Obama To Give Missile Secrets To Russia With Love?
Security: A deputy defense secretary tells
Congress that the administration is indeed considering giving Moscow
sensitive Aegis ballistic missile defense data. We've gone from "trust
but verify" to "appease and surrender."
Brad Roberts testified before a House Armed Services subcommittee
Tuesday that the Obama administration was actively considering giving
Moscow classified missile defense data to allay Russian concerns about
the capabilities and intent of our proposed ballistic missile defense
system based in Europe to guard against missiles launched from Iran.
Roberts testified that the administration believes "cooperation could
be well-served by some limited sharing of classified information of a
certain kind if the proper rules were in place to do that." The Bush
administration also sought cooperation on missile defense, he noted.
The only thing President George W. Bush wanted to share with the
Russians was a heads-up on our plans to deploy long-range, ground-based
interceptors, such as those deployed in California and Alaska, in Poland
as well as missile defense radar in the Czech Republic.
He certainly wasn't offering them data such as the burnout velocity
of Raytheon Co.'s Standard Missile-3 interceptors, the centerpiece of
our Aegis ballistic missile defense system.
When the Russians protested, President Obama scuttled those plans and
substituted a more modest, layered defense capable of defending Europe
but not the continental U.S. against Iranian missiles. It was one of
many concessions Obama has made to Russia as part of pressing the
"reset" button in return for nothing but unfulfilled promises of
cooperation on Iran.
Typical of the way the president has treated loyal allies such as
Britain and Israel, the Poles were notified with a midnight phone call
in September 2009, the 70th anniversary of their country's invasion by
Soviet and German forces, telling them we were pulling the plug.
The Russians say our ballistic missile defense is really targeted
against them, which is nonsense. It would take more robust systems and
widespread deployment to pose such a threat. They are rearming, having
recently deployed their Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missile, and
want us as weak as possible.
At
one point, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov even proposed
that Russia be given a "red-button veto" over any use of a
European-based missile defense. "In practical terms," he said, "that
means our office will sit, for example, in Brussels and agree on a
red-button push to start an anti-missile," and that he would decide
whether we would shoot down a missile launched against us or our allies.
Obama wants to save the New Start Treaty that the Russians have
threatened to abandon if we try to fully implement the Strategic Defense
Initiative, President Reagan's dream of defeating a nuclear missile
attack. Russia has unilaterally asserted that any qualitative or
quantitative improvement in U.S. missile defenses would be grounds for
withdrawal from the treaty.
Section 1227 of the 2012 defense authorization bill prohibits
spending any funds that would be used to give Russian officials access
to sensitive missile-defense technology as part of a cooperation
agreement without first sending Congress a report identifying the
specific secrets, how they would be used and steps to protect the data
from compromise.
The president also must certify to Congress that Russia will not
share the secrets with other countries and that the data will not help
Russia "develop countermeasures" to U.S. defenses.
There's no telling where Obama's "outstanding relationship" will take
us. He betrayed the Poles and Czechs on European ground-based
intercepters and has limited further deployment of our own at Russian
insistence. He has also scuttled ready-to-deploy missile defense systems
such as the Air Force's Airborne Laser Program.
"The House Armed Services Committee will vigorously resist such compromise of U.S. missile defense capabilities," Ohio's Michael Turner, chairman of the House subcommittee, said last November.
We hope so. We don't know whom to trust less on this — Obama or the Russians.
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