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CNN Crossfire

Can Missile Defense Work?

Aired May 01, 2001 - 19:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL PRESS, CO-HOST: Tonight: Star wars -- the sequel. President Bush outlines a national missile defense strategy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: This is a time for vision, a time for a new way of thinking, a time for bold leadership.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PRESS: But will it work and can we afford it?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D-SD), MINORITY LEADER: We fear that the president may be buying a lemon here. I don't know how you support the deployment of a program that doesn't work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: Live from Washington, CROSSFIRE. On the left, Bill Press. On the right, Robert Novak. In the CROSSFIRE: Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska, member of the Armed Services Committee, and fellow committee member, Senator James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

TUCKER CARLSON, CO-HOST: Good evening, and welcome to CROSSFIRE. The Cold War is over, says George W. Bush. That's why we need star wars. In a speech in Washington today, the president argued that the time is right for a missile defense system, an idea that has been the subject of acrimonious debate since the Reagan years.

Critics charge it's too expensive, doesn't work and will make the rest of the world angry. Supporters say missile defense is the best defense against attacks by rogue nations and accidental launches from Russia. But there is a roadblock on the way to Bush's vision: the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. Replace it, Bush said today. He attacked it as a relic from the 70s, as useless and outdated as a pet rock. The president pledged to take his case to America's allies in Europe and Asia.

So, can missile defense work? Can we afford it? And even if it does, and we can, would star wars start a new arms race -- Bill. PRESS: Senator Inhofe, let me ask you about this pet rock. I'd like first to read you a quote which I think sums up theory of missile defense.

Quote: "We will produce a defensive weapon that will make all nuclear weapons obsolete and thereby abolish the terror of nuclear warfare."

Any idea who said that, senator?

SEN. JAMES INHOFE (R), OKLAHOMA: No, I don't.

PRESS: I want to tell you, I wouldn't expect you to. I didn't, either, until I read a book called "Way Out There in the Blue," by Frances Fitzgerald, who pointed out that that quote is from a 1966 Alfred Hitchcock movie called "Torn Curtain." The words were expressed by Paul Newman and that's where Ronald Reagan got the idea for star wars, and he used those almost exact same words when he tried to sell it to the nation back in 1984.

My point is, Senator, this is all pure Hollywood fantasy that we're going to hit an incoming missile with an outgoing missile. That's all star wars.

INHOFE: Bill, that's the most ridiculous assertion I've ever heard. During the Persian Gulf War, we saw missiles hitting missiles. We know the technology is there. Our problem is we can't get into the upper tier, and that is just a small bit of technology away and it's something that we're going to have to do.

I mean, I come from Oklahoma. The Murrah Federal Office building tragedy was done with one ton of TNT, that was its explosive power. The smallest nuclear warhead we know of is a kiloton, a thousand times that powerful. So, this is a big thing. We should have had -- we would have had one deployed by fiscal year 1998 if it hadn't been for President Clinton and his vetoes.

PRESS: Well, actually, I was surprised -- I want to ask you about the Murrah Building a little later -- but I was surprised and disappointed that President Clinton ended up trying to get this system going, but you assert that the technology works. Senator, almost every test -- we spent $140 billion testing this dog since 1984. In 1999, six out of six tests failed. The last round they had, two out of three failed. You have no proof if works.

INHOFE: We had an intercept that worked, didn't we?

PRESS: But one out of all of these tests.

INHOFE: We're just starting. We've done the research, the technology. Now, we're going into the experimentation. Every platform that we have out there has had failures during its development. This is the most significant of all platforms, the one that will defend us to stop another tragedy from happening, is going to have problems in the development.

Does that mean you don't do it?

(CROSSTALK)

PRESS: We are in the most threatened position today as a nation that we've ever been in, and that is not just Jim Inhofe speaking. George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, in the committee that I chair said that same thing because we do not have anything to stop an incoming missile. You know and I know and Ben knows that we have missiles tat are aimed at American cities today, and remember the Cuban missile crisis, hysteria hit the streets? We're facing that same thing today.

CARLSON: Senator Nelson, given some of the reactions today to the president's speech, you'd think he proposed invading Canada, which may have its own merits, but that not what he proposed. He proposed not attacking anybody or expanding U.S. territory, but purely a way to defend the continental United States. What could possibly, possibly be wrong with that or less important than that?

SEN. BEN NELSON (D), NEBRASKA: Well, I think it's probably not a question of whether it's important or what's wrong with the suggestion, it's whether or not we are ready to move forward with something as important as this, given the fact that we haven't had the scientific and research development that is going to be necessary in order to be able to carry out something that will work.

