The year was 1983. The president was Ronald Reagan and he was addressing the Congress as he said, “When I took office in January 1981, I was appalled by what I found: American planes that couldn't fly and American ships that couldn't sail for lack of spare parts and trained personnel and insufficient fuel and ammunition for essential training. The inevitable result of all this was poor morale in our Armed Forces, difficulty in recruiting the brightest young Americans to wear the uniform, and difficulty in convincing our most experienced military personnel to stay on. There was a real question then about how well we could meet a crisis. We had to move immediately to improve the basic readiness and staying power of our conventional forces, so they could meet -- and therefore help deter -- a crisis.” (Sound familiar?)
Then he posed this question: “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?”
He was referring of course to the prevailing foreign policy doctrine of that time - Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The concept in itself was pure madness, defined in the dictionary as foolishness, idiocy, stupidity, insanity and lunacy. It was predicated on the premise that no foreign power would attack us because they knew we could retaliate with even bigger weapons and they would also be destroyed.
But President Reagan had the prescience to see that the day might come when we would be dealing with a true madman, an immature rogue dictator who is willing to starve his own people so his little country can become a major nuclear power and rule the entire world. In his childish immaturity, he is willing to sacrifice many of his countrymen and the citizens of neighboring countries to feed his ego.
So President Reagan went before Congress in March of 1983 and proposed that the U.S. embrace the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was immediately dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics. The heart of the SDI program was a plan to develop a space-based missile defense program that could protect the country from a large-scale nuclear attack using many layers of technology that would enable the U.S. to identify and automatically destroy incoming ballistic missiles as they were launched.
As Chairperson of the Reagan Campaign in Laclede County for the 1980 election, I was chosen to go to Washington D.C. and meet with NATO officials and other defense personnel for special training so I could become a spokesperson for the SDI in this area. Probably some of you heard me speak before our civic organizations and other meetings throughout the state.
As you might imagine, opponents became very vocal and the criticism was so widespread that President Reagan and his team of defense experts had to give up on the idea. Like Noah of old who found it hard to convince his neighbors they had best get on his ark to be saved from the coming flood because it had never rained before, the President and his team of defense officials could not convince our elected representatives that this kind of defense system would be worth the money.
So we sat by and watched as Israel took advantage of the developing technology and used it to build their own defense system called the Iron Domes, and in fact the U.S. subsidized almost all the cost of that defense system for them. I have no problem with that of course, but apparently nobody in the U.S. questioned why we were not protecting outselves.
And lest you think that’s the only problem we are facing - the Business Insider website is reminding us that North Korea may decide to launch a low-yield nuclear missile from a submarine, ship, or even a balloon and explode it at high altitude above the atmosphere.
The result would be a blackout of the Eastern grid that supplies 75% of power to the United States. A Congressional Commission having to do with Electromagnetic Pulse attacks, warns that within 12 months following a nationwide blackout, “up to 90% of the U.S. population could perish from starvation, disease and societal breakdown.”
And we have no defense against that, either. It’s the Noah’s ark story all over again. We have never had a power outage of that magnitude so we can’t imagine it happening. I’ve been writing about this possibility for five years now but nobody in power seems to be listening.
© Joan Rowden Hart August 2017
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