Congressional Schedule for DoD and DoE Bills

Provided below is an updated schedule of Congressional action on key Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Energy (DoE) bills, as prepared by David Culp of FCNL.

North Korea Nutshell: Geneva or Bust

For months now, the U.S. has urged North Korea to submit a declaration that is both complete and clear. The North Koreans have responded by discounting U.S. claims and the frustration in Washington with the delay is becoming more evident as the weeks pass by. This has led U.S. Ambassador Chris Hill to consider some more creative approaches to break the impasse. Rumors have been circulating that Hill was considering trying to separate the controversial issues of the nuclear declaration out of the main issues involving the bomb-making program itself, thereby allowing progress on this latter issue to continue while discussions continue on the former.

The North Koreans have yet to really respond to this proposal until only recently. Several news organizations are now reporting that a special set of bilateral discussions have been arranged for the end of this week in Geneva. Followers of the 6-Party talks will remember that Amb. Hill and his North Korean counterpart have met before in Geneva to resolve the conflicts over the money frozen in the Banco Delta Asia scandal.

Sources that I have heard from on this subject have painted the following scenario for the resolution coming out of the meeting. The U.S. will issue a statement saying that North Korea will be required to provide all details concerning their plutonium production, bomb design and manufacture, work towards a uranium enrichment capability, and anything that may be related to proliferation of nuclear materials to sources outside of North Korea (ie. Syria). However, the issues of past proliferation activities, as well as possible attempts at acquiring a uranium enrichment capability, will be separated from the general declaration to the 6-Party Talks.

Instead, North Korea will issue a statement just to the United States concerning its work towards a uranium enrichment program and any direct connection they have with what went on in Syria, leaving the job of advising the other four countries about this development to the U.S. In this way, North Korea can avoid contradicting previous statements made at the larger 6-Party negotiations while still providing information that will be required for the U.S. to move forward with the process. North Korea has seemed to already indicate their acceptance of this method of progress by admitting to the U.S. that there were North Korean engineers at military facilities in Syria.

It should be noted that it is likely that North Korea will use the term uranium enrichment program in its admission instead of the common U.S. reference of highly enriched uranium. This is important as a highly enriched uranium program intrinsically implies that the North Koreans were looking to develop a second source of bomb-making material. By only referring to the acquisition of materials for low-enriched uranium, North Korea avoids much of the significant embarrassment that has likely prevented it from making this admission up until now.

Up to this point, Amb. Hill has likely been reluctant to make any compromise on the Syria and HEU issues due to the negative reaction this would receive in Congress. Hill will need to maintain significant Congressional support for delisting North Korea from the lists of State Sponsor’s of Terror and the Trading with the Enemy Act. This compromise, modeled somewhat off of Richard Nixon’s famous “Shanghai Communiqué”, allows the North Koreans to finesse their concerns over having to admit that they have lied about their previous activities while still satisfying everyone else’s concern over what exactly North Korea has been up to. The success or failure of this effort in Geneva will, as usual, depend on the degree that North Korea is willing to offer transparency on its activities.

There are several factors that have all likely contributed to the recent decision by North Korea to accept this plan to go to Geneva and I will tick them off below in what I consider to be the order of importance:

• The determination of the Chinese to not have this issue hanging over their heads as they head towards the summer Olympic Games
• New South Korean President, Lee Myung-bak, significantly altering South Korean foreign policy, emphasizing aid to North Korea be linked to denuclearization
• The improvement of ties between the U.S., South Korea and Japan after some serious strains in recent years
• The U.S. finally making progress in providing promised oil shipments to North Korea
• Persistence on the part of the U.S. negotiating team to demand a complete declaration and withhold delisting until this takes place
• The New York Philharmonic (then again, maybe not)

Kingston Reif Interviews Dr. Leonard Weiss on U.S.-India Nuclear Deal

Kingston Reif, Scoville Fellow at the Center, recently interviewed Dr. Leonard Weiss on the U.S.-India nuclear deal. Weiss is an affiliate at Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, a consultant to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and advisor to the Campaign for Responsibility in Nuclear Trade.

