Time for a Missile Ban
Treaty
By Alice Slater
This July, only one day after the US celebrated another anniversary of its
Declaration of Independence from tyranny, it was reported that once more, a test
of US anti-missile defenses against incoming long-range ballistic missiles,
launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California had failed again. This was the third consecutive test of the
Missile Defense Agency’s Ground-Based Mid-Course system, in which our military was unable to
intercept an incoming missile, programmed to target the US, which had been
launched towards the mainland from the U.S. Army's Reagan Test Site on
Kwajalein atoll, in the Marshall Islands.
This lunatic program, dreamt up by Reagan and known by its comic book
reality, Star Wars, will never work.
Numerous scientists have testified that it would be impossible to
guarantee that our anti-missile interceptors could accurately hit an incoming
nuclear missile, because the enemy launch would be accompanied by a phalanx of
decoys, preventing us from ever knowing with certainty which incoming missile
would be carrying a lethal payload. In
the sixteen tests of this ill-conceived “defense”, only eight have ever hit
their target over the past nine years[i]
and the target has been rigged with a homing device sending a signal to allow
the anti-missile to zero in on its location.
One truly need not be a rocket scientist to figure out that this ill-gotten
program, a multi-billion dollar gift to the
military-industrial-academic-congressional complex is insane because no enemy
attack would give such friendly instructions to our “defenses”.
In 2002, the US unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty which had been negotiated with the Soviet Union as a way to slow
down the arms race. The two countries
reasoned that if they refrained from building anti-missile systems, they could
also stop the burgeoning pile-up of missiles they were acquiring to “deter”
each other during the Cold War. After
the Berlin Wall came down, any good will we had built up with the Russians
swiftly began to dissipate. We expanded
NATO right up to Russia’s border, despite promises we gave to Gorbachev that if
he didn’t object to a united Germany joining NATO, it would expand no further. Russia lost twenty million people during the
Nazi onslaught, and was understandably wary of a reunited Germany in NATO. Today
NATO is even working to admit former Soviet Republics, Georgia and Ukraine, as
members. And we are planting our missile
“defenses” in Poland, Romania, and Turkey.
A powerful global grassroots campaign influenced the Czech Republic to
back out of a scheduled deployment in that eastern European country. Adding
Turkey to the mix of NATO missile bases must be particularly offensive to
Russia, when you consider that part of the deal during the Cuban missile crisis
between Kennedy and Khrushchev, was a secret agreement to remove US missiles from
Turkey when the Soviets agreed to bring back their missiles from Cuba.
The US anti-ballistic missile defense program, started in 2002 after we
walked out of the ABM Treaty, now deploys about 30 interceptors in Fort Greely,
Alaska and at Vandenberg in California.
Despite the latest fizzle, the Pentagon announced that it would not be
deterred in its plans to place another 13 interceptors in Alaska at a cost of
$1billion. In addition, the Congress has
mandates that the Pentagon study an ground-based missile defense system in
either New York or Maine. One of the
biggest sticking point in moving towards meaningful negotiations for nuclear
disarmament is Russia’s strong objection to the US missile defense program. When you realize that it wouldn’t work
anyway, that it’s costing billions of dollars and untold losses of intellectual
treasure applied to meaningless work, surely it’s time to call for a missile
ban treaty. [ii] Indeed, both China and Russia have repeatedly
offered a draft treaty to ban weapons in space where the US was the only nation
to block their proposal at the UN’s Commission on Disarmament which requires
consensus to move forward. Any ban on
weapons in space would have to deal with the missiles as well which are an
integral part of a space fighting system.
