BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
The Clinton administration has taken further steps in its
militarization drive to extend the use of force around the
world and at home. U.S. defense secretary William Cohen
announced January 21 that the White House projects spending
nearly $7 billion over six years to build a missile system
similar to the "Star Wars" program pushed by President Ronald
Reagan in the 1980s.
That same day President Clinton called for spending $2.8 billion to establish a domestic military command to combat "terrorism." Washington has military commands overseeing regions around the world but none for the continental United States. To justify this plan, the U.S. president claimed that "probably a terrorist group that attempts to bring to bear either the use or the threat of a chemical or biological operation" in the United States would materialize in the "next few years."
In paving the way for this assault on civil liberties, Clinton said in a New York Times interview that any supposed germ or chemical weapons attack would provoke "at least a proportionate if not a disproportionate response."
The proposed missile system would purportedly give Washington a complete defense against nuclear attack, which also means the ability to carry out a first strike with nuclear weapons. Such a system would violate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), signed in 1972 with the former Soviet Union. The treaty presumed that neither state would launch nuclear-armed missiles against the other if it lacked the means to block retaliation.
Since 1983 the U.S. government has spent some $55 billion to build a workable missile system. "Those of us who work in the program are very confident we're going to have a working system and we're going to have it soon," said Lt. Col. Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the National Missile Defense Program, at the Pentagon.
While Moscow and Beijing have objected to the construction of the military system, Washington has threatened to abrogate the ABM treaty unless the Russian government agrees to the changes that would permit the project to proceed.
In a January 22 Wall Street Journal article, Republican senator. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee called for trashing the ABM treaty. "Toss it into the dustbin of history and thereby clear the way to build a national missile defense," he declared. Helms said Washington is vulnerable to "outlaw regimes," specifically referring to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which "test-fired a missile over Japan last August" and is "capable of striking both Alaska and Hawaii."
Russian officials called Clinton's move a unilateral assault on the treaty. "The United States is misleading world opinion," declared Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, head of international military cooperation at the Russian defense ministry. He said Washington was exaggerating supposed missile threats from Iran and north Korea to justify building a national missile system.
"Once [U.S. officials] become sure they can defend themselves against our missiles, they will start speaking to us from a position of strength," said Gen. Yuri Lebedev, a Russian arms control negotiator.