http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Nuclear.html
March 12, 2002
Shays-Kucinich | "Theological Fascination With Missile Defense,"
Lawmakers Doubt Need for Defense Plan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republican and Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday questioned the Bush administration's spending on missile defense, arguing that a terrorist is more likely to attack by truck or by boat.
"Why would someone send a missile when they can just put it in a suitcase?" Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., asked a panel of experts at a hearing on protecting the United States from terrorism. "It's inexcusable for this administration not to recognize that possibility and act on it."
"We can't afford to waste billions of dollars" because of the Bush administration's "theological fascination with missile defense," said Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio. "No threat assessment exists to justify the spending."
U.S. intelligence agencies say it is far more likely that a bomb would be delivered by a truck or a boat than by a ballistic missile. A non-missile attack would be cheaper and more reliable and it could not be traced easily to the country responsible. Kucinich also railed against recent administration comments that the United States might use a nuclear weapon in a first strike, calling it the "height of immorality ... to throw that stuff around as if it were casual locker-room banter."
The administration comments followed news reports on its new Nuclear Posture Review, which says the Pentagon is developing contingency plans for using nuclear weapons against countries developing weapons of mass destruction. The United States has never ruled out using nuclear weapons against a nuclear-armed enemy, said Secretary of State Colin Powell, contending the policy should deter any would-be attacker.
"We think it is best for any potential adversary out there to have uncertainty in his calculus," Powell said Sunday.
"People are playing with the apocalypse," said Kucinich, top Democrat on the national security subcommittee. "These are doomsday scenarios ... (and) it needs to be challenged."
Shays, the subcommittee chairman, said he hesitated to mention the first-strike comments "because I don't give them any validity."
Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace played down the need for a missile defense system, saying, "A major reason why the United States was so unprepared for terrorist attacks is that our national threat assessments for the past few years have consistently pointed policy-makers in the wrong direction."
But former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, now at the Heritage Foundation, called creating a missile defense system a top priority. He cited studies led by current Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that found a number of nations have ballistic missile capability as well as weapons of mass destruction.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, supporting Meese's view, said he doesn't have confidence in predictions 10 to 15 years in the future, like those made by the intelligence agencies.
"One cannot say what the world will look like in 10 years," Bremer said. Randall Larsen, director of the ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, said the nation's top focus should be bioterrorism: "Our enemies know how poorly we responded" to the anthrax letter attacks.
Henry L. Hinton of the General Accounting Office called anew for the administration to develop a threat and risk assessment, which the committee supports.
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