“Star Wars” and the Senator

Bush has cast himself as the heir to Ronald Reagan’s legacy: the president who will make the Gipper’s missile shield a reality. NMD was in many ways the centerpiece of his defense platform during the 2000 campaign, and he’s made it a priority while in office. On August 17, Bush told Boeing employees in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania, that the Alaska-based interceptor loaded in July marked “the beginning of a missile-defense system that was envisioned by Ronald Reagan.”

Following the president’s speech, Kerry adviser Rand Beers issued a statement deriding the administration’s “near obsession” with NMD in the months prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks. “Bush and his closest advisers were preoccupied with missile defense,” he said, “and their misunderstanding about the threats we face continues to this day.” According to Beers, Kerry feels an “effective” NMD is “crucial to our national security strategy,” but he “also understands the importance of facing our most pressing national security threats while continuing to develop and deploy a national missile defense which we know will work.”

Though Beers’s statement was somewhat muddled, Kerry himself was unequivocal when responding to a “Council for a Livable World” survey of the Democratic primary field late last year. One of the questions asked: “Do you support or oppose the current plan to deploy a ground-based version of a national missile defense in Alaska and California by the fall of 2004? Please feel free to discuss your administration’s plans for missile defense.” Most of the candidates described their broader philosophy on NMD in several sentences. But Kerry offered just a one-word answer: “Oppose.” In a major foreign policy address on June 3, he hedged a bit, vowing to “build missile defense, but not at the cost of other pressing priorities.” He did, however, call NMD the “wrong priority” at this time, and he pledged to scale back funding in order to expand the active-duty Army by 40,000 troops.

THAT KERRY WOULD SLASH the NMD budget comes as no surprise. Indeed, over the past 20 years, he has been one of the Senate’s most consistent opponents of missile-defense funding, testing, and implementation. His record speaks for itself.

During Kerry’s successful 1984 Senate campaign, he vigorously courted nuclear freeze activists, who called for disarmament and opposed President Reagan’s Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI). Kerry ran as a staunchly pro-freeze candidate. According to the Boston Globe, he even modified his original responses to a Freeze Voter ’84 questionnaire in order to gain a perfect score (and thus the group’s endorsement). Betsy Taylor, who headed Freeze Voter ’84, later claimed the freeze issue had been “a key factor” in Kerry’s victory.

As a freshman senator in 1985, Kerry emerged as a leading critic of SDI (dubbed “Star Wars” by its detractors). He sponsored an amendment to the 1986 authorization for SDI that halted funding at its 1985 level. Going ahead with Reagan’s SDI program, he warned his colleagues, would violate “the single-most important arms-control treaty of our time,” the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, and set off a “new and unrestrained competition” with the Soviet Union. The Senate ultimately rejected Kerry’s amendment in June 1985 by a vote of 78-21, along with three other amendments to trim SDI’s budget. (Of the four, Kerry’s had proposed the deepest cuts and was rejected by the widest margin.) A year later, Kerry introduced legislation to prohibit testing of the nuclear-powered X-ray lasers used in SDI. “The choice we really face,” he said at the time, “is a choice of arms control or ‘Star Wars,’ but not necessarily both.” The Senate defeated Kerry’s proposed ban by a 61-33 vote in August 1986.

Throughout the first Bush and Clinton administrations, Kerry repeatedly voted to cut or freeze spending on both NMD and theater defense systems (such as the Patriot missile). All told, he has voted against funding missile defense at least 50 times in the Senate. True, he supported the 1999 National Missile Defense Act, which passed 97-3 and called for deploying NMD as soon as it was technologically feasible. But despite his “yes” vote, Kerry nonetheless expressed unease with “the building of a system that simply creates greater unrest, greater instability, greater question marks.” At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in March 2000, he argued that the “deterrent balance is altered by the deployment of a missile defense system, because obviously it affects what people think is their strategic hit capacity that protects them. It’s the mutual assured destruction theory that protected us for so many years. If you can’t sufficiently knock down enough missiles to have in fact impacted that equation, then the question ought to be properly asked why you’re deploying it in the first place. And we haven’t asked that question, and we certainly haven’t found the answer for it.”

Since George W. Bush entered the White House, Kerry has been sharply critical of the president’s NMD plan. In a May 2001 speech on the Senate floor, Kerry stressed that when defending against nuclear blackmail by outlaw regimes, “missile defense is only a response of last resort, when diplomacy and deterrence have failed. And given that no missile defense system will be 100 percent effective, we must not set aside the logic of deterrence that has kept us safe for 40 years.” He supported amending the ABM Treaty “to reflect our changed security environment. But to abandon it all together is to welcome an arms race that will make us more vulnerable, not less.” (In December 2001, President Bush formally announced U.S. withdrawal from the treaty, effective as of June 2002.) A month later, when Bush was in Europe promoting NMD, Kerry went on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews and said, “The missile shield that could defend the United States against any incoming missile is a fantasy. It is too expensive. It won’t work. And that’s what people believe will drive an arms race.” He has also denounced what may be the next stage of NMD development–the militarization (or “weaponization”) of outer space.

Taken together, Kerry’s record indicates a firm skepticism, bordering on outright hostility, toward missile defense. Perhaps the most salient indication of how little Kerry values NMD is the 2004 Democratic platform–which doesn’t even mention missile defense. (Not once.)

Kerry’s stance should hearten NMD critics, who include most of the Democratic party’s base. For it suggests that the progress made thus far at Fort Greely, Alaska, could be meaningless unless George W. Bush is reelected.

Duncan Currie is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.