by George Monbiot
Published in the Guardian (August 18 2008)
It's a novel way to commit suicide. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions which annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by kindly offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.
The US government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the United States against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don't possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.
They permit us to look forward to a glowing future, in which missile defence, according to the Pentagon, will "protect our homeland ... and our friends and allies from ballistic missile attack" {1}; as long as the Russians wait until it's working before they nuke us. The good news is that, at the current rate of progress, reliable missile defence is only fifty years away. The bad news is that it has been fifty years away for the past six decades.
The system has been in development since 1946, and so far it has achieved a grand total of nothing. You wouldn't know it if you read the press releases published by the Pentagon's Missile Defence Agency: the word "success" features more often than any other noun {2}. It is true that the programme has managed to hit two out of the five missiles fired over the past five years during tests of its main component, the Ground-based Midcourse Missile Defense (GMD) system {3}. But sadly these tests bear no relation to anything resembling a real nuclear strike.
full: http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2008w33/msg00040.htm
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