[Peace-discuss] National Missile "Defense"

[Chuck Minne]

I’m sorry but I barely scanned this long article, so perhaps it covers this point, but I think not: The missile “defense” system is basically an offensive system that will permit us to militarize space and “control the world.” At least that is what I perceive to be Chomsky’s take on it. I naturally take his word for it. Further, my own opinion is that it will also be done because it is a way for the military to spend a lot of money, and spread it over a vast range of high tech industries and institutions, universities being not the least of them. IMO anyone who thinks this is about defense is very, very naive. There is a tape of Chomsky discussing this at length at Stanford in 2002; it is very shocking. 


ppatton at uiuc.edu wrote:National Missile Defense: The Secrets the Pentagon Doesn't 
Want You to Know
by Robert Freeman


There is a dirty little secret about national missile defense 
the Pentagon doesn't want you to know. It is this: missile 
defense is fundamentally flawed--not just in technology but 
in rationale and in concept. It should not be built. It 
should never have even been started. And like the war in 
Iraq, if deployed, missile defense will leave the U.S. more 
vulnerable and less secure than if it had never been built at 
all.

Let's do a little thought experiment. How would we know if a 
weapon system such as missile defense was a good idea or not? 
Well, like any complex system looking for a justification, 
missile defense must pass four simple tests: Is it necessary? 
Can it work? Are there better alternatives? And, does it do 
more good than harm? These are very simple, very sensible 
considerations. The problem with missile defense is that it 
fails not just one, but all four of these tests. And badly. 
Consider:

First: Is it necessary? Missile defense's purported rationale 
is to defend against so-called "rogue states" launching a 
nuclear attack on the U.S. This has been almost laughable 
from the beginning. It is hard to imagine people can even 
talk about it with a straight face.

The purportedly suspect countries (North Korea, Libya, Iran, 
and Iraq) do not possess ballistic missiles. The 2005 target 
readiness date was based on a worst case scenario developed 
in 1997 of North Korea possibly being able to launch such a 
missile within eight years. But North Korea had suspended its 
missile development program almost two years before that 
scenario was even created. And until President Bush promised 
to invade it, North Korea was steadily working toward 
rapprochement with South Korea. Somehow, however, the magical 
2005 date was never changed.

And what of the other so-called "rogue states"? Iraq is in 
rubble, militarily occupied, and posing no threat to anybody 
but the hapless US soldier on the ground. Iran does not 
possess either nuclear weapons or ballistic missile delivery 
systems. Libya never showed the capacity to develop anything 
even as technically sophisticated as a watch much less an 
ICBM capable of accurately delivering a nuclear warhead 
thousands of miles away on the first try. And it has recently 
come over to the side of goodness and light. Strike One.

Second: Can it work? The tests to date have been more comical 
than credible. Most of them ended in failure. The one that 
didn't was so phony it prompted charges of fraud by 
contractor employees who said they were pressured to fake 
their data. And on the most recent test, the target contained 
a homing beacon advertising its trajectory so that only a 
blind mule couldn't find it.

The problems with workability are four-fold. First is the 
very real difficulty of "hitting a bullet with a bullet". 
Actually, this metaphor understates the problem as incoming 
ballistic missiles travel at 10 times the speed of a bullet.

The second problem with workability is testing. A truly 
operational missile defense system would be the biggest 
machine ever conceived-hundreds of millions of lines of 
computer code, tens of millions of parts, strewn across 
millions of miles of earth and space. And it has to work 
perfectly. The first time. Without ever having been tested in 
its real-world environment.

Think about that. Would you operate your company's accounting 
department with such a system? Would you agree to blindly pay 
whatever phone bill was sent to you by such a system? Would 
you trust your personal checking account to a system that had 
never been realistically tested? And yet missile defense 
proponents want you to bet yours and the nation's security on 
such a system. It is beyond arrogance. It is lunacy.

The third problem with workability is that it is impossible 
to distinguish "dummy" warheads from the real thing. But it 
is much cheaper and easier to proliferate dummies than it is 
to hit all of them. This asymmetry of offense and defense 
makes it impossible for the defense to win. And needless to 
say, it only takes one real one to slip through and the 
system has catastrophically failed.