When you don't know whether something is going to work, I don't know whether you want to continue to plow 100 billion or another 100 billion into the technology. And of course, there's all kinds of questions about whether countermeasures will put in place with dummy missiles coming in and which one do you target and how do you make it work.

But I think the whole question is: Are we more at risk as to what happened in Oklahoma City or in New York harbor or San Francisco Bay with a ship bringing a warhead in or going down Interstate 80 or in some other capacity. I hope that we're focused on the most severe and significant defense needs that we have today rather than seeing a channelization of our resources into another area.

CARLSON: But certainly you won't deny with North Korea and Iraq and Iran disseminating weapons technology to other rogue states, not even to mention their own capacity for mayhem, that we don't face a threat. What is wrong with putting money toward this? We're talking about not very much, the market cap of Yahoo! Small potatoes, really, and as "The Wall Street Journal" pointed out, the human genome mapping project, complicated, it happened.

(CROSSTALK)

NELSON: I'm not sure what small dollars are. I don't put $100 into small dollars.

INHOFE: We don't need to talk about figures like that, and Ben, you know that and I know that. If you take -- start off with the Aegis system, we have a $50 billion investment in 22 Aegis ships that are capable of being upgraded to the upper tier. Now, that's already bought and paid for. That's done. It'd be somewhere between $3 and $8 billion to give it that upper tier capability.

I'd like to do more, and I think we will do more, but we shouldn't be talking and trying to scare people off by saying it's going to be $100 billion or $120 billion.

NELSON: Well, I don't know what it will be because I'm not sure what we're going to get.

INHOFE: We have guesstimates.

NELSON: Well, I know, but we also have Secretary Rumsfeld doing a complete evaluation, reevaluation of the Department of Defense. We don't have that number. We don't because he's not ready for it. It will come in sometime next year. I've read where it may be $200 to $300 billion or more over a five-year period.

That's on top of whatever this missile defense system might cost, and we are looking at time when I don't think anyone knows where we're going to be able to get that kind of money next year. I just hope we'll put our resources into those areas where we have, I think, the greatest risk, the most likely risk, and that is in terrorism, and in intermediate and medium range...

INHOFE: I've heard this argument, Ben, and to me, no, we don't want to neglect that. Certainly, being from Oklahoma, no one is more sensitive to this type of terrorism than I am, and we want to concentrate on this. But it doesn't mean that we're going to -- it's not either this or this, it's both of them. We have to address both of these risks.

PRESS: Senator, maybe you can help me explain something, because I've always heard argument for this that this is going to be system that's going to protect us from incoming missiles. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said something today that really stunned me. He admitted that this is never going to be a fool-proof system. It's never going to work all the time, but he said we ought to spend another $100 billion anyhow.

Now, would you help explain to me if the damn thing is not going to work, why are we spending?

INHOFE: He didn't say it's not going to work.

PRESS: It's not going to work all the time. Why do it?

(CROSSTALK)

INHOFE: If it works 90 percent of the time, and one ICBM comes in and is intercepted and destroyed, and you talk about the cost of this, even if $100 billion is right, what is the cost of a city being hit by something with a thousand times the explosive power of the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma. If it stops one, if it's only 90 percent good, and I think that's essentially what he's saying. We can't guarantee it's going to stop 100 percent. During the Persian Gulf War, we couldn't guarantee that we could knock down all of these missiles. We got a good percentage.

PRESS: What he's saying, really, is we're going to put up a scarecrow. We're going to scare nations away because we've got this system and they don't whether their incoming missiles are going to make it or not. Well, Senator, at the last count, and I looked today, we have 982 intercontinental missiles. China has 32. Doesn't the fact that we have 10 times more than anybody else, isn't that enough to scare them away?

INHOFE: Actually, China, I understand it, has 24, but you might have more...

PRESS: All right, 24. That's worse than I though.

INHOFE: But all it takes is one. Look, right now, you know and I know, we all four know that American cities are targeted today by Chinese missiles. You know that. Intelligence knows that. It's been in the newspapers. Everybody realizes it. It just takes one, Bill.

PRESS: But this is not necessarily going to stop it, Senator.

INHOFE: A 90 percent chance of stopping it, I'll buy that any day. I've got eight grandkids that will appreciate that.

CARLSON: Senator Nelson, one of the great arguments against this is that it will scare the rest of the world, basically, and I want you to listen to the president's account of his conversation with Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Here's what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I also made it clear to him that it's important for us to think beyond the old days of when we had the concept that if we blew each other up, the world would be safe.

