Reality of North Korean Missiles vs. the Mythology of Missile Defense
Last month, the mainstream media endorsed the Pentagon’s description of a collision between an American interceptor rocket and a mock intercontinental ballistic missile over the Pacific Ocean as the “first successful test of whether it could shoot down a North Korean warhead racing toward the United States.” Nonsense!
The reality of anti-missile defense, whether called anti-ballistic missiles, “Star Wars,” or today’s National Missile Defense is—in Yogi Berra’s ironic words—a continuing story of “deja vu all over again.” For the past sixty years, an alliance of weapons laboratories and defense contractors have exaggerated the military threat that these systems are supposed to meet as well as the potential for the success of these systems.
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The USS Liberty: a Well-Planned Accident
Today marks the 56th anniversary of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, which has been described by too many U.S. and Israeli accounts as an accident. In fact, the attack took place after eight hours of aerial surveillance by Israel, and it involved a two-hour air and naval attack that killed 34 sailors and wounded an…
The Mainstream Media’s Unwillingness to Challenge U.S. Militarization
The Post regularly states that the United States spends as much on defense as the next 10 or 11 nations combined, but the cruel fact is that we spend as much as all other nations combined. The global total for defense spending is around $2.5 trillion, and U.S. defense spending exceeds $1.2 trillion. The Pentagon’s budget for next year is $886 billion, but that is not the full extent of defense spending. The budget for the Veteran’s Administration is over $120 billion, which takes total defense spending to more than $1 trillion. There is significant defense spending in the budgets of the intelligence community, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Homeland Security, bringing total defense spending to at least $1.2 trillion.
