From: Rense.com

Canceled European Missile Defense
Signals New Disarmament Race To War
By Joel Skousen
World Affairs Brief
9-25-9

Begin Excerpt

CANCELLED EUROPEAN MISSILE DEFENSE SIGNALS NEW DISARMAMENT RACE TO WAR

This week Obama scrapped the Bush era proposal to build an anti-ballistic-missile system in Poland along with its corresponding search and tracking radar in the Czech Republic, which was supposedly designed to protect against a rogue missile attack from Iran. Getting Obama to dump the ABM system was a top priority for Russia, which knew that the Iran threat was an excuse to justify placing a system close to Russia capable of intercepting Russian missiles in their upward boost phase. This is where US interceptors would be most effective, having no warhead–instead of trying to knock down incoming Russian warheads, traveling at hyper speeds, over the target area. That’s a recipe for failure, especially if Russian claims about maneuvering warheads are true. This sudden backing down from directly confronting Russia appears to be part of a new and massive disarmament campaign as heralded by Obama in his speech to the UN–something the West always reverts to prior to sinking into a new world war. This week I’ll analyze why all such disarmament measures, without actual and verifiable Russian and Chinese reductions, will make the US more susceptible to a nuclear first strike.

The UK Guardian reported that, “Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country’s arsenal, the Guardian can reveal.” This is exactly the same thing President Bill Clinton ordered in 1996 that led to the secret issuance of PDD-60 completely changing the Reagan era nuclear doctrine designed to win a nuclear war with Russia. PDD-60 is still secret, but a few public statements issued in late 1997 by Clinton disarmament advisor Robert Bell and Craig Cerniello of Arms Control Today (who was part of the drafting and review process) [<[http://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997_11-12/pdd> http://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997_11-12/pdd ] indicated that the Presidential Decision Directive instructed US missile commanders “not to depend on launch-on-warning” (a tactic of launching all fixed silo missiles at the enemy before opponents first strike missiles landed and destroyed ours), –in essence, this PDD directed our country to absorb a first strike and retaliate later.

A frustrated Marine General is said to have exclaimed, “Retaliate with WHAT?” He knew, as did other commanders of our Trident nuclear submarines that Clinton had unilaterally agreed to keep half of all our SLBM submarines in port at any one time “to assure our Russian friends that we are not a threat.” When you telegraph a subtle message to the Russians that we are going to absorb a first strike, you induce them to make sure they hit us with everything necessary to make sure we cannot respond after a first strike.

PDD-60 also removes all alternate submarine launch codes so that our subs cannot fire without direct communications with the President. Those vital communications links will assuredly not survive a massive first strike. Even if they did, it is probable given what we know that the President would simply not issue the orders to launch until a first strike had landed. This is not deterrence. This is suicide, or a very carefully planned agenda to make the US vulnerable. Why would US leaders do this? It is designed to drive Americans into a New World Order that has military power over member nations–something no amount of public manipulation in past decades has been able to do. When our leaders come out of their bunkers they will declare the “Russians and Chinese deceived us” and now (that our military forces are mostly destroyed) we have no choice but to enter into a military alliance with the UN to save us.

This is all too similar to the Clinton era of nuclear doctrine change. The impetus to change U.S. strategic doctrine came on the heels of President Clinton’s demand to the joint chiefs in early 1996 that they prepare to unilaterally reduce America’s nuclear warhead deployment to 2,000-2,500 in eager anticipation of the ratification of START II disarmament treaty (which has yet to be ratified by the Russian Duma). General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, responded that he couldn’t comply since the U.S. military was still operating on a former Presidential Directive of 1981 to prepare to ‘win a protracted nuclear war.’ A winning strategy couldn’t be implemented without the full contingent of current nuclear strategic warheads.

