The real Star Wars: Bush revives missile defence plan

[struggle4progress]

The saga of America's ambition to put weapons in space has been as protracted as George Lucas's film franchise. Now George Bush has a new plan - at a stellar cost of $58bn. Rupert Cornwell reports

30 May 2005

<snip> It started as a dream of Ronald Reagan, the Strategic Defence Initiative he presented to a disbelieving world on 23 March 1983, a Cold War vision of a space-based shield that might protect the US from an attack by Soviet long-range ballistic missiles. Critics nicknamed it star wars and said it could never work. A decade later, with the Soviet Union consigned to history, Bill Clinton attempted to do the same to SDI. <snip>

In the early 1990s, the Clinton administration cancelled every Pentagon programme that smacked of an offensive use of space. And in its anxiety to preserve the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, the historic cornerstone of arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, and later Russia, it also put SDI on the slowest of back-burners.

Today, however, the ABM treaty has gone, 11 September has turned national security into a paranoia, while North Korea is reportedly close to developing a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to hit Alaska. The largely pacifist Clinton policy of 1996 is about to be replaced by a far more forceful doctrine, designed to prevent what Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, once called "a space Pearl Harbour". <snip>

The best guess is that the Pentagon has already spent $22bn (£13bn) on space weapons research - although no one can be sure since much of it is financed out of a classified black budget. Some specific programmes are said to have been cancelled. Equally likely, they may merely have been renamed. <snip>

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=642631

[democraticrevolution]

1. LOL

This Star Wars missle defense has got to stop.

[Cassandra]

2. If we put a stake through its heart...

would that kill it once and for all? How often does that program have to fail before they get it? Or is it just a WPA program for the companies involved?

[stellanoir]

3. yeah heard about it on NPR

"rods from god" they're calling the bunker bombs.

Who's god and what of the "culture of life" I can only ask.

[punpirate]

4. The problem of...

... threat management conveniently puts lots of money into the coffers of aerospace defense firms.

In prior wars, battlefield analysis pointed the direction for improvements in weapons. Even the development of fission weapons was driven by tangible evidence that Germany was working on a super-weapon themselves (even if they were going in the wrong direction, there was evidence they were trying).

Beginning with the Cold War, the emphasis, in a time of nominal peace, was on think tanks imagining threats. If it could be imagined, it had to defended against. The more remote the possibility of a threat, the more money was spent on countering it over the very long term. That's the mentality driving these absurd programs at absurd costs.