He might as well have observed that the man dropping from the mountain ledge, if asked in mid-air whether he'd rather have stayed in place, would have answered conventionally. That's a pretty good launch an epochal debate by a young president to whom Mr. Daschle and his colleagues condescended for so many months for President Bush, and a crystallization of the elements in that debate is badly needed. One demurral doesn't deserve very much time, though it is the fault of some conservatives that it was given any time at all. There is the school of thought that says the ABM Treaty is no longer binding on the United States for the very simple reason that it was negotiated with a national entity now dead. The Soviet Union, with which the pact was signed in 1972, does not exist.
Some people argue that therefore there is no surviving treaty.
Treaties with the government of Louis XVI were no longer inhibiting in Europe after Napoleon took over. But the problem with that glib line of reasoning is that various treaties with Moscow have, in fact, continued in place since 1991, and we are on record as having recommended to President Yeltsin that it should be so. But that is an ephemeral question because the treaty clearly gives to either government the authority to cancel it on six months' notice. And here is an important aspect of the approach Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld have in mind. The antimissile system is not to be compared with landing on the moon.