According to Craig Cerniello of Arms Control Today (Nov/Dec 1997 issue), “the administration viewed the 1981 guidelines as an anachronism of the Cold War. The notion that the United States still had to be prepared to fight and win a protracted nuclear war today seemed out of touch with reality, given the fact that it has been six years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

Certainly, the apparent collapse of the Soviet Union is the linchpin in every argument pointing towards the relaxation of western vigilance and accelerated disarmament–and still is. Indeed, it is the driving argument that is trumpeted constantly before Congress, U.S. military leaders and the American people. Almost everyone bought into it, even most conservatives who should have been more suspicious. The most savvy of the non-establishment Soviet watchers can point to a host of evidence indicating that the so-called collapse was engineered to disarm the West and garner billions in direct aid to Russia while inducing the West to take over the economic burden of the former satellite states that Russia could no longer support.

For one, there was the phony Gorbachev ‘coup’ that failed and was so patently contrived and parroted by the western media that they had to be covering for this keystone cop affair. Then, the heads of the KGB, GRU, and Defense Ministries supposedly had to flee into hiding. If they were the real heads of these feared organs of state power, who were they fleeing from? Then there is the statement of Eric Honeker, former head of the German DDR who stated before his death that he was instructed by Moscow to step down and allow the student protests in Leipzig to go forward without Stazi interference. Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu said he got the same orders to step down, but refused. He had to be forcibly removed by another phony coup, made to look like an uprising of anti-communists (which it was not).

But the most ominous evidence is found in defectors from Russia who tell the same story: The whole fall of Communism was planned years in advance to gain Western financial and military assistance, all the while snookering the West into treating Russia as a new ally. The whole charade of Russian oligarches in pretended opposition to the super-patriot Vladimir Putin is part of this sophisticated game. Virtually all significant opposition political parties are controlled by forces loyal to Putin. While Russia feigns weakness in the private economic sector its underground military industrial complex is humming along at full speed, deploying top of the line new biological, chemical and nuclear weapons systems in secret, all aimed at taking down the U.S. military in one huge decapitating nuclear strike. This is what makes the new disarmament moves by the Obama administration so worrisome.

In line with this general process, Obama returns to another wholesale change in America’s nuclear doctrine. “Obama has rejected the Pentagon’s first draft of the ‘nuclear posture review’ as being too timid [in disarmament], and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials. Those options include:

Reconfiguring the US nuclear force to allow for an arsenal measured in hundreds rather than thousands of deployed strategic warheads.

Redrafting nuclear doctrine to narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.

Exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads.

Obama’s UN speech this week pushed disarmament strongly, but much of his emphasis was tied to justifying a future strike on Iran. The announcement today of the “discovery” of a second underground nuclear site in Iran was specifically timed to coincide with Obama’s UN speech attacking Iran. In fact, US intelligence admits it has long known about the site, but had not mentioned it now.

Thus the official thinking linked it all to non-proliferation: “It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.” Actually, it’s a devil’s bargain. Obama’s overtures on deep disarmament were created to help focus even more attention on Iran and North Korean nuclear programs as “out of step with the rest of the disarming world.” It may serve that purpose in the short run, but in the long run all disarmament is one sided on the part of the US and western allies. The Russians will continue to build in secret. In fact, they never stopped even during the phony “fall”. There is virtually a total blackout of media information on the history of Russian cheating on each and every disarmament agreement.

Here is a brief review of recent disarmament history: Under the 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiative, the US decided to

eliminate our entire inventory of ground-launched nonstrategic nuclear weapons (nuclear artillery and Lance surface-to-surface missiles);

Remove all nonstrategic nuclear weapons on a day-to-day basis from surface ships, attack submarines, and land-based naval aircraft bases;

Remove our strategic bombers from alert;

Stand down the Minuteman II ICBMs scheduled for deactivation under Start I

Terminate the mobile Peacekeeper and mobile small ICBM programs and

Terminate the SCRAM-II nuclear short-range attack missile

In January 1992, the second Presidential Nuclear Initiative took further steps which included:

Limiting B-2 production to 20 bombers

Canceling the entire small ICBM program

Ceasing production of W-88 Trident SLBM (Sub launched missiles) warheads–our most powerful

Halting purchases of advanced cruise missiles

Stop new production of Peacekeeper MX missiles (our biggest MIRV warhead ICBM)

As a result of these significant changes, the U.S. nuclear stockpile has decreased by more than 50 percent. All of this has been done without any meaningful disarmament by the Russians. The Clinton Administration would counter this charge by citing the ‘successful’ dismantling of the 3,300 strategic nuclear warheads by Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, and the destruction of their 252 ICBM’s and related silos–all paid for with US taxpayer funds to the tune of 300 million per year (the Nunn-Lugar legislation).

