11/29/00 2:05 p.m.
Nunn-sense
W. should say No to Sam Nunn.

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., former senior staffer in Reagan Defense Department. He is currently the president of the Center for Security Policy.

ow that Florida has certified the results of the November 7th election, George W. Bush's transition team has begun visible — if still unofficial — operations. The first sign that momentous work is underway is the intensified speculation about which Democrats will be included in the president-elect's Cabinet.

The most surprising of the names in circulation at the moment is that of former Democratic senator Sam Nunn as a candidate for secretary of defense. After all, entrusting the Pentagon to Sen. Nunn would not be a matter of finding a like-minded individual who happened to hail from "across the aisle." Rather, it would be tantamount to bringing into the Bush-Cheney administration a man who has actively opposed many of the things for which the principals have stood and run for office.

Contrast such an appointment with Bill Clinton's selection of former GOP senator William Cohen to serve as his second-term defense secretary. Cohen was a somewhat left-of-center Republican who happened to agree with Clinton on most defense matters. Nunn, on the other hand, is a Democrat whose record reflects strong disagreement with the Bush-Cheney team on the following sorts of issues:

• The single clearest security-policy commitment made by the GOP ticket was its pledge to deploy an effective anti-missile defense system for the American people and their forces overseas as soon as possible. For most of the past decade, Sen. Nunn has actively opposed such a step.

Last September, Sen. Thad Cochran, chairman of the Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on International Security, issued a superb publication documenting the myriad impediments that have to date blocked the deployment of an American missile-defense system. Stubborn Things: A Decade of Facts About Ballistic Missile Defense makes clear that prominent among these obstacles has been Sen. Nunn.

For example, in 1992, the Nunn-led Armed Services Committee eliminated $1.1 billion from then-President Bush's request for the Strategic Defense Initiative. It also explicitly changed the date for an initial SDI deployment — that had been written into law the year before — from 1996 to 2002. It cut nearly in half funding for Mr. Bush's Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor program and required that all missile defense acquisition activities be subjected to the standard Pentagon bureaucratic red-tape, virtually eliminating any chance that development could be undertaken on the needed, accelerated basis.

Missile defenses fared no better during the remainder of Sam Nunn's tenure in the Senate. In the Fiscal Year 1994 defense budget, National Missile Defense (NMD) funding was cut by 46% from the president's budget request with overall spending on ballistic-missile defense being reduced by 27%. The next year, Sen. Nunn presided over a whopping 64% reduction in NMD funding from the president's budget request; the entire missile-defense account was cut by 14%.

Then, in his last full year as chairman, Sen. Nunn helped the Clinton administration strip out of his committee's annual authorization bill language that would have required the deployment of an initial "affordable and operationally effective" NMD system by the end of 2003. In no small measure thanks to Sam Nunn's dilatory machinations, George W. Bush will be hard pressed to deploy any competent defenses against long-range ballistic missiles for some time to come.

• Nunn has been no better on the related issue of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty--an obsolete relic of the Cold War that the senator, like most Democrats, nonetheless regards as the "cornerstone of strategic stability." This stands in stark contrast to Candidate Bush's pledge that he was not going to allow the ABM Treaty, signed with the Soviet Union under altogether different strategic circumstances, to prevent the United States from having the missile defense it needs to protect against third-party ballistic missiles. The last thing President Bush needs around him are people who think it more important to defend this defunct treaty than it is to defend America.

• Sen. Nunn has also mapped out positions on nuclear issues at odds with those of Gov. Bush. Like Vice President Gore, he favors the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty--a defective accord rejected by a majority of senators when it was considered in October 1999. Unlike the President-elect, Mr. Nunn fails to appreciate the incompatibility of such a permanent, zero-yield ban on nuclear testing with the necessary maintenance of a credible U.S. nuclear deterrent for the foreseeable future.

More troubling still, Sen. Nunn has in the past year lent his name and prestige to the latest brainchild of that notorious champion of left-wing causes, Ted Turner. The founder of CNN is pledging to spend at least $250 million over the next five years promoting a variety of initiatives he thinks will "help reduce the international threats of weapons of mass destruction" (WMD). (Is it any coincidence that CNN is the media outlet most relentlessly trumpeting Nunn's candidacy for the Pentagon job?)

It remains to be seen precisely which hare-brained ideas will benefit from Turner's largesse and political muscle. But it is a safe bet that they will start from the premise that disarming the United States is an essential prerequisite to getting others to cooperate in curbing and undoing the proliferation of WMD, a preposterous premise Sen. Nunn apparently shares.

• Nunn has been a supporter of the use of U.S. military personnel for operations that Candidate Bush assailed as "nation-building" missions in places like Haiti and Bosnia. In 1995, the senator voted against legislation requiring prior congressional authorization before funds could be expended to deploy American troops to Bosnia. The preceding year, he resisted Republican efforts to block the Clinton-Gore administration from treating defense monies as a slush fund for otherwise unauthorized peacekeeping operations, diverting them from training and readiness activities for which those funds had been appropriated.

• A further consideration in the appointment of a Democrat like Sam Nunn would be the likelihood that he would want to put into senior positions trusted subordinates with whom has worked closely over the years. Two come to mind: former members of Nunn's Armed Services Committee staff Robert Bell and John Hamre.

President-elect Bush would face a fire-storm of criticism were he to entrust senior positions to either man. During nearly seven years as a senior member of the Clinton National Security Council staff, Bell was responsible for the administration's efforts to breathe new life into the ABM Treaty and to negotiate and sell the CTBT and other defective arms control agreements. He also played a central — and usually contemptuous — role in the sandbagging of myriad congressional missile-defense initiatives.

Ditto Hamre, who served for most of the Clinton years in senior Pentagon management positions, finishing up in the Number Two job of deputy secretary of defense. It is inconceivable that the Bush-Cheney team, having railed against an administration that presided over the hollowing out of the military, that failed to defend America against ballistic-missile attack and that perpetuated Cold War treaties and mind-sets to the detriment of this country's 21st Century national-security requirements would possibly want people on its team who did much to create that sorry record.

• Finally, if the foregoing were not enough, Sam Nunn cannot be forgiven for playing partisan politics with potentially horrific consequences for national security. In 1990, he crossed George W. Bush's father and his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, by leading the opposition to their efforts to muster congressional support for forcible expulsion of Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. At that juncture, Sen. Nunn showed not only flawed strategic judgment but a proclivity for sticking with his party's disciplined caucus in the Senate that even Al Gore and Joe Lieberman were able to resist.

If Gov. Bush does not know it yet, he is going to find out shortly that the rebuilding of America's military and the conduct of U.S. security policy in the years ahead is going to be a bruising contact sport. He needs a reliable, robust champion of his principles, philosophy, and programs at the Pentagon. Sam Nunn simply does not qualify.