#10
Rossiiskaya Gazeta
No. 18
January 30, 2002
[translation for personal use only]
HOW SHOULD RUSSIA REACT TO US WITHDRAWAL FROM ABM TREATY?
By Sergei SHISHKAREV, deputy chairman of the State Duma committee on international affairs

The numerous experts in Moscow are demonstrating their usual, skin-deep and "down-to-earth" reaction to the official US notification of withdrawal from the ABM treaty. They mostly describe the decision as a slap or kick at Russia. The Americans used our friendship at the initial stage of the counter-terror operation but have decided to show the new ally his place now, they say. And suggest that we should react by mounting new warheads on our missiles, and so on. They also hope other countries, above all China, will react forcefully to the US decision.

However, these "wise men" overlook the tectonic processes in the USA that make the task of NMD deployment unavoidable and imminent, a question of life and death for the Bush administration. I don't mean military matters at all. The US administration has a realistic view of the defence abilities of the NMD system and the military-technical problems accompanying its deployment. But these aspects are not the key ones for the implementation of the project now and will hardly be so in the future. The US administration is using NMD to resolve quite different problems.

To begin with, NMD is the only thing Bush can offer to the people within the framework of the programme of strengthening US security. It is apparent that the public is waiting for the president to take large-scale and inordinate measures to strengthen the security of the nation and the people after September 11. And George Bush more than once pledged to take such measures in an attempt to calm down public convulsions, but NMD was mentioned as only a part of a comprehensive national security programme.

The military operation in Afghanistan was a great propaganda boon but it proved a bad substitution for a comprehensive counter-terror programme of protecting the national US territory. This is how NMD was made the focus of the national idea of the protection of Americans from international challenges and risks. The public sees the immediate launching of the project as the solution to the security problem in the country as such.

This is why the public will not accept any delay in the implementation of the NMD project. Because the people badly want security. Since there are no other ways of ensuring it, the US administration could do nothing other than make the decision on withdrawal despite Russian and Chinese protests.

The ideological element of that decision is complemented with an even more important aspect - economic considerations. Allocations on the NMD project have been well nigh divided between the leading US military-industrial corporations. This major injection of state funds will brace up the withering US economy and is reasonably regarded by the US elite as the mainline of US development in the next few decades.

This method of stimulating economic development in the USA has been successfully used more than once. Take Reagan's Star Wars, which the administration financed in the 1980s. It entailed mind-boggling budgetary injections into corporate economy and the research and technological results scored in the process were subsequently used to create a new economy for the country, which is now described as hi-tech. Budgetary allocations to the SDI programme ensured many years of economic growth and the US technological leadership in science-intensive industries in the 1990s.

The US big business expects even greater kudos from NMD grants. The dwindling economic indices and the powerful pressure mounted by the national centres of power faced the Bush administration with a hard decision that buried the soft variant of withdrawing from the treaty.

The US president must clearly show to the establishment that "the ball is rolling." The foreign policy consequences of the harsh withdrawal from the treaty, including the potential reply measures of Russia and China, are of secondary importance in this case. This explains the restrained reaction of the Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, to that unilateral US step.

The reply measures to the NMD project should not be military. We must admit at long last that the ensurance of national strategic security is no longer linked with mathematical diplomacy, meaning a simple calculation of missiles, warheads and so on. Russia's reply to the NMD challenge should be sought in the economic sphere. It should be based on the need to bridge the growing intellectual and technological gap between Russia and the USA by effectively using state resources for the development of Russian economy.

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