Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Nothing is taboo for these guys

Pogge has a good post about the latest missle defense moves: Peace, order and good government, eh?: Let's not let the facts influence our decision
What frustrates me about the missile defense discussion is Canada's pious insistence that even if it does participate in the "defense" part, it would not participate in the weaponization of space, oh no, never, and besides the Americans say they don't want to put weapons in space anyway.
My question is -- why wouldn't they?
For the last 40 years, the American military has worked to weaponize everything else -- just tonight, on Countdown I think, there was a laudatory story about how US unmanned planes can fire missiles at Iraqi snipers, on orders from corporals sitting in bunkers a thousand miles away. One of the big scare stories in the Iraq war buildup was the "discovery" of some torpedo-like tubes which the Americans said were Iraqi prototypes of unmanned aircraft which the Iraqis were planning to use to attack the US -- of course, they turned out to be nothing of the kind, but it shows what the Americans were thinking. And they're working hard making nuclear weapons that they can actually use, that will, for instance, burrow underground.
So why wouldn't they want to be able to put weapons in space? In fact, some think they already are doing this -- its the final frontier, for one thing, and besides, they likely think they will need such weapons to win the war against China which they probably think America will be fighting in about 20 years.

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