Robert Jensen
Department of Journalism
University of Texas
Austin, TX 78712
rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu
office: (512) 471-1990
fax: (512) 471-7979
Newsday, July 7, 2000, p. A-45. An edited version appeared as "‘Star Wars’ accomplishes its main goal," Dallas Morning News, June 23, 2000, p. 25-A
by Robert Jensen
When the U.S. missile defense system is tested today, much attention will be focused on whether the technology to shoot down nuclear warheads from the much-feared “rogue states” is more than a pipe dream. But the focus on that question misses the program's main function.
The National Missile Defense (NDM) program -- what began under President Reagan as the Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed “Star Wars” by critics) -- has shown it’s capable of carrying out its primary mission, and the proof is in the numbers not performance tests:
Since Reagan first mentioned the idea in 1983, we have spent about $70 billion on missile-defense research. With both major-party presidential candidates supporting the project and pork-hungry representatives in Congress happy to vote more money, it’s likely that billions more will be spent.
In short, the program does what it was designed to do: transfer money from the pockets of taxpayers to corporations.
Forget about the fact that the technical tests of the system have been failures, and that most everyone agrees that a viable system in not within reach with technology we have or can reasonably imagine. Forget that the timetable proposed would require huge financial commitments before anyone knows whether a system could ever work.
Forget about the fact that there exists no viable threat from which we must be protected. Forget that most of our allies, not to mention the rest of the world, seriously object to the concept and see it as a threat to world peace.
What matters to decision-makers is the flow of public subsidies for high-tech industries, always one of the key functions of the Pentagon budget. The real targets of the NMD system are not the illusory incoming missiles, but the main missile contractors who will profit -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and TRW.
The companies “are looking to missile defense to revive them from mismanagement and technical problems that have slashed their stock prices and reduced their profit margins,” according to the World Policy Institute’s William Hartung, an astute observer of the weapons scene.
Hartung reports that these corporations have given $2 million to the 25 hard-core NDM boosters in the Senate and spent $34 million on lobbying during 1997-98. Interesting how the “national interest” tends to run so closely to corporate interests, and how the construction of threats to “national security” helps it run smoothly.
NMD helps with a serious problem for the military-industrial complex. With the demise of the Soviet Union, government, military and corporate officials faced a problem -- how to justify huge expenditures on high-tech weapons systems with no evil empire to scare people.
Enter the rogue state. Now the gravest threat to our security is not a superpower, but countries such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Never mind that North Korea is on the brink of collapse and has begun conciliatory talks with South Korea, that Iran is acknowledged to be decades away from a workable long-range missile, or that a decade of cruel sanctions have crippled Iraq. And never mind that every nation in the world knows that to launch a missile attack against the United States would be suicide, given the American willingness to use grotesque levels of violence to vanquish enemies.
As 1990s planners searched for ways to continue subsidies to high-tech industries, they found that Reagan’s loopy SDI concept had legs. Many people had written off SDI as the product of Reagan’s good-natured buffoonery, his penchant for Buck Rogers fantasies. But when a no-nonsense policy wonk such as Al Gore endorses the concept, it’s difficult to avoid the obvious truth -- the system has nothing to do with defending the nation from missile attacks and everything to do with defending corporations from the harsh realities of the market.
This weapons con game has been going on since the end of World War II. If all it did was create dangerous (or useless) weapons, that would be bad enough. But while we dump billions into such plans year after year, remember what is going underfunded or unfunded: quality education for all students, child care, national health insurance and a host of other social programs that could actually benefit the people of this country and serve the real national interest.
In attempt to quiet objections around the world, President Clinton has
said the United States will share the NMD technology with “civilized nations.”
The only question is, what civilized nation would want it?
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.