hello? Yes, I'm not nearly as fluent as your guest in any of these things. It seems to me that today a great deal of earth threat is from individuals with with a particular problem, Mr. McVeigh, these people in Japan several years ago. I'm not sure I can actually state their name properly, but somebody with a very limited budget with a great deal of knowledge can wreak an enormous amount of havoc on any nation state. And it's not really a war anymore between nation states and some aspects is more ideological wars between people who are not really getting along with whatever the problem may be.

And this effort you're putting forward really doesn't address that in any way. I agree that it I think it primarily what you're focused on here is terrorist threat. Yeah, exactly, but terrorists cannot it don't exactly have to be just a country terrorism or be a blend of the two, you know, like like you say with a rack will finance somebody or you could pick any number of small states would have enough money. Absolutely, what I would like to do is reassure you that on those kinds of threats is it relates to those that come from abroad is that we spend until the administration increased the level that they're proposing for the missile defense budget about three times what we do on ballistic missile defense. That is is that we spend about 11 or so billion dollars a year according to the last accounting on trying to address this kind of threat as it relates to the domestic terrorists, the Tim McVase. I think we have to make a very important distinction here and that is is that domestic terrorism is primarily a law enforcement issue. It is not a national security issue.

I don't think we should ever be in this country prone to calling out to army to take care of somebody who's a citizen of the United States who's engaged in illegal activity. So that I acknowledge that you have to take a different approach as it relates to to those people that would be engaged as citizens of the United States in violent activity. And I just for my purposes, I don't see that as a national security issue, but a law enforcement issue. But it could definitely impinge upon your national security. There's no doubt about that you're what you're going to have out there is what we call the first responder community to any sort of violent activity here in the United States. That are not national security people indeed many of them are not law enforcement people. They're local ambulance people or that they may be the technical folks. For example, we have a federal agency, the federal emergency management agency that will go in and help take care of those things. And should they in some instances coordinate their policies with people in the Department of Defense and even the military services from time to time, certainly at the National Guard level, for example.

Yes, I think that they should do that. But there are there are different standards and appropriately so on how those are handled. I think thinking back to the last time we talked about this on this program last fall call after call came in similar to this last call. And it seemed to be that what people were really worried about was this possibility that a terrorist act. Someone would bring in a biological weapon or a nuclear weapon in a suitcase or in a truck or on a little boat and would sneak in under the radar, so to speak. And it seemed that that people were much more worried about that than they were the possibility that Iraq or North Korea would launch an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead against the United States. And it seems to be a possibility that we're not really equipped to defend against. There's no doubt about it that the terrorist threat to the United States is significant. It's real. And indeed we should do things in terms of our defensive capabilities against terrorism that maybe we're not doing today.

But one thing we don't do is we don't say, oh, we're going to have a mutual assured destruction policy with terrorists. We don't say, oh, we're going to leave our borders undefended for somebody that wants to drive a truck across from Canada and you know blow up Buffalo, New York. So that I think that one of the reasons that we focus on this, at least that I focus on this is an important issue for national security, is there is this underlying lack of comfort I have with this with any policy that the United States would leave an avenue of attack to its citizens open as a matter of policy. And that's exactly where we stand with ballistic missile defense. We don't stand that way in terrorist threats. We do have defenses. We probably can do a better job in that front.

But at least we don't say, well, we're just not going to try and address it as a matter of policy because we think that the vulnerability to terrorism is it would be vulnerability to missile attack is somehow strategically stabilizing. Well, about 10 minutes left. And again, I should introduce our guest. We're speaking with Baker Spring. He's research fellow in national security policy at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC. We're talking about national missile defense. And we have several other callers here. We'll try to get everybody in and the time that remains. And our next caller is in champagne and it's line number three. Hello. Yes. Yeah. I have two things I wanted to respond to. One of them was one of your statements. And the other was a question I had concerning missile defenses. Okay. First, the one with your statement. If I remember right, the salt treaties, when you stated that there were more warheads available, that's kind of a fallacy because many of the more warheads were multiple warhead missiles. And the actual tonnage of nuclear, the actual nuclear arsenal as it relates to tons or destructive power, was actually decreased during that time. And I remember that distinctly by reading several articles on that.

That's issue number one. Issue number two is what about some type of a cruise missile that's launched from, let's say, a ship in the ocean? How can we defend against that? Because I can understand how the technologies we could defend against, let's say, a strategic missile. I mean, obviously, we need more development, but some type of low flying underneath the radar missile launched by some rogue nation. How can we defend against it? And furthermore, how could we retaliate against something like that? So I'll just hang up now and hope the guests can respond to my question. Thank you. As it relates to the history between the United States and the Soviet Union following the entry into the salt, and the ABM treaty was, in fact, a product of the salt talks in the Nixon administration. I don't think that anybody would deny that there was a qualitative and quantitative nuclear, offensive nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union essentially throughout the period from 1972 to 1990.

