Will Gore’s Slips Sink U.S. Ships?
<<This is the article I remembered reading. -josh>>
By J. Michael Waller
waller@insightmag.com
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.
The defense-conversion program’s early and widely predicted failure set the stage for similar results in the overall Cooperative Threat Reduction program, known as CTR, which Congress had designed in 1992 to dismantle Soviet-built weapons of mass destruction. CTR largely has succeeded in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus, which inherited Soviet strategic nuclear-missile systems, but it is a far different story in Russia.
Recent events and audits are raising alarms about the Clinton-Gore administration’s stewardship of CTR and related programs. The latest General Accounting Office, or GAO, studies show Pentagon reports to Congress have been late, incomplete and often inaccurate and have exaggerated the effects of the programs. Successive GAO reports have found CTR and related programs suffer from lack of leadership, conflicting and uncoordinated bureaucratic delays and foul-ups and mission creep. Pentagon briefers have provided impressive-looking progress reports to Congress, but reporting does not stand up to scrutiny.
A March GAO report found that the Department of Defense, or DoD, “cannot fully support its determination that assistance was used as intended,” even though the law requires that it must if the program is to continue. The CTR program’s 1997 and 1998 reports to Congress, apart from being delayed by as many as 16 months, “contained relatively little information” to confirm that the State Department and Energy Department were using CTR funds “to support DoD’s blanket assertion that the assistance was being used as intended.”
“Neither report,” according to the GAO, “included information to support a determination that funds provided to the Department of Energy for former Soviet weapons scientists were being used as intended. Instead, the reports contained erroneous assertions that the Department of Energy audits its support for these scientists. Department of Energy officials informed us that rather than conduct audits of these projects, the Department only remits payment for projects after researchers have sent it the deliverables … such as progress reports.”
The intent of the funds, under the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program, or IPP, was to keep Russian scientists and engineers who had worked on nuclear-, chemical- and biological-weapons programs from passing their talents to rogue regimes and to help them put their skills to civilian use. A 1999 GAO report found that the Department of Energy’s stewardship of IPP was so poor that even after five years of funding it had not developed “program goals and a strategic plan.” The report also revealed that the department did not even know the identities of the scientists it was paying and that the IPP actually was paying the salaries of scientists as they continued developing new Russian weapons of mass destruction (see “Subsidizing Russia’s Nuclear Scientists,” April 5, 1999).
Feeling the heat, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson is sponsoring a “blue-ribbon” panel to assess the department’s programs in Russia.
The latest GAO study also found that the Pentagon’s report to Congress for 1998 could not substantiate the statement that the State Department’s International Science and Technology Center, intended to help workers developing weapons of mass destruction to produce civilian products instead, was using CTR funds as intended. Earlier GAO reports found that, like the Energy Department’s IPP program, the State Department initiative was paying Russian scientists and technicians who continued to develop nuclear and chemical weapons. The GAO also found that the State Department was funding development of Russian dual-use technology that could help other countries test nuclear weapons. After the first such GAO report in 1995, Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, called for a full probe, but neither the administration nor the House GOP leadership would go along.
Under the Clinton-Gore administration, the Pentagon also failed properly to audit another project, the Civilian Research and Development Foundation, according to the GAO, which says in its latest report to Congress that DoD “audits made no determination of whether the assistance provided had been used for the purposes intended.”
Insight has discovered that recent Pentagon CTR briefings for members of the Senate Armed Services Committee had been so politicized that they used careful wording to mask program failures. One briefing paper boasted that the CTR program would “eliminate the remaining” air-launched cruise missiles in Ukraine by funding the “complete destruction of 93 ALCMs.” Nowhere in the briefing does it report that Ukraine recently sold about 500 ALCMs to Russia, along with its remaining operable strategic nuclear bombers that now have replaced obsolete Russian bombers destroyed with U.S. aid money.
