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The newest website to terrify you into resisting Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ defense reorganizations: 33 Minutes, a missile-defense boosterism site set up recently by the Heritage Foundation, complete with documentary. The film’s trailer makes the following claim: "The longest times are typically around 30 to 33, 34 minutes, and that would be for a long-range missile that would be fired from, for example, North Korea to the United States, or from Iran to the United States," says a retired Air Force general and head of the Missile Defense Agency. Left unsaid is that neither North Korea nor Iran has such a missile. "Less than 33 minutes away, their whole city — their whole life — could be annihilated," intones Heritage president Edwin Feulner, while scary music scares you into being scared.
It’s not clear where the 33-minute estimate comes from, but the film’s overtones invoke a classic episode of "Battlestar: Galactica" called "33," in which the 50,000 survivors of a robot attack on humanity, on the run in spaceships, have to make a faster-than-lightspeed jump into deep space every 33 minutes in order to evade their pursuers. The exhaustion experienced by the survivors leads them to destroy a civilian vessel with 1000 people aboard that may or may not have been controlled by the robotic Cyclons. Point being: reasoning from fear is a dangerous thing.
For a relatively sober view of the North Korea missile threat, here’s Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
There’s two things that we look at on the North Korean missile. One is their ability to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a weapon of mass destruction, and the second is their desire to potentially proliferate that and sell it around the world.
On the first, the technology they were seeking after the first two failures was the ability to stage; in other words, transition from one stage of boost to the next. They failed. On the idea of proliferation, would you buy from somebody that had failed three times in a row and never been successful?
Is Cartwright being irresponsible? We’ll find out in… 33 minutes.
Crossposted to The Streak.
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Excellent Post.
See American Security Project Senior Fellow Bernard I. Finel’s post on The Flash Point Blog on this topic: http://www.americansecuritypro…..y-hit-us/.
Dr. Finel points out that North Korea and Iran have at no point demonstrated the ability to hit the United States with a ballistic missile, and that when talking about deploying a missile defense system, “…we have to be clear that we are planning and spending against a potential threat, not an actual one.”
He also notes that the Ground-Base Midcourse Defense System has been “promising of late,” and that “at this point there is a higher probability that we could shoot down a North Korean missile than there is of them actually being about to successfully launch a missile capable of hitting us.”
For more information on ASP’s mission and Dr. Finel’s work, read his latest article in Armed Forces Journal: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2009/03/3920564, or visit the website at http://www.americansecurityproject.org.