I’ve been watching the news coverage of Hamas missiles attacking Israel for the last several days. The chilling wailing of the air-raid sirens reminds me to pray for the Israelis and their leaders every time I hear them go off.
I support Israel in its defense efforts and I’m thankful for the Iron Dome that Israel has put in place but regret that we were never able to get its counterpart in our own country where we are vulnerable and in the hands of more of our allies when we had the capability and a president with the desire to do so.
I served as Laclede County chairman for the Reagan campaigns in the 80’s, and in that context, one of Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham’s associates in the High Frontier organization approached me about becoming a part of the National Speakers’ Bureau for the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the SDI.
At that time, the defense policy of the United States consisted of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, appropriately nick-named MAD, which simply meant that the Soviets knew that if they attacked us and killed our citizens, we had more than enough weapons to retaliate and kill even more of them, so in effect both nations were held hostage by the other.
As Ronald Reagan's military adviser in his 1976 and 1980 campaigns, Lt. Gen. Graham was responsible for having President Reagan articulate the crucial question on March 23, 1983: "Would it not be better to save lives than to avenge them?"
President Reagan then proposed the concept of using a ground and space-based defense system, and the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization was set up in 1984 within the Dept. of Defense.
If it had not been for Gen. Graham’s leadership, President Reagan would not have had the vision of a defense against ballistic missiles, and the United States would not have had a project called SDI; and many defense experts believe that had it not been for this project and the threat of what it could do, the Cold War would have been lost.
The following language is taken from one of the tributes offered up in the House of Representatives after Lt.Gen. Graham’s death.
“It is now clear that we won the Cold War when Mikhail Gorbachev reluctantly concluded that he couldn't talk Reagan out of SDI (at Geneva or elsewhere), and that the miserable Soviet economy couldn't match U.S. expenditures for building a nuclear defense. When Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, the media laughed; but SDI turned that "pie-in-the-sky" prediction into reality.”
General Graham had a much-decorated 30-year military career that included service in Germany, Korea and Vietnam and was capped by serving as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In retirement, he rejected lucrative offers from defense contractors and dedicated his life to American national defense.
When I was asked to participate as a representative of the SDI project, I thought about Mrs. Mae Riley, one of my high school science teachers, and how it would have thrown her into a tailspin because she knew I had never had a scientific bone in my body and my grades back then proved it.
But I grew up in the Cold War Era, where we kids often ran outside to look up at low-flying planes to see if they looked like Russian bombers. Some of you will remember those days when we lived in fear of being “attacked by the Russians”, and we had the “duck and cover” drills in elementary school just in case (as though our little school desks would have shielded us from such a possibility).
So even as an adult, I have always been a “hawk” with very vocal opinions about the need for a strong national defense.
Plus I always enjoyed a challenge, and the idea of learning about the trajectories of Intercontinental ballistic missiles, and “star war” type defense shields, and all the associated elements of the project was too provocative to turn down.
So I received a grant from the High Frontier, which was a non-governmental, non tax supported, policy organization “think tank” set up by Lt. Gen. Graham, for the purposes of studying and promoting defense systems in space.
The organization sent me to Washington, D.C. for a seminar where we met with Lt. Gen. Graham and several retired NATO officials and other defense experts, and were given an intensive training course in the concepts of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
After I returned to Lebanon, I spoke to most of our service organizations here and throughout the state as a representative for High Frontier and the SDI.
President Reagan broached the concept of SDI to the country in March 1983 asking this question: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest on the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack; (what if) we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”
It was one of the most controversial and influential presidential speeches of the 1980’s.
I found some interesting language while mulling through the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014. At Section 241, the bill mentions this year as the 30th anniversary of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and then provides that “The Secretary of Defense shall preserve each intercontinental ballistic missile silo that contains a deployed missile as of the date of the enactment of this Act in, at minimum, a warm status that enables such silo to remain a fully functioning element of the interconnected and redundant command and control system of the missile field; and be made fully operational with a deployed missile.
According to the Washington Times dated April 8, 2014 the Pentagon said: “The U.S. will keep its current force of 450 land-based nuclear missiles but remove 50 from their launch silos as part of a plan to bring the U.S. into compliance with a 2011 U.S.-Russia arms control treaty.”
