By
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The missile defense favored by President Bush - a shield of global reach rather than covering only U.S. territory - bears a striking resemblance to the approach his father's Pentagon was pursuing a decade ago. The Clinton administration quickly killed it.
Bush will outline his intentions for missile defense in a speech Tuesday that aides say will link the concept to his desire for substantial, perhaps unilateral reductions in the U.S. nuclear missile arsenal.
The question Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been mulling is how to go beyond the current missile defense approach that is focused on a land-based intercept system designed to protect just the 50 U.S. states.
One approach reported to be under consideration by Rumsfeld and Bush is known as a "layered" missile defense.
It might combine the Clinton approach, which would use ground-launched rockets to intercept missiles midway through flight, with sea- and space-based weapons that would make the intercept during the hostile missile's ascent phase, or while its rocket plume was still burning inside the atmosphere.
The result - if it worked - would be a missile defense system with global reach.
Brig. Gen. Michael Hamel, director of space operations for the Air Force, said last week he supports that approach.
"Layered missile defense is absolutely the right way to go," he said.
More than 30 scientists and missile experts who oppose the administration's push for missile defense planned to gather at the Capitol on Wednesday to assert that the science of missile defense is too immature to justify moving ahead with a project expected to costs tens of billions of dollars.
The administration has made clear it will press ahead; when, at what cost and with what blueprint are the only questions.
How far-reaching a missile defense should be is a sensitive issue.
For one, it affects the degree of political support by Canada and U.S. allies in Europe. It also bears on the prohibitions against certain missile defenses spelled out in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.
The first Bush administration believed that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the emphasis in missile defense should shift from protection of the United States against an attack by thousands of nuclear missiles to protection of America and its allies against perhaps several dozen missiles of any origin.
It was called Global Protection Against Limited Strikes, or GPALS, and was made public at a Pentagon news conference Feb. 12, 1991.
The official who presented the $32 billion plan was Stephen J. Hadley - then an assistant secretary of defense, now a deputy national security adviser to Bush. The defense secretary at the time was Dick Cheney, now the vice president.
Rumsfeld may come up with a different acronym, but the concept of global protection is likely to be a key aspect of whatever missile defense program the administration decides to pursue, in the view of many private analysts who follow the subject closely.
"After the president's speech we will no longer be talking about national missile defense," but instead a global or international approach that is much broader - and probably much more expensive - than the Clinton administration was developing, said Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Alan Frye, an arms control expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he believes, based on his contacts with administration officials involved in the matter, that Bush will adopt a GPALS-like approach. He also thinks it highly unlikely Bush will announce a U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty, but rather that he is willing to discuss possible missile defense cooperation with the Russians.
Morton Halperin, director of policy planning at the State Department during the Clinton administration, said he believes the Russians would be more likely to engage in missile defense talks if Bush also committed to reducing the U.S. offensive nuclear arsenal to 1,500 or 1,000 warheads.
The United States now has about 7,200 active warheads and is committed to cutting to 3,500; Clinton favored cutting to 2,500, although that has not been made a binding commitment.
Rumsfeld has made a point lately of saying that he has stopped using the term "national missile defense," because "what's 'national' depends on where you live," as he put it to reporters March 8. His point was that if a U.S. missile defense is capable of protecting, say, Japan, then it is "national" to the Japanese but is global to everyone else.
