Frogger
01-31-2008, 07:42 AM
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2008/jan/19/ben-bova-best-offense-good-missile-defense/I am in full agreement with the article. A working missile defense can make nuclear missiles obselete and remove one of the world's greatest dangers.
Ben Bova: The best offense is a good missile defense
By BEN BOVA
Saturday, January 19, 2008
You don’t hear much about it from the news media, but defenses against ballistic missiles are becoming practical.
Within the past month, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency shot down a target missile at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This achievement follows several other successful tests on longer-range missiles from the Pacific site of Kwajalein.
Two weeks later the Japanese destroyer Kongo shot down a test missile launched by the U.S. Navy that mimicked the performance of a North Korean Rodong missile. The intercept showed that the shipboard Aegis antimissile system can find and hit enemy missiles during their midcourse flight, when they are coasting after their rocket engines have shut down.
And less than three weeks ago, the U.S. Air Force announced that its Airborne Laser system is ready to flight test its high-power laser. The ABL consists of a Boeing 747 aircraft carrying a multimegawatt chemical laser. The system is intended to destroy ballistic missiles while they are in boost phase, minutes after launch.
The U.S. is deploying missile defense sites in Alaska and in eastern Europe, aimed at protecting American troops, American interests and American cities against ballistic-missile attacks from North Korea, Iran or terrorist groups.
Israel, bombarded by rockets and mortars from its fanatical neighbors, is also developing anti-missile defenses and even working on systems that can knock out mortar shells in flight.
The technology is progressing, but America’s news media have hardly mentioned this development. Why?
When I was in journalism school, we were taught that “good news is no news.” But the almost complete silence about this vitally important issue goes beyond such platitudes.
The problem, as I see it, is that the news media have been convinced for more than 20 years that missile defenses are impossible — and worse, they believe that even if such defenses are possible, we shouldn’t develop them.
How did this mind-set come to be? It goes back to Ronald Reagan’s original announcement in 1983 of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Much of the media had already decided that Reagan’s election to the White House was a fluke; they “knew” that a former movie actor shouldn’t be president of the United States.
When President Reagan proposed developing defenses that would make ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete,” it was a stunning surprise to the news media. And since the idea came from a man they already “knew” shouldn’t be president, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that the idea was silly. They dubbed it “Star Wars.” But, to their credit, the news media went to the experts to get their opinions on the matter. And here’s where the tale gets interesting.
The news pundits didn’t ask the scientists actually working on missile-defense systems about the validity of SDI. Those were government employees, either directly or indirectly, and the news people didn’t trust them to give an unbiased opinion.
Instead, the news hounds went to scientists and other public figures who were not in the government’s employ and who did not work on missile defense. And guess what? Those experts were almost unanimously against SDI.
At first, I couldn’t understand why some of the nation’s best scientists could take such a firm stand against SDI. Then I slowly began to realize that they were not talking about the science and technology so much; they were expressing their political opinions about nuclear weapons, the Cold War and President Reagan.
Some of these scientists were Nobel Prize winners. Several of them had worked on the original Manhattan Project. They had spent a good part of their lives trying to hammer out with their Soviet counterparts some steps toward nuclear disarmament and the prevention of nuclear weapons proliferation.
They had helped to create the strategic policy of mutual assured destruction, the policy whereby both the U.S. and Soviet Union maintained such enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons that if one side launched a devastating attack against the other, the other side would still have enough weaponry left to utterly destroy the attacker.
This MAD policy was a mutual-suicide pact. Reagan was proposing a defense that could make both sides safer. A key point in his SDI speech was his offer to share the new technology with the Soviets.
The Soviet Union rejected the offer and the very idea of missile defenses. The Soviet hierarchy, who had practically bankrupted the U.S.S.R. by building more missiles and nuclear warheads than the U.S. and its allies possessed, eventually gave way to new leadership. Within less than a decade, the Soviet Union crumbled into the ash bin of history.
Today, though, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is decidedly against American initiatives to put missile-defense bases in eastern Europe, even though those defenses could protect Russian cities from missiles fired from the volatile Middle East.
Why? Because Russia still possesses thousands of long-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads and Putin does not want to see them made “impotent and obsolete.” And most of the American news media still have the ingrained bias against missile defenses that they formed more than 20 years ago.
When all else fails, those who denigrate missile defense point out that such systems cost the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars. Perhaps so, but how much is Honolulu worth? Or Seattle? Or San Francisco? Those cities could be targets of North Korean or Chinese missiles.
How much is New York City worth? Or, for that matter, Miami or Orlando? What a coup for terrorists to wipe out Disney World in a radioactive mushroom cloud.
Fortunately, missile defenses are moving forward. Let’s hope they are in place when an enemy launches his attack on us. If they are, the attack may never be launched.
