Executive Summary
of the Report of the Commission to Assess
the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States
July 15, 1998
Pursuant to Public Law
104th Congress
Members of The Commission To Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States were nominated by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate, and the Minority Leaders of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives:
The Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld, Chairman
Dr. Barry M. Blechman
General Lee Butler, USAF (Ret.)
Dr. Richard L. Garwin
Dr. William R. Graham
Dr. William Schneider, Jr.
General Larry D. Welch, USAF (Ret.)
Dr. Paul D. Wolfowitz
The Honorable R. James Woolsey
and appointed by the Director of Central Intelligence.
II. Executive Summary
A. Conclusions of the Commissioners
The nine Commissioners are unanimous in concluding that:
* Concerted efforts by a number of overtly or potentially hostile nations to acquire ballistic missiles with biological or nuclear payloads pose a growing threat to the United States, its deployed forces and its friends and allies. These newer, developing threats in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq are in addition to those still posed by the existing ballistic missile arsenals of Russia and China, nations with which we are not now in conflict but which remain in uncertain transitions. The newer ballistic missile-equipped nations' capabilities will not match those of U.S. systems for accuracy or reliability. However, they would be able to inflict major destruction on the U.S. within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability (10 years in the case of Iraq). During several of those years, the U.S. might not be aware that such a decision had been made.
* The threat to the U.S. posed by these emerging capabilities is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the Intelligence Community.
* The Intelligence Community's ability to provide timely and accurate estimates of ballistic missile threats to the U.S. is eroding. This erosion has roots both within and beyond the intelligence process itself. The Community's capabilities in this area need to be strengthened in terms of both resources and methodology.
* The warning times the U.S. can expect of new, threatening ballistic missile deployments are being reduced. Under some plausible scenarios--including re-basing or transfer of operational missiles, sea- and air-launch options, shortened development programs that might include testing in a third country, or some combination of these--the U.S. might well have little or no warning before operational deployment.
Therefore, we unanimously recommend that U.S. analyses, practices, and policies that depend on expectations of extended warning of deployment be reviewed and, as appropriate, revised to reflect the reality of an environment in which there may be little or no warning.
B. The Commission and Its Methods
The Commissioners brought to their task the perspectives of former senior policymakers from outside the Intelligence Community, who have decades of experience and a variety of views as users of the Intelligence Community's products. We shared an informed understanding of intelligence processes. In making our assessment, we took into account not only the hard data available, but also the often significant gaps in that data.
We had access to both data and experts drawn from the full array of departments and agencies as well as from sources throughout the Intelligence Community. We also drew on experts from outside that Community and on studies sponsored by the Commission. Our aim was to ensure that we were exposed to a wide range of opinion and to the greatest possible depth and breadth of analysis.
We began this study with different views about how to respond to ballistic missile threats, and we continue to have differences. Nevertheless, as a result of our intensive study over the last six months we are unanimous in our assessment of the threat, an assessment which differs from published intelligence estimates.
This divergence between the Commission's findings and authoritative estimates by the Intelligence Community stems primarily from our use of a somewhat more comprehensive methodology in assessing ballistic missile development and deployment programs. We believe that our approach takes more fully into account three crucial factors now shaping new ballistic missile threats to the United States:
* Newer ballistic missile and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) development programs no longer follow the patterns initially set by the U.S. and the Soviet Union. These programs require neither high standards of missile accuracy, reliability, and safety nor large numbers of missiles and therefore can move ahead more rapidly.
* A nation that wants to develop ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction can now obtain extensive technical assistance from outside sources. Foreign assistance is not a wild card. It is a fact.
* Nations are increasingly able to conceal important elements of their ballistic missile and associated WMD programs and are highly motivated to do so.
C. New Threats in a Transformed Security Environment
The Commission did not assess nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs on a global basis. We considered those countries about which we felt particular reason to be concerned and examined their capabilities to acquire ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction.
All of the nations whose programs we examined that are developing long range ballistic missiles have the option to arm these, as well as their shorter- range systems, with biological or chemical weapons. These weapons can take the form of bomblets as well as a single, large warhead.
The knowledge needed to design and build a nuclear weapon is now widespread. The emerging ballistic missile powers have access to, or are pursuing the acquisition of, the needed fissile material both through domestic efforts and foreign channels.
As our work went forward, it became increasingly clear to us that nations about which the U.S. has reason to be concerned are exploiting a dramatically transformed international security environment. That environment provides an ever-widening access to technology, information, and expertise that can be and is used to speed both the development and deployment of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. It can also be used to develop denial and deception techniques that seek to impede U.S. intelligence gathering about the development and deployment programs of those nations.....
