Katrina vanden Heuvel: Stopping the New Arms Race

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from The Nation:



BLOG | Posted 02/26/2008 @ 1:25pm
Stopping the New Arms Race



The White House will do everything it can to push its reckless, European-based missile defense plan forward. Not only is there growing citizen opposition in the host countries to the proposed ten interceptor missiles in Poland and radar military base in the Czech Republic, but the system fuels a new arms race and militarism that is a far greater threat to our national security than any nuclear missile from Iran it would purportedly defend against.

As Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund and author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons told me last year, "President Bush is rushing to deploy a technology that does not work against a threat that does not exist."

But even worse than this rush to deployment is the destabilizing impact it has on relations with Russia and the prospects for real security and peace. Joanne Landy and Thomas Harrison--co-directors of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy--recently wrote in Foreign Policy In Focus, "When the Soviet Union first built a limited missile defense system in the late 1960s, the United States responded by building up a nuclear strike strategy to overwhelm the new technology. The cycle of nuclear one-upmanship was partially halted by the ABM Treaty, but then the Bush administration withdrew from the treaty in 2002. Now… history repeats itself, but the table has been turned. Today it is the United States building a limited missile defense system… and it is the Russians who say they need to target it to maintain the effectiveness of their deterrent. The Cold War may be over, but military and policy planners in both countries still think in Cold War terms."

Landy and Harrison also point out while opposition to the proposed US installations gathers strength within Poland and the Czech Republic, many in the US peace movement don't know about the European-based system, which costs over $1 billion annually, further erodes our international reputation and fuels a new Cold War. "This issue feeds into the mistrust of America that Europeans feel on a host of Bush Administration policies from global warming to Iraq," Cirincione says. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=290865

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