20 October 1999
(Ken Bacon stresses bilateral cooperation to avoid costly nuclear errors) (1060) By Susan Ellis Washington File Staff Writer Washington -- Defense Department Spokesman Ken Bacon, in remarks to international reporters at the State Department's Foreign Press Center October 20, offered wide-ranging perspectives on the U.S. defense posture and relationships with overseas allies. He emphasized that the United States has undertaken "a very significant scaling back on (its) reliance on tactical or theatre nuclear weapons in just the last decade," and stressed the importance the nation places on adherence to arms treaties. Asked whether the United States plans new initiatives to convince Russia to change its position on the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, Bacon said the treaty "is a fundamental building block of arms control. We want the treaty to continue. But the treaty allows for review and change and we believe some changes are appropriate to allow us and Russia to address new threats on the horizon." He named the threats as limited attacks, when compared to "strategic nuclear attacks that Russia and the United States prepared for over the decades (during the years of the Cold War)." He said that, in pursuit of an agreement on the ABM Treaty, Defense Secretary Cohen went to Moscow and met with his counterpart, "Marshal (Igor) Sergeyev, the former commander of the strategic rocket force, so he's very knowledgeable about these issues." They discussed some of the changes the U.S. would like to make, Bacon said, adding, "We will continue to talk with the Russians." Bacon said the cogent point is that the National Missile Defense System, "should President Clinton decide to deploy it next summer, and the changes we want to make in the ABM Treaty, do not threaten Russia. What we're building and what we're proposing would do nothing to stop the type of attack that Russia could today launch against the U.S. or any other country in the world. What we're looking at is a very limited system that could deal with a very small number of warheads coming at us, not the thousands that Russia could launch today under the current limits. "We think this is an important point. We think that Russia faces some of the same threats that we do from emerging nuclear powers that may not respond to deterrents in the same way that Russia and the U.S. have, and therefore, we will continue to talk with them on this." Asked what help Russia might expect from the United States to deter attacks, Bacon said that "cooperation" would be a better word. "Russia has an extremely sophisticated strategic rocket force; an extremely sophisticated radar technology. Unlike the United States, Russia does have a National Missile Defense System deployed around Moscow. We don't have one deployed anywhere in the United States now. So Russia has considerable knowledge and skill in this area," Bacon said. The United States is proposing that both countries cooperate to address "what we believe is a threat to both countries," he said. There are no firm proposals at this stage, he added, but rather "types of cooperative events we could approach together. There are still a lot of decisions to be made both in Moscow and Washington on this." The crucial point, Bacon said, "is that we see this as a common problem and there are common solutions" to be reached by the U.S. and Russia working together. As examples of such cooperative ventures, Bacon said the Russians "could deal with specific radars...with sharing surveillance technology. One thing discussed publicly is the Clinton-Yeltsin proposal for a shared early warning center. Russia has volunteered to establish that center in Moscow. There have been discussions under way on our side, conducted by Assistant Secretary of Defense Ted Warner. These are ways that build on the confidence-building measures that we already have between our two countries." The shared early warning center, he said, "would have Russian and American technicians sitting together, reviewing radar, infrared and other data that indicates missile launches -- so that we sort of eliminate chances for miscommunication and misunderstanding in crisis situations, whether they're real crises or anomalies that occur sometimes." To illustrate how such bilateral cooperation could prevent misunderstanding, he explained that "a huge gas fire somewhere in the world...can sometimes be picked up on our satellites and misinterpreted as a missile launch. This is a problem that's common to both countries and it's happened in the past." Bacon was asked about a study published October 20 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, based on information on the U.S. nuclear program released as a result of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. The article stated that during the Cold War years, the United States had placed nuclear weapons in some allied nations without the knowledge of their leaders. The U.S., Bacon said, has a "longstanding policy worked out in cooperation" with its allies around the world "to not comment specifically on where we or other NATO allies maintained tactical nuclear weapons." The policy, he added, is both for security reasons and because of the domestic political sensitivities of some of the host countries. "But I can tell you that now in the very limited number of places that we, as a member of the NATO alliance, have nuclear weapons, it's done with the consent of the host countries," Bacon said. Further, he said, the article's writers "made inferences or extrapolations about which countries were included, and they did this by using some alphabetical guesswork. They assumed that countries were listed in alphabetical order. Some of their guesses are wrong." However, he stressed, "the basic point that the article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists makes is that at one time, during the height of the Cold War, the 1950s, 60s and 70s, we did have a large number of tactical nuclear weapons deployed around the world. And the article also makes the point that that number has decreased dramatically since the height of the Cold War and, as it points out in the last paragraph...now tactical nuclear weapons are a very small part of our defensive arsenal." (The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State)