Moving Beyond ABM
Just do it.

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president & CEO of the Center for Security Policy
December 11, 2001 5:50 p.m.

t is official, or nearly so. According to a Reuters' report, the Bush administration has begun briefing Congress that the President Bush is "going to give formal notice in January of [his intention to] withdraw...from the [1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty."

Pursuant to the Treaty's Article XV, six months after such an announcement the United States would no longer be subject to even the political obligation to observe its myriad constraints. (According to a definitive legal analysis performed for the Center for Security Policy by Douglas J. Feith — who is now President Bush's undersecretary for policy — and George Miron in 1999, the ABM Treaty ceased to be legally binding on the United States in 1991 when the other party, the Soviet Union, was formally disestablished.)

President Bush most recently publicly signaled his intention to take such a step in an important address today at the Citadel, marking the three-month anniversary of the attacks that initiated the war on terrorism:

Last week we conducted another promising test of our missile defense technology. For the good of peace, we're moving forward with an active program to determine what works and what does not work. In order to do so, we must move beyond the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a treaty that was written in a different era, for a different enemy.

America and our allies must not be bound to the past. We must be able to build the defenses we need against the enemies of the 21st century.

To its credit, the United States has not only made known its intention to congressional figures but to the Kremlin. Reuters noted in its wire story today that "The Russian news agency Itar-Tass reported separately on Tuesday that the Bush administration will soon officially announce it is leaving the treaty."

If these reports are in fact true, President Bush is to be heartily commended for taking the only step vis a vis the ABM Treaty that is compatible with his declared purpose of defending the American people against the real and growing ballistic missile threat. The Center for Security Policy (and NR) has long urged both him and his predecessors to take precisely this action and it would be particularly gratifying were he now to do so in lieu of adopting the course some of his subordinates and others have been urging upon him — i.e., preserving the ABM Treaty for the time being but securing (somehow) from the Russians permission to conduct certain anti-missile development tests prohibited by that accord. This was a snare and delusion that would inevitably have continued to hobble the development, let alone any deployment of effective missile defenses. Mr. Bush will deserve great credit if he rejects it as such.

The question occurs, however: Why wait until January? The leaks about Mr. Bush's impending decision are certain to engender, both here and abroad, whatever (probably vestigial) opposition remains in the wake of 9/11 to the United States defending its people. No good can come from creating a window in which that opposition might be fanned and orchestrated in the hope of dissuading the president from acting — or, at least, adding to the political costs of his doing so. Even if he acts at once, it will still be six more months before there is any relief from the treaty. During that period, missile-defense tests will have to continue to be made less realistic and less useful than they might otherwise be. Deployment-related activities for sea-, air- or space-based systems will remain illegal. Why add an extra month to the already too long list of unjustified costs of what Mr. Bush has correctly called an "obsolete," "outdated" and "dangerous" treaty?

In the words of a great marketing campaign: Just do it. Reuters' competitor, the Associated Press, is at this writing running an item saying Mr. Bush "will announce the decision in the next several days." That's better. The time to move beyond the ABM Treaty is now.