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by Helen Caldicott
Posted: 07/11/01
A Star Wars story that
won't end happily Australians must wake up to the dangers of our likely
role in US plans for a missile defence shield, writes Helen Caldicott.
When Australia truly
understands the dangers of President George Bush's National Missile
Defence scheme - and John Howard's embrace of it - it will be a major
issue in the coming Federal election.
Australia is the only
Western country to unequivocally support NMD, aka Star Wars. In return for
this boot-licking behaviour, Washington is dangling a free-trade agreement
in front of us. Forget being deputy sheriff, we are about to become the
51st State as we help America take nuclear war to outer space.
In a new policy paper,
the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank responsible for most of
Bush's agenda, ominously suggests direct Australian involvement in NMD.
The local US base at Pine Gap is already playing a major role in NMD
planning.
And on July 29 to 31,
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Defence Minister Peter Reith will
meet their US counterparts, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, leading up to John Howard's pilgrimage to
Washington on September 10 to see Bush.
Star Wars will be high
on the agenda as well as US plans to heavily involve Australia in
America's aggressive arms build-up in the Asia-Pacific region. We've seen
this week how this Government has buckled under intense US pressure to
give up our defence self-reliance and to climb into bed with the US Navy.
This is but Scene One, Act One, of a nefarious drama of which Star Wars is
also an integral part.
NMD was officially
initiated by Ronald Reagan following his notorious Star Wars speech of
1983. Since then more than $US60 billion has been spent by American
universities, academics and military corporations to determine the
feasibility of this method of protecting America from a strategic nuclear
attack. Their conclusion? NMD is a non-starter.
But this was not going
to thwart the Heritage Foundation and the Centre for Security Policy whose
financial backers include Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing and TRW, all
major defence contractors eager for the in excess of $US200 billion that
NMD has been estimated to cost. Suddenly they decided that tiny North
Korea and Iraq would shortly be able to launch nuclear-armed missiles at
the US. Although the CIA disagreed, these bizarre theories were fervently
adopted by Bush's Administration.
Not surprisingly, many
Bush appointees hail from Lockheed Martin and the Heritage Foundation.
These connections run deep: Rumsfeld, once described by Henry Kissinger as
the most ruthless man he ever knew, is a close associate of Frank Gaffney,
a major Star Wars warrior from the Reagan administration, who heads the
Centre for Security Policy and is behind the demonisation of China as the
new Cold War enemy.
All this makes it
vital for Australians to understand the complexities of NMD so they can
understand the dangerous nuclear morass this Government is plunging them
into through ignorance or hubris or both.
NMD, which is intended
to set up an impenetrable shield, has four layers:
1) Theatre missile
defence, which is a low-altitude system to deal with attack by short-range
missiles. This could be deployed from Taiwan to destroy Chinese missiles.
2) Boost-phase missile
defence to destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles as they soar
through the atmosphere into space in only a matter of seconds.
3) Transit defence
which uses laser beams, hit-to-kill missiles or even nuclear weapons to
intercept intercontinental nuclear weapons as they travel thousands of
kilometres through space.
4) Terminal defence
which involves missiles that target enemy missiles as they approach their
targets.
These missile
interceptors will be launched either from land, ships at sea, from planes
or from space. Construction of these weapons is under way.
Almost all credible
scientists, including the Federation of American Scientists, have
concluded the system will never work. Apart from the difficulties posed by
its extremely complex technology, NMD will be readily overwhelmed by the
launching of large numbers of hydrogen bombs mixed with decoys, mylar
balloons, which are impossible to tell from actual weapons.
However, the sad irony
is that, apart from NMD, we already face a grave nuclear danger: 12 years
after the end of the Cold War, the US still has Russia and China targeted
with more than 5,500 hydrogen bombs on hair-trigger alert, and Russia has
a similar number facing the US, also on alert. In contrast, China has only
20 antiquated liquid-fuelled intercontinental nuclear missiles.
Official US policy is
still to fight and win a nuclear war, so it maintains extremely accurate,
first-strike weapons whose purpose is to destroy enemy missiles in their
silos in a surprise attack. NMD weapons would then be launched against the
few enemy missiles that may survive an American first-strike. This scheme
will thus destabilise the delicate nuclear balance among the superpowers,
because Russia and China see it as a move to enhance America's
first-strike capability.
The result will be a
new arms race as China, India, Pakistan and even Russia attempt to
overcome NMD by building even more nuclear weapons. What's more, NMD will
also negate the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty, the cornerstone of
nuclear arms control, and all other subsequent treaties which provide a
modicum of stability in a nuclear-armed world.
But there is a fifth
dimension beyond NMD, and it is truly the most frightening.
The US Space Command,
under the control of the US Air Force, is intent on dominating space. For
years, under the romantic guise of space exploration, NASA has been
mapping the planets, the moon and asteroids for rare minerals. Manned
colonies planned for these bodies, powered by nuclear reactors, are to
mine these deposits and return the minerals to the US.
If America invests
heavily in space it must protect its investments and dominate it. To this
end, the US Space Command is developing sophisticated technologies
including anti-satellite weapons to disarm foreign military and commercial
satellites; cyberspace warfare; and laser and particle beam weapons. In
1998, the US Space Command, in conjunction with 75 military industrial
corporations, published a long-range plan with these basic goals:
1. To assure the means
to get to space and to operate once there; 2. To surveil the region to
achieve and maintain situational understanding; 3. To protect America's
critical space systems from hostile action; 4. To prevent unauthorised
access to, and exploitation of US/allied space facilities; 5. To negate
hostile space systems that place US and allied systems at risk.
In other words, the
militarisation of space. Not only does the US plan to wage war in space
but it plans to "hold at-risk", "high-value Earth targets" with "near
instantaneous force application". In English, that means the ability to
target cities, and to kill millions of people, from space.
The Australian people
would rise up as one if they understood the implications of these US plans
and that our Government, in our name, is complicit in them.
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