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Archived News Articles: NMD and Foreign Policy
6/17/2001 from The Progressive Populist:
http://www.populist.com/01.12.galbraith.html
Dangerous Dead-End
JAMES K. GALBRAITH
"... missile defenses in all forms are drastically
destabilizing, easily defeated, and globally dangerous
whether the system works or not. ... Without the ABM
treaty, neither Russia nor China can feel secure in
their deterrent capabilities, and neither will
comfortably adhere to their longstanding restraint in
nuclear offensive weapons. ... As defense, national
missile defense will not work, for the simple reason
that it is too easily defeated by decoys and by attacks
on the "eyes" of the system. ... Missile defense is
impossibly expensive. ...
The fact that NMD cannot defend us calls attention to
the only way in which NMD might work: as an adjunct to
an American first strike that destroys most enemy forces
and everything else on the ground. Following a first
strike, a limited missile defense might then shoot down
the handful of surviving retaliatory missiles -- thus
completing the carnage. This point is clear to both
Russia and China who long ago concluded that NMD extends
long-standing American strike-first plans -- by which
they have felt threatened for 50 years. They will
respond, as both have warned, by increasing the numbers
of their own missiles and by placing their forces on a
higher alert.
National Missile Defense is, in short, an unlimited
budget drain mined at a deeply immoral objective: the
nuclear blackmail of other states. It repudiates
diplomacy. It puts hair-trigger systems back onto
forward stations. It signals, and reflects, contempt for
the interests, concerns and perspectives of allied
powers. It is a highway back to the days when
thermonuclear death threatened from one minute to the
next in any form, it threatens the fragile stability of
the nuclear peace.
As the United States government now announces its
irrevocable commitment to this program, it is past time
for the world's great anti-nuclear communities to wake
up to the danger."
6/18/2001 from The Seattle Times:
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?
slug=plate14&date=20010614
Editorials & Opinion : Thursday, June 14, 2001
Rumsfeld-led hawks play high-risk game with China
By Tom Plate, Syndicated columnist
6/19/2001 from The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/world/19RUSS.html
Putin Says Russia Would Counter U.S. Shield
By PATRICK E. TYLER
June 19, 2001
MOSCOW, June 18 - President Vladimir V. Putin said today
that if the United States proceeded on its own to
construct a missile defense shield over its territory
and that of its allies, Russia would eventually upgrade
its strategic nuclear arsenal with multiple warheads -
reversing an achievement of arms control in recent
decades - to ensure that it would be able to overwhelm
such a shield. ...
6/19/2001 from Tech Central Station:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/DefensePinkertonSpace.asp?id=54
New Military Doctrine Requires a Back-Up Plan in Space
By: James Pinkerton, TCS Columnist and Fellow,
New America Foundation
Second of two parts:
"Yes, earth has been a wonderful home to all of us, but
what home lasts forever? And thus the fourth doctrine of
defense - after MAD, NMD, and PES - is, or should be, ETR,
for extra-terrestrial relocation.
ETR doesn't mean giving up on earth; it means
duplicating earth, by sending volunteers permanently to
the moon, Mars, wherever. Would folks want to go? Would
governments want to pay for it? It all depends upon how
much time they spend thinking about Murphy's Law and
Fermi's Paradox."
(These are our bright leaders?)
6/26/2001 from The Seattle Times:
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?
slug=krauthammer25&date=20010625
Bush hasn't gone wobbly; he has just gone smart
By Charles Krauthammer, Syndicated columnist
Editorials & Opinion : Monday, June 25, 2001
" ... Be nice, but be undeterred. The best unilateralism
is velvet-glove unilateralism.
At the end of the day, for all the rhetorical bows to
Russian, European and liberal sensibilities, look at how
Bush returns from Europe: Kyoto is dead. The ABM Treaty
is history. Missile defense is on. NATO expansion is
relaunched. And just to italicize the new turn in
American foreign policy, the number of those annual,
vaporous U.S.-EU summits has been cut from two to one. ... "
6/26/2001 from space.com
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/russia_canada_010625.html
Canada Wants U.S. to Consult with Russia on Missile Defense Plan
By Interfax, posted: 03:05 pm ET, 25 June 2001
MOSCOW. June 25 (Interfax) - Canada insists that the
United States cooperate with Russia in matters relating
to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty,
Canadian Foreign Minister John Manley said on Monday.
Canada is against any unilateral steps by the United
States regarding its national missile defense (NMD)
plan, Manley told a news conference in Moscow after
talks with his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov. ...
Manley said the United States has still not given
Canada a clear idea of what NMD would be like. Nor did
Canada know who would control it, he said. ... Ivanov,
when asked what Russia and Canada thought of the space
weapons problem, said the two countries "consider this
to be one of the most burning problems and stand for
joint efforts by the international community to prevent
the penetration of any kind of weapons into space."
Manley said Canada supported all measures to prevent
weapons from being stationed in space. ...
6/27/2001 from The Washington Post:
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49355-2001Jun26.html
Defense Meets the Tax Cut
Editorial
Wednesday, June 27, 2001; Page A24
" ... Missile defense, even in the Clinton
administration's limited model, could cost $60 billion
to deploy; new weapons acquisitions proposed by Mr.
Rumsfeld's advisory panels could cost another $35
billion. Yet nothing like this kind of money is going to
be available in the tax-cut depleted budgets of the next
few years. As it is, the Pentagon's requested $18
billion in additional spending for fiscal 2002 is
significantly below the amount sought by both Mr.
Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs, and barely would cover
immediate needs, such as spare parts and increased
housing and health care costs. Missile defense gets an
increase of less than $3 billion over the funding
planned by the Clinton administration -- hardly the
boost suggested by the administration's huge political
and diplomatic investment in the initiative. Even this
defense increase will be difficult to accommodate in
next year's budget -- and at the moment budget
projections suggest that a further increase can be
accommodated in 2003 only with big cuts in other
domestic programs or a raid on Social Security or
Medicare. ... "
6/27/2001 from Reuters: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010626/pl/arms_usa_missiles_dc_1.html
Bush Beefs Up Effort to Develop Missile Defense
By Jim Wolf
Tuesday June 26 5:42 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration will ask
Congress for $7.9 billion in fiscal 2002 to speed up a
controversial missile defense program that would go
beyond the limited, ground-based system proposed by
former President Bill Clinton, Pentagon documents
obtained on Tuesday showed. ... the Bush program will
explore ``to the fullest extent possible'' land, air and
space platforms to thwart missiles in all flight stages:
boost, or liftoff; midcourse; and terminal, according to
Program Budget Decision 816, as the memo is called. ...
The memo did not say when deployment would begin. But
the Pentagon's chief weapons purchaser, Edward Aldridge,
told a House Armed Services subcommittee on Tuesday:
``The things we can field as early as we can, we will.''
... The plan erases the diplomatically troublesome line
separating national missile defense from programs aimed
at defending troops in a combat theater. The memo
approved by Wolfowitz said preliminary results of the
Rumsfeld strategy review had determined that BMDO
programs should be restructured to provide
``simultaneous research in multiple areas against
threats in the boost, midcourse and terminal stages of
attack.'' ``To achieve this, it is recommended that the
current BMDO program be eliminated and replaced with a
streamlined program designed to merge mature and
emergent technologies in innovative ways as each new
combination is proven,'' it said.
Under the Bush approach, three programs now controlled
by the Air Force -- the experimental space-based laser,
the airborne laser and space-based infrared system low
-- would move to BMDO to ``allow a more streamlined
approach to developing BMD technology.'' ...
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