A FAQ from the Guardian about the National Missile Defense plan, “son of Star Wars.” Learn more about this issue! Major problems with the plan: (1) it’s made to deal with a nonexistent threat, nuclear attacks by “rogue states”. It could legitimately be perceived, therefore, as a stalking horse for a more large-scale program directed against other nuclear powers.(2) It will utterly destabilize hard-won arms control measures that have kept the real danger of the strategic arms race at bay. (3) Technologically, it won’t work. (4) If funded, it would be a massive windfall for the ailing aerospace corporations which can’t afford it to be found unnecessary or unfeasible. (5) It looks like the Administration is pushing us towards implementation at least partially to position Gore better against his more hawkish opponent. (6) There’s little effective public opposition because most people have been lulled into complacency about the continuing dangers of the arms race by the “end of the Cold War”, most people think it’s a non-issue because they think we already have a Star Wars defense system (since the Reagan years), and most people don’t make foreign policy issues a factor in their voting decisions. [By the way, here’s a wonderful resource, the entire archive of FAQs, which the Guardian calls “The Issue Explained”, on a range of topics in the news deserving further explanation.]

Before leaving the issue, read why Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal disarmament tract The Fate of the Earth and, most recently, of The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now, calls today The Second Age of Nuclear Danger:

In short, the post-Cold War period has turned out to be less hospitable to nuclear arms control than the Cold War. Why has the end of

the great global conflict in whose name almost all nuclear weapons were built been followed by the near-collapse across the board of the

world’s efforts to control these weapons? Why has peace been worse for nuclear disarmament than cold war?

[Boston Review]