BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE

BATTLEFIELD OF THE FUTURE
defense budget, the cold war is over . What's more, I've had
visits from the head of the KGB, and Col General Ivanov, head
of Russia's rocket forces . We're talking with them about
shared exercises ; I've been invited to Moscow . Given all this, I
think it's reasonable to assume that the cold war is overand,
therefore, I think the ABM Treaty has outlived its
usefulness .
That does not mean that we and the Russians are not going
to have tensions, conflict, disagreements, and competition .
But, I think that things have fundamentally changed between
our two countries . Yet we still have ballistic missiles pointed at
each other . To what end? We are not going to fight each other .
So, it's now a question of how we walk away from the cold war,
not do we walk away from the cold war .
In walking away from the cold war, one area we must
investigate is shared ballistic missile defenses with the
Russians . That requires building trust with the Russians . Nor
is it an easy thing to do since they are still coming from a
bipolar world view, and I think that they are genuinely
concerned about our ability to outstrip them in technology.
They want to be in the driver's seat in determining how we
march forward on ballistic missile defenses, and the ABM
Treaty gives them the leverage to do that . I ran into this
problem with Ivanov . We were at the national test facility,
which is an impressive operation, and we were briefed by
people from our Ballistic Missile Defense Organization . You
could see that General Ivanov, who is a very thoughtful,
intelligent, and tough guy, was threatened . He looked as if he
were thinking, "My God, I didn't know they were this good ."
I knew we were going to reach this point, so I had spoken
with him all morning about how could we cooperate with him .
"What we need to do," I said, "is work together on this . We
need to share these technologies . You have things that we
can't match, like heavy-lift access to space . There's a marriage
right there-our technology in ballistic missiles and your
access to space to put things in orbit . There's no reason our
two countries can't work together, other than the fact that
there are those in both of our capitals who are still very close
to the cold war ." And he said, "What is your problem in
achieving this technology?" I said, "Well, it's the budget. We
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