September 22, 2020—"Déjà Vu All Over Again” . . . Not!

“The global missile defense system, under construction by the United States, is a prime example of Washington trying to take advantage at the cost of other countries’ security. Meanwhile we are adamant that achieving agreements on nuclear missile issues without factoring in U.S. missile defense is impossible.” ~ Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev

Patrushev’s statement, reportedly from a video of a September 15, 2020 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting, suggests Russia’s negotiating position is that agreements on nuclear weapons are impossible without constraints on U.S. missile defenses — a position reminiscent of the Soviet reaction to President Ronald Reagan’s March 23, 1983 speech that launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), immediately called “Star Wars” by Reagan’s critics to suggest his interest in space-based defenses was a fantasy.

Indeed — during President Reagan’s 1984 campaign for re-election, they withdrew from all negotiations and claimed that SDI would even be more dramatic, it would end all arms control, and that position was echoed by leaders of the U.S. arms control community, who argued we could have missile defenses or arms control, but not both.

Click here for “The President’s Choice: Star Wars or Arms Control,” in the 1984/85 Winter Issue of Foreign Affairs by then leading U.S. Arms Control proponents McGeorge Bundy, George F. Kennan, Robert S, McNamara and Gerard C. Smith.

In this sense, we’ve been down this road before, fitting of my favorite philosopher Yogi Berra’s “Déjà Vu” quip.

But, while there are indeed similarities, the world is a very different place now — and while Vladimir Putin’s seeks for Russia to reinstate the Soviet Union’s dominant role in a bipolar world now led by Russia, that objective is “a bridge too far” given China’s growing threatening capabilities — and not only in its “near abroad.”

Recently, the Pentagon reported that China now has the world’s largest Navy — and others have suggested also the largest Army and perhaps Air Force, increasingly empowered with weaponry that exploits the best of the best of the world’s advanced technology, much of which has been stolen, bought or developed from U.S. capabilities.

For example, click here for Michael Peck’s September 1, 2020 Forbes article, “China Has The World’s Largest Navy, And It’s Getting Better, Pentagon Warns.”

As China increases its military strength, it demonstrates a growing threat to its near abroad, as illustrated by its hostile take-over of Hong Kong, once a safe haven those seeking freedom from China’s Communist Party. Click here for an article describing the travails of one who sought freedom in Hong Kong and is now seeking freedom by evacuating to Taiwan. Sadly, it seems only a matter of time before China seeks to realize its long-standing aspirations to annex Taiwan.

Moreover, China is also a major growing threat to the United States — and not just to our interests in the Pacific. That condition is why the United States seeks to include China in its negotiations with Russia on nuclear weapons in an increasingly multipolar world in which China plays a very important role.

Click here for a new study by the U.S. Air Force’s university think tank confirming that China’s anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons pose a national security threat and also highlights China’s use of soft power and diplomacy as potentially powerful weapons to undermine U.S. interests.

Of course, Russia seeks to muddy these waters as it resists U.S. objectives in establishing a negotiating agenda on nuclear arms to its liking, including efforts to involve China in seeking any future agreement.

Click here for a September 21, 2020 Reuters report in U.S. News that Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov rejected U.S. demands in establishing conditions for future talks. The U.S. Envoy leading the U.S. delegation in these talks, Ambassador Marshall Billingslea, stated that if President Trump wins the election in November, the U.S. price for agreement “will go up.” And if there is no agreed extension, the current New START Treaty will expire in February.

Meanwhile, Russia wants to restrict U.S. development of effective Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) systems. In that context, there is small wonder that Patrushev used the SCO to press Russia’s position on missile defenses.

The SCO is a regional international association chaired by Russia in 2019-20, made up of China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan — and, via their observer status, Mongolia, Iran, Afghanistan, and Belarus. “Dialog partners” Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Turkey and Sri Lanka further augment this source of instability.

Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons and well known, longstanding associated tensions…many troublesome scenarios could stem from those historical conditions without additional prompting. Iran has nuclear aspirations if not existing capabilities and is a major source of regional instability closely allied with North Korea, not a member of the SCO but a rogue nuclear state also associated with Russia and China.

As I have pointed out previously, Russian authorities informed the EMP Commission over a decade ago that Russia “accidentally” told China and North Korea how to build low-yield super-EMP nuclear weapons that could threaten regional and international instabilities.

Moreover, Russia potentially could work with Iran and Turkey to undertake joint efforts to create havoc in the Middle East. Click here for an interesting related discussion by Scooter Libbey and Hillel Fradkin on “The Wolves of Peace: Iran, Turkey and a Strategic Revolution in the Middle East.”

Given these complexities, the United States doesn’t want to muddy the waters of negotiations with Russia and China on nuclear weapons with such multilateral negotiations any more that we wished during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations to confuse our bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union and Russia with then multilateral negotiations, especially with the United Nation’s Committee on Disarmament (CD), that sought to muddy the waters in those days with its proposals to block our most cost-effective MDA systems — especially those based in space.

