Special report: George Bush's America
Martin Kettle in Washington Tuesday May 1, 2001 The Guardian
George Bush will launch the biggest weapons policy gamble of his presidency today when he announces that Washington is willing to spend whatever it takes to build its controversial missile defence shield. The announcement, which involves crucial decisions for America's allies including Britain, will put relations between the US, EU and Russia to their most critical test since Ronald Reagan's 1980s cruise missile deployments.
On the day which the former Soviet Union always chose to parade its military might, Mr Bush will tell a May Day military audience that the US is preparing to scrap the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty which both Russia and China claim is the cornerstone of arms control agreements.
The scrapping of the treaty paves the way for a vastly more ambitious missile defence programme than anything the Pentagon has yet contemplated.
Instead of the relatively limited but still controversial national missile defence system developed under Bill Clinton, Mr Bush intends to build a "multi-layered" shield for the US and its allies, using sea- and space-based radars, lasers and interceptors, in a project reminiscent of the Reagan-era "Star Wars" system.
The Clinton administration's plans were confined to 100 land-based interceptors in Alaska that were intended to provide a shield for the US.
The 1972 treaty explicitly bans the US and Russia from developing national missile interceptor systems for defence, and is regarded by most countries as the foundation of three decades of negotiations to prevent arms proliferation. Military chiefs and Republican politicians in the US have long disliked the treaty, however, and have won the argument in the new administration.
"We will deploy defences as soon as possible. Therefore we believe that the ABM treaty will have to be replaced, eliminated or changed in a fundamental way," a Bush administration official, Lucas Fischer, said in Denmark last week.
"Mr Bush appears to be on the threshold of unleashing nuclear anarchy," Dan Plesch of the British American Security Information Council in Washington, said.
In an attempt to cushion the inevitable blow which the decision will deliver to the existing structure of international arms control, Mr Bush is expected to signal US willingness to make deep new cuts in its nuclear arsenal, reducing the current 7,500 warheads by up to two-thirds.
The US is already committed to cutting its strategic nuclear warheads to 3,500 under the 1993 Start-2 strategic arms limitation treaty with Russia, but Mr Bush is expected to go further. Administration hawks believe such decisions should be made unilaterally, befitting the US's post-cold war status as the sole global superpower.
Mr Bush will also announce that the US is launching an intensive diplomatic offensive with Nato and Russia to win international acceptance for the missile shield plan. Britain will be a particularly important part of that persuasion effort because the US shield involves the upgrading of the Fylingdales radar station in north Yorkshire.
Yesterday he telephoned Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, the French president, to discuss today's announcement.
Teams of senior US officials are expected in European capitals within days in an exercise which governments on both sides of the Atlantic hope will give a face-saving cover of consultation to what most independent observers now see as a fait accompli .
President Bush is due to come to Europe next month for the first time to meet Nato chiefs in Brussels and to attend a US-EU summit in Gothenberg.
Britain and other US allies have pressed Washington to consult widely and in detail about its plans before announcing its conclusions, but there has never been any question of the administration's commitment to a policy which was at the heart of Mr Bush's election platform. "We want this to be a consultative process," the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, told a congressional committee last week. "But we're going forward with a missile defence."
Mr Bush is not expected to go into detail about his plans in today's speech to the National Defence University in Washington, but the announcement will make little attempt to hide the fact that his administration has already decided to commit billions of extra dollars over the coming decades to missile defences.
The plans were "a hairbrained scheme to defend the US against non-existent threats," Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said.