Abstract
A half century ago, President Eisenhower told the American people: “I am convinced that a cessation of nuclear weapons tests, if it is to alleviate rather than merely to conceal the threat of nuclear war, should be undertaken as part of a meaningful program to reduce the threat.”
On October 13, the Republican-controlled Senate killed–at least temporarily–Eisenhower's dream by voting down ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Tr eaty. The treaty, signed in September 1996, was the culmination of worldwide efforts dating back to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy to prevent additional countries from developing nuclear weapons and the existing nuclear powers from improving theirs. The major loser was U.S. national security. There are militants in India, Pakistan, China, Russia–and the United States–who want to test and deploy new nuclear weapons.
Defeat was a bitter blow; but supporters of the treaty will continue to work for its eventual ratification. Unlike Majority Leader Trent Lott, they know that the treaty is not “fatally flawed.” Far from it. Its verification system is unprecedented, and it has the potential of putting a nearly airtight lid on nuclear proliferation. Ratification was not voted down because the treaty was flawed, but because the Republican Party remains a captive of its extreme right wing and unreconstructed Cold Warriors.
Lott in particular played games with an important national security issue by scheduling a quick “gotcha” vote without extensive hearings or careful consideration. He also went to extraordinary lengths to enforce party discipline to keep Republicans in line against the treaty to score political points against President Clinton.
Meanwhile, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms remained locked in a time warp in which the old Soviet colossus still dominates Eastern Europe and threatens nato forces. For two years, Helms refused to hold hearings or schedule a vote in his committee.
Having said that, it does not follow that the Clinton administration was blameless. The new team could have built on President George Bush's arms control legacy. Days before he left office, Bush signed the start ii agreement to reduce longer-range nuclear weapons from 6,000 to 3,000-3,5000 operational warheads for each side. The Bush administration also completed the Chemical Weapons Convention to eliminate all nerve gas weapons.
Seven years later, the START II treaty remains in limbo and START III is a distant goal. The United States and Russia still have more than 30,000 nuclear weapons in various stages of readiness. In the former Soviet Union, these weapons are under uncertain control. The president refused to end the Cold War practice of retaining thousands of strategic nuclear weapons on high-alert status poised for immediate launch.
The president, however, successfully concluded the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in his first term, signed the treaty with great fanfare and claimed credit for achieving “the longest-sought, hardest-fought prize in the history of arms control.” Then the treaty stalled, partly because Clinton was unwilling to take the case to the American people, thus making an end run around Helms.
Finally, in late September, after the Democratic leadership threatened to tie up business in the Senate, the Republicans called the Democrats' bluff. The Senate would debate the treaty and vote during the week of October 11. The Democrats were caught flatfooted; they were not sure they had the votes to achieve the two-thirds majority needed for ratification. But the Democrats could not simply say, “Sorry, we don't want a vote now, after all.”
Then came the debacle, as the Democrats quickly realized they really didn't have the votes. The game plan became one of backtracking, of attempting to work with Lott on a face-saving plan in which the treaty would be withdrawn by the White House for an unspecified time. Lott and his hard-core colleagues would have none of that. They wanted to exact a humiliating written promise that Clinton would not resubmit the treaty during the remainder of his term.
In the end, it was clear that the administration lost because of politics. At the same time, Clinton has also failed to protect the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which bars all but limited missile defense systems. Rhetorically, the administration pledged fealty to the treaty. As late as June 1999, under ceaseless fire from Republicans determined to destroy it, Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin reaffirmed “their commitment to that treaty, which is a cornerstone of strategic stability, and to continuing efforts to strengthen the treaty, to enhance its viability and effectiveness in the future.”
But that pledge has been undermined as the Clinton administration ceded ground bit-by-bit to an ideologically committed Republican Party. In early 1999, the president added funding and momentum to the missile defense budget. In March, his administration accepted a congressionally voted commitment to deploy a missile defense system “as soon as technologically feasible.” Now it promises a deployment decision in July 2000–in the middle of an election campaign. Most observers expect the president to come down in favor of deployment in order to deprive the Republicans of one more election issue.
If this prediction comes true, it may be the death knell for the ABM Treaty and the final crushing blow to U.S. relations with Russia. For good measure, it may provoke a damaging crisis with China as well.
When Clinton came into office, there was an opportunity to bring Russia into the community of nations similar to the way Germany and Japan were rebuilt after World War II. However, Russia has found the path to capitalism and democracy difficult to navigate, and the United States has exacerbated tensions with a series of policy decisions. Most notably, the expansion of NATO to include former Soviet bloc nations Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic was seen by a wide spectrum of Russians as being anti-Russian and a violation of previous commitments. Bombing Russian allies Serbia and Iraq further inflamed anti-Western passions.
What happened? Why is an administration so full of promise ending in dismal failure? In major part, arms control was never a priority for the president and his team, who chose to focus instead on domestic priorities–health care, trade agreements, and economic issues. President Bush felt more comfortable on national security issues than those at home, and paid a political price for it. Clinton was determined not to repeat Bush's error.
This determination, and Clinton's own lack of confidence in national security issues, meant that the sustained highlevel attention needed to produce progress was rarely evident. An occasional press conference or speech was never followed by a vigorous public and political campaign. Clinton began 1998 with a ringing affirmation of the test ban treaty in his State of the Union address and released a letter from four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsing the treaty. A few weeks later, he toured the Los Alamos National Laboratory and received a helpful endorsement by the directors of the three major nuclear weapons laboratories. There the “campaign” ended and the administration turned its attention to other urgent priorities–particularly the long saga of Monica Lewinsky and later the war in Kosovo.
Although the president appointed many competent officials, the top levels, particularly at the State Department, focused on the crisis du jour–Kosovo and Serbia, East Timor, Haiti, Iraq, Somalia, the Irish peace settlement, the Middle East–and let arms control vegetate. In part, Clinton was a victim of events beyond his control. The Duma failed to approve the START II agreement. Republican control of Congress after the 1994 election made the treaty-approval process torturous.
But in the face of these difficulties, the administration has never proved nimble enough to change course. Seven years after START II was signed, the administration still more or less insists on Duma approval of that agreement before moving on to deeper reductions in nuclear weapons. Confronted with Senator Helms's diktat that the test ban treaty must be tied to ABM Treaty modifications and the Kyoto global warming treaty, the administration froze.
The record has not been totally bleak. To his credit, Clinton diplomacy played a critical role in securing the indefinite and unconditional extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Early on, the administration persuaded Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to return the former Soviet nuclear weapons on their soil to Russia. The United States continued the Nunn-Lugar program to help Russians safeguard their nuclear weapons and materials and to destroy many weapons of mass destruction. Patient negotiations with North Korea kept that country's nuclear programs in check.
But these positive steps have been overwhelmed by drift and a lack of progress. The Clinton years should be judged on opportunity costs; that is, seven years in which there was scant progress toward reducing or eliminating weapons of mass destruction.