The last and most damning problem with workability is that a 
bomb placed in the cargo hold of a ship or the bed of a truck 
bypasses the entire system. This, of course, is how a real 
aggressor would deliver a warhead (if he had one). Think 
9/11. It is vastly easier, quicker, less costly, more certain 
of success, and more discreet than an ICBM with a return 
address emblazoned in its exhaust plume. Missile defense is 
completely useless against such a simple recourse. No 
engineering workarounds, no amount of expanded funding, and 
no amount of Buck Rogers "spin" can fix it. Strike Two.

Third: Are there better alternatives? The most conservative 
estimates of the system's cost place it in the low hundreds 
of billions of dollars. (Some $90 billion have already been 
spent and we've hardly even started.) Critics put the final 
cost at closer to a trillion dollars. Given the Pentagon's 
history of cost overruns (remember $700 hammers?), there's 
good reason to believe the latter estimates will prove closer 
to the mark.

A trillion dollars could pay off a significant portion of our 
$7 trillion (and growing) national debt. With regard 
to "rogue states" we could: offer incentives to stop any 
missile development programs; permanently position warships 
off of their coasts to shoot down any missile launched from 
their soil; give them economic development assistance; give 
them access to U.S. markets; dramatically step up inspections 
at U.S. ports; or any of a number of other types of 
constructive engagement.

All of these combined would not begin to approach the cost of 
a missile defense system. Any one of them would likely be 
more effective. In particular, a simple commitment to North 
Korea to not invade it would, according to North Korea 
itself, invite the suspension-and verification-of its nuclear 
weapons programs. It seems a simple, astoundingly cost 
effective proposition. Yet it is routinely rebuffed by the 
U.S. Strike Three.

And finally, fourth: Does such a system do more good than 
harm? This is perhaps the most damning indictment of missile 
defense. Missile defense destroys the entire framework of 
international arms control and non-proliferation that was 
built up over the past fifty years. And it is the U.S. that 
is the aggressor, the destroyer.

Both China and Russia have said they would respond to such a 
system by dramatically increasing their offensive 
capabilities so as to be able to overwhelm any system the 
U.S. deployed. It would spark a new global arms race, 
especially in south Asia, increasing tensions in one of the 
world's already most unstable areas.

Our European allies are opposed to missile defense precisely 
because of this certainty-that it makes the world not more 
but less secure. The president of France, publicly mocking 
the idea on Bush's first visit to Europe, said 
accurately, "It is a fantastic invitation to proliferation." 
North Korea's response to the invasion of Iraq is 
instructive: it now views nuclear weapons as its only 
insurance against a similar such invasion. And this is 
entirely logical.

This same logic applies equally well to missile defense. If 
the U.S. is going to build it and others perceive that it 
threatens their security, they will not sit idly by. They 
will proliferate their nuclear warheads and their delivery 
systems so as to overwhelm or underfly any US attempt at 
effective defense. And more nuclear weapons in the hands of 
more states would leave the U.S. and the rest of the world 
less stable and more insecure than if such a system were 
never built in the first place. Strike Four.

Note that to be justified, a weapon system must pass not just 
one but all four of these tests. For example, even if it 
could work, such a system must first be necessary. And even 
if it was necessary and worked, it must still produce more 
good than bad. And so on. The overwhelming indictment of 
missile defense is not that it does not pass all four of 
these tests. It's that it doesn't pass any! A more dangerous, 
ill-conceived system could scarcely be imagined.

So, why, then, if there exist all these problems, the 
desperate, headlong rush to deploy? First, missile "defense" 
has never really been about defense at all. Its proponents 
know the above flaws much better than the public does. 
Missile "defense" is now and always has been about missile 
offense. It is about control of space as the next battle 
frontier. And it is about projecting instantaneous, 
indefensible US destructive capacity over the heads of every 
country on earth.

>From its very inception-in the days of the Reagan 
administration when it was routinely derided as Star Wars-the 
heart of missile "defense" has been the nuclear pumped X-ray 
laser. This system generates an intense laser beam by 
detonating and channeling the force of a nuclear weapon from 
space. According to Roy Woodruff, the physicist who headed 
the X-ray laser program at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, "If 
the lasers can be made powerful enough to destroy enemy 
missiles, they also would be able to destroy targets on Earth 
surgically and instantaneously."

To reinforce this point, consider the following from Space 
and Security News: "Studies done for the Department of 
Defense have concluded that before a system of laser battle 
stations gets good enough to be really useful against 
ballistic missiles, they would be powerful enough to 
incinerate cities in minutes."