But the real story is otherwise. Yes, Americans paid for the dismantling of these system–the oldest and most out of date in the Soviet inventory. They were scheduled for replacement anyway, so the US taxpayer ended up saving the Russians over a billion dollars, allowing them to use this and other Western aid to develop and build new systems, coming on line right now. But that isn’t all. What the administration doesn’t say is that they allowed the Russians to reclaim all the nuclear warheads, and paid them to recycle the usable material into new, updated warheads. We even built them a state of the art Nuclear Warhead refurbishing and storage facility. Once complete, our inspectors were banned from entry. We didn’t diminish the threat at all. We only helped them to transform it into something more dangerous.

As J. R. Nyquist wrote in an article for WND.com, “‘In 1982’ wrote William R. Graham, ‘President Reagan asked me to serve as the Chairman of his General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament. This was the committee tasked to review Russian compliance with various arms control treaties. ‘It took the General Advisory Committee about a year to review the entire record,.. Neither the institutions of the State Department nor the Intelligence Community were cooperative,’ noted Graham. Nevertheless, with help from ‘a few knowledgeable individuals,’ a highly classified report of 300 pages was issued [it is still classified to keep the public from knowing about it]. In Graham’s words, the report uncovered ‘a systematic pattern of Soviet violations of their arms control commitments in the post-WW II era.’

“Predictably, the report was attacked by intelligence intellectuals across the board. The house that Kissinger built — the house of denying Russian violations — was a strong house. The pattern of Russian cheating did not change during the following decade [the so-called “collapse of Communism”]. According to an April 9, 1992, report entitled ‘Soviet Noncompliance with Arms Control Agreements’ submitted to Congress by the White House, ‘documented Soviet violations of major arms control treaties and agreements … included the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, SALT I and II, the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons, the Helsinki Final Treaty (LTBT), and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.'”

The Conventional Forces Treaty (CNF) allowed Russia to not disarm its huge stockpile of tanks and mobile artillery as long as it stockpiled them east of the Ural mountains–typical of US loopholes offered the Soviets, while we strictly destroyed our older tanks. In 2007 NATO announced that it was going to establish military bases in former Soviet states (now part of NATO), Russia complained that this amounted to a NATO violation of the CNF treaty. Russia’s Foreign Minister responded that Russia would consider itself no longer limited in its deployment of heavy weapons (tanks and artillery) to its western border with NATO countries.

While this implies that Russia was formerly in compliance, it is not true. During the 1990s, Russia had used the expansion of NATO as an excuse to demand amendments to the treaty that ratified Russia’s huge armor deployments from the Ural depots to the South of Russia during the Chechen war. In fact, Russia had moved those weapons out of storage in clear violation of the treaty and then demanded the treaty be amended to ratify the violation. Russian, never one to give an inch when it can demand a mile, offered to withdraw troops from Georgia and Moldova in exchange for the changes. The deal was made, but Russian troops are still in Georgia.

The cheating on the INF treaty transcended the “fall of Communism” and proved “the fall” to be a sham on many fronts. It was discovered that the Russians never did remove their Intermediate range missiles from Czechoslovakian and Romanian caves in which they were hidden. Worldnetdaily.com had Ken Timmerman detail the violations during the Clinton administration:

“As President Clinton met with Russian President Putin in Moscow to discuss nuclear arms control over the weekend, an old story from the Cold War has resurfaced that sheds doubt on Russia’s reliability as a negotiating partner: nuclear-tipped SS-23 missiles that the Soviet Union never declared to the United States, in direct violation of a 1987 arms-control agreement.

“During the Cold War, the SS-23 missiles were equipped with a 100-kiloton nuclear warhead and were fired from wheeled launchers, making them virtually impossible to destroy once they were deployed from their underground storage sites. The Soviets secretly deployed the SS-23s in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria in 1986. In the event of war in Europe between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, they would have given the Soviets a clear military advantage by allowing them to launch a surprise nuclear strike at the heart of NATO forces in Germany.

