Beyond Threats to Destroy Women and Children

Pentagon Defense Policy Chief Speaks on Missile Defense

by J. Michael Waller

"The first and most important point about an American ballistic missile defense program is that it is going to happen." That's what Richard Perle, chief of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, told international military attaches at an exclusive Global Security News forum in Washington.

"It is going to happen if no one else in the world wants it to happen except the President of the United States and the majorities he will have to assemble in Congress. And I have no doubt that substantial majorities are there. It is inevitable," Perle said. He was speaking his own views and not those of the U.S. government. The event was cosponsored by the Defense Attaches' Association and the Institute of World Politics. Richard Perle is a member of the advisory board of Global Security News.

Among Perle's points:

• "If Mr. Putin decides he wants more nuclear weapons, that's OK with us. Because we don't feel threatened by those nuclear weapons."
• "With respect to the offensive forces, I can tell you that we will be reducing the total size of our nuclear force -- significantly, substantially. And ideally we will do so not in the context of a lengthy negotiating process."
• "When the United States asserts its national interest it is sometimes, now, criticized, principally by Americans because we are our own most vociferous critics. It is sometimes criticized as unilateralism. Well, we are not about to submit our most sensitive security interests to a vote by other interested parties."
• "In our current situation, the threshold for achieving the ability to threaten the United States, or others, with a ballistic missile and a weapon of mass destruction -- which could be nuclear, it could be chemical or biological. The threshold is one missile."
• "If a missile is fired at Pakistan or at India or at South Korea, wouldn't the world be better off if there was a defensive missile that might intercept it?"
• "After the Cold War, when we have the alternative of a defense, I don't see how we can sustain reliance on that policy. That policy of the threat to destroy."
• "Now I am sometimes astonished at friends and colleagues, Senators, Congressmen, editorial writers, who so cavalierly suggest that deterrence is just fine. 'All we need is deterrence.' And what deterrence really means is that if a Saddam Hussein should do something crazy, that the women and children of Baghdad should be destroyed. And I think that is a morally untenable position. And the sooner we put in place an alternative to reliance on deterrence alone, the prouder we can be of our effort to provide for our own security without having to rely on the threat to destroy women and children."

The full transcript of Perle's presentation, along with that of Ambassador Henry Cooper, former chief of the Defense Department's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) and now director of High Frontier, is available at the Global Security News Store.

J. Michael Waller is editor-in-chief of GlobalSecurityNews.com.
He can be reached at editor@GlobalSecurityNews.com.

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