Indeed, in those days, the CD regularly echoed the Soviet/Russian position to “prevent and arms race in space,” a phrase used so often that I shorthanded it as “PARIS” in the notes I took while following those developments. And I should note that those positions were often also taken by our allies who opposed deploying missile defense in space.

A major difference between those days and today is that then SDI included efforts to prove out the important role of space-based BMD systems — indeed it was these efforts that gave us our greatest negotiating leverage.

That leverage first was important in bringing the Soviets back to the negotiating table in 1985, after they had walked out of all our negotiations in 1983, when we began deploying our Ground Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCMs) and especially Pershing II Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) to offset the Soviet SS-20s that were threatening NATO in ever increasing numbers. And it was also important in leading to the INF and START treaties in 1988 and 1991 — the first arms control agreements ever to actually reduce nuclear arms.

Furthermore, Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, actually proposed that the SDI effort take advantage of Russian technology and that we together build a global defense to protect the world community — while at the same time agreeing to deep reductions in offensive strategic arms, as indicated in the following concurrent front page Washington Post article.

Yeltsin’s public proposal turned on its head the previous Soviet/Russian arguments that SDI efforts would make deep nuclear arms reduction impossible. In effect, he said “Yes” to President Reagan’s position that I had advocated for five years in Geneva — and that my successor (Ambassador David Smith) and I as SDI Director continued to press during President George H.W. Bush administration.

And, by the way, we were pursuing the Brilliant Pebbles space-based interceptor program as my top priority SDI effort as was well understood by everyone at the time, including the Russian negotiators and leaders up to and including Russia’s President Boris Yeltsin .

As one of my final initiatives as Chief Negotiator in the beginning of these Bush-41 years, I had set up a trip for the Russian delegation to visit some of our SDI facilities — and Ambassador David Smith led that visit, while I worked to bring Russian scientists to Albuquerque to cooperate on how we might mutually exploit Russian technology previously employed on their operational nuclear-powered satellites.

And though we were not in complete agreement, our negotiators were making serious progress on Yeltsin’s proposal — again, which was a variant of Reagan’s position that I advocated in Geneva for five years, and continued to support actively as SDI Director.

And most notably, Presidents Bush and Yeltsin concurrently led the negotiations to achieve substantial reductions in strategic offensive forces — the 1991 START Treaty, making it explicitly plain that we could build truly cost-effective defenses while actually reducing nuclear arms. A lesson worth relearning.

In those days, it was the law of the land that our missile defenses had to satisfy the Nitze criteria, after Ambassador Paul Nitze; i.e., they had to be survivable against direct attack and cost-effective-at-the-margin. And Brilliant Pebbles was the only SDI effort that met that criteria. Moreover, no other BMD concept since has met that same standard, which was abandoned by congress, which had originated it during the SDI era.

We were working toward that cost-effective BMD objective when Bill Clinton was elected President, but the Clinton Administration cancelled these SDI and joint U.S.-Russian efforts and returned to the Cold War status of assuming that Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was the preferred strategic condition — as the “cornerstone of strategic stability.”

Regrettably, Yeltsin’s proposed cooperative approach was abandoned outright by the Clinton administration at the first Clinton-Yeltsin Summit in Vancouver, when Russian negotiators sought to continue what had been done. And associated Clinton administration policies eroded the progress that had been made at the negotiating table. And the Russians eventually reverted again to Cold War thinking — views that Vladimir Putin is now making abundantly clear in the current political scene.

Regrettably, the positions of the Trump administration seem also to be on that same wavelength. Click here for the transcript from an authoritative presentation of the Trump administration’s views by Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy, Dr. Robert Soofer.

So, the Clinton administration gutted the SDI effort — and as then Defense Secretary Les Aspin memorably stated — “took the stars out of Star Wars,” it immediately accomplished what the Soviets/Russians could not during the Reagan and Bush-41 years.

Most notably, they not only ended SDI’s most cost-effective missile defense system effort, which was to be based in space, and dispersed its supporting high technology teams to the winds. They continued only the Theater Missile Defense (TMD) systems that began under the SDI — while reducing its appropriated budget (from my watch) by 25-percent.

Regrettably, even though President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty that adopted the MAD doctrine, his administration did nothing to revive Reagan’s vision for cost-effective space-based defenses, and of course the Obama administration did nothing either.

While I have had hopes that President Trump would reverse course, that clearly has not happened … and I think my favorite President, Ronald Reagan, would be very disappointed, especially since we learned 30 years ago that those truly cost-effective defenses are in fact technically feasible.

But keeping the American people vulnerable to missile attack appears to remain our national policy — regrettably.

Bottom Lines.

With few exceptions, the elite scientific community opposed President Reagan’s SDI effort from its outset and was part of the reason why the Clinton administration “took the stars out of Star Wars” at its first opportunity in early 1993.

Nevertheless, as discussed in numerous previous messages, we have known since the late 1980s how to build the most cost-effective BMD systems — based in space. The new Space Force should be advocating such capabilities, but is not doing anything apparent to develop that capability.

How about a change in direction? That would be a welcome Déjà Vu All Over Again, to quote Yogi Berra, as he watched Roger Marris hit home run after home run . . .

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