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The Bookpress
Vol. 13, No. 3: April 2003 Copyright © 2003 The Bookpress. Missile Defense Before and After 9/11 revisions 6/3/03 Stuart Davis Fatal Choice By Richard Butler Westview [2001] 175 pp., $22.00, cloth The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex Dr. Helen Caldicott The New Press [2002] 263 pp., $14.95 An Evening with Dr. Helen Caldicott. Ithaca College, 17 November 2002 A FreeAirProduction CD, $5.00 Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War Frances FitzGerald Simon and Schuster [2000] 592 pp., $30.00, cloth Weapons in Space Karl Grossman Open Media Pamphlet Series [2001] 80 pp., $6.95, paper When American Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:43 that September morning, the crash interrupted a conference in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office on missile defense. (So Newsweek * reported; other sources made it a routine intelligence briefing.) The subject was not dropped in the urgency of defending the homeland against airborne or pedestrian terrorists but only adjourned. Within weeks Congress voted to give the President most of the $8.3 billion he had sought for this cause, and the business press had reason to celebrate "the Good News on Missile Defense" * and to congratulate the nation on its good sense: since September 11, opined Rupert Murdoch's Daily Standard in late October, "in the two places where it matters most --Congress and the minds of the American people --support for missile defense has, if anything, increased." * The Bush administration needed no reinforcement, having never lost the faith. Defense strategists of the Perle-Rumsfeld-Cheney stamp have cherished Missile Defense (hereafter MD) ever since Reagan days, first as a counterforce to arms control negotiations and more lately as a tool for reinstating Cold War antagonisms in a unipolar world. Rumsfeld chaired two pro-MD panels before taking office, the first espousing the "rogue states" theory of nuclear conflict during the Clinton administration's lapse of confidence in MD and the second threatening a "space Pearl Harbor" if such initiatives waned. Bush campaigned on it; Powell promised to get on with it "as aggressively as possible" at his confirmation hearings; * and in late 2001 Bush announced the country's withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the U.S. and the Russians, long an article of international stability. The Defense Department's Nuclear Posture Review of January 2002 made MD the centerpiece of and fig leaf for its radical redefinition of U.S. strategic forces as a New Age warfighting force. * And when Bush announced the first "modest" deployment of ground-based interceptors in Alaska last December, he cited the 9-11 attacks as an example of the "unprecedented threats" that called for such a shield. Thus far the recent record. "Modest" in cost and conception is something Missile Defense has never been, as Frances FitzGerald's dramatic and detailed history of "Star Wars" --the derisory sobriquet for MD, called the Strategic Defense Initiative under Ronald Reagan --makes clear, and modest it will never be, if Dr. Helen Caldicott's punchy new guidebook to nuclear threats old and new, of which MD is only one, proves reliable. (Her recorded talk at Ithaca College is even punchier in its language.) Americans have spent roughly eighty billion dollars on MD since 1983 without producing a "capable" weapons system, one without the dismal history of operational tests, many of them botched or cooked, conveniently chronicled at the Union of Concerned Scientists' website *. The cost to international stability and confidence, writes veteran disarmament negotiator Richard Butler, has been big and will get bigger; the "fatal choice" of his title, for the U.S., is or was between shoring up and extending existing arms-control law and sabotaging the whole structure with proliferative measures like, for example, MD. But this is what our masters are committed to doing, in the face of resistance both popular and governmental from our traditional enemies (France and the U.K.) as well as our new friends (Russia and China), and most everyone else. Further, Caldicott and Grossman contend, current MD plans are a means to another means, the weaponization and nuclearization of space, for the sake of exploiting the stars and ruling the world. Much of the world, predictably, fears this thing and hates us for trying to build it; what drives it on into the new century? * Evan Thomas, "A New Day of Infamy," Newsweek 15 September 2001: 30-31. up * Stan Crock, "Star Wars: The Case for Going Ahead," Business Week 15 October 2001: 66. up *Lee Bockhorn, "A New Day for Missile Defense," Daily Standard 21 October 2001: 30-31. up *Barry Schweid, "Powell Pushes for Missile Defense," AP 17 January 2001, up *Western States Legal Foundation, "The Shape of Things to Come: The NPR, Missile Defense, and the Dangers of a New Arms Race," April 2002 <http://www.wslfweb.org/docs/shape.pdf > up *Union of Concerned Scientists, "Chronology of Missile Defense Tests" (12 March 2003) < http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/missile_defense/page.cfm?pageID=600 >. Test failures and technical deficiencies of planned systems are elegantly summarized in Craig Eisendrath et al., The Phantom Defense: America's Pursuit ofthe Star Wars Illusion (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001). up |