.....D. A New Non-Proliferation Environment
Since the end of the Cold War a number of developments have made ballistic missile and WMD technologies increasingly available. They include:
* A number of nations have chosen not to join non-proliferation agreements.
* Some participants in those agreements have cheated.
* As global trade has steadily expanded, access has increased to the information, technology, and technicians needed for missile and WMD development.
* Access to technologies used in early generations of U.S. and Soviet missiles has eased. However rudimentary compared to present U.S. standards, these technologies serve the needs of emerging ballistic missile powers.
* Among those countries of concern to the U.S., commerce in ballistic missile and WMD technology and hardware has been growing, which may make proliferation self-sustaining among them and facilitate their ability to proliferate technology and hardware to others.
Some countries which could have readily acquired nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles-such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea-have been successfully encouraged not to do so by U.S. security guarantees and by non-proliferation agreements. Even though they lack such security guarantees, other countries have also joined non-proliferation agreements and abandoned development programs and weapons systems. Some examples are Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, and the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.
1. Increased Competence of, and Trade Among, Emerging Ballistic Missile Powers
Conversely, there are other countries--some of which are themselves parties to various non-proliferation agreements and treaties--that either have acquired ballistic missile or WMD capabilities or are working hard to do so. North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, as well as India and Pakistan, are at the forefront of this group. They now have increased incentives to cooperate with one another. They have extensive access to technology, information, and expertise from developed countries such as Russia and China. They also have access through commercial and other channels in the West, including the United States. Through this trade and their own indigenous efforts, these second-tier powers are on the verge of being able to provide to one another, if they have not already done so, the capabilities needed to develop long range ballistic missiles.
2. U.S. as a Contributor to Proliferation
The U.S. is the world's leading developer and user of advanced technology. Once it is transferred by the U.S. or by another developed country, there is no way to ensure that the transferred technology will not be used for hostile purposes. The U.S. tries to limit technology transfers to hostile powers, but history teaches that such transfers cannot be stopped for long periods. They can only be slowed and made more costly, and even that requires the cooperation of other developed nations. The acquisition and use of transferred technologies in ballistic missile and WMD programs has been facilitated by foreign student training in the U.S., by wide dissemination of technical information, by the illegal acquisition of U.S. designs and equipment, and by the relaxation of U.S. export control policies. As a result, the U.S. has been and is today a major, albeit unintentional, contributor to the proliferation of ballistic missiles and associated weapons of mass destruction.
3. Motives of Countries of Concern
Recent ballistic missile and nuclear tests in South Asia should not be viewed as merely a sharp, but a temporary setback in the expanding reach of nonproliferation regimes. While policymakers may try to reverse or at least contain the trends of which these tests are a part, the missile and WMD programs of these nations are clearly the results of fundamental political calculations of their vital interests. Those nations willing and able to supply dangerous technologies and systems to one another, including Russia, China, and their quasi-governmental commercial entities, may be motivated by commercial, foreign policy, or national security interests or by a combination thereof.
As noted above, such countries are increasingly cooperating with one another, perhaps in some instances because they have reciprocal needs for what one has and the other lacks. The transfer of complete missile systems, such as China's transfer to Saudi Arabia, will continue to be available. Short of radical political change, there is every reason to assume that the nations engaged in these missile and WMD development activities will continue their programs as matters of high priority.
4. Readier Market Access to Technology
In today's increasingly market-driven, global economy, nations so motivated have faster, cheaper and more efficient access to modern technology. Commercial exchanges and technology transfers have multiplied the pathways to those technologies needed for ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. These pathways reduce development times and costs, lowering both technical and budget obstacles to missile development and deployment.
Expanding world trade and the explosion in information technology have accelerated the global diffusion of scientific, technical, and industrial information. The channels, both public and private, legal and illegal, through which technology, components, and individual technicians can be moved among nations have increased exponentially.
5. Availability of Classified Information and Export-Controlled Technology
Those trends in the commercial sector have been accompanied, and in many ways accelerated, by an increased availability of classified information as a result of:
* Lax enforcement of export controls.
* Relaxation of U.S. and Western export controls.
* Growth in dual-use technologies.
* Economic incentives to sell ballistic missile components and systems.
* Extensive declassification of materials related to ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction.
* Continued, intense espionage facilitated by security measures increasingly inadequate for the new environment.
* Extensive disclosure of classified information, including information compromising intelligence sources and methods. Damaging information appears almost daily in the national and international media and on the Internet.
