THE TIME FOR MISSILE
 DEFENSE IS NOW
 SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS
 SERVICE

 Date: Friday, September 10, 1999

 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH

 Scripps Howard News Service

 Memo: Advance for SUNDAY release

 Column
 (Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Denver
 Rocky Mountain News.)

 Edition: 

 Frank Gaffney Jr. poses the question about missile
 defense in dramatic terms. "Are we going to have this
 defense before we need it, or after?"

 Gaffney, who worked on arms control policy in the
 Reagan administration and now heads the Center for
 Security Policy, was speaking at "The Weekend," a
 convention for conservatives held over Labor Day
 weekend at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs, Colo.

 The threat is no longer thousands of ballistic missiles
 launched simultaneously, as it was during the Cold War.
 Instead, he said, "It's the onesies and twosies from
 countries we may not be able to deter."

 And what countries might those be? On Thursday, the
 CIA released a summary of a 1998 classified intelligence
 report on ballistic missiles.

 According to the Associated Press, the agency said North
 Korea was most likely to have long range missiles by
 2015, that Iran probably would and Iraq possibly.

 That's not quite so pessimistic as the Rumsfeld
 Commission, which said last year that it believed North
 Korea and Iran would have missiles able to reach the
 United States within five years. But it's quite bad enough,
 and right now, the CIA report says, short-range missiles
 are an "immediate, serious and growing threat to U.S.
 forces, interests and allies."

 Gaffney believes the United States should deploy a
 missile defense as quickly as possible, and he even has a
 plausible way to do it at modest cost - modest, at least, in
 comparison to rebuilding Los Angeles after a nuclear
 attack - adapt the Navy's AEGIS system of weapons
 control, already deployed on 65 ships that could launch
 high-altitude interceptors.

 He adds that a good many Americans are surprised to
 learn we don't have a missile defense now.

 The reason we don't is that it would violate the 1972
 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, which
 among other things bans any kind of sea-based missile
 defense.

 The Soviet Union no longer exists, of course, but that has
 been no obstacle to the Clinton administration, which has
 conferred the benefits the Soviet Union enjoyed under
 the treaty on Russia, its successor state.

 "They are monomaniacally determined to defend the
 treaty instead of the nation," Gaffney says. He believes
 that under international law a treaty is void once the other
 party to it disappears, and even while it was operative the
 United States had the option of withdrawing with six
 months' notice.

 Congress has passed and Clinton signed the 1999 Missile
 Defense Act, which makes it U.S. policy to deploy
 anti-missile defense as soon as it is technologically
 feasible. But Clinton continues to maintain there has been
 no decision on deployment, and his joint statement with
 Russian President Boris Yeltsin on the ABM talks that
 will resume in Washington Sept. 17 commits the United
 States to maintaining the treaty, in effect giving Russia a
 veto over our missile defense.

 They are likely to exercise their veto. In June, when I
 traveled with a group of journalists to Russia, officials of
 the Foreign Ministry who briefed us on arms control
 made it clear they thought all the American talk about
 North Korea and Iran was simply a cover-up for our real
 intentions to make the United States invulnerable so we
 could launch a massive attack against Russia with
 impunity.

 That's nonsense (though none of us on the trip was rude
 enough to tell our hosts so). Apart from the fact that the
 United States has no strategic interest whatsoever in
 destroying Russia, as long as it is no threat to us, no one
 believes we are anywhere near having the technology to
 be certain we can knock down every single missile in a
 flight of hundreds, or thousands.

 Even with the exponential growth of computer capacity
 since former President Ronald Reagan first proposed the
 Strategic Defense Initiative, we're only just barely at the
 point of being able to hit one incoming missile "hitting a
 bullet with a bullet," as it is fairly described.

 Perhaps the Russians' irrational fears could be dispelled
 with another Reagan-era suggestion - if we succeed in
 deploying a missile defense, give it to them. Why not, if
 it's true that the threat to us lies elsewhere?

 But if not, their opposition should not determine
 American policy. The time for a missile defense is
 before, not after, a missile attack.