Germ warfare is another failed area the Pentagon has concealed from the Senate. The CTR program was intended to “destroy” former Soviet weapons of mass destruction, including biological weapons. But Insight has learned that CTR briefings to the Senate, in an attempt to disguise failure, say the administration’s new goal is to “prevent proliferation of biological-weapons capabilities.” This, Senate defense experts say, means the administration has given up trying to get Russia to terminate and destroy its ongoing biological-weapons program, which is illegal under the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
The Pentagon CTR briefings also misled the Senate about nuclear-warhead destruction. They proudly say that the program has helped “deactivate” 4,918 nuclear warheads, with 9,296 to be “deactivated” by 2007. Senate defense analysts say that “deactivation” means only that the warheads have been removed from missiles or other delivery systems. The law specifies that the warheads must not be merely “deactivated” but “destroyed.”
Earlier CTR briefings failed to address the issue, bothersome to several Senate Republicans, that Russia is replacing obsolete missiles being destroyed at U.S. expense with more modern missiles designed to smash through a U.S. antiballistic-missile defense system. The administration touts that U.S. aid is being used to dismantle the multiwarhead SS-18 ICBMs, which are considered the greatest Russian nuclear threat, but Russia must dismantle the SS-18s with or without U.S. aid because the aging missiles are decaying. And, until recently, the administration has ignored Moscow’s decision to replace the SS-18 with the SS-27 Topol-M, a next-generation ICBM currently being deployed in underground silos.
Even so, a politicized Pentagon puts on the best spin possible. In its Senate briefings, it cites a “benefit” from the “elimination of all land-based, multiple-warhead missiles” and a reconfiguration of the Russian strategic nuclear arsenal to “more stabilizing systems” based on submarines and “single-warhead land-based missiles.” Untrue, says former National Security Council arms-control director Sven Kraemer. While the White House insists that the SS-27 is a single-warhead missile, Kraemer says, Russian military leaders have suggested that it can carry multiple high-tech, smaller nuclear warheads. Furthermore, Russian plans to deploy the SS-27 on a trucklike mobile launcher are far more destabilizing strategically because the United States cannot target them.
Pentagon briefers also describe a huge, U.S.-funded nuclear-storage facility in Russia to house the fissile material from deactivated warheads, assuring that the world will be “safe” from the blast or radiation effects from those materials. The GAO isn’t convinced. “We may never be able to prove that [the programs] have achieved their intended results,” says Harold J. Johnson, an associate director of the National Security and International Affairs Division of the GAO. “For example, we are far less confident that Russia’s new DoD-built nuclear storage facility will actually support Russia’s dismantlement of nuclear warheads.”And there is good reason to doubt whether Russia will “securely store” the fissile material as the Pentagon promises in the years and decades ahead, Johnson recently told a Senate subcommittee.
Meanwhile, costs balloon. The De-fense Department told Congress in 1996 that the dubious nuclear-storage facility would cost the United States no more than $275 million. That estimate grew to more than $640 million in 1998 and “could now approach $1.3 billion,” according to Johnson. And Russia could end up making the United States pay more than $10 million a year in operating costs.
The Pentagon disagrees with the GAO’s implication that CTR resources are being used improperly. “This implication is unwarranted. It indicates that GAO did not acknowledge and credit other available information in its analysis,” says Assistant Secretary of Defense Edward L. Warner III, who is, of course, a Clinton-Gore political appointee. “The DoD remains fully confident that this assistance is
properly accounted for and is being used for its intended purpose.”
The GAO counters that the Defense Department is not in compliance with the law. “DoD failed to submit timely, complete, or accurate reports to Congress on assistance provided through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program for 1997 and 1998,” the GAO concludes in its latest report to Congress. “DoD also provided incomplete, and in some cases, inaccurate information on assistance provided through the Cooperative Threat Reduction program in its 1997 and 1998 accounting reports. These deficiencies erode the reports’ credibility and undermine their usefulness to Congress.”
Where the Clinton-Gore administration has failed to use the immense resources and good will it once had in Russia to promote meaningful demilitarization, as the CTR law envisioned, it also has failed to persuade Russia not to proliferate weapons to other countries more likely to use them against the United States. Much of this failure, analysts say, is the responsibility of Vice President Al Gore, who has been the administration’s point man on aid and cooperation with Moscow (see “Loving the Russian Bomb,” Dec. 6, 1999).