Consonant with Bush's radical doctrine of pre-emptive war, 
national missile "defense" offers the U.S. the exquisite pre-
emptive capability: to be able to take out any weapons system 
from any adversary before it could ever be used. It 
represents the ultimate decapitation of any enemy's 
conventional war fighting capability.

But remember the caution above. The simplest workaround to 
missile "defense" is to simply bypass the system, to deliver 
nuclear weapons through conventional means-boats, trucks, 
airplanes, etc. Think of the French Maginot Line in World War 
II. German Panzer divisions simply drove around this 
supposedly impregnable line of fortresses, leaving to the 
English language the standard epithet for an expensive, 
ineffective illusion of defense.

Far from making the world safer from nuclear threats, then, 
national missile offense actually increases such risks. For 
alternatives are cheap, more discreet than missiles, and much 
more certain of success. And by both provoking such recourse 
while starving the nation of the means to defend against it, 
missile "defense" leaves the US far less secure than if the 
system had never been built in the first place.

The second real rationale for missile "defense" is that it 
has always been a welfare program for large military 
contractors whose gravy train dried up with the end of the 
Cold War. Like it or not, we have a class of politically well-
connected dependents in this country who live at the trough 
of military spending-they can't do anything else. They are 
big. They are powerful. And they spend millions of dollars 
buying politicians the way most people buy groceries.

>From their point of view, missile "defense" is the perfect 
weapon system: it is unnecessary; it doesn't have to work as 
defense; it generates hundreds of billions of dollars in 
direct revenue; and the cherry on top of the sundae is that 
since it invites retaliation by China and Russia, it delivers 
a new, built-in global arms race, a vast new opportunity to 
arm all sides of all new global conflicts for the next half 
century. It is the Mother of All Self Licking Ice Cream Cones.

Either of these rationales-missile "defense" as missile 
offense, or missile "defense" as corporate welfare-provide a 
more credible explanation of known motives and technical 
realities than do the childish fantasies of "defense" offered 
by the military.

It is a particular perversity of our political process that 
this dangerous, Rube Goldberg scheme has become the litmus 
test of "strength" in military affairs. And the mainstream 
media is not simply culpable but craven in the perpetration 
of the fraud. It has not only shown itself timorous in taking 
on the powerful weapons industry. It has, as with the 
invasion of Iraq, happily put itself at the industry's 
disposal to act as its Hallelujah Chorus in the selling of 
the program to an ignorant, credulous public.

But the failed Iraq invasion notwithstanding, the U.S. is 
still stronger today than it has ever been. We won the Cold 
War, remember? There are no credible challengers to U.S. 
military might anywhere in the world. If ever there was a 
time to offer the world a true "Pax Americana" this is it.

This is the first opportunity in fifty years to be not just 
strong but wise, to seize the peace we fought half a century 
to win and turn it into a prosperity that buoys all the 
world. We have a rare opportunity to make former enemies 
reluctant to wage war against their greatest benefactor, to 
make them, instead, co-creators in a more peaceful, more 
prosperous world for all of humanity.

We seized a similar such opportunity at the end of World War 
II. The Marshall Plan not only rebuilt Europe from the ashes 
of the greatest devastation ever, it not only proved an 
effective bulwark for shattered democratic states against the 
predation of Soviet aggression, it also jump-started the 
greatest engine of wealth creation the world has ever seen.

But missile "defense" renders such possibilities stillborn. 
While it is an unequaled, unending bonanza for the U.S. 
weapons industry, missile "defense" would be the death knell 
of the just and peaceful and prosperous future the world's 
people now deserve.

Robert Freeman writes about technology and economics. He can 
be reached at robertfreeman10 at yahoo.com.

###
__________________________________________________________________
Dr. Paul Patton
Research Scientist
Beckman Institute Rm 3027 405 N. Mathews St.
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Urbana, Illinois 61801
work phone: (217)-265-0795 fax: (217)-244-5180
home phone: (217)-328-4064
homepage: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~ppatton/index.html

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and science."
-Albert Einstein
__________________________________________________________________

_______________________________________________
Peace-discuss mailing list
Peace-discuss at lists.cu.groogroo.com
http://lists.cu.groogroo.com/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss


		
---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Domains - Claim yours for only $14.70/year
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.cu.groogroo.com/cgi-bin/private/peace-discuss/attachments/20040521/25997283/attachment-0001.htm