[Newspoetry] Letter To George W. Bush

[Joe Futrelle]

Dude,

I'll brief you on missile defense.
How about it.

I was still sort of
a kid when I saw that Reagan-era
TV ad, animated crayon
shield around the crayon-scrawl
houses, the Little Crayon Scrawl
LCSM Missiles bouncing off

You think I fell for that crap?

I researched SDI in high school
found out what the scientific community
thought, and except for Edward Teller,

(may he die at the hands of his own bomb)

they didn't fall for it either.
Here's what I learned:

satelite defense is not an option,
strategically, because your enemies'
satelites can just destroy yours
before they attack.  required tactical
response times drop to the fractions
of seconds.  decisions would have to
be made by computers.  even the
military didn't like that in the 80's.

ground-based technologies all failed
in decades of ground tests.

expensive ground tests.

Edward Teller continued to push for
H-bomb based technologies such as the
X-ray laser.

rolls right off the tonuge
in a Dr. Evil voice.

the X-ray laser is an H-bomb bristling
with rubies or some such laser material.
It's detonated in space

(since satelite-based defense is
not an option, strategically, it would
have to be launched, and somehow faster
than your opponent's ICBMs or just seconds
later)

destroying the lasing material which
just before it melts
emits powerful X-ray bursts capable
of destroying targets on the ground
and in space
from hundreds of miles away.

Underground testing was
undertaken, I understand,
in the 80's, for this
"peace-keeping anti-weapon".

I began to get the idea
that SDI was all Teller's idea
and was just an elaborate excuse
to build the X-ray laser, which
was itself just an elaborate excuse
to detonate more H-bombs, which
was just an excuse to legitimize
the invention of the H-bomb,
to assuage the guilty conscience of
a brilliant physicist who let
the allure of scientific status
blind him to the destructiveness
of his thinking

"look, I can explain how
to kill millions of people
at the touch of a button!"

give him the Nobel prize
for idiocy

and George W. Bush,
don't go there.

Don't start another friggin
cold war.  I, my generation perhaps,
woke up screaming from nightmares
consumed by fireballs,
missiles, no matter whose,
falling around us

Hysteria

We had no illusions that we could just
wait it out in a bomb shelter.

This concludes my briefing,
now get lost

--
Joe Futrelle
Editor-within-chief,
Newspoetry dot com