Posted on 06/09/2004 10:44:02 AM PDT by jazzo
One of the many things Ronald Reagan was right about – and many others, including John Kerry, were wrong about - was missile defence. The “bullet that can shoot down a bullet” is already a scientific reality, which is more than can be said for most of the predictions the eco-doom-mongers were making in the Eighties. On the best way to defend against nuclear weapons, President Reagan was right in principle: you can’t uninvent things, you can only make them obsolete. But he was also right in practice – that American technology would find a way sooner than anyone thought. This column appeared in The Spectator on July 28th 2001, when the main objection of the Democrats and the media seemed to be that it was unfair not to let China become a massive threat to the west coast of the United States:
LIKE most expert commentators, I haven't a clue what I'm talking about 90 per cent of the time. Fortunately, it's usually pretty easy to fake it.For example, you'll recall that when John F. Kennedy's plane plunged into Long Island Sound, we columnists moved smoothly into the improvised Aviation Correspondent routine, pointing out that when you're flying at night across water it's easy to lose sight of whether the big coloured thingamajig on the instrument panel is correctly aligned with the funny-shaped wossname tracking the whatever.
Unfortunately, for anything faster than a twin-prop, it all gets a bit technical. Much easier to take refuge in metaphor. Here's Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist of The New York Times, explaining his objections to the Bush administration's plans for missile defence:
It's good to have layers of defence, just as it's good to have belts and suspenders. But if you already have suspenders, it would be crazy to pay $100 billion for a belt of uncertain reliability - especially if that belt makes it more likely your pants will fall down.
If I follow correctly, the suspenders (or braces, as you chaps say; no transvestism in this metaphor) are conventional nuclear deterrence; the unreliable belt is missile defence; and the pants are America's cherished freedoms, the role of the great Republic itself presumably being played by the pimply, hairy legs left so perilously exposed by the concertinaed trousers.
What I don't understand is why an unreliable belt would lead to the collapse of your pants if you're still wearing the suspenders, unless, of course, the suspenders themselves are also unreliable, perhaps even obsolescent, a relic of the Cold War era liable to snap unexpectedly when you're bending down to pick up your derby.
But, of course, it is not necessary for Friedman's metaphor to make sense, as all the smart people who read The New York Times already agree with him. Missile defence has been a joke ever since it was cooked up a generation ago by President Reagan, the noted B-movie cowboy moron, and instantly dismissed as Star Wars, a comic-book fantasy. Then, as now, the smart set lined up to pour scorn on the presidential clod: according to JFK/LBJ national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, renowned Kremlinologist George F. Kennan, veteran arms control negotiator Gerald Smith, former defence secretary Robert S. McNamara, and a zillion others of one mind, Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative was an 'act of folly', a 'dream' that 'cannot be achieved'. Worse, the whole scam was a 'telling commentary on his presidential style', according to Philip Geyelin in The Washington Post in 1984:
Reagan had no proposal worked out when he first floated the idea almost casually in a speech devoted to other, known quantities in his military program. He had only a fatuous, personal vision of a nuclear-free world.
Just as President Kennedy had no proposal worked out - onlya fatuous personal vision of putting a man on the moon within the decade.
When Reagan first floated his fatuous proposal, the guy representing the other side was Andrei Gromyko. Less than two decades on, Gromyko and the state he served are dead, and all manner of things are technically feasible. It never occurred to me back in the 1980s that one day I'd be able to write a piece for The Spectator while simultaneously watching split-screen live streaming video of grandmothers having sex with goats. And not just any goats, but Nubians. If President Reagan had proposed the Internet, or cloning, or any of the other novelties of the age, they, too, would have been fatuous delusions. Much has changed in the world since the 1980s, but happily the quality of Star Wars jokes remains delightfully unspoilt by progress. The other day, after listening to a detailed presentation by deputy defence secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, fired off a zinger he'd taken the precaution of preparing in advance. 'This administration's plans for missile defence for fiscal year 2002 have been harder to zero in on than a target in a missile-defence test, ' he said. Ha-ha! Missile defence, what a hoot! Talk about pie in the sky!
A couple of days later, the pie was blown out of the sky. On 14 July, a dummy warhead was launched from Vandenberg air force base in California. It was intercepted and destroyed by a missile launched from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, 5,000 miles away. At the point of impact, the two missiles were travelling at a speed of 16,200 miles per hour. This test is the reality, the fact of the matter. The other stuff - the G8, Nato, EU and all the other international gabfests George W. Bush has to endure - is the fantasy, the B-movie, the shadow play. While the media fret about the various reservations expressed by the Prime Minister of Canada, the Chancellor of Germany, the foreign minister of Sweden and the deputy tourism minister of Belgium, missile defence is happening.
President Reagan did what politicians are always being urged to do: he took the long view. And, while Tony Blair and other CND unilateralists were insisting that the best way to make the world safe from annihilation was to surrender, Reagan understood that the surest method of neutralising any weapon is to make it obsolete. Why the Left should be opposed to ending the nuclear age is unclear. But first there were the jokes about the ludicrousness of the very idea - a bullet hitting a bullet! Then there were the cost estimates:
Thomas Friedman's $100 billion belt is bargain-basement compared to the estimates of Jimmy Carter's defence secretary Harold Brown in 1983 ('the first trillion dollar defence system') and longtime Soviet watcher Stephen Shenfield in1985 ('The total cost of a Star Wars system may eventually reach $2 trillion'). And so now that the technology is in reach at an affordable price-tag - indeed, a price that would be derided by Democrats as pitiful if it were to be applied to a new Special Education entitlement or prescription drug coverage for seniors - the Left has developed a mystical attachment to the old Cold War certainties of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Friedman even managed to write this sentence with a straight face: 'It is absurd that a system that has kept the peace for 50 years - classic deterrence, reinforced by arms control - is so hated by the Republican Right.'