I told him the Cold War is over, and that Russia was not our enemy. And I helped try to define the threats as realistically as I could, and that we needed to have defenses to meet those threats.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Now, that ought to be enough to calm anybody's fears, it seems to me. My question is, what possible objection could Russia, or any country not actively planning war against United States, have to SDI? What possible -- why wouldn't they like it?

NELSON: Well, I think the whole question is going back to the ABM treaty and our desire to stop proliferation. We want to make sure that we don't do anything that would cause others to misunderstand what our true intentions might be. If we have trouble wording an apology in a way that's not an apology to China, I'm worried about people being in other parts of world understanding our intentions with respect to this kind of defense system. There are going to be those who could very easily look at this as proliferation on our part.

CARLSON: But how does that work? How does defending yourself provoke aggression in others? If I'm walking in a street, and I see a cop and he's got a gun and a badge and a police radio, my first instinct isn't, "well, he's well defended, I think I'll go after him," it is, "back off." Isn't that the reaction other nations will have to our increased defense?

NELSON: Well, if we thought that was true, then they would all be lining up to -- in support of what it is we are doing, and I don't know that we have many allies that are lining up behind us on this. I do know that we have talked to some of our allies, and I'm sure that they have certain views that are similar to ours. But there are others who have some severe questions, very serious questions about what it is we are doing and what this could represent.

I think the real question here is: how do you deploy your resources against the most realistic and most likely threat? And if you look at the most simplistic approach, that is not an ABM missile coming at us with weapons of mass destruction, but floating one in New York harbor and floating one into the San Francisco Bay.

I want to make sure that we don't get distracted from that effort by putting all of our resources, or enough or our resources, that we don't have resources to go around to deal with other areas of defense that we need.

PRESS: Always a good debate, senators, and we'll continue. We're going to just take a break here. When we come back, there may be something else going on. How much of this debate over "Star Wars" is about policy and how much of it is about politics? Back with more CROSSFIRE.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PRESS: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE.

President Bush was short on specifics today. He's not even sure yet what kind of missile defense system he wants to build. So why didn't he wait to give his Star Wars speech? Was it because it wanted to reaffirm his commitment and get the process started? Or was it because, as some Democrats suggest, just a political payoff to his hard-core, right-wing supporters?

The yes, no and maybe of missile defense tonight with: Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, and Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee -- Tucker.

CARLSON: Senator Inhofe, welcome, on behalf of the president's hardcore right-wing supporters. In the speech today, as you know, the president spent a lot of his time talking about the ABM Treaty which is obviously a barrier to a workable strategic defense. Listen to what the president said about the ABM Treaty today, if you will.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: This treaty does not recognize the present or point us to the future. It enshrines the past. No treaty that prevents us from addressing today's threats, that prohibits us from pursuing promising technology to defend ourselves, our friends, and our allies is in our interests or in the interests of world peace.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CARLSON: Now, when this was signed in 1972, Nixon was president, the Vietnam War was going on, the Paris Peace Talks in progress, we signed this with a country that no longer exists; why in the world should we stick to the ABM Treaty?

NELSON: Well, it was a bilateral agreement, and I don't think we can unilaterally walk away from it without having some repercussions from the other signing party: Russia.

CARLSON: Isn't it the Soviet Union?

NELSON: The Soviet Union. Russia today. I do understand the distinction, but the key here is that we signed that agreement and I think we -- I'm encouraged by the fact the president said he wants to talk to President Putin and Russia and will try to work his way through that, but my sense is, by stating that it's outdated and it's outlived its usefulness, before we have an agreement with the other side, I'm a little worried about what that may...

CARLSON: But it is a completely different world!

INHOFE: Let me get in here, one of most trouble part of this whole thing: the fact that during the Clinton years, he was using that as an excuse to stay in this thing.

First of all, as Ben and I both know, the treaty was with the Soviet Union; it doesn't exist any more. Sometimes I think that's the advantage not to be a lawyer, because you don't have to try -- it's not there anymore.

Secondly, the threat that was facing us back in 1972 was two super powers: the Soviet Union and the United States of America; who is the architect of this thing? Henry Kissinger. Henry Kissinger now says, our threat is not the same threat; there's not a threat from over there. It's a threat that's proliferated.

And now we have the Chinese and the Russians and the North Koreans trading technology and systems with countries like Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya. And so, you have a totally different threat that's out there. So, it makes absolutely no sense to say, all right, we are good boys, we will not defend ourselves against Russia, when Russia is not the threat.

PRESS: Here is what the threat is...