The failure of the CTR defense-conversion program, which had targeted the SS-N-22 Sunburn design bureau, and the failure to leverage economic aid on nonproliferation initiatives have provided Beijing with a fleet of supersonic cruise missiles against which the U.S. Navy has no defense. The Sunburn, which the Russians call Moskit (“Mosquito”), is powered by a dual solid-fuel-rocket/liquid-fuel-ramjet that provides sea-skimming speeds up to Mach 3. Capable of carrying a 200 kiloton nuclear warhead, it was designed “to destroy the [U.S.] Aegis command/defense-system-equipped vessels guarding the carrier battle groups,” according to Jane’s Naval Weapons Systems. Aegis-equipped vessels are expected to be a core part of U.S. and Japanese ballistic-missile-defense systems. “Even one of its conventional missiles could sink a U.S. Arleigh Burke-class destroyer or disable a carrier,” says Al Santoli, a senior adviser to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican. Russia and China agreed to the sale, to be deployed aboard two Russian-built Class 956 Sovremenny destroyers, during Chinese Premier Li Peng’s December 1996 visit to Moscow, in response to a visit of two U.S. aircraft-carrier groups to the Taiwan Strait earlier that year.
Washington Times national-security correspondent Bill Gertz first reported the $800 million sale in January 1997. The United States was backing billions of dollars in multilateral loans to Russia’s central bank at the time yet, as Rohrabacher has protested, never linked those loans to nonproliferation issues. According to the Russian news agency TASS, Russia is to send 50 of the destroyer-based missiles to Beijing by mid-2000. One destroyer, the Hang-zhou, built at the Severnaya Verf shipyard in St. Petersburg, hoisted the Red Chinese flag late last December and sailed for China in early January. It passed the USS John C. Stennis in February during the aircraft carrier’s February port call on Hong Kong. The second destroyer is to be delivered in November.
“China is interested in buying not two but a larger number of Russian destroyers equipped with Moskit missiles,” Russian Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov announced in March. Moscow expects a decision by late summer.
Faced with no Clinton-Gore opposition, Moscow announced it would increase its Sunburn missile sales to China and would begin selling the weapon to other countries. TASS reported in 1998 that Russia would sell China more Sunburns outfitted for air launch from the new Su-27 fighter jets, and Defense News reported that Russia did offer Beijing an air-launched model for Su-30 long-range bombers. The ship-launched version has a 150 kilometer range; the air-launched variant has a range of up to 250 kilometers.
Russia announced through TASS in 1998 that it “is going to increase the export of supersonic antiship 3M-80E Moskit missiles” to China and to unspecified other countries. Congress had the chance to use U.S. leverage against the sale but collapsed under White House pressure. In an unusual bipartisan coalition, the House of Representatives voted 244-184 in June 1997 approving a Rohrabacher bill to stop all aid to Russia if Moscow went ahead with the Sunburn missile sale to China. A follow-on vote would have restricted fiscal 1998 CTR money for Moscow and was the first vote to question the troubled CTR program. The Clinton administration, with the help of Sen. Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, and Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, a California Democrat, persuaded the House to reverse its vote.
The net effect has been, ironically, to worsen the proliferation problem. Russia’s follow-on sales of advanced weapons to China now have policymakers wringing their hands about what to do next.
Rohrabacher once again has taken the initiative to force Congress to address Russian missile proliferation to China. He recently introduced HR4022, the Russian Anti-Ship Missile Nonproliferation Act of 2000, to link proliferation with U.S. economic relief for Russia. The bill would “prohibit the forgiveness or rescheduling of any bilateral debt” owed by Russia to the United States until Moscow “has terminated all sales and transfers of Moskit [Sunburn] anti-ship missiles that endanger United States national security.”
The bill has broad bipartisan support. But before it got out of the International Relations Committee in March, Reps. Doug Bereuter, a Nebraska Republican, and Sam Gejdenson, a Connecticut Democrat, attached an amendment allowing the president to nullify the bill if he determines “that such a waiver is important to the national-security interest of the United States.” Rohrabacher and Bereuter, on opposite sides of the China debate, will fight out the amendment on the House floor.
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