Natn'l Missile Defense

Ever since nuclear weapons of mass destruction have existed, people have been attempting to create ways to prevent a war that would bring about a worldwide Arma-geddon. Many of today’s top military and government officials have been studying ways in which the United States can protect itself from a nuclear missile attack. What they have come up with is the National Missile Defense program, or NMD. The NMD would consist of a network of satellites, early-warning devices, and missiles pro-grammed to spot an incoming nuclear missile. When a nuclear missile is detected, the NMD would automatically launch the computer-guided interceptor missiles to seek out and destroy the incoming nuclear missile. This program, however, should not be im-plemented or researched any further. There are a few factors to support this claim. First, the NMD program is very costly. According to the website of the Federation of American Scientists, the projected total costs by the year 2005 will be close to $14 bil-lion dollars, obviously a large amount of money that could be well spent elsewhere. Second, the NMD program is ineffective. There are many ways for a rouge state or a terrorist group with nuclear capabilities to get around the NMD.

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During the

Cold War, we sought to contain a threat to survival of

free institutions. ” (Winkler 1999, 205-206)

Even the scientist Edward Teller makes a similar statement in his book, “Better a Shield than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology. ” (Combs 2000, 124)

However, the likelihood of this occurring is undoubtedly small. However, as long as every one of these democracies, who are only working in for their own national interest, realize that build-ing a nuclear weapon is not in anybody’s interest, the world can breathe easy because nobody will want to acquire nuclear weapons. (Cirincione and Von Hippel 1999, 2) After signing the NMD act of 1999, President Clinton ordered another $6. The problem with this theory is that its is quite expensive to acquire, maintain, and fire Inter-continental Ballistic Mis-siles, or ICBMs, which are necessary to deliver the nuclear warheads to their targets. Now we seek to enlarge the circle of

nations that live under those free institutions, for our

dream is of a day when the opinions and energies of

every person in the world will be given full

expression in a world of thriving democracies that

cooperate within each other and live in peace.

We think that with these [anti-missile] systems, we

are just going to spur swordmakers to intensify their

efforts. If nobody has nuclear capabilities, however, then each state has absolutely nothing to worry about. According to Teller, Soviet General Secretary An-dropov “criticized the Strategic Defense Initiative as an effort to ‘militarize space. Since 1962, as of 1999, the United States has spent over $99 billion dollars on ballistic missile defense systems. " (Council for A Livable World, web site )

If even powerful world-leaders fear that the establishment of NMD would only increase the power of attack weapons, Then there must be some validity to the idea. The technology to create such programs had not been perfected or in some cases, such as Yonas’ and Teller’s proposals, had not even been developed.

Approximate Word count = 3694
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page double spaced)

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