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a failed anti-missile test

Welcome calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons or major cuts in the US arsenal have come recently from Global Zero, a policy group that includes a long list of retired US military hawks, and from the International Coalition to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, I-CAN, a sister organization that enjoys broad public support.

A Global Zero report — signed last year by Gen. James Cartwright, a previous commander of all US nuclear weapons, and several senior government officers including Richard Burt, a former chief arms negotiator, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel (who signed when he was a former Republican senator from Nebr.), Thomas Pickering, a former ambassador to Russia, and Gen. John Sheehan, who held senior NATO positions — calls for the elimination of all 450 US land-based (Minuteman) missiles, and over-all reductions  leaving a total of 900 nukes: 450 in reserve and 450 deployed on submarines and bombers, down from a current total of 2,500. Global Zero’s call also urged that US H-bombs be taken off hair trigger alert to reduce chances of pre-emptive or “accidental” nuclear attacks.

Trading warhead reductions for anti-missile contracts?

Predictably, the Global Zero proposal advocates development of “missile defenses” to bolster US military firepower in the face of reduced nuclear warhead numbers. This apparently cynical concession must be a payback guarantee for campaign contributions from military contractors, because missile defense programs have an unbroken 30-year-long chain of failed or faked tests with no prospect for success (what the New York Times in March called “a half-century of global anti-missile failures”) — as two studies from prestigious groups in the last 16 months indicate. Even the staunchly pro-corporate Times has opined that “there is widespread agreement among experts that the missile defense system as a whole has serious weaknesses.” Still the program is larded with about $10 billion in annual budget outlays.

The dream of shooting down weapons travelling over four-miles-per-second has been the Sci-Fi scam of university and national laboratory grant writers — and the profitable private think tanks and weapons builders — ever since Ronald Reagan gave them the nod with his 1982 Star Wars “missile shield” speech. British PM Margaret Thatcher told Reagan in the White House later that the idea, called delusional by critics, was a costly pipe dream. “I am a chemist,” Thatcher told him. “I know it won’t work.” MIT physicist Lisbeth Gronlund said likewise to the Washington Post 12 years ago: “This is basic physics … the system won’t work.”

In spite of an estimated $250 billion in program spending since the ‘80s, absolutely nothing has been developed — according to reports from both the National Academy of Sciences and the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board — that can distinguish real enemy warheads from cheap decoys used to divert and foil US rockets. A study by the Union of Concerned Scientists reached the same conclusion in 2004, $120 billion ago. The NAS’s report of last September called for elimination of a $28 billion Pentagon array of satellites designed to track enemy warheads, calling it costly and unneeded.

Even reported success stories about anti-missile systems, like Israel’s Iron Dome program, and a “kill vehicle” promoted by US military contracting giant TRW Inc. in Cleveland, have been lampooned by experts. Rather than shoot-down rates of 90%, as claimed by Israeli officials, weapons expert and author Richard Lloyd found that only between 30% and 40% were successful, and Ted Postol, an MIT physicist who uncovered the Patriot antimissile failures of 1991, said last March, “It’s very hard to see how [Iron Dome] could be more than 5 or 10%” successful. Mordechai Shefer, an Israeli rocket scientist who studied 24 videos from Nov. 2012, when some 1,500 rockets were fired into Israel from Gaza, concluded that the kill rate was zero.

Professor Postol is involved with the TRW case too, since Sept. 2000 when the FBI began looking into charges that the firm committed fraud and tried to cover it up when it falsely claimed that its “hit-to-kill” rockets could discern warheads from decoys. Since 2001 Postal has said the Pentagon knows it can’t build an effective missile shield and is concealing that fact with lies, fraud and abuse.

Faulty anti-ballistic missiles already deployed against nothing  

The Pentagon’s current anti-missile bases set up jointly at Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenberg AFB in Calif., are a cartoonish “nothing-to-do-at-work-today” sham, set up to alarm the public about Iran and North Korea and to maintain the program’s funding.

Still, anti-nuclear pressure on the White House seems to be having minor effects, in view of a June 24 statement by President Obama that the ongoing deployment of 90 U.S. thermo-nuclear bombs in Europe should be reevaluated. Last March Obama even canceled George Bush’s plans to place “interceptors” in Poland and Romania.

Like critics of Cold War fear-mongering over the former Soviet Union’s intentions, European leaders complain that the US has no need to install missile defenses and are overstating the threat from Iran and North Korea. This summer, the 20 US H-bombs still deployed at Buchel Air Base in Germany, will be the focus of an August 11 blockade by musicians from around the world demanding their ouster.