E. Alternative Ballistic Missile Launch Modes
In evaluating present threats, it is misleading to use old patterns of development as guides. The history of U.S. and Soviet missile and WMD development has become irrelevant. Approaches that the U.S. considered and specifically rejected on grounds of safety, reliability, accuracy, and requirements for high volume production are in many cases well suited to nations less concerned about safety and able to meet their needs with only a few, less accurate, less reliable weapons. Analytical approaches the Intelligence Community could realistically rely on in the past need to be restudied and reevaluated in light of this newer model.
The Commission believes the U.S. needs to pay attention to the possibility that complete, long range ballistic missile systems could be transferred from one nation to another, just as China transferred operational CSS-2s to Saudi Arabia in 1988. Such missiles could be equipped with weapons of mass destruction.
One nation's use of another nation's territory also needs to be considered. The U.S. did this during the Cold War, and the Soviet Union tried to do it in Cuba in the early 1960s. For example, if Iran were to deploy ballistic missiles in Libya, it could reduce the range required to threaten the U.S. as well as Europe. Given the existing patterns of cooperation we have already seen, both testing by one country on the territory of another and deriving data from other-country tests are also distinct possibilities.
Sea launch of shorter range ballistic missiles is another possibility. This could enable a country to pose a direct territorial threat to the U.S. sooner than it could by waiting to develop an ICBM for launch from its own territory. Sea-launching could also permit it to target a larger area of the U.S. than would a missile fired from its home territory. India is working on a sea launch capability. Air launch is another possible mode of delivering a shorter range missile to U.S. territory.
The key importance of these approaches is that each would significantly shorten the warning time of deployment available to the United States.
F. Erosion of Warning
Precise forecasts of the growth in ballistic missile capabilities over the next two decades--tests by year, production rates, weapons deployed by year, weapon characteristics by system type, and circular error probable (CEP)--cannot be provided with confidence. Deception and denial efforts are intense and often successful, and U.S. collection and analysis assets are limited. Together they create a high risk of continued surprise.
The question is not simply whether we will have warning of an emerging capability, but whether the nature and magnitude of a particular threat will be perceived with sufficient clarity in time to take appropriate action.
Concealment, denial, and deception efforts by key target countries are intended to delay the discovery of strategically significant activities until well after they had been carried out successfully. The fact that some of these secret activities are discovered over time is to the credit of the U.S. Intelligence Community. However, the fact that there are delays in discovery of those activities provides a sharp warning that a great deal of activity goes undetected.
Both technical and human intelligence are inherently more difficult to collect in those countries where the United States has limited access, which includes most of the ballistic missile countries of concern. The U.S. is not able to predict and anticipate with confidence the behavior and actions of emerging ballistic missile powers and their related political decision-making.
Their ballistic missile programs often do not follow a single, known pattern or model, and they use unexpected development patterns. These are not models of development the U.S. follows or that intelligence analysts expect to see.
For example, Pakistan's test launch in April 1998 of its Ghauri medium range ballistic missile (MRBM)[2]--its version of the North Korean No Dong--could not be predicted on the basis of any known pattern of technical development either for MRBMs generally or Pakistan in particular.
Similarly, North Korea's decision to deploy the No Dong after what is believed to be a single successful test flight is another example. Based on U.S. and Russian experience, the Intelligence Community had expected that a regular test series would be required to provide the confidence needed before any country would produce and deploy a ballistic missile system. Yet North Korea deployed the No Dong.
The Commission believes that the technical means of collection now employed will not meet emerging requirements, and considerable uncertainty persists whether planned collection and analysis systems will do so.
G. Methodology
In analyzing the ballistic missile threat, the Commission used an expanded methodology. We used it as a complement to the traditional analysis in which a country's known program status is used to establish estimates of its current missile capabilities. We believe this expanded approach provides insights into emerging threats that the prevailing approaches used by the Intelligence Community may not bring to the surface.
To guide our assessment of the ballistic missile threat to the United States we posed three questions:
* What is known about the ballistic missile threat, including the domestic infrastructure of a ballistic missile power; the efforts of a power to acquire foreign technology, materials and expertise; and the scale, pace, and progress of its programs?
* What is not known about the threat in each of those three categories?
* Can a power intent on posing a ballistic missile threat to any part of the United States, including the use of but not limited to ICBM-range missiles, use the open market, the black market, and/or espionage to secure the needed technology and expertise and then carry out its program in ways that will minimize the interval between the time the U.S. becomes aware of the threat and the fielding of that capability?
In seeking answers to these questions, the Commission familiarized itself with the current state of knowledge as well as the depth of analytic capability within the Intelligence Community related to ballistic missile and WMD threats. The Commission used its broad access to individuals, special compartmented intelligence, and special access programs. It consulted with experts in the broader government and private analytic and policy communities.