“Under the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Agreement signed in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 8, 1987, President Reagan and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to destroy all existing theater nuclear missiles in Europe, including all SS-23s… While the Soviets allowed U.S. inspectors to witness the destruction of the longer-range SS-20 missiles [the US allowed the Russians to keep the warheads], which constituted the bulk of their force, they secretly rushed several batteries of the shorter-range SS-23s to East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria just prior to signing the Treaty, and never declared them or destroyed them.”

It was also little wonder that all of this points to the “fall of the Soviet Union” as a grand defection. Defectors from the Czechoslovakia secret police fingered Vaclav Havel, the supposed pro-western, anti-Russian leader of the revolution as a Soviet agent masquerading as pro-West. Lech Walesa the famed anti-Soviet leader of Solidarity has similarly been outed as a Soviet agent in Poland.

Russian cheating continued through the 1990s — on nuclear, biological, chemical and ABM treaties. According to Bill Lee, a veteran CIA and DIA analyst, there is a large Russian nuclear stockpile unaccounted for by the arms control inspectors. Lee also asserts that Russia has a nationwide ABM defense today, clearly in violation of the ABM Treaty. But the Russians are allowed to cheat, and our government covers for them. They are allowed to retain hidden reserves of strategic striking power while the US disarms. Even our vaunted ABM system is a sham. It has no warhead and must make a perfect hit in order to work. Even if it did work, the number of interceptors are less than a dozen, hardly useful against thousands of Russian and Chinese warheads.

The problem of “looking the other way” while the continuing Soviets cheat on all disarmament pacts isn’t just a Clinton thing. The Bush administration continued to fulfill its share of the two disarmament reduction pacts signed with Russia recently even though Russia has backed out of their commitments. The Russians announced they were not going to destroy their remaining SS-18 Satan missiles as stipulated in the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, but the US continued to dismantle our 50 Peacekeeper missiles, with 10 warheads each.

Thus, the Russians still maintain a more than 3 to 1 advantage over the US in both throw weight and nuclear delivery vehicles. That disparity widened dramatically with the Clinton and Bush Administration’s unilateral disarmament while, at the same time, encouraged the Russians to proceed not only with the deployment of new Topol-M missiles (which are mobile launched and therefore difficult to target), but to put 3 MIRVed warheads on each missile instead of the treaty limit of 1 warhead–for a total deployment of 1500 warheads. Not counting the presumed minimum 4,000 to 6,000 warheads in the current Russian inventory, these 1500 new warheads would overwhelm our measly handful of ABM interceptors in Alaska.

To pacify our increasingly worried military leaders, there is a shift going on in procurement dollars to deploy a more flexible sea-based missile deterrent, which does have merit–if it comes in time. As Roxana Tiron reports, this “sea-based missile deterrents–is a boon for the Raytheon Co. and Lockheed Martin, which have significant missile defense operations in Arizona, Arkansas and New Jersey. It is however bad news for the Boeing Co. and its congressional supporters in Alabama, where the company builds and manages its ground based missile interceptors… Most Republicans strongly support the ground-based interceptors that became a centerpiece of the Reagan administration while Democrats have generally been critical, saying they don’t work well [true, but that doesn’t mean the disarmament minded Democrats want something that really works].

At the present time the US and Britain are both pushing for major disarmament without any iron-clad enforcement and verification authority. Britain is offering to decommission one of its four Trident SLBM subs as its first disarmament gesture. This indicates that a betrayal of national interests in coming, masked by the typical rhetoric of “peace.” “According to a final draft of the resolution due to be passed on Thursday, however, the UN security council will not wholeheartedly embrace the US and Britain’s call for eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. Largely on French insistence, the council will endorse the vaguer aim of seeking ‘to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons.'” These statements are typical of the fact that there is always a divergence between political rhetoric and what actually gets done within the bowels of government. The public, of course, is never allowed to know what our government is really doing, which should worry us all.

End Excerpt

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Copyright Joel Skousen. Partial quotations with attribution permitted.

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