Whoa, hang on, man. We weren't the guys making doomsday-scenario thrillers, peddling 'BETTER RED THAN DEAD ' stickers, organising 'NO NUKES ' rock mega-galas. We weren't the ones in the smelly T-shirts jumping up and down with the hirsute feminists outside Greenham Common. Senator Levin was far too grand to sleep in the trees outside US air bases, but he did his best to oppose every viable deterrent of the day, voting against Reagan's ICBM deployment because it 'would make the world more insecure'.
Those Greenpeace dudes breaking into Menwith Hill have it easy: they're against anything America does. But the clever people - the folks whose impeccable track record of getting everything wrong never dents their contempt for boneheads like Reagan and Bush - are obliged to find more artful arguments. Though Friedman mocks what he calls the Republicans' 'religious devotion' to missile defence, the only supplicants on view are his crowd prostrate at the altar of the 1972 ABM treaty. The other signatory to the treaty - the USSR - no longer exists, and Vladimir Putin's attitude to it is boundlessly flexible, depending on what he thinks he can get Bush to go along with. So now The New York Times is arguing that America should negotiate with China over the ABM treaty.
China, like Chad, Slovenia, Papua New Guinea and the Turks and Caicos Islands, isn't a signatory to the treaty, but the Times feels that Bush is being insensitive by not pretending they are. Beijing, after all, is an expanding nuclear power, unlikely to welcome the obsolescence of its armoury.
'China has more immediate fears that even a limited missile defence could nullify its far smaller number of long-range missiles, ' the Times leader-writer noted. 'These concerns are legitimate.'
Read that again slowly: China has a 'legitimate' right to target Los Angeles and San Francisco without the Americans being so unsporting as to put up defences.
Why, in the face of a few lovable rogue states, Bush is carrying on like a nuclear Tony Martin. The politics of the Cold War have been precisely inverted: the bien-pensants in Europe and North America now want 'our children' to live under the shadow of the mushroom cloud for ever; conversely, the right-wing warmongers are the new unilateralists, determined to push ahead with a defensive system that will enable them to get rid of a vast chunk of their arsenals.
'I have an honest difference of opinion with them. I think they're dishonest, ' said actor John Cusack about the Republicans, in the course of promoting his newmovie with Julia Roberts. '"There's no conclusive science on the Kyoto accord." That means they paid some scientist to say there's no global warming. But there is no science that says the missile defence shield can work.'
Actually, it's the other way round. On 14 July, science said an interceptor could shoot down an incoming missile. Science has yet to find anything proving a connection between the one-degree rise in temperature over the last century and that proportion of greenhouse-gas emissions for which Western industrial societyis responsible, nor anything to suggest that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions would reverse the modest warming trend. But, on the hunch that there just might be some connection, we're supposed to plunge the world into a massive global economic depression. On the other hand, missile defence is a delusion of the GOP's Dr Strangeloves. This is one reason why the Right has such a difficult job making its case: the politics of the Left is a secular religion, as impervious to rational, peerreviewed scientific truth as the most isolated Cargo Culters.
Twenty years ago, Ronald Reagan foresaw a missile defence shield. By contrast, John Cusack's chums foresaw a global population explosion, the exhaustion of the world's oil resources, and the melting of the polar ice caps. Whose crystal ball would you bet on? In Bonn this week the Rest of the World was meeting to 'rescue' Kyoto - not rescue their beloved planet, mark you; only one of their sacred texts, and even then there's not exactly a stampede to join Romania in actually ratifying it. Meanwhile, 144 miles over the Pacific, the Pentagon blew a warhead out of the sky. So who are the fantasists and who are the realists?
No doubt Colin Powell and Condi Rice will be happy to assure the French, German and even the Canadian governments that if they are determined to ensure that their citizens remain vulnerable to nuclear attack, the Americans will not stand in their way. But it's no longer possible for the smart set to argue that this is a fool's obsession. If Bush pulls off missile defence, it will mark the end of the era that began with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or, to put it in terms Thomas Friedman would understand, this is as seismic a shift as the changeover from fly buttons to zips: when a rogue nation aims a lethal projectile below your belt, you don't want to be fumbling with outmoded buttons easily penetrated; you want a reinforced-steel zipper that can repel all comers -and, at a hundred billion, we'll be paying wholesale.
BIG Steyn B U M P
Cheers,
knews hound
Ronald Reagan's Iron Will, his vision of SDI and the fact that as President he...
Approved the Plan to Sabotage Soviet Technology
are what won the Cold War and eliminated the USSR without a World War to do it.
This Book Recounts a Cold War Program That Made Soviet Technology Go Haywire!
I bump for Steyn.
Who can forgey Meryl Streep shreiking to Congress "What are you doing to our children?" regarding the use of Alar on apples, or Ted Dansen lecturing us about destroying the worlds oceans. They must be so disappointed that the earth hasn't become the wasteland they expected it to be by now, because we didn't listen to them.
b
FMCDH(BITS)
Don't we already have large aircraft with chemical lasers on permanent rotaition over the pacific? I remember seeing a graphic about this as a stage one shield system.
bttt
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