It reviewed the strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities of current and planned human and technical collection efforts and capabilities, especially in light of the increasingly sophisticated means and methods available to target countries to hide from U.S. intelligence collection. It reviewed with scientists, engineers, and program managers from the public and private sectors the technical issues associated with the design, development, and testing of ballistic missiles and the means and methods available to the emerging ballistic missile powers to meet the challenges associated with long range ballistic missile development and testing.
The Commission analyzed the available information in order to develop an understanding of the threat from three perspectives:
* We examined the known size and quality of the deployed forces, the doctrine and the command and control systems that govern the forces, and the availability of weapons of mass destruction to arm the forces. We reviewed the infrastructure supporting the programs and the extent of past and present foreign assistance available to those programs from Russia, China, and other countries, including the West.
* We examined the ways in which the programs of emerging ballistic missile powers compared with one another. For example, we traced the development histories of the related programs of North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan and the relationships among them. This comparison helped in identifying the similarities between programs, the extent to which each had aided one another in overcoming critical development hurdles and, importantly, the pace at which a determined country can progress in its program development.
* We reviewed the resources ("inputs") available and the ways in which they provide indicators of the prospects for successful missile development.
By integrating these perspectives, we were able to partially bridge a significant number of intelligence gaps. Emphasizing inputs makes two important contributions to the analysis. Inputs include domestic opportunity costs, the foreign technology and expertise sought and obtained, the urgency with which facilities are constructed both above and below ground, and the willingness to absorb cost and time penalties in order to hide activities from detection by U.S. intelligence.
Attention to inputs across all elements of a program helps develop an understanding of the scale and scope of a program before traditional output indicators, such as testing and production rates, can be observed and evaluated. When combined with observed outputs and the application of engineering judgments, the understanding of the scale and scope of a program that this provided helped us to measure the probable pace and magnitude of a program and its potential products. We were then able to make what we believe to be reasonably confident estimates of what the various programs can achieve.
Rather than measuring how far a program had progressed from a known starting point, the Commission sought to measure how close a program might be to demonstrating the first flight of a long range ballistic missile. This approach requires that analysts extrapolate a program's scope, scale, pace, and direction beyond what the hard evidence at hand unequivocally supports. It is in sharp contrast to a narrow focus on the certain that obscures the almost-certain. The approach helps reduce the effects of denial and deception efforts. When strategically significant programs were assessed by narrowly focusing on what is known, the assessments lagged the actual state of the programs by two to eight years and in some cases completely missed significant programs.
We chose to focus on what is left to be accomplished in the programs of potentially threatening ballistic missile powers and alternative paths they can follow to attain their goals. We reviewed program histories and current activities, including foreign assistance, to determine whether a ballistic missile program acquired the means to overcome its identified problems.
We considered the multiple pathways available for completing its development given the combination of expertise and technology available to it and the circumstances in which it is operating. This approach accepts as a basic premise that a power determined to possess a long range missile, knowing that the U.S. is trying to track its every action but aware of American intelligence methods and sources, will do its best to deny information and to deceive the U.S. about its actual progress.
Because of these options available to emerging ballistic missile powers, the Commission, unanimously recognizing that missile development and deployment now follows new models, strongly urges the use of an expanded approach to intelligence that assesses both inputs and outputs in other countries' ballistic missile programs. We believe this approach is needed in order to capture both sooner and more accurately the speed and magnitude of potential ballistic missile proliferation in the post-Cold War world and to assess, in time, the various threats this proliferation poses to the United States.
The Commission's key judgments are derived from applying this methodology and examining the evidence in light of the individual and collective experience of the nine Commissioners.
H. Summary
Ballistic missiles armed with WMD payloads pose a strategic threat to the United States. This is not a distant threat. Characterizing foreign assistance as a wild card is both incorrect and misleading. Foreign assistance is pervasive, enabling, and often the preferred path to ballistic missile and WMD capability.
A new strategic environment now gives emerging ballistic missile powers the capacity, through a combination of domestic development and foreign assistance, to acquire the means to strike the U.S. within about five years of a decision to acquire such a capability (10 years in the case of Iraq). During several of those years, the U.S. might not be aware that such a decision had been made. Available alternative means of delivery can shorten the warning time of deployment nearly to zero.
The threat is exacerbated by the ability of both existing and emerging ballistic missile powers to hide their activities from the U.S. and to deceive the U.S. about the pace, scope, and direction of their development and proliferation programs. Therefore, we unanimously recommend that U.S. analyses, practices, and policies that depend on expectations of extended warning of deployment be reviewed and, as appropriate, revised to reflect the reality of an environment in which there may be little or no warning.
claremont.org |