The interview can be seen below. Check it out.

Highlights of House Hearing on Missile Defense

On March 5, the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs held a hearing entitled, “Oversight of Ballistic Missile Defense (Part 1): Threats, Realities, and Tradeoffs.” In his opening statement, Subcommittee Chairman John Tierney (D-MA) described the hearing as the beginning of “a robust and concerted investigation into the rationale for missile defense; its costs, benefits and technical obstacles; and the accountability, transparency and testing regime of the Missile Defense Agency.” The specific purpose of this first oversight hearing was to examine “the potential threat our country faces from ballistic missiles and how that threat compares to other homeland security and weapons of mass destruction vulnerabilities.”

The witness list for the hearing included Joe Cirincione (President of the Ploughshares Fund), Stephen Hildreth (of the Congressional Research Service), Baker Spring (of the Heritage Foundation), and Stephen Flynn (of the Council on Foreign Relations). Their testimony’s can be found here, here, here, and here, respectively.

In keeping with the stated goals of the hearing, the majority of the Member’s questions focused on the relative severity of the ballistic missile threat. Here are some (paraphrased) highlights:

Tierney: Do you agree or disagree that it is more likely a nuclear weapon would enter the US by unconventional means?

Cirincione: Agree.
Spring: Disagree.
Hildreth: I don’t know.

[snip]

Tierney: What is the likelihood that someone would attack the US knowing the result would be their ultimate destruction?

Cirincione: Deterrence is alive and well. There are military measures we can take to enhance deterrence on Iran.

[snip]

Stephen Lynch (D-MA): Is the $120 billion funding proportional to the ICBM threat?

Cirincione: Absolutely not. It is the biggest scam in history. This program is out of whack, and this budget is unsustainable.

[snip]

John Yarmuth (D-KY): What should we be spending our money on?

Cirincione: We need a more comprehensive threat assessment, and then we need to do our funding based on that. We need to cut back funding and let the joint chiefs decide how to distribute it.

[snip]

Chris Van Hollen (D-MD): During the Bush administration, ground-based missile defense (GMD) has been deployed despite a test success rate of 50% on “dumbed-down” tests. Would this even succeed?

Cirincione: The history of this program is that the threats and capabilities have been inflated. So, funding is being inflated. You’ve got to restore some realism. We have never had a realistic test, not even under the most primitive conditions. Without these tests, how can Congress justify deploying? You have to fly before you buy. We need to cut back and give funding to our actual number one threat: preventing another 9/11 with the nuclear component.
Spring: I think you are describing a cycle of failure, where you’re going to cut funding for testing even while saying more testing is necessary.
Flynn: I wish I could take the money you cut and use it for my stuff. There is a disconnect between how much we spend on the threat of containers getting to the US, which is a miniscule amount of funding, as compared to what we have put into the missile defense system.

Dan Burton (R-IN): We need a more complete threat assessment, and I still think we need ABM at all three levels (inter-continental, intermediate, and short-range).

Tierney: We have a tendency to overexaggerate the capacity of others, for example with Iran and North Korea. Neither country has come even remotely close to completing ICBMs, correct?

Hildreth: I would agree, yes. You can’t get around issues without testing, and we just don’t see these countries doing that.

In sum, the consensus opinion of the witnesses (Spring notwithstanding) was that:

• The ballistic missile threat has been wildly inflated
  
• The U.S. is far more likely to be attacked with WMD transferred via non-missile means such as a dirty bomb than by ICBMs
  
• The opportunity costs of spending roughly $10 billion a year on missile defense are enormous. According to Flynn, the combined budgets for funding domestic and international maritime and port of entry interdiction efforts and nuclear detection activities is equal to roughly one-half of the annual budget for developing missile defense.
  
