Faced with this conundrum, faced with the reality that violating treaties is not something that the U.S. does lightly, even in the face of significant provocation, the administration tried a series of steps. If tried consulting with the Soviets, it tried discussing the problems both publicly and in private session with the Congress. It consulted exhaustively with its allies. It suggested a willingness to forbear on responding to Soviet violations for a period of time in the hopes that that would bring the Soviets back into compliance. And nothing worked. The pattern, the gravity, the variety of Soviet violations increased virtually month by month. Finally, in May of this year, having tried these various other steps, the President took what I believe is, whether you agree with him or not, a courageous and direct step. In fact, I might just add parenthetically that in the midst of this debate about what we should do about the ABM Treaty that there are many who believe that what we should do about the ABM Treaty in the face of the Soviet violation of that Treaty is precisely what the President has done under the SALT Treaty, which is to say enough, we will not accept unilateral compliance to the entire treaty which is being selectively adhered to at best by the Soviets. My statement tries to draw out some of the areas in which these violations have occurred, and the significance of those violations, but I could encourage this committee as it thinks about taking so momentous a step as repudiating the President of the U.S., who has I think taken a courageous and difficult step in the face of these challenges from the Soviet Union, that it consider what this means for the process of arms control. It is often argued that the reason for taking the step of reimposing upon the U.S. compliance with the MIRV sublimits is that if we were to fail to do so, the arms control process will be shattered. I submit to you, gentlemen, that the arms control process may not survive a practice whereby the Soviet Union can negotiate with us agreements and then pick and choose what will be complied with, knowing full well that either through the benevolence of the Executive Branch or through the muscle of the Legislative Branch the U.S. will indefinitely, notwithstanding violations, observe the agreements in effect in toto. That, it seems to me, is a formula for at best lousy arms control and at worst very likely a process that will not give rise to new agreements of the kind that we are seeking, namely agreements which result in arms reductions, but rather the perpetuation of agreements which facilitate, if not legitimize Soviet buildups. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I may suggest, Mr. Hawes may be the proper person to lead the follow-up. [The statement of Mr. Gaffney follows:] Testimony of Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. before the House Appropriations Committee Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank you for inviting me to contribute to the Committee's deliberations on arms control-related. amendments attached to the bill providing supplemental appropriations to the Department of Defense. These amendments concern issues of direct and profound importance to the national security of the United States and that of our allies and friends: the credibility of our nuclear forces, upon which the Western alliance must continue to rely for the foreseeable future to deter Soviet aggression; and our ability to achieve arms control agreements providing for deep, equitable, and effectively verifiable reductions Given the magnitude of these issues, as well as the hard historical experience that we can draw upon in formulating our nation's defense and arms control policies, it is very disappointing to see that the proposed amendments to be considered by this Committee would resuscitate simplistic, discredited, and indeed reckless approaches. Were these amendments to be enacted by the House, they would weaken our defense and arms control policies even if they ultimately were rejected by the Congress. And it should be recalled that in his State of the Union address, when commenting on the possibility of legislative proposals such as those under consideration today, the President promised that he would veto any such legislation. Turning first to the proposed amendment that would ban all U.S. nuclear testing above 1 kiloton, my sad sense of "deja vu" is 2. compounded by more than a little amazement. How is it possible that the amendment's proponents could have ignored the overwhelming evidence put forward by the Administration over the past year with regard to our national security requirements for continued nuclear testing? - in Last September 23rd, for example, Secretary of Defense Weinberger wrote an open letter to Congress (a personal copy of which was sent to each Member of this Committee) that set out in great detail why nuclear testing is essential to ensure the safety, reliability, effectiveness, and survivability of our nuclear weapons short, the credibility the U.S. deterrent. In that letter, Secretary Weinberger pointed out that Congress has insisted forcefully has he -- on the need for the highest performance and safety standards as well as the most stringent testing for non-nuclear defense systems. It is sadly ironic then that many in Congress, nonetheless, are prepared to consider banning effective testing of defense systems which we depend on most critically for deterrence and which rely on the most complex technologies - our nuclear weapons. -- as In addition, the Secretary outlined some of the specific and dire consequences to be expected should the House amendment on testing be enacted: The introduction of state-of-the-art safety and security weapons that do not yet have them, would be halted. Stockpile testing, such as that which allowed us to fix defects that were suddenly discovered in our Polaris submarinelaunched ballistic missiles - defects which could have 3. rendered the vast majority of weapons in our sea-based As the independent Directors of the National Laboratories have stated, while non-nuclear quality assurance/reliability testing sometimes detects problems with the nuclear components of warheads, the most serious stockpile problems are only revealed and solved by nuclear tests. The small ICBM program would become highly problematical, We would be forced to forgo nuclear effects tests, which are The exploration of advanced nuclear concepts needed to avoid - Finally, while our technical base and expertise would atrophy (as was the case in the 1958-61 moratorium that was broken by the Soviets), the Soviets could keep their massive nuclear weapon establishment intact. Proponents of a U.S. testing cut-off often claim, of course, that this would somehow slow the "arms race". But as Secretary Weinberger pointed out, such a cut-off would not eliminate a single 4. existing weapon. In fact, it is in no small measure thanks to nuclear testing that we have been able to introduce newer, safer, and more effective systems while actually reducing the numbers of weapons in our nuclear arsenal by one-third from what we had twenty years ago. We have, moreover, been able to reduce the explosive power of our arsenal to one-quarter of the level fielded by the U.S. two decades ago. Finally, while the House measure would appear to acknowledge the importance of verifying Soviet compliance with agreements on testing limitations a point made repeatedly by this Administration - - for the past several years its provisions in fact would not that despite the efforts and optimistic predictions seismologists since 1974, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union signed the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT) limiting the yield of individual nuclear weapon tests to 150 kilotons, those seismologists have yet to produce better than a factor-of-two uncertainty level in their estimates of Soviet yields. Yet the proposed amendment would have us commit ourselves to an unsafe and inequitable ban and then, in effect, "trust" seismologists to find a solution to an inherently insolvable verification problem. As just one example, the proposed amendment ignores altogether the very real possibility that, particularly in a one-kiloton regime, the Soviets could attempt to circumvent the treaty by testing in outer space, remote ocean areas, or in the atmosphere above remote parts of the world where U.S. monitoring capabilities are minimal. And lest the significance of possible Soviet clandestine testing be dismissed, it should be |