Gore Camp Takes Aim at Bush’s Defense Plan

Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore’s national security advisor on Saturday warned that the type of missile defense system advocated by Republican rival George W. Bush could renew the arms race.

Leon Fuerth said the proposal has rekindled memories in Moscow of the space-based “Star Wars” system first proposed by President Reagan two decades ago before it was rejected as economically and technologically unfeasible.

“The Russians are concerned,” Fuerth said. “It signals interest in a technology that goes all the way back to a Reagan-style Star Wars.”

“It carries the risk of reigniting the arms race,” he said in a telephone interview. “If it becomes apparent to the other side it’s dealing with a country determined to go this route, what we will get is not agreements but countermeasures.”

Fuerth’s comments were part of a weekend offensive against Bush’s call to build a national missile defense system that could protect the United States as well as its allies and at the same time reduce the number of U.S. nuclear warheads.

Congressional Democrats and administration members arranged to appear on today’s TV talk shows to denounce the twin moves as a recipe for disaster.

“Unilaterally reducing nuclear forces while building up a Star Wars-like, full-fledged missile defense sounds tempting, but it is destabilizing,” White House National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger wrote in the weekend edition of USA Today.

The Clinton administration is pushing a limited missile defense system against nuclear attack from terrorists or a rogue nation. Thus far, the Russians have refused to go along with changes in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that would clear the way for it.

The proposal was among the topics being discussed in Moscow this weekend by President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.

Fuerth said he was encouraged that the Russians now at least acknowledge the threat of attack by rogue nations.

But trying to mark a contrast with Bush’s plan, Vice President Gore last week denounced the Texas governor’s proposal and said the United States and other nations must work together on arms control--not independent of each other.

Critics warn that the response to building a comprehensive missile defense shield would be the construction of more nuclear warheads by those determined to be able to pierce it.

“A strategic, stable relation exists for both parties or neither,” Fuerth said. “There is no point in one side trying to outmaneuver the other into a position of inferiority.”

Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer responded by noting that when Bush staked his position last month he was flanked by such figures as former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and retired Gen. Colin L. Powell.

“The proposal has been very well received,” Fleischer said. “It’s no surprise the Gore campaign finds fault and attacks, and now they have their surrogates doing their work for them.

“This proposal has been hailed as new thinking in the post-Cold War era that can lead to a new era of a more secure peace.”

Bush said he would be prepared to withdraw from the ABM Treaty between the United States and Russia if that is what it would take to make his plan a reality.

Fuerth predicted that the Russians would never buy into Bush’s proposal and warned that they would see it as a bona fide threat.

“Go to the Russians and say, ‘We’d like to open up the ABM Treaty so we can explore any technology we like and deploy any kind of system that we can invent, and if you don’t want to let us, we will break this treaty anyhow,’ ” he said.

“Meanwhile tell them, ‘How about deep reductions in offensive nuclear weapons?’ ” he said. “What that works out in mind of the Russian military planner is the same as how it would work in mind of the American military planner.”