[530] in peace2
Missile Shield
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (felixauyeung@juno.com)
Wed Feb 7 19:39:14 2001
From: felixauyeung@juno.com
To: peace-list@mit.edu
Cc: papouse@hotmail.com, clayadler@hotmail.com, tauyeun@muse.sfusd.k12.ca.us,
wauyeung@stanford.edu, AnniqueClaussen@gmx.de, elder@sinosphere.com,
erika@public.bta.net.cn, tomuster@technologist.com,
brianerobinson@hotmail.com, jshulman@fas.harvard.edu,
JulianeTeller@gmx.de
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 20:06:19 -0800
Message-ID: <20010208.083544.-217467.0.felixauyeung@juno.com>
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*** TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13 AT 7:00PM IN 6-120
MISSLE DEFENSE: TECHNOLOGY AND POLITICS
For information, call 253-0108 or <http://web.mit.edu/tac/www/>
The program is free and open to the public; no registration is required.
Seating is first come, first serve. This program will be broadcast live
(and archived) on the Internet via the T&C website.
***
U.S. Intends to Put Anti-Missile Shield Around the World
Joseph Fitchett
International Herald Tribune
Monday, February 5, 2001
MUNICH The Bush administration will move ahead with a controversial
missile defense system, one that is even more ambitious and far reaching
than the proposal put on hold by Bill Clinton in the last year of his
presidency.
.
The confirmation of the Bush administration's determination - its first
major initiative on international security - was delivered by Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at a weekend conference on security in Munich.
.
From Mr. Rumsfeld's terse description, the administration intends to
create something amounting to a global defense system - probably a mobile
one - that could protect the United States as well as American armed
forces in such distant regions as South Korea or the Gulf.
.
European governments, which in the past have echoed Russia and China in
objecting to U.S. missile defense, will seek urgent consultations with
Washington now that the plan seems bound to go ahead, allied officials
said after hearing about the Bush team's intentions.
.
Similarly, Mr. Rumsfeld implied, the interceptor missiles could be
deployed in Europe or in Asia to protect allied nations that otherwise
would have no defense against even one or two ballistic missiles - from
the Middle East or North Korea, for example.
.
By expanding the system's coverage in this way, the administration of
President George W. Bush clearly hopes to curb complaints from allies
that missile defense is an umbrella for the United States that would be
liable to make Americans seek security in isolationism.
.
Mr. Rumsfeld, speaking at the Munich Conference on Security Policy, an
annual meeting attended by a score of defense ministers and 200 other
specialists, said Saturday, "The United States intends to develop and
deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and our forces
against a limited missile attack and is prepared to assist friends and
allies threatened by missile attack to deploy such defenses."
.
The Clinton administration's plan had been called "national missile
defense," but Mr. Rumsfeld pointedly did not use the word "national" when
describing the Bush team's approach.
.
He did not bring up any circumstances or conditions that might throw
doubt over U.S. determination to proceed with the program. Previous
programs have had to meet such criteria as the performance of technology,
costs and arms control treaties signed with Moscow.
.
Underlining the new approach in Washington, Senator Joseph Lieberman, the
Democratic nominee for vice president last year, said at the conference
that U.S. missile defense was "not a question of whether, only when and
how."
.
Russia and China, which have threatened to build more weapons if the
United States adopts missile defenses, were not mentioned by Mr. Rumsfeld
in his speech.
.
But the defense secretary said afterward said that Moscow and Beijing did
not need to worry about a system that would be designed to handle
"handfuls" of incoming missiles, not the full arsenal of a major nuclear
power.
.
Still - "limited" in the sense of being designed to intercept a few
missiles launched by a so-called rogue state, by terrorists or by
accident - the proposed U.S. system would extend far the beyond the
previous "national missile defense," one that would have been designed to
cover part of the continental United States.
.
For the moment, the United States does not have any proven technology to
protect even limited parts of U.S. territory against incoming warheads,
especially a strategic ballistic missile traveling at supersonic speed.
