OT(or is it?)
Will Gore?s Slips Sink U.S. Ships?
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By J. Michael Waller
waller@insightmag.com
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Al Gore?s weak nonproliferation policy toward Russia ? camouflaged with hype and untruths ? has allowed China to buy Russian missiles made to sink U.S. aircraft carriers.
"There?s nothing that we can see that contravenes international law or our own law." That was the State Department?s response in January 1997 to a report that Russia would sell to China nuclear-capable SS-N-22 ?Sunburn? supersonic cruise missiles, designed to sink U.S. aircraft carriers and against which the U.S. Navy has no defense.
Three years later, in March 2000, the daily paper of the People?s Liberation Army, or PLA, trumpeted that the recent shipment of missiles as part of a larger Russian arms package advanced China?s ability to ?attack U.S. aircraft carriers.? Now, with the sale to the Chinese navy and air force of more than 50 such missiles and the promise of dozens more, the U.S. Navy faces prospects of losing its aircraft carriers for the first time since World War II. The first carriers on the line, say Senate sources, could be the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS John C. Stennis.
Russian missile proliferation to China and the Clinton administration?s acquiescence to it are a far cry from the optimistic days when Vice President Al Gore pushed programs to direct U.S. tax and investment dollars into the Russian military industry with the hope that old Soviet factories would churn out consumer goods instead of missiles. The administration?s defense-conversion program, that tied up precious resources in the early and mid-1990s which Congress had intended to be used to dismantle Russian nuclear-weapons production, quietly was swept aside after meeting no significant success. In 1997, First Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov noted ?the extreme lack of effectiveness of these programs.? Insight has learned that the Raduga Machine-Building Design Bureau near Moscow, one of Gore?s early candidates for U.S. aid and investment, produces the Sunburn missile.
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