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Ready [Or Not]

Excited panting about missile defense, Star Wars, or for true believers “President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” will likely climax today, the 25th anniversary of Reagan’s speech unveiling the concept.

The breathing is already labored in the wake of the February US shoot-down of a falling spy satellite over the Pacific.

Investors Business Daily whipped itself into a frenzy over the recent Dick Cheney speech teeing off Hillary Clinton’s 3AM-Your-Children-May-Die commercial.

The King of Mirthless Laughter charmed us all with his Darth Vader self depreciation, and said wistfully:

” the best tool we can leave to a future commander in chief is a weapon of defense to blow that missile out of the sky.”

In the Reagan manner, IBD took that dream, sprinkled it with pixie dust, and pronounced deal done!

“We don’t know who might pick up that 3 a.m. phone call, but 25 years ago Ronald Reagan made sure that if it’s about an incoming ballistic missile, the order will be: “Shoot it down.”..Today we can…Last month, the Aegis missile cruiser USS Lake Erie succeeded in shooting down a dying U.S. spy satellite, the National Reconnaissance Office’s NROL-21 Radarsat, before it could strike the earth with its deadly hydrazine fuel tank nearly full. It could just as easily shoot down an incoming nuclear warhead… thanks to Reagan, the next president will be able to give the order, in Cheney’s words, to “blow that missile out of the sky.” Happy anniversary, Ronnie.”

In the February shoot-down the actual “risk” posed by the falling satellite was overstated, leading many to conclude something else was going on. Critics pointed to “…the near impossibility that the hydrazine tank would survive the 50 g-forces acting on it during reentry, putting the probability of killing someone on Earth below 0.01 percent–NASA’s baseline standard. In the absence of a credible rationale, suspicions of ulterior motives abound. Mainly, many believe that the shoot-down was a disguised demonstration of the U.S. missile defense system’s ASAT capability.”

 

The shoot-down didn’t tell us much about hitting missiles, but may show how we can take war to space.

“…taking out a crippled satellite and destroying an attacking ballistic missile are not the same thing. Most importantly, the satellite’s trajectory was known in great detail and it could not maneuver under its own power. That’s not the case for enemy ballistic missiles, which have unknown trajectories for large portions of their flights …[and] are likely to be able to maneuver themselves midcourse and release decoys to confuse the missile-defense interceptors. … Navy personnel were able to choose the location and timing of the intercept.. The satellite was also several times larger than a ballistic missile would have been and was therefore easier to see”

Let’s have Reagan Legacy Casper Weinberger Jr. bring us back to magic time:

“It took that great visionary, the true man with the white horse, that symbol of Twentieth Century strength and goodness, the ultimate cowboy of the Lord, Ronald Reagan, to bring it down from the heavens for us and fight right up to his death to make it a reality.”

Hi-Yo, Silver!