Tag: Missile Defense

Obama Scraps Central European “Missile Defense”!

The Wall Street Journal is reporting what would be maybe the best move, yet, by the Obama Administration:

The White House will shelve Bush administration plans to build a missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, according to people familiar with the matter, a move likely to cheer Moscow and roil the security debate in Europe.

The U.S. will base its decision on a determination that Iran’s long-range missile program has not progressed as rapidly as previously estimated, reducing the threat to the continental U.S. and major European capitals, according to current and former U.S. officials.

This is a brilliant move, on several levels, the first and foremost being that “missile defense” is an enormously expensive farce that has yet to come close to being a proven technology. Despite billions upon billions poured into the coffers of its various contractors. Beyond that, though, merely attempting to put even an ostensibly advanced weapons system in Central Europe, in nations that were once part of the former Soviet Union’s buffer zone, was seen as a blatant provocation to Russia, thus politically enabling the hard line Putin regime. As explained by the BBC:

The US piggy bank is empty

The low-key announcements of several military retrenchment measures suggest to me that the US plutocracy is sufficiently frightened by the negative economic diagnosis to abandon its recreational drug of choice: military spending. Here are the clues:

1. Today brought news of the abandonment of a costly “missile shield” to be deployed in Europe. Not only does this remove an irritant in diplomatic relations with Russia and Europe, but it portends big cutbacks in the development and deployment budgets for all Star Wars missile defense programs.

2. America has suddenly developed a lively interest in free and fair elections in Afghanistan. This is consistent with the need to de-legitimize our puppet government in order to prepare for exiting this costly and futile “war.”

3. Iraq withdrawal plans appear to be picking up speed, with no signs that an upsurge of violence in Iraq will lead to second thoughts.

4. A few bloated defense procurement programs have actually been cancelled, including F22 production and an alternate engine for the F35.

The plutocrats are very afraid that they will not be able to make the bellicose American public go cold turkey when huge defense cuts come. But defense is the only place left to cut, and they know that a hard economic rain is going to fall when the current Fed cash-for-everything bubble pops.

The British and Soviet empires did not give up their military toys until their economies collapsed. We are following a similar course. We should have done so much sooner.

Obama may not deploy Bush’s missile defense in Poland

Gazeta Wyborcza is reporting the Obama administration will not implement the Bush administration’s plan for a missile “shield” in Eastern Europe.  “The missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic are virtually certain to be abandoned“.

The Polish newspaper names Washington lobbyist Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defence Advocacy Alliance, as its source. “The signals that the generals in the Pentagon are sending are absolutely clear: as far as missile defence is concerned, the current US administration is searching for other solutions than the previously bases in Poland and the Czech Republic,” Ellison said.

“The administration has been sounding out for a couple of weeks now how the Congress will react when the plans for building the missile defence in Poland and the Czech Republic are dumped,” Ellison said a Congressional source has told him.

Bush: Buy Our Weapons or Iran will hit Paris with Nukes

Think the Bush Administration is done trying open new fronts in using scare tactics in the service of war profiteering?  Think again.

In yet another display of mindboggling display of fearmongering coupled with greed, the Bush Administration is now now telling Europe that it needs to buy American missile defense systems–or else.  From the Los Angeles Times:

With American officials working to close a deal on a missile defense system in Europe, the head of the U.S. program warned Thursday that Iran was within two or three years of producing a missile that could reach most European capitals.

“They’re already flying missiles that exceed what they would need in a fight with Israel. Why? Why do they continue this progression in terms of range of missiles? It’s something we need to think about,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering III, director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, told a conference here on missile defense… [snip]

“Our short-range defenses could protect Rome and Athens,” Obering said, but he warned that London, Paris and Brussels would remain vulnerable “against an Iranian [intermediate-range missile] threat.”

That’s right, mes amis, meine Damen und Herren.  Unless you buy our preposterously expensive and utterly ineffectual Star Wars “defense” technology, dangerous terrorist Ahmadinejad and his merry band of clerics will unilaterally start a war with Israel, create a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv, and use the expanded conflict to send your beloved Arc de Triomphe and Reichstag into the stratosphere.

Chicken Little As Red Herring

You’re waking up to the exciting news that a falling satellite has been shot out of the sky, thus preventing a potentially dangerous crash landing, with a potentially dangerous release of toxic gas. The Pentagon is proudly showing off the video. On television, it will likely be the most played clip of the day. You can expect much hyperventilated cheerleading from the usual professional hairpieces. But there’s one aspect to the story that I don’t expect the TV news to cover. It’s tucked in this New York Times report:

Completing a mission in which an interceptor designed for missile defense was used for the first time to attack a satellite, the Lake Erie, an Aegis-class cruiser, fired a single missile just before 10:30 p.m. Eastern time, and the missile hit the satellite as it traveled at more than 17,000 miles per hour, the Pentagon said in its official announcement.

It almost sounds good. As if the most expensive weapons system in human history was finally being put to positive use. But what if that was the purpose, all along? Two days ago, the science journal Nature had this:

A plan by the US government to shoot down an out-of-control spy satellite has been described as a cynical tit-for-tat move in response to China doing the same last year. Scientists and arms-control experts fear that the operation will create damaging debris and weaken international efforts to ban space weaponry.

On 14 February, officials from the Pentagon, White House and NASA announced plans to use a ship-based missile to strike the satellite as it passes roughly 240 kilometres overhead. The satellite, which belongs to the National Reconnaissance Office in Virginia, dropped out of control after its launch in December 2006, and would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere around early March if no action were taken.

The strike is necessary to prevent the dispersal of around 450 kilograms of hazardous hydrazine thruster fuel onboard, according to James Jeffrey, assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser. If the fuel survived re-entry, it could be dispersed over an area of roughly 20,000 square metres, although “the likelihood of the satellite falling in a populated area is small,” he says. “Nevertheless, if the satellite did fall in a populated area, there was the possibility of death or injury to human beings.” The Pentagon denies that the shoot-down is to protect classified technologies on the satellite.

But scientists familiar with both satellite re-entry and the US missile defence system question the decision. The chances that the tank, which is 1 metre in diameter, will survive and strike land are extremely small, says Geoffrey Forden, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Most likely it will land in the ocean,” he says. The reasons given for the plan “don’t sound too credible to me”, he adds. “I think they’re doing it mainly to tell the Chinese that we can blow up a satellite too,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “This gives the US cover to carry out a test.”

And I’m guessing that the corporate media will do their job to ensure that such cover is provided.