NATO and Russia facing off, plans for star wars causing political ructions – its almost like the 80’s all over again. Without the ra-ra skirts. Which can only be a good thing.
So finally Poland has signed an agreement to host part of the US missile defence system on its soil. With just parliamentary approval to leap (and a supportive parliament in place) it seems the US's Son of Star Wars dreams have advanced apace.
In return for hosting ten US missile interceptors the ex communist, now NATO, country gets 100 US troops stationed on its soil, US patriot missiles and ‘assistance in modernising its military’ and (ahem) help with ‘responding to the threats of the 21st century’.
Russia has reacted with predictable fury to US missiles being placed 115 miles from its border. General Anatoly Nogovitsyn has warned that the deal "could not go unpunished" and the newspapers have made much of the (militarily unsurprising) fact that hosting US missiles on its border puts Poland on Russia’s list of nuclear missile targets.
The fury is predictable because Russia has repeatedly stated its opposition to plans for both Poland and Czech Republic to host part of the planned US system. And the creeping expansion of NATO up to its borders (seen most recently through the lense of conflict in Georgia) is clearly another aggravating factor in the mix. For context - imagine the US response if Russia announced a military partnership with say Mexico and moved in their missiles.
The US claims that the system has nothing to do with threatening Russia its all about taking down missiles from ‘rogue states’ like Iran (though a few years back I guess the topline would be Iraq). Russia doesn’t buy that argument and sees it as a move against their military power.
Don’t let all the political development fool you into thinking that the Son of Star Wars system is actually working though, despite some $100 billion having been spent on missile defences over the past 20 years.
More fundamentally – putting the technical arguments aside – history shows that the more you build defences to neutralising enemy weapons, the more your opponents will develop new weapons and technologies to evade them. As Jacques Chirac put it ‘''ever since men began waging war, you will see that there's a permanent race between sword and shield. The sword always wins. The more improvements that are made to the shield, the more improvements are made to the sword.''
Who wins? Er, the arms companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing that build both the weapons and the defence systems - the Polish and Czech systems alone seem set to bring some $4 billion into their coffers over the next few years. Who loses? Everyone else.
This isn't a done deal though - as a US press release issued yesterday by Congresswoman Tauscher, Chair of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, reminded people. The fact is that under US law Congress requires an independent assessment of the missile defence system which proves that the system can work under operationally realistic conditions before any deployment to Europe goes ahead.
The repeated failures of system tests and its massive costs should give us all hope that star wars and the notion of a cold war revival can once again be kicked back into the realm of arms companies' fantasies.
Meanwhile, public opposition to the building of a star wars radar remains strong in the Czech Republic. Their PM has signed a deal with the US but it still has to get through a hostile parliament. You can become a citizen of Peaceland – a notional state set up by the Czech arm of Greenpeace. And don’t forget the UK’s complicity in the Star Wars programme through allowing use of the Menwith Hill and Fylindales bases in Yorkshire - more here.
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