Missile defense fails again

Chomsky: ``...a lot of this is called `missile defense,' but as everyone knows on every side, missile defense is not a defensive system, it's a first strike weapon."


It all "would work" if nothing went wrong. Graphic credit: Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

In a report earlier this week, we learned that yet another test of the politically-deployed Alaskan missile defense system has failed.

The interceptor, located at the Ronald Reagan Test Site at Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, was supposed to target a mock ballistic missile fired from Kodiak Island, Alaska. The target missile went off as scheduled at 9:22 p.m. Alaska time Sunday, but the interceptor failed to launch.

While missile defense officials ``expressed relief that the problem did not appear related to the interceptor," John Pike, a missile defense critic at globalsecurity.org worried that ``You don't get second chances in nuclear combat."

Totally absent from most public discourse on missile defense, however, are the negative diplomatic and security implications of the $10 billion/year program. In short, the effect of missile defense is exactly opposite of what this kind of system is purported to be. Because the US has declared to the world that it will not pursue diplomatic reductions and will continue to raise the provocative posture of its own long-range weapons of mass destruction, the mere existence of missile defense further declares a highly aggressive US stance. Instead of protecting anyone from missile attack, such an attack will in the future be all the more likely. States concerned about being in the crosshairs of the US eventually will react aggressively themselves, rapidly increasing tension and the likelihood of war.

Chomsky further explains

There's a lot of debate and discussion about the so-called missile defense. A lot of criticism on grounds that it hasn't been tried, and probably won't work and so on. That may be true or may not be true, but it's kind of missing the point. The system is far more dangerous if there's some appearance that it might work, that is going -- that's what's going to impel potential targets to do exactly what the United States did in the case of a much more primitive and insignificant missile defense system in 1968. Namely, to expand their offensive military capacities to overwhelm it.

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