By Dave Lindorff
It’s July 4. Do you want fireworks? You’re in luck, because that’s what your militarist government wants to deliver.
You may have to wait a bit, but what’s in store is a new arms race, a new era of super instability with the chance for, or even likelihood of a catastrophic ending in the form of a global nuclear war.
It’s all about a new race between the US, Russia and China to be the first to develop a fleet of hypersonic cruise missiles capable of flying low to the ground at speeds of between 4-15,000 miles per hour while maneuvering and even changing targets along the way, making them virtually unstoppable.
Apparently spending 60% of our annual tax payments on the military and on pointless wars around the world that only seem to create more chaos and more hatred of the US as we already do now isn’t enough. We need to blow even more of our hard-earned income on weapons and war in another pointless arms race that never should have even been contemplated, much less launched.
Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s it was the so-called “Missile Gap” that led to a paroxysm of massive spending on developing ever larger missiles and nuclear bombs to be carried by them, the construction of costly missile silos to house them, and a fleet of huge missile launching submarines to bring them closer to the coasts of the Soviet Union and China. There actually never was a “gap.” US intelligence knew from satellite and U-2 spy plane overflight photos that the US always had more ICBMs and shorter range IRBMs capable of delivering H-Bombs to Russia than the Russians had, but the fake story that the Soviets had more missiles than the US did the trick. The missile arms race was on.
Now we’re getting new scare stories out of the Pentagon and militarist members of Congress claiming that a new “missile gap” is developing: Those sneaky Russkies, we’re told, “are building ultrafast missile technology at a quicker speed than the U.S,” and have jumped ahead of us, developing hyper-speed maneuverable long-range nuclear cruise missiles that could be launched in waves, fly at multiple times the speed of sound, and alter their course significantly at low altitude to avoid detection and interception while reaching targets in the US.
Que horrible!
Unmentioned is the critical question of why Russia, with its struggling and much smaller economy compared to the US, and China, with its grave environmental, economic and internal political problems, would be devoting valuable resources to this mad endeavor. The answer is…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative new site, please to to:www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3922