The patriot is not our only missile..it happened to be the one we used in the Iraqi fight because it is good short range. There are other missiles that are capable of knocking out an ICBM.
Name one deployed and active missle that can shoot down an ICBM.
Tim,
In my effort to answer your question, I came across an article that is typical of stuff re the cold war armament. Its the stuff that rankles me....the billions wasted....60 billion on Star Wars alone. And yet we have people hungry and homeless. One nation fell under the onslaught of huge defense budgets and we may be the second if this reactionary call for armaments is met.
Here is the link and the first few pages:
nybooks.com
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May 11, 2000
Fantasia
LARS-ERIK NELSON
Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War
by Frances FitzGerald
592 pages, $30.00 (hardcover)
published by Simon and Schuster
(order book)
1.
Modern history, as it is taught in Republican campaign speeches and conservative Op-Ed articles, holds that when Ronald Reagan took office as president in 1981 the Soviet Union was a thriving superpower, militarily superior to the United States and able, without much apparent strain, to outdo America in developing and deploying dangerous new weapons. Year after year during the 1980s, the Pentagon issued a slick booklet, "Soviet Military Power," that recounted breathtaking new feats of Soviet weaponry. Experienced defense intellectuals warned of a "window of vulnerability," a period during which Russia might calculate that it could start and win a nuclear war. One theory, put forth by Paul Nitze, speculated that Russia had such superiority that it might launch a nuclear attack on the United States, ride out the inevitable US nuclear retaliation by sheltering in its extensive civil defense network, and then fire another nuclear salvo that would leave the United States devastated and unable to respond. Almost as bad, the Kremlin could merely point to this alleged strategic advantage and American leaders, seeing the undeniable calculus, would be forced to accept Soviet diktat.
The Central Intelligence Agency judged in the late 1970s that Soviet per capita income was about that of the United Kingdom or Japan. Internally, communism was portrayed, by us, as an economic success, distributing goods and services that satisfied the needs of a vast, multinational population. Externally, communism was on the march, from Afghanistan to Central America to South Africa.
In Moscow, the Communist Party was firmly entrenched and, according to the neoconservative scholar Jeane Kirkpatrick, incapable of change. Even as late as October 1988, a full three years after Soviet Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev had begun the revolution that eventually cost him his country and his job, the CIA's top Soviet analyst, Robert Gates, warned in a speech, "The dictatorship of the Communist party remains untouched and untouchable.... A long, competitive struggle with the Soviet Union still lies before us."
Yet, two months later, Gorbachev came to the United Nations in New York and, to anyone who paid attention, announced the surrender of communism. "We are, of course, far from claiming to be in possession of the ultimate truth," he said—in one sentence undermining Marxism-Leninism's claim to be the only scientific worldview, stripping legitimacy from the Party's claimed right to have the "leading role" in Soviet society, and exposing his own doubt that communism would be the inevitable victor in the global class struggle. In the same speech, he announced unilateral military withdrawals from Eastern Europe. Finally, the light had failed, even for Gorbachev. In 1989, the Berlin Wall was dismantled, and two years after that, the Soviet Union collapsed altogether.
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What happened? According to conservative thinkers, Ronald Reagan had looked upon this seemingly all-powerful Soviet structure and was unafraid. He had denounced it as "the evil empire," called upon Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, and, most important, had envisioned an impermeable American defense, the Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars, that would make all Soviet missiles useless.
EDIT. Its this country's fault for believing that a B rated actor had the credentials to be president.
Upon considering Reagan's line of attack, according to the now current legend, the Soviet leaders clapped their hands to their collective foreheads in despair, realized the game was up, and allowed their entire political, economic, ideological, and social system to fall to pieces. They did not merely enter into arms negotiations; they gave up their empire, abandoned their values, surrendered their dreams, threw out their textbooks, and even lost their livelihoods. With his Everyman innocence and Midwestern straight talk, Ronald Reagan had caused the most dramatic collapse since Alice looked at the Red Queen and her court and exclaimed, "You're nothing but a pack of cards".
Reagan's able biographer Lou Cannon writes that the President foresaw all this. In the preface to the new edition of President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime,1 Cannon says:
Reagan launched a military buildup premised on the belief that the Soviet Union was too economically vulnerable to compete in an accelerated arms race and would come to the bargaining table if pressured by the West. He preached a message of freedom that he believed would energize the people of Eastern Europe and penetrate within the Soviet Union itself. Many members of the political establishment, including some leading Republicans, thought these views were at best naive. They were also alarmed by Reagan's provocative comments about communism, particularly his resonant description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." But times changed. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989; by the end of 1991 most nations behind the former Iron Curtain were masters of their destiny, and the Soviet Union, as Reagan had foreseen, was left on the scrapheap of history. 1 Public Affairs, April 2000. (back) |
