What Do We Need? Missile Defense. When do we need it? NOW

File photo: An unarmed Minuteman II intercontinental 

ballistic missile launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base,

California. Photo credit: by USAF/Getty Images.

“The best defense is a good offense,” as the old saw goes. The nature of that “good offense” matters, though. Too often, American officials mistake “any offense” for a “good offense.” As tensions between North Korea and the United States continue to escalate, it is apparent that American policymakers haven’t yet determined what form its “good offense” will take. Sanctions on the Kim regime have not worked and will not work as a means of defending the United States against North Korean aggression—nor do sanctions appear to be restricting North Korea’s development of nuclear bomb-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). A preemptive strike would invite disaster. Empty threats and tweeted insults are an absurd counterstrategy.

For the crisis with North Korea, the best defense would be a “good defense”: The United States should develop and deploy a comprehensive antimissile defense system.

President Ronald Reagan launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983 with the long-term goal of making nuclear weapons obsolete. He wanted to deploy a system that could neutralize the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal. The plan as he first proposed it was technically not feasible, and SDI opponents made much hay out of that fact.

To this day, many on the left still disdain the concept of national missile defense and continue to pooh-pooh “Star Wars” (as Reagan’s plan was derisively dubbed) as folly. They rarely mention that Reagan’s subordinate goal of protecting the United States from nuclear threats posed by lesser powers was achievable. The time would come, Reagan administration officials understood, when such ICBMs and nuclear arms would see wider distribution. It could not be expected that they would remain the monopoly of a few leading powers—and they haven’t. Today, according to the Arms Control Association, 31 countries have ballistic missiles, and 9 of those countries are known to have or are believed to have nuclear weapons.

Read the rest of the story HERE and follow link below to a related story:

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