WASHINGTON — Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the powerful Armed Services Committee, teetered on calling Pentagon officials deceptive when he lambasted them and the Bush administration Thursday for keeping Congress in the dark about the national missile defense program and whether testing will violate an international arms treaty.
Congress learned Thursday through news accounts of the White House’s notifications to Russia and other U.S. allies that testing of Ballistic Missile Defense program will "conflict with ABM Treaty limitations in a matter of months, not years," according to White House correspondence.
Two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress it would be years before the Pentagon had to worry whether testing would violate the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty signed between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Three weeks ago, Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of Ballistic missile Defense Organization, testified to same thing.
But Pentagon officials announced plans to begin building a test bed in Alaska next month, with initial testing to follow in April.
"Something’s changed in the last three weeks," an angered and seemingly incredulous Levin said, wanting to know why facts changed in such a short time frame. "You can’t tell us if anything in this budget, if everything works well, will lead to activities which can threaten the ABM treaty? You don’t know?
"We’re not going to know [if testing violates the treaty] before you’re asking us to vote on [the fiscal 2002] budget, whether your own compliance review committee thinks activities you’re asking us to fund are in conflict with the ABM Treaty, which could lead to all kinds of ramifications for the world," said the Michigan Democrat.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the committee members there is a lot of legal ambiguity in the treaty that lawyers are still working to translate.
Not knowing is a "pretty significant jump," Levin said. "You’re proceeding without it and you’re asking us to proceed without it and I hope we don’t."
The political wrangling comes days before Saturday’s high-stakes launch of an intercept missile, to be fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, that will try to destroy an "enemy" warhead fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
Much political pressure is riding on Saturday’s test, the first in a year. The intercept "kill vehicle" failed to hit its target during a test last July.
The Pentagon has asked for $8.3 billion for the system, an increase of 57 percent over the previous year, while cutting funding for weapons procurement, Navy shipbuilding and infrastructure and housing.
The Pentagon plans to begin in April tests that might violate the treaty, Wolfowitz said. The treaty that exists today bans the construction, testing and deployment of any space- or sea-based systems to defend against long-range missiles.
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., spoke to keep the peace during the hearing, calling for bipartisan cooperation with the White House.
"We need to give [Bush] the opportunity in a statesmanlike manner to prepare to lead the nation on a course of action to defend this country in what we clearly see now as actual threats," Warner said.
With regard to the treaty, the Soviet Union no longer exists and Russia is not the enemy, Wolfowitz said. The Pentagon has no intentions of violating the treaty, Wolfowitz said. The countries have two options, either they revise the treaty to permit testing and deployment of the U.S. missile system, or the United States withdraws from the treaty, Wolfowitz said. The treaty mandates that the United States notify the Russian government six months before withdrawing from the agreement.
But why would the Pentagon want to spend billions of dollars and abandon a system of treaties that has proved for the past 30 years to be 100 percent effective in deterring an enemy attack, and replace it with one that is not 100 percent effective and could lead to another arms race, asked Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga.
He especially objected to the cost increase in the program.
"We can’t even replenish the stockpile of precision munitions that do work," he said of the depleted weapons used during fighting in the Balkans.
He called it "unconscionable" to spend money on missile defense when servicemembers are flying aging aircraft and using equipment nearing their projected service lives, he said.
Some senators argued the threat of a missile attack pales in probability to other types of attacks, more likely to be delivered in a "truck, a ship or a suitcase," as Levin put it.
Missile attack threats are real and very probable, Wolfowitz countered.
"The short-range missile threat to our friends, allies and deployed forces arrived a decade ago, the intermediate-range missile threat is now here, and the long-range threat to American cities is just over the horizon — a matter of years, not decades away — and our people and territory are defenseless," he said.
Today, 12 known countries have nuclear weapon programs and 28 have ballistic missiles.