Not Your Daddy's Star Wars

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Back in the 80's when I was heavily involved in the Nuclear Weapons Freeze movement I was adamantly against Reagan's "Star Wars" plan (the Strategic Defense Initiative - SDI). Today, I'm strongly in favor of a scaled down version of exactly the same thing. So what's different today? - - The "Axis of Evil".

Bush II's "Axis of Evil" is the term he used to describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. He claimed that they sought WMD's and were generally trouble makers and untrustworthy. In my opinion Bush got two out of three right.

I don't think Iraq ever posed a serious challenge to the world. But I think Iran's current leadership is a theocratic dictatorship which, borrowing Tom Friedman's words about Osama Bin Laden, hates us more than they like life... No, I take that back, I don't think they're quite as extreme as OBL, but they're closer than just about anyone else in the world. And then North Korea... well Kim Jong-il is just scary.

Reagan's Star Wars was supposed to stop the Soviet Union's 20,000 nuclear weapons. Yes, 20,000. It was billed as a panacea that would solve all our pesky nuclear problems.

The idea that we could build a system that could stop 20,000 warheads from the Soviet Union is laughable. But the really scary nations of today which are about to (or already do) have nuclear weapons, well those nations only have a few such weapons, and for the forseeable future they're not likely to have the resources to make more than a handful of weapons.

A missile defense system against, for example, ten warheads could work, and we could build such a system to have a high degree of likelihood of being 100% successful.

So my hope is that whoever is president in 2009 takes this to heart, and builds us a new kind of missile defense system.

This week's news of our shoot-down of an out-of-control satellite is what prompted these thoughts.