• The Missile Defense Agency should not be exempted from normal acquisition, testing and reporting requirements
• We need a comprehensive assessment of the threat posed by ballistic missiles in relation to other threats, such as threats to the homeland transferred via non-missile means

National Security Legislative Wrap-up

This week, both the Senate and the House are expected to take up the Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Resolution. Both Budget Committees approved the Bush Administration's request: $542 billion for defense budget authority (function 050 in the budget) plus $70 billion as a down payment for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While some Members of Congress may try to increase the Iraq and Afghanistan money to a more realistic total of about $170 billion for the next fiscal year, the President's overall defense total is likely to be endorsed. In contrast, the House Budget Resolution includes $37 billion for the international affairs budget.

Over the weekend, the President vetoed the bill barring waterboarding by the intelligence community, and there are not sufficient votes to overcome the veto.

Downing a Sick Satellite, or Upping the Arms Race?

The Center's Katie Mounts recently put together a terrific piece on the long-term ramifications of the decision by the United States to shoot down its failing spy satellite. The full text of the article is provided below.

Downing a Sick Satellite, or Upping the Arms Race?

When the White House announced in January that a failed U.S. intelligence satellite would soon fall out of orbit to the Earth, Bush administration officials claimed the potential for risk was “very small."

That story quickly changed, however, in order to launch an experiment with dangerous consequences. Claiming that the satellite’s toxic fuel tank could land and explode in a populated area – an extremely unlikely scenario – the Pentagon elected to attempt to destroy the satellite with an anti-ballistic missile. The goal was to rupture the gas tank, causing the fuel to disperse safely at a high altitude.

The administration’s explanation unravels, however, when one looks beyond the cover story. Was the United States using a failed satellite as cover for target practice to develop high-tech space weapons? Maybe Star Wars isn't just for the big screen after all.

The satellite’s toxic fuel might have been vaporized from the heat of re-entry or expelled through the tank's openings even without being hit. When the missile was launched and succeeded in striking its target, there was still a chance it would fail to burst the fuel tank. As for the risk to human life, it is worth pointing out that no falling satellite has ever caused a human casualty.

Some experts placed the chance of intercepting the satellite as low as 50 percent. Even Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright only gave it a "reasonably high opportunity for success" -- hardly enough to inspire confidence, especially when you consider a price tag of $40 million to $60 million to carry out the mission.

Beyond these immediate costs, the operation calls into question the logic of excessive spending on ballistic missile defense, the most expensive weapons system in the Pentagon budget. The United States has already spent over $200 billion on missile defense to date, and the Pentagon proposes to spend another $12 billion in 2009. This latest stunt may be a last-ditch effort for the Missile Defense Agency to demonstrate that its product works before facing possible budget cuts under the next administration.

The political costs of this stunt are also high. When it comes to targeting a satellite, missile defense clearly becomes an offensive weapon, not just defensive.

America has not conducted an anti-satellite test since the 1980s because of concerns over dangerous debris left in the Earth's orbit. The United States objected loudly when China destroyed one of its own failing satellites in January 2007 and created thousands of pieces of space debris. An American test now is not just perceived as hypocritical by the international community, but appears to the Chinese as a response to their test. Should the United States, more reliant on satellite technology than any other country, launch a space arms race with China, it undoubtedly has the most to lose.

The Bush administration's announcement came in the wake of the U.S. rejection of a draft Russian and Chinese treaty banning weapons in space. At a time when the United States needs these countries’ cooperation, especially in regards to Iran and North Korea, this missile strike jeopardizes larger U.S. foreign policy goals.

In light of this larger context, the Bush administration should not be surprised that experts and the American public do not take their humanitarian justification for this operation at face value. After all, this wouldn’t be the first time the Bush White House has provided false justification for a controversial – and later regrettable – foreign policy decision.

Ballistic Missile Defense: An Update

The last few weeks have witnessed some important developments in the arena of ballistic missile defense.

