Is Alaskan Field the Home for Bush's Shield of Dreams?
Jul 11, 2001
Contact: Chris Madison - 202.546.7095 × 135 / Luke Warren - 202.546.0795 × 127
Just days before it launches another test of the snafu-plagued missile defense system from California and the Marshall Islands, the Bush Administration is making some devious missile defense moves in a totally different direction: Alaska.
The Administration’s latest plan, provided to the media and Congressional staff in recent days, is to build a new missile defense test facility at Fort Greely, Alaska that would be used to store interceptor missiles that would be test-launched from Kodiak Island. However, this testing facility could easily be upgraded to a bare-bones missile defense system as early as 2004, and is in fact exactly the same site that the Pentagon has marked for the initial deployment of a national anti-missile system.
“The Administration’s plan is too clever by half,” said John Isaacs of the Council for a Livable World. “This is a classic “camel’s nose under the tent” to start the money flowing without having to show that the system will work. But they’re not fooling anyone.”
The move also allows the Administration to begin walking away from the 1972 ABM Treaty, which President Bush and other officials have ridiculed as a “relic.” The treaty prohibits deploying a missile defense system anywhere but at a single approved site - North Dakota.
“The Administration is making a virtue out of obfuscation,” said Chris Madison, director of the missile defense campaign at the Center for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation. “Are they testing or deploying? Are they violating the ABM Treaty or not? We simply don’t know on either count, and that’s the way they seem to want it.”
The Administration recently submitted to Congress a revised FY2002 Defense Department budget that includes $8.3 billion in spending for missile defense, a 57 % increase over 2001 levels. Much of the increase is for more robust research and development on this proposed system, that still does not work.
“The whole question of missile defense is too important to be accomplished through sleight of hand,” said Isaacs. “It is foolhardy to break the ABM Treaty that has helped prevent nuclear war for a generation, particularly with a system that has not been shown to work. That is still some years away.”
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