Which is the ultimate goal of such defenses.
Ben Bova: The best offense is a good missile defense
By BEN BOVA
Saturday, January 19, 2008
You don’t hear much about it from the news media, but defenses against ballistic missiles are becoming practical.
Within the past month, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency shot down a target missile at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This achievement follows several other successful tests on longer-range missiles from the Pacific site of Kwajalein.
Two weeks later the Japanese destroyer Kongo shot down a test missile launched by the U.S. Navy that mimicked the performance of a North Korean Rodong missile. The intercept showed that the shipboard Aegis antimissile system can find and hit enemy missiles during their midcourse flight, when they are coasting after their rocket engines have shut down.
And less than three weeks ago, the U.S. Air Force announced that its Airborne Laser system is ready to flight test its high-power laser. The ABL consists of a Boeing 747 aircraft carrying a multimegawatt chemical laser. The system is intended to destroy ballistic missiles while they are in boost phase, minutes after launch.
The U.S. is deploying missile defense sites in Alaska and in eastern Europe, aimed at protecting American troops, American interests and American cities against ballistic-missile attacks from North Korea, Iran or terrorist groups.
Israel, bombarded by rockets and mortars from its fanatical neighbors, is also developing anti-missile defenses and even working on systems that can knock out mortar shells in flight.
The technology is progressing, but America’s news media have hardly mentioned this development. Why?
When I was in journalism school, we were taught that “good news is no news.” But the almost complete silence about this vitally important issue goes beyond such platitudes.
The problem, as I see it, is that the news media have been convinced for more than 20 years that missile defenses are impossible — and worse, they believe that even if such defenses are possible, we shouldn’t develop them.
How did this mind-set come to be? It goes back to Ronald Reagan’s original announcement in 1983 of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Much of the media had already decided that Reagan’s election to the White House was a fluke; they “knew” that a former movie actor shouldn’t be president of the United States.
When President Reagan proposed developing defenses that would make ballistic missiles “impotent and obsolete,” it was a stunning surprise to the news media. And since the idea came from a man they already “knew” shouldn’t be president, they immediately jumped to the conclusion that the idea was silly. They dubbed it “Star Wars.” But, to their credit, the news media went to the experts to get their opinions on the matter. And here’s where the tale gets interesting.
The news pundits didn’t ask the scientists actually working on missile-defense systems about the validity of SDI. Those were government employees, either directly or indirectly, and the news people didn’t trust them to give an unbiased opinion.
Instead, the news hounds went to scientists and other public figures who were not in the government’s employ and who did not work on missile defense. And guess what? Those experts were almost unanimously against SDI.
At first, I couldn’t understand why some of the nation’s best scientists could take such a firm stand against SDI. Then I slowly began to realize that they were not talking about the science and technology so much; they were expressing their political opinions about nuclear weapons, the Cold War and President Reagan.
Some of these scientists were Nobel Prize winners. Several of them had worked on the original Manhattan Project. They had spent a good part of their lives trying to hammer out with their Soviet counterparts some steps toward nuclear disarmament and the prevention of nuclear weapons proliferation.
They had helped to create the strategic policy of mutual assured destruction, the policy whereby both the U.S. and Soviet Union maintained such enormous arsenals of nuclear weapons that if one side launched a devastating attack against the other, the other side would still have enough weaponry left to utterly destroy the attacker.
This MAD policy was a mutual-suicide pact. Reagan was proposing a defense that could make both sides safer. A key point in his SDI speech was his offer to share the new technology with the Soviets.
The Soviet Union rejected the offer and the very idea of missile defenses. The Soviet hierarchy, who had practically bankrupted the U.S.S.R. by building more missiles and nuclear warheads than the U.S. and its allies possessed, eventually gave way to new leadership. Within less than a decade, the Soviet Union crumbled into the ash bin of history.
Today, though, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is decidedly against American initiatives to put missile-defense bases in eastern Europe, even though those defenses could protect Russian cities from missiles fired from the volatile Middle East.
Why? Because Russia still possesses thousands of long-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads and Putin does not want to see them made “impotent and obsolete.” And most of the American news media still have the ingrained bias against missile defenses that they formed more than 20 years ago.
When all else fails, those who denigrate missile defense point out that such systems cost the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars. Perhaps so, but how much is Honolulu worth? Or Seattle? Or San Francisco? Those cities could be targets of North Korean or Chinese missiles.
How much is New York City worth? Or, for that matter, Miami or Orlando? What a coup for terrorists to wipe out Disney World in a radioactive mushroom cloud.
Fortunately, missile defenses are moving forward. Let’s hope they are in place when an enemy launches his attack on us. If they are, the attack may never be launched.
Which is the ultimate goal of such defenses.