13 July 2000 Congressional Report: Three Key Senate Democrats Urge Delay on Missile Defense Decision Three key Democratic members of the U.S. Senate said July 13 that any decision on whether to move toward deployment of the proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) system should be deferred. The three -- Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, and Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware -- told reporters at a news briefing at the U.S. capitol that that is particularly true in light of the failure of the most recent system test. Daschle noted that President Clinton had laid out four fundamental criteria on which to base a decision, listing those as "the cost of the system,...the threat the nation faces,... the operational effectiveness, and... the impact on our overall national security." "I do not believe today that the NMD would satisfy those criteria," Daschle said, adding he intends "to propose to the president that he delay a decision," leaving that decision to the new president who takes office next year. Itemizing his concerns about NMD, Daschle argued that "we don't have sufficient information about its technological feasibility, we really don't know what its impact is going to be on ABM (the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia), we really don't know its effect on overall national security." Levin, the senior Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that at least two of the four Clinton-set criteria for making a decision have not been met. "There is no way that we can say that this system will be operationally effective, given the failure of this last test," Levin said. And, perhaps most importantly, "there is no way...that we will be more secure with this system than without it," he added. While holding the NMD decision in abeyance, Levin urged, Clinton should "continue to seek to negotiate with the Russians a modification in the ABM Treaty, so that if we can come up with an operational system, one that would make us more secure, that then we would be able to do so consistent with a modified treaty with the Russians." Levin said the driving force for a decision this year has been the desire to be able to deploy the system by 2005. But, he contended, 2005 "is now a totally unrealistic date," and so the "requirement that there be a decision this year has faded away." Biden, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, went even further than his colleagues, declaring that "no president -- this one or the next one, unless things change drastically -- should in fact deploy this system." But, he added, "at a minimum, we should defer." "If we pour concrete in Alaska now (to begin preparations for deployment), in my humble opinion, we should pour concrete in the cavity of our brains," Biden said. The senator advocated continued testing, along with serious consideration of alternative systems to the NMD. Also, he said, "we should be simultaneously and equally as ardently discussing this with our adversaries as well as our allies." Speculating about other nations' possible reactions to U.S. deployment of NMD, Biden said that if such a move "would result in China going from 18 to 800 ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), Japan becoming a nuclear power, the Korean peninsula deploying, I would suggest that would make us less secure. "Therefore, I don't know how anyone could rationally reach the decision" to deploy without prior discussions with all parties, he said. (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov) Return to the Washington File