INHOFE: Henry Kissinger says, today, and he was the architect, he says, it's nuts to make a virtue out of your vulnerability.

PRESS: You know, Senator, the more you quote Henry Kissinger, the more I'm against you. So, I just want to warn you right there.

But look, you talked about the threat, you've touched on a couple of times today, and so has Senator Nelson. The real threat today -- if these countries are smart enough to build an ICBM, if they are smart enough to know how to get a missile here, and it's not an intercontinental warhead -- it's on a -- it's in a ship, it's on a truck, it's in a briefcase -- that's what happened at Oklahoma City. And you have to admit that this Star Wars, whether you spend $100 billion or what on it, is zero protection against terrorism.

INHOFE: Well, you do both. You don't just do one and not the other. Obviously, they're both great threats out there and we've already said that. You don't want to ignore one just because there's a threat on the other side.

PRESS: But if you talk about the rogue nations, this is the threat from them, right?

INHOFE: Don't you remember what Saddam Hussein said, back, right after the Persian Gulf War? He said if we had waited for 10 years to go into Kuwait, the Americans would not come because we'd have a missile that could reach them. Here it is, 10 years later.

PRESS: Senator, don't those nations know -- Iran or Iraq or North Korea, whatever -- if they were foolish enough to lob a missile in our direction, which couldn't get here now, but if they had one -- they'd be a parking lot before it landed.

INHOFE: You're dealing with a different mentality. You know that and I know that. Sometimes I look back at the Cold War and think things weren't so bad then. At least they were predictable. We knew that there was one central power there, and they were predictable. Now it's all proliferated to all these different countries. We don't know for sure -- it may be true that Iraq and Iran could not develop one of these indigenous, but we know that they're trading technology. They could have one today.

PRESS: You wanted to say something...

NELSON: Yes, I was going to say something about the agreement. Obviously, technically, it's a different world. It's a different country on the other side. The Soviet Union no longer exists. But I do think we have an obligation to make sure that the other countries, who are allies, understand what it is that we want to do and why we want to work our way through.

So I was pleased that the president said that he wanted to work his way through this with the allies and not do this in a unilateral way. CARLSON: But very quickly, Senator, about the countries that aren't our allies, say, China, and to some extent, Russia, it strikes me that they take a pretty rational view of this. If they're against it, they're against it for a reason. They may be against it because they think it's going to work. Is that plausible?

NELSON: I don't know. I think it's a question of what's proliferation in the world today, and who understands who's doing what. We live in a world of technology and information, and so the more we know about one another, I think, in many ways, the more secure we are.

If we can explain to them what it is we want to do, and what we're trying to establish here, and we can work with countries for mutual defense, wherever it works, then I think we probably bring partners into the process. But going it alone causes me just a little bit of heartburn unless we work through the research and we have agreement with our allies as well.

PRESS: Quick last word.

INHOFE: You know, the defense minister of China, Chi Haotian, said war with America is inevitable. They now have our cities that are targeted with missiles. I don't know how anyone can sit around and not deploy a national defense system as soon as possible.

CARLSON: Amen. Senator Inhofe, thank you. Senator Nelson, thank you. Bill Press and I will be back in just a minute to lob a few missiles (UNINTELLIGIBLE) for our closing comments we will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PRESS: You know, Tucker, I'm just trying to understand this conservative mentality. So, we don't whether this thing will work. We don't know whether it will be based on land, or air, or sea. And we don't know whether it's just going to be regional or global, but we will spend $100 billion.

CARLSON: This is what I love, Bill. Someone like you who can stay up at night worrying about drinking water standards, who would say kids ought to wear helmets when they ride their bikes, wear seat belts in the car -- if just one life is saved it's worth the authoritarianism. We're talking about the capacity to save entire American cities and you don't want to spend an extra $5 billion on it? Talk about cheap.

PRESS: No, first of all, it's 100 billion and we're talking about a system that the secretary defense of defense says isn't always going to work. So why do it?

CARLSON: Who can put a price on a city, bill? Nobody can and if one city actually -- Senator Inhofe was right -- if one city is saved it's worth this and so much more.

PRESS: There is no guarantee -- don't you hear me -- there is no guarantee this is going to save any American city, so nine don't make it one dozen -- good bye, New York.

CARLSON: No guarantee in life at all, but worth the chance.

PRESS: From the left, I'm Bill Press good night for CROSSFIRE. See you later in THE SPIN ROOM -- both of us.

CARLSON: And from the right I'm Tucker Carlson. See you again tomorrow night for another edition of CROSSFIRE.

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