Critics Thwart Clinton Missile Defense Plan

With President Clinton now widely expected to defer the key decisions on a national missile defense system to his successor, U.S. officials and outside experts say the president’s own plan no longer commands broad support and may be abandoned soon after he leaves office.

For more than seven years, Clinton’s blueprint for building a limited, land-based missile shield has been the focus of intense planning and debate. It was the administration’s carefully calibrated response to growing concern about a possible small-scale missile attack by a “rogue state” such as North Korea, and the momentum behind it seemed to be building.

But in recent months, Clinton’s plan has come under blistering attack from both left and right. Advocates from both camps now say it is increasingly regarded as a political “orphan” that may be quickly cast aside after a new administration takes office next year.

The implications of the shift are substantial. At the least, it could delay deployment of a system beyond 2005, when U.S. officials believe North Korea may become capable of hitting the United States with a long-range missile. And it could open the door to development of a different kind of missile shield. Possibilities include an expanded land-based system, a sea-based “boost-phase” system, or a bigger, more complex “Star Wars”-like system with land, sea and space components.

Administration officials say they expect Clinton will offer his final word on the issue this fall, by proposing to take the first steps toward construction of his proposed system. But he will leave the pivotal deployment decisions to his successor, officials say, thus minimizing the immediate political and diplomatic fallout.

The handoff is expected to ease the pressure for rapid deployment of a missile shield, some analysts predict, as the new president studies his options on an issue with enormous political and diplomatic ramifications.

Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the presumptive GOP nominee, has said he wants a missile shield “as soon as possible.” But he also wants to thoroughly research alternative technologies, including sea-based and space-based components that are not as fully developed as the components of Clinton’s land-based plan. “I want to make sure we explore all options,” Bush said last week in Cleveland.

Vice President Al Gore, the expected Democratic nominee, has declared that he, too, generally favors a missile defense program, but has stopped short of offering specifics on what kind of system he would advocate.

Gore presumably would be more eager to preserve the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, which bans any kind of national missile system in an effort to avoid a greater arms race. The Clinton administration has been pressing the Russians--so far, without success--to rewrite the treaty to permit a limited missile defense system. Moscow is instead advocating development of a “boost-phase” system that would shoot down rogue state missiles shortly after they are launched but would not affect the U.S.-Russian nuclear balance.

Current Debate Like That on MX Missile

U.S. officials and outside analysts compare the current situation to the polarizing debate that occurred 21 years ago over plans for a new missile called the MX. President Carter, worried about an increasing Soviet missile threat and under pressure from the right, in 1979 ordered full-scale development of a scheme that would have involved moving U.S. missiles from place to place, making them harder to find and kill.

But two years later, President Reagan, although an advocate of a forceful response, scrapped that plan and ordered new studies.

“We have seen this kind of thing before,” said one defense official.

Clinton’s current plan calls for an initial system of 100 interceptor missiles based in silos in Alaska. Working with a network of radars and satellites, these missiles would be designed to knock down enemy warheads in mid-flight. The system would defend against as many as 20 missiles launched simultaneously by a nuclear foe.

Earlier this year, there was considerable momentum behind deployment of such a system because of increasing anxiety about the threat posed by countries such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq. Two years ago, North Korea alarmed the world by unexpectedly firing a three-stage missile that, while inaccurate, suggested Pyongyang was on the way to developing a missile that could reach the United States.

Yet as the administration’s self-imposed deadline for making a deployment decision drew near, arms control advocates and other critics increasingly complained that the Clinton model would fail because it couldn’t reliably distinguish a warhead from the various decoys that the enemy might release in space to fool the interceptor.

Meanwhile, conservatives have grown more disgruntled with the Clinton blueprint because of their view that it would fail to fully protect the country at a time when, according to the Pentagon, many medium-sized “regional powers” are developing ballistic missiles.

Both liberal and conservative analysts have been increasingly interested in the possibilities offered by “boost-phase” interceptor systems. These systems seek to avoid the problem of decoys by trying to hit the enemy missile in the first five minutes of its flight, when it is a large, hot target that is easy to pick out. John M. Deutch and John P. White, former deputy Defense secretaries under Clinton, and Harold Brown, Carter’s Defense secretary, have stepped forward to advocate this approach.

These growing dissatisfactions have made the Clinton plan a political orphan--a term used by both Baker Spring, an analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, and John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, an arms control advocacy group.

There are reasons why the next president may move carefully before committing to a system, some analysts point out.

A move to build a missile defense system would galvanize opposition from Democrats in Congress and “would unify our allies, Russia and China against us,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a Brookings Institution scholar who was on the National Security Council staff earlier in the Clinton administration. To take on such adversaries “is a big deal in your first 100 days in office.”

“The political incentive is to defer, under Gore, and even under Bush,” he said. “So Clinton’s decision to defer could in fact be a decision to defer this for quite some time.”

One defense official said that even if the lame-duck Clinton offers a ringing endorsement of the missile defense technology, it would not necessarily create great pressure on the next president.

The momentum would be “really not all that much,” said this defense official. Citing the example of the MX missile, he said: “There’s really nothing [Clinton] could do that couldn’t be undone.”

The next key step in the administration’s program will come Friday night, when the Pentagon is scheduled to launch a missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base in the third of 19 planned flight tests of its missile defense technology.

If all goes as planned, the missile will be detected by defense satellites, which will send tracking data to a “battle management” center, which in turn will launch an interceptor missile from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific. Less than half an hour later, a 40-pound “kill vehicle” should break free from the nose of the interceptor, and maneuver to collide with a dummy warhead released by the target missile.

Test Aims to Gauge ‘Kill Vehicle’ Capacity

The $100-million test is designed to evaluate, among other issues, whether the components of the system can work together smoothly, and whether the “kill vehicle” can maneuver itself into the path of the dummy warhead.

Pentagon officials have played down the chances of a direct collision, or “kill.” They say they may declare the flight test a success even without an intercept, provided other aspects of the system perform suitably.

A satisfactory result would clear the way for Clinton to keep the program alive, but defer the critical decisions to the next president.

Administration officials say the process will unfold in this fashion:

Sometime this fall, Clinton will declare that the missile defense proposal has shown promise, and that the nation should leave its options open by taking the first steps toward deployment.

Clinton will then authorize the Pentagon to seek bids for initial site preparation for a radar station at Shemya, a wind-swept Alaskan island at the western end of the Aleutian chain.

The contract must be awarded late this year for construction to begin in the spring; that, in turn, is necessary if the Pentagon is to finish a system by 2005.

But actual construction wouldn’t begin until next year, enabling Clinton to contend that he has taken no action that would violate the ABM treaty’s ban on building a missile defense system. That would prevent a diplomatic showdown with Russia, which adamantly opposes the administration’s missile defense program.

Thus, Clinton will leave the big decisions to his successor, these officials say, while offering enough of an endorsement of missile defense that Republicans won’t be able to use the issue to attack Gore in the fall election.