Hawaiian Assured Destruction

See previous post on this topic here.

Let's begin with the basics. A President's job, in major part, is to protect the American people from external aggressors. That's why he is the head of the military. So if a foreign country with nuclear weapons announces its intention to test-fire at the United States a long range missile, it would seem the President would be required to take some immediate action to deter a belligerent threat to the the safety and well-being of American citizens.

The North Koreans have scheduled for July 4th weekend just such a missile test aimed at our 50th State, Hawaii. President Obama's response was to deploy missile defense assets to the region, which is certainly prudent, but seems inadequate to the situation. In nuclear confrontation matters, rope-a-dope defensiveness is not quite the strategy that will deter North Korea from its mad ambitions.

And now we learn that the President's missile defense deployment might not even be sufficient as rope-a-dope. Because of the Obama administrations budget cuts on missile defense technology, the SDI assets being deployed are not capable of stopping the type of missile being sent our way by the Norks. The Washington Times quotes a missile defense expert,

"that the sea-based SM-3 missiles now deployed to "protect" Hawaii are not equipped with adequate software and communications to intercept a missile traveling from North Korea to Hawaii, which would reach a terminal velocity of Mach 23 to 25. The SM-3s are effective only against targets traveling at up to half that speed. It would take about $50 million to upgrade the software to enable a Mach 25 intercept. The Army's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile, which also has been activated after successful tests at Barking Sands on Kauai, "doesn't come close" to being effective against this type of threat"

If this is anywhere close to true, then the President is engaging in saber-rattling of the worst kind. Rattling sabers works at all only when no one calls the bluff. But here, the Norks are already planning to test the adequacy of our missile defense technology. Should our defenses fail, as the Washington Times article indicates it might, then the President's actions will only serve to embolden North Korea in its nuclear diplomacy.

Let's remind ourselves of the grand vision of President Reagan in proposing missile defense: to make ballistic nuclear weapons obsolete. If we have viable defenses against ballistic missile attacks, then major aggressive powers like the Soviet Union of the time, and also pipsqueaks like North Korea and Iran, would not bother to expend the billions of dollars necessary to develop and stockpile ballistic nuclear missiles.

After billions already spent on missile defense and for a mere $50 million more, President Obama might have an occasion to follow through on Reagan's noble dream, and demonstrate the futility of the Nork's mad ambitions. But instead he adopts a rope-a-dope strategy in which there is no rope supporting us from behind and Hawaiians are the dopes.

Why? Because he is locked in a 1980's ideology of the Left that he learned as a young man, that Reagan's "Star Wars" was the mad plan of a Cold War ideologue. History vindicated Reagan, but ideologues like our current President are not much interested in history that doesn't conform with their prejudices.

And so we go from the successful policies of the 1980's involving the Strategic Defense Initiative and Strategic Arms Reductions, back to the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine of the Cold War, as modified by Obama into Enemy God Awful Destruction (EGAD). And now, picking up speed on the nuclear slippery slope, we come to this July 4th when history might write that Hawaiian Assured Destruction became the order of the day in Washington. That's Hawaiian Assured Destruction as in HAD as in we've been had.