Significantly, during his recent visit to the United States, Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek announced that U.S. and Czech negotiators are nearing an agreement on placing an early warning radar base in the Czech Republic.

Recall that in January 2007, the Bush administration asked that formal negotiations begin on the proposed deployment of a ground-based mid-course defense (GMD) element of the larger Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) in Europe to defend against an Iranian missile threat. In addition to the radar base in the Czech Republic, the system would include 10 interceptors in Poland, all of which would be completed by 2013 at a cost of $4.04 billion. The FY2008 Defense Appropriations Bill (H.R. 3222; P.L. 110-114) eliminated the Bush administration’s request for $85 million for the European site construction, but permits $225 million for further study of the proposed European GMD element.

While negotiations between Washington and Prague appear to be coming to a successful conclusion, Poland continues to tie acceptance of the U.S. plan to support from Washington for modernizing the Polish armed forces and providing Poland with U.S. air defense systems. Missile defense promises to figure prominently in talks between Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and President Bush scheduled for later this week. No final deal can be reached until both the Czech Republic and Poland agree to the U.S. proposal.

In related news, on February 26, the GAO released a study entitled “Assessment of DOD Efforts to Enhance Missile Defense Capabilities and Oversight” (GAO’s annual report on missile defense is in draft and is slated to be issued in final by March 15). The study took a broad look at BMDS over the course of the past year, and made the following conclusions:

• MDA has fielded additional new assets, enhanced capability of some existing assets, and achieved most test objectives
  
• However, the goals originally set by MDA for Block 2006 were not met, as it ultimately fielded fewer assets, increased costs by about $1 billion, and conducted fewer tests
  
• GAO was unable to assess whether MDA met its overall performance goal because (1) there have not been enough flight tests to validate the models and simulations that are used to predict system-level performance, (2) some interceptors may not be reliable, and (3) tests done to date have been developmental in nature

What do these new developments tell us about the recent and future trajectory of an integrated BMDS? First, on the issue of U.S.-Poland negotiations, it seems clear that the new government of Prime Minister Tusk has been a tougher negotiator (in demanding more for Poland) than the coalition of his predecessor, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Given that any agreement to base interceptors in Poland is subject to the approval of the Polish parliament, Tusk’s harder line, coupled with the fact that the majority of Poles disagree with the U.S. proposal to place interceptors in their country, suggests that interceptors will not be put in Poland anytime soon.

A similar dynamic is at work in the Czech Republic, despite the fact that Washington and Prague are nearing an agreement on the radar base. Many Czechs are hostile to the U.S. proposal, and any agreement will have to be ratified by the Czech parliament (and perhaps even survive a public referendum). Consequently, as a recent CRS report puts it, “approval is not a foregone conclusion.”

Second, the GAO study does nothing to ally the doubts of critics (see here and here for examples) who question the technical feasibility and cost-effectives of GMD both in Europe and on the American west coast. Since the 1980s, DOD has spent more than $100 billion on missile defense, and it estimates that another $50 billion will need to be spent between FY2008 and FY2013. Were GMD likely to result in a net increase in U.S. security, perhaps such enormous costs could be justified. That most of the available evidence points in the opposite direction suggests that America should stop further deployment of GBD.

National Security Legislative Wrap-up

Last week, the Senate spent three days of debate on Iraq with no final vote on either of the measures introduced by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI). The first measure would have cut funding for U.S. troops 120 days after enactment of the measure except for specified purposes, including bringing troops home. The second measure would have required an Administration report to Congress on its strategy for combating al Qaeda.

On March 5, the Senate and House Budget Committees are slated to markup or write the Fiscal Year 2009 Budget Resolution, and both chambers are expected to take up the measure next week.

Work on the $100 billion-plus fiscal year 2008 Supplemental Appropriations bill to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been put off, perhaps until April. The measure is expected to be the vehicle for new fights over withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq and perhaps many other issues.