Guest Blogger: Amb. Hank Cooper on New START’s Missile Defense Limits

Amb. Hank Cooper / June 17, 2010

Yesterday, Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, director of the Missile Defense Agency, testified about New START before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “There are no limitations in the treaty that affect our plans for developing missile defense.”

Problem is O’Reilly’s statement ignores the lessons of unintended consequences – or in this current case, I suspect “intended consequences.” The unaffected “plans” he mentioned are, as he also indicates, “current plans”, which do not include all or even the most effective possibilities for truly effective missile defenses…such as space-based defenses.

For example, recall that the ABM Treaty was not supposed to limit our theater defenses—except that it did politically, as repeatedly illustrated by Paul Warnke’s testimony in the 1980s. As a former ACDA Director and SALT Negotiator, he repeatedly claimed that the limited Patriot improvements proposed by then-Sen. Dan Quayle (R-IN) (and supported by Ted Kennedy among others) would “violate the ABM Treaty” by enabling a limited ballistic missile defense, even though it clearly could not reasonably be covered by the Treaty. Warnke’s claim held more sway in the House which every year voted to zero out Quayle’s initiative. But the US Senate, kept allowing a half-funded improvement program to limp along which eventually ended up providing a limited (and untested I might add, because inadequate funding slowed development) capability barely in time to be used in the 1990 Gulf War. (more…)