I support Israel in its defense efforts and I’m thankful for the Iron Dome that Israel has put in place but regret that we were never able to get its counterpart in our own country where we are vulnerable and in the hands of more of our allies when we had the capability and a president with the desire to do so.
I served as Laclede County chairman for the Reagan campaigns in the 80’s, and in that context, one of Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham’s associates in the High Frontier organization approached me about becoming a part of the National Speakers’ Bureau for the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as the SDI.
At that time, the defense policy of the United States consisted of the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine, appropriately nick-named MAD, which simply meant that the Soviets knew that if they attacked us and killed our citizens, we had more than enough weapons to retaliate and kill even more of them, so in effect both nations were held hostage by the other.
As Ronald Reagan's military adviser in his 1976 and 1980 campaigns, Lt. Gen. Graham was responsible for having President Reagan articulate the crucial question on March 23, 1983: "Would it not be better to save lives than to avenge them?"
President Reagan then proposed the concept of using a ground and space-based defense system, and the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization was set up in 1984 within the Dept. of Defense.
If it had not been for Gen. Graham’s leadership, President Reagan would not have had the vision of a defense against ballistic missiles, and the United States would not have had a project called SDI; and many defense experts believe that had it not been for this project and the threat of what it could do, the Cold War would have been lost.
The following language is taken from one of the tributes offered up in the House of Representatives after Lt.Gen. Graham’s death.
“It is now clear that we won the Cold War when Mikhail Gorbachev reluctantly concluded that he couldn't talk Reagan out of SDI (at Geneva or elsewhere), and that the miserable Soviet economy couldn't match U.S. expenditures for building a nuclear defense. When Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, the media laughed; but SDI turned that "pie-in-the-sky" prediction into reality.”
General Graham had a much-decorated 30-year military career that included service in Germany, Korea and Vietnam and was capped by serving as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In retirement, he rejected lucrative offers from defense contractors and dedicated his life to American national defense.
When I was asked to participate as a representative of the SDI project, I thought about Mrs. Mae Riley, one of my high school science teachers, and how it would have thrown her into a tailspin because she knew I had never had a scientific bone in my body and my grades back then proved it.
But I grew up in the Cold War Era, where we kids often ran outside to look up at low-flying planes to see if they looked like Russian bombers. Some of you will remember those days when we lived in fear of being “attacked by the Russians”, and we had the “duck and cover” drills in elementary school just in case (as though our little school desks would have shielded us from such a possibility).
So even as an adult, I have always been a “hawk” with very vocal opinions about the need for a strong national defense.
Plus I always enjoyed a challenge, and the idea of learning about the trajectories of Intercontinental ballistic missiles, and “star war” type defense shields, and all the associated elements of the project was too provocative to turn down.
So I received a grant from the High Frontier, which was a non-governmental, non tax supported, policy organization “think tank” set up by Lt. Gen. Graham, for the purposes of studying and promoting defense systems in space.
The organization sent me to Washington, D.C. for a seminar where we met with Lt. Gen. Graham and several retired NATO officials and other defense experts, and were given an intensive training course in the concepts of the Strategic Defense Initiative.
After I returned to Lebanon, I spoke to most of our service organizations here and throughout the state as a representative for High Frontier and the SDI.
President Reagan broached the concept of SDI to the country in March 1983 asking this question: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest on the threat of instant US retaliation to deter a Soviet attack; (what if) we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”
It was one of the most controversial and influential presidential speeches of the 1980’s.
I found some interesting language while mulling through the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014. At Section 241, the bill mentions this year as the 30th anniversary of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and then provides that “The Secretary of Defense shall preserve each intercontinental ballistic missile silo that contains a deployed missile as of the date of the enactment of this Act in, at minimum, a warm status that enables such silo to remain a fully functioning element of the interconnected and redundant command and control system of the missile field; and be made fully operational with a deployed missile.
According to the Washington Times dated April 8, 2014 the Pentagon said: “The U.S. will keep its current force of 450 land-based nuclear missiles but remove 50 from their launch silos as part of a plan to bring the U.S. into compliance with a 2011 U.S.-Russia arms control treaty.”
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