National Missile Defense
Historical Perspective
On March 23, 1983, through a nationally televised address to the nation, then President Ronald Reagan envisioned a ”Star Wars” defense system to replace the existing element of mutual deterrence between the two Cold War superpowers. The system calls for a high-tech impenetrable ballistic missile shield for the United States. The speech marks the birth of the Strategic Defense Initiative1 (SDI). It came about when the Soviets then had numerical advantage over the United States in ballistic missiles that are increasingly accurate and powerful. In fact, the Soviets has the ability to overwhelm the United States' missiles on the ground should a conflict ever occur. Arms race is a vicious cycle in itself and will not contribute to the cause of world peace. Therefore, to render this advantage impotent and obsolete, President Reagan directs the nation’s talented and government agencies to begin exploring and researching programs that will achieve the ultimate goal of eliminating threats due to weapons of mass destruction now and for the years to come.
In less than a decade after setting the vision, the United States was grossly reminded of the necessity of employing a capable missile defense system during the Gulf War. On February 25, 1991, in a missile attack on Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, an Iraqi-launched Scud missile’s warhead hit a warehouse that served as a United States barrack, killing 28 soldiers and injuring scores of others in the process. Apparently, one Patriot battery was not operational while the other was not able to track the incoming missile due to a software problem.
Immediate Perspective
The number of nations possessing ballistic missiles has increased ov...
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...ense What Does It All Mean?" Missile Defense Issue Brief.
Center of Defense Information.
17 May 2002. <http://www.cdi.org/Hotspots/nmdissuebrief/nmd32.pdf>
10. Antonia Handler Chayes and Paul Doty. Defending Deterrence. Virgina: Pergamon-
Brassey's International Defense Publishers, Inc., 1989.
11. "Commentary: The Moral Necessity of Missile Defense." Reason, Individualism,
Achievement and, Freedom.
Mar. 2001. The Objectivist Center. 17 May 2002.
<http://www.objectivistcenter.org/articles/jrobbins_moral-necessity-missile-
defense.asp>
12. Lieutenant Ron G. Jacobson "Morality of Nuclear Deterrence and Missile Defense."
Military Philosophy and Ethnics.
Feb. 1999 National Security Affairs. 18 May 2002.
<http://nsa.nps.navy.mil/Publications/Micewski/Jacobson.html>
The Cold War was a period of dark and melancholic times when the entire world lived in fear that the boiling pot may spill. The protectionist measures taken by Eisenhower kept the communists in check to suspend the progression of USSR’s radical ambitions and programs. From the suspenseful delirium from the Cold War, the United States often engaged in a dangerous policy of brinksmanship through the mid-1950s. Fortunately, these actions did not lead to a global nuclear disaster as both the US and USSR fully understood what the weapons of mass destruction were capable of.
During Desert Shield and Desert Storm, European Command (EUCOM) air defense units from 32d Air Defense Command deployed with the mission to provide security for the back door of Iraq from locations in Israel and Turkey. (Global Security) The threat the US and coalition forces faced was Sadaam Hussein’s chemical weapons arsenal. Intelligence suggested that Iraqi Forces filled both chemical and biological payloads to the Scud missiles. (Rostker) The concern was if a warhead would explode, it would release airborne agents on the US and coalition forces. US Commanders had additional concerns. Could Patriot engage the warheads successfully? Patriot capabilities were not for the purpose of the mi...
1. What do you think of when you drive by that big B-52 at the museum? Being the history buff that I am, I think about Vietnam, where that old “Buff” was used the most. “Why should I care about Vietnam?” you ask yourself. Well, last time I checked there’s a history section in the PFE guide, so there might be a test later! The intent of this paper is to inform you about Operation Linebacker II. I’ll explain the events leading up to the operation, discuss the strategy, and finally I’ll sum up the results of a bombing campaign Sir Michael Knight characterized In the book Strategic Offensive Air Operation as “...may have played a role not unlike two B-29s over Japan 27 years earlier”. (Knight: 77) I’ll start by explaining why President Richard Nixon gave the order to begin this new bombing campaign.
Hellman, Chris. “Chronology of Major Attacks Against US Targets). Center for Defense Information. Web. 01 Aug 2011.
National Missile Defense (NMD) is an extremely complex land-based ballistic missile system with the sole purpose of defending the United States against a ballistic missile attack from a foreign country. The NMD architecture consists of five main components.
9-11 Review: Remote Control and the 9-11-01 Attack. (n.d.). 9-11 Review. Retrieved April 28, 2010, from http://911review.com/means/re
After the fear of terrorism grew in the United States do to the Al Qaeda 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the US Government found a need for a centralized department that umbrellas all other agencies when it comes to homeland security. The U.S. Government found this umbrella agency with the passage of the Homeland Security Act by Congress in November 2002, the Department of Homeland Security formally came into being as a stand-alone, Cabinet-level department to further coordinate and unify national homeland security efforts. (Homeland Security) With the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the government had a pinpoint location for the collection and gathering of intelligence, control of policies that effect national security, and a no fail mission. The Department of Homeland Security started to engulf other agencies and created many more, a total of 22 agencies now fall under the DHS. The DHS is control of all areas that deal with national security which included but are not limited to coastal and boarder protection, domestic terrorism, international terrorism, protection of the American people, protection of key infrastructure, protection of key resources and respond to natural disasters.
Explain how the concept of whole community is used at the local level of government to mitigate against risk.
Glynn, Patrick. Closing Pandora's Box "Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War". New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, Inc. 1992.
On January 17, 1966, a U.S. Air Force B-52G bomber carrying a hydrogen bomb collided with a KC-135 refueling tanker off the coas...
Foreign policy in focus. (1999,November). In Focus: U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy at the End of the Century: Lost Opportunities and New Dangers.
It was originally assumed that the SDI program was a virtually perfect defense against a large intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, attacks, which required very competent weapons. An ICBM has three levels of flight; the boost phase, the midcourse phase, and the terminal phase. With the SDI program, a space-based directed energy, or a laser, weapon would be used to destroy ICBM’s in the boost phase. Ground-based, space-based lasers or continental weapons could be used to destroy ICBM’s in midcourse, and ground-based beam weapons and missile interceptors could be used to destroy ICBM’s in the terminal phase. But as the goals of the program have evolved toward more realistic ambitions, the requirements for highly competent weapons diminished. Therefore, the initial focus on space-based directed energy weapons gradually shifted toward interest in ground-based kinetic energy weapons.
Upon taking office in 1981, Ronald Reagan began to implement a simple strategy to win the war against the Soviets: he would outspend them in an arms race and force them to the negotiating table. Over the course of this erratic arms build-up the president spent a total of $2 trillion on the military alone. The most notorious of these programs was the Strategic Defense Initiative; also know as Star Wars, in which the president authorized billions to be spent to research a program that could defend America against a possible nuclear attack by blowing in an incoming nuke out of the sky. A vast majority of the scientific community thought such a program to be absurd and implausible, but Reagan pushed on. His belligerence in this arms race only provoked the Kremlin, and increased tensions. This massive military funding only led Russia to assume that the United States was planning to attack, and undercut efforts of peace. Also, in order to maintain such large military growth hundreds of ...