.
In tests last year, failures led to the Clinton administration's decision
to shelve its program for a national system centered on new radars and
interceptor missiles in Alaska and Europe.
.
But the Bush administration, U.S. officials have said, will authorize a
research program that examines a much wider range of technologies,
including sensors in space - an element banned by an arm control treaty
that the Clinton administration was reluctant to breach.
.
It is unclear whether Washington will press ahead with the old program
while perhaps seeking to mesh it with more advanced systems. One new idea
involves trying to spot a missile at launching, perhaps early enough to
destroy it in the boost phase, when the missile provides a relatively
easy target.
.
The current program against long range missiles might also be meshed with
so-called tactical anti-missile systems that are designed to intercept
short-range nuclear missiles.
.
These systems can be operated from warships, so they offer rapid mobility
in a crisis and could help neutralize Scud type missiles, like those of
Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries.
.
All of these questions - the mix of technologies, the political impact
for the allies of a shift in Western nuclear strategy, the reactions of
Russia and China and the potential industrial opportunities for allied
countries to participate - will now be broached in U.S. consultations
with European governments in the coming weeks, officials said, once Mr.
Bush installs more top appointees in the Pentagon and the State
Department.
.
Mr. Rumsfeld, the first Bush cabinet member to visit Europe, encouraged
the allies to seek ways to benefit from the U.S. program to tighten
Western solidarity and increase their own protection against missile
threats across the Mediterranean.
.
"We will consult with you," the defense secretary said.
.
The allies, Mr. Rumsfeld added, ought to agree that European nations
"share similar threats" to the ones alarming the United States. But he
offered no guarantee that Washington would refrain from proceeding with
missile defense unilaterally if the allies refused to join in.
.
European leaders have so far largely shunned domestic debate about
missile defense because they felt that the program had only half-hearted
support from the Clinton administration.
.
The center-left governments in Britain, France and Germany worry that
missile defense will lead to new tensions with Moscow and put fresh
pressure on military budgets that are already strained.
.
European leaders' hopes that the missile defense issue might go away if
it was ignored long enough seem to have evaporated after the exchanges in
Munich, British and French officials said.
.
The German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, said, "We Europeans place great
value on frequent exchanges with the American administration on plans for
missile defense."
.
Sounding as if he anticipated trouble from arms control advocates among
his Social Democratic Party and its coalition ally, the Greens, Mr.
Schroeder called for German debate on missile defense "that takes into
account the entire width and breadth of German American relations and
does not make the mistake of concentrating on this question alone."
.
Russian Warns of Arms Race
.
A senior Russian security official said Sunday that plans by the Bush
administration to deploy an anti-missile system would undermine world
stability and lead to a new arms race in outer space, Reuters reported
from Munich.
.
"The destruction of the ABM Treaty will result in the annihilation of the
whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new
arms race, including one in outer space," the official, Sergei Ivanov,
secretary of Russia's security council, said at the conference on
security.
.
Military analysts say the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty between
Washington and Moscow would be breached by the new U.S. system if it were
deployed.
.
Mr. Ivanov offered talks on deep cuts in strategic nuclear weapons if the
Bush administration abandoned its plans for missile defense.
.
He added: "Restraining the so-called rogue nations - to use the American
terminology - may be carried out more effectively from the point of view
of both expense and consequences by means of a common political effort.
The situation in North Korea is the obvious example because the situation
a year ago seemed much worse than today."
***
no longer NMD, just missile defense now, bush and his ancient 70's cold
war defense secretary rumsfeld try the strategy: if the technology
doesn't even work, let's distract the critism and just make it bigger.
not only is it a government spend spend spend program, which republicans
supposed loathe, but it's welfare for the arms industry and
militarization for the world. bush probably slept in the day they talked
about the hundreds of deteriorating russian missile silos with nuclear
warheads still on hair trigger alert...
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