The quality of offensive arms was going up. The numbers of deliverable warheads was going up. It is true that the gross megatonnage probably was relatively stabilized, but that had to do with the fact that we were making nuclear weapons significantly more accurate. So you didn't have to have these large yields that were associated with the last accurate systems that we had earlier. But I think that it is generally a consensus among the people that have looked at the issue that there was a very clear buildup on offensive systems throughout that period. The cruise missile threat. It says a very significant threat. We do have cruise missile defense capabilities. The Navy, because it has been concerned about the cruise missile threat to its ships, has been the service that has been most aggressively looking at that. I think that the best way to look at cruise missile defense is in the same vein that we look in terms of technologies that we have for air defense. That means countering aircraft.

Cruise missile characteristics and aircraft flight characteristics are actually quite similar or can be. We have air defense systems. Most people assume that for example the older versions of the Patriot have a cruise missile defense capability. That are Navy ships with service to air missiles that they carry also have probably an inherent cruise missile defense capability. And we need to refine those, but it can be done and that the air defense model is the best to fall. All right. Let's go to the next person up here and that would be champagne line one. Hello. Yes. It seems to be an important thing to see about this weapon is that it's not a defensive weapon at all. It's an offensive weapon. Indeed, it's a first strike weapon. You have to begin with the real history of the nuclear period in which every US president since Truman has threatened to use nuclear weapons against a third world country.

Well, that becomes less possible of that third world country whether it's Iraq or Guatemala or whoever has a missile that would allow them to exact a price from an attack, the price being New York or Washington or something like that. The construction of a system that prevents that it means that the unacceptable cost of threatening and indeed using nuclear weapons against third world countries is ended is not a defensive weapon at all. But it's part of an offensive system and that's clearly what the administration and the previous administration to have been going for here. Now, the fact that it also feeds into the military canesianism and pumps money into declining economy. Certainly that's good too from the point of view of our rulers. But on the strategic level, the important part about the system is that it's part of an overall offensive policy that is extremely dangerous and is most likely to lead to nuclear war.

I can't disagree with that assertion more. Ballistic missile defense systems that we are designed today have only one purpose and they only have one capability. That is to destroy a ballistic missile in flight that has already been fired in the direction of the United States its allies or forces in the field by those that would wish it harm. It has no other purpose as far as the system itself. Now, in the strategic sense, is there a defensive element that would allow the United States using other other weapons to be more offensive or aggressive? I think that that's really mixing apples and oranges. That capability, that offensive capability is inherent in the United States arsenal. If someone were to come to me and say, are the nuclear missiles the United States has, the nuclear bombers the United States has, are those in essence really offensive weapons? I would say yes, they are. Now, I am quite confident that the United States uses those technically from a military standpoint offensive weapons essentially for defensive purposes. That is a deter attack.

I actually would feel more comfortable of the United States would assume a posture that was even in conceptual terms defensively oriented by matching them with defensive systems. By the way, non-nuclear defensive systems. I am hoping that we can arrive at a conclusion, particularly in the context of these consultations that President Bush and Putin have established, to look at reducing offensive arsenals in the context of also allowing for defense to move forward. I think it's important that the United States, the only country actually to use nuclear weapons in wartime has never up to the President Administration been willing to say it wouldn't be the first to use nuclear weapons. And this system simply makes that more likely. By the way, does it bother you at all that the Pentagon faked this task last week? I did not fake this task. The people tend to focus, who are critics of the program, focus on the fact that we use certain sensor capabilities.

Either one for range safety purposes or two to fill in for what in a deployed system will be, I think that what you're referring to here is the fact that we substituted for what would be mid-course radar capabilities. Some signals in terms of establishing the trajectory and parameters of the interceptor. That is part of the developmental testing process that is not rigging a test. Why didn't they announce it then? Why didn't they say they'd done it? I don't think that they ever said otherwise. The fact of the matter is that those systems that we use for range safety and other things are readily acknowledged as being part of these tests. As a matter of fact, if we didn't have those systems, they probably wouldn't allow the test because of safety consideration. Well, I'm going to have to jump in here and my apologies to the car, but we're simply going to have to stop because we've used our time and I have a couple of other people that I cannot take.

But for now, we'll have to stop with the promise that we will be talking more about this issue later in the week on Thursday at 11 with a different guest in the different perspective. That will be Carl Grossman. He's Professor of Journalism at State University of New York. He's written a lot about defense and security issues, so that will be at 11. And also, we want to say to our guest Baker Spring, Research Fellow in National Security Policy at the Heritage Foundation. Thank you very much for giving us some of your time today. Thank you for having me.