Thirty years ago, on March 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan made a television address calling on the U.S. to build an anti-missile defense. His rationale was compelling: Isn't it better to save American lives than to kill millions of the enemy? Our enemy then was the fearsome Soviet missile force. Reagan's steadfast determination to build a U.S. anti-missile defense was why he won the Cold War at Reykjavik (as we now know from revealed Soviet documents) without firing a shot (as Margaret Thatcher famously said). The propaganda against U.S. anti-missile defense started immediately after Reagan's 1983 speech with Ted Kennedy ridiculing it as Star Wars, and continues to this day. The building of an anti-missile system always posed the number-one non-negotiable issue between the U.S. and our enemies and, incomprehensively, between conservatives and the Left. We now face other enemies. But the Left is still dug in behind its opposition to saving American lives by an anti-missile system. Barack Obama became president by spouting the typical left-wing, anti-defense policy and dreaming of the fantasy of a nuclear-free world. He seems to think diplomatic talks, combined with his personal charm, can replace peace through strength, but it can't. One of President Obama's first acts was to effectively cancel the final phase of a Europe-based missile defense system because it was vehemently opposed by Russia. He started unilaterally reducing our nuclear deterrent in the hope our enemies would follow suit, which, of course, they didn't. Obama chose Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense because he supported zero-nuclear foolishness. Hagel was on the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund, which gave millions of dollars to spread zero-nuke nonsense and lift sanctions on Iran. Obama used his State of the Union speech this year to breathe new life into his effort to reduce nuclear weapons around the world. He wants to cut our nuclear forces by about a third, but Communist North Korea is not responsive to these overtures. North Korea's new boss, Kim Jong Un, is the 30-year-old grandson of the Communist tyrant who started the Korean War in 1950. Kim has now put our 28,000 U.S. troops at risk by declaring that the 1953 Armistice suspending the Korean War is null and void, so North and South Korea are in a "state of war." U.S. defense experts believe that North Korean missiles can reach Hawaii and Alaska, but not yet the continental U.S. North Korea has conducted a long-range missile test, a nuclear test and demonstrated a mobile launcher, all of which indicate that North Korea's technology is advancing faster than the U.S. had predicted. http://news.investors.com/ibd-edito...s-shows-reagans-wisdom-on-missile-defense.htm
In fairness, there was a bit more to it. The stated purpose of the anti-missile system was to protect europe from a possible Iranian strike. Since Iran lacked long range missiles, that seemed a little odd, plus the obvious question of why were we building a missile defense system for europe? Who else in the area had missiles? Russia, of course. Putin and the russian military saw it as provocative. We had been doing an endzone dance ever sonce the Soviet Union broke up, inviting former eastern bloc countries into NATO, an alliance specifically designed to counteract the Soviets. Then to top it off, we plan an anti-missile system right on their border. Of course they were pissed off. How would we react if they got together with Mexico or Venezuela to build one on our doorstep? It was another bad idea from the bad idea folks in the Bush administration. Obama was right to drop it in my opinion.
Iran is said to have missiles that can reach southern Europe. But I was primarily referring to the star wars system Reagan put in motion to protect the U.S. Obama scrapped the airborne laser system that was starting to show promise and he had scrapped the missile defenses in the west before he decided the other day to re-install them. I just see Obama as afraid to upset Putin. But, IMO, Russia can build their own missile defense system if they are so concerned!
as was I. I think Europe can protect themselves at this point. If we are going to have socialistic polices which destroy our GDP potential,h we are not going to be able to spend money protecting Europe. High taxes and a powerful military do not go together for long.
I just spoke with a guy who knows about this stuff because he works in the field. He says he is not sure... but Obama may crippled us in the missle shield area... just as some of our technologies were getting close to mature. I said I hope we have some the public does not know about.. and he said that this North Korea thing is very troubling. I also learned that once a country can put up a satellite in theory they can hit anywhere.
We really need to keep working on this star wars defense badly. N.K. already put a satellite in orbit although uncontrolled. That's bad news if they keep working on missile and nuke technology which they are doing. The same with Iran.