This article appeared in the February 26, 1999 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

The New ABM Flap

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

The following statement was issued by LaRouche's Presidential campaign committee.

February 11, 1999

In the matter of certain Senators' implied radical revisions of the currently outstanding U.S. Treaty agreements on Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense (S. 257), the Senators have displayed no military skills but their impulse for flight forward. The authors of S. 257 pair nicely with that Defense Secretary William Cohen who has plunged ahead, in the same area, expressing no care for either the technical competency, or the strategic implications of what he is saying.

Meanwhile, to add spice to the same issue, swivel-tongued British journalist Christopher Hitchens, has dragged my name into the middle of the same, current ABM flap. While Hitchens' effort may be discounted as consistent with his reputation for "stalk" raving nonsense, the fact remains that he has pulled me into the middle of the controversy. It happens that I am in a key position to clear up the leading elements of confusion on the technical issues and the substantive implications of the proposed revisions of the ABM treaty. All things considered, I am obliged to intervene into this matter.

What both S. 257 and the Principals Committee are plunging into, is a revival of the 1983-1986 controversy over the mess which both Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the leaderships of both the Republican and Democratic National Committees made of what had been President Ronald Reagan's initial, competent, public proposal, to the Soviet government, for scientific cooperation in creating a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

The President's stated purpose, then and later, was to begin a process of freeing the world from thermonuclear doomsday scenarios, from the tyranny of "revenge weapons." Although the President remained committed to that perspective, through no later than October 1986, the British monarchy and also the National Committees of both the Republican and Democratic parties remained determined to destroy the President's initiative. Some, as on the Democratic Party side, simply opposed it outrightly. Others, like the Heritage Foundation's raving and ranting ideologues, concentrated on wrecking the SDI from the inside, by transforming it into something silly.

What confronts us today, from both S. 257 and the yahoo strategists around the Principals Committee's Secretary Cohen and General Shelton, is a farcical resurrection of the silly version of SDI demanded, back in 1983, by the Heritage Foundation's Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Daniel Graham and kindred stone-age ideologues. That, in brief, is the issue of military policy as such, behind the recent weeks' revived controversy over Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense. That is what the relevant Senators, Secretary Cohen, and major news media, if they wished to be honest, should admit to be the crucial issue in the present ABM flap.

In this area, I have some expertise, which ideologues such as Secretary Cohen, Frank Gaffney, et al. clearly do not. What I know about that matter, includes some areas which, according to the last relevant report I have received, may be still highly classified matters from the early 1980s. However, without invading probably classified matters, evidence which has been in the public domain since 1979-1986, is sufficient to refute, conclusively, the dangerous nonsense currently paraded as proposals for ABM spread today.

1. The strategic situation

In such times as these, whether in U.S. Vice-President Al Gore's New Zealand, or elsewhere, before proceeding with the marriage, it is wise to check, who, or what the intended bridegroom might actually be. Before debating the demerits of the converging proposals on strategic defense, of S. 257 and the Principals Committee respectively, we must first take into account the reason this particular debate, on this putative issue, has erupted at this particular time.

We must not overlook the nature, and common origin of the plainly advertised political motives of both the authors of that bill and Secretary Cohen's pronouncements. We must not adopt the naive presumption, that the proponents of either of those two versions of ABM policy are acting in good faith. In these incidents, as in the case of sets of gladiators battling in the ancient Roman arena, the real issue of the combat in the arena is not the conduct of the gladiators, but the higher, imperial authority which has ordered the gladiators to stage this show.

Neither those Republican Senators nor Secretary Cohen, are acting out of rational concern for U.S. security; they have made it clear by both what they say and chose not to say, that they do not care whether what they are proposing would work as a defense policy, or not. They are marching to a different drummer, a drummer heard from a universe not our own.

What we are witnessing--and this is no guess on my part--is not their desire to win a war; theirs is a far more modest goal: merely to start one. They, together with the interests behind the United Kingdom's failed "Frankenstein Monster" experiment, Prime Minister Tony Blair, are determined to have a brutal strategic confrontation with a group of nations including China and Russia. What do they seek from such a quarrel? Don't ask them: they are merely the liveried lackeys picking the fight which their paymaster sent them out to provoke. They are picking the fight, where no cause for quarrel had actually existed. Yet, they are determined to have the quarrel, on any pretexts, however fanciful, they may choose to concoct for that purpose.

All of their chatter about ABM revisions and related matters, are essentially a lackey's pretexts for picking a fight he does not understand, but nonetheless fights, like the hit-man who said afterward, "I was only doing my job." The brutish lackey sent out for this purpose, knowing virtually nothing, glares at his target with a knowing eye, draws a line in the sand, and then says to his assigned target: "I dare you to cross that line!"

Under such circumstances, the shamelessly reckless features of S. 257 and related statements by Secretary Cohen, are not surprising. These proposals are intended to be as half-baked and reckless as they are. The town-criers for this new ABM policy, like the British monarchy's lackeys who launched, and are still currently directing the bombing of Iraq, are committed to picking a fight, but show no rational form of concern for what might lie further down the road, beyond the start of that war. Do not ask the gladiator why he fights, or with what choice of weapons. Focus your attention on the lackey's master, who ordered him to conduct the fight, who chose the gladiator's target and the weapons.

The relevant strategic issue motivating this ABM flap, is as follows.

All parts of the world are presently dominated by the effects of a process of disintegration of the world's present international financial and monetary systems. Nothing could save that system. Nonetheless, the packs of lunatics gathered around the British monarchy and the carrion crows of Wall Street, are obsessed by their commitment to risking everything you own, including your savings, your Social Security benefits, your health-care, and even your life, in a futile effort to keep their system functioning, even if only for a few more weeks. Thus, in the aftermath of the September 23, 1998 bankruptcy-reorganization of Wall Street's Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge-fund, U.S. Federal Reserve System Chairman Alan Geenspan, acting in concert with the governments of the G-7 group, has unleashed the most monstrous hyperinflationary bubble in history.

The resistance to those lunatic policies of Greenspan and the G-7 comes initially from a group of Eurasian nations, typified by Malaysia, but pivotted around China, Russia, and India. The interests behind Greenspan et al., are determined to crush those Eurasian and other nations, such as Brazil or Mexico, which might come to resist the imposition of so-called "International Monetary Fund (IMF)" hyperinflationary policies of "free trade" and "globalization" upon them.

Although U.S. President Bill Clinton has so far consented to these lunatic "IMF policies," his foreign policy has been in direct opposition to the efforts of the Principals Committee, and their backers, Wall Street's wild-eyed monetarists, to start a war with China, Russia, and India. Our Wall Street gang, and its global allies, are using any pretext they could concoct to create a brutally hostile confrontation with those and other nations. In addition to the President's concern for peace in Ireland and the Middle East, the principal focus of his foreign-policy efforts, has been to create a U.S. global partnership pivotted on three nations: Germany, Russia, and China. Germany represents the pivotal nation of western continental Europe's economy, and Russia and China, together with India, are not only pivotal for the majority of the population of this planet, but the successful growth of the Eurasian region's economy, is the keystone for the economic future of the U.S.A. and the group of western European nations for which Germany is the economic center of gravity.

Over those financial and foreign-policy issues, the Wall Street madmen, Britain's Blair government, and their allies, have been determined to eliminate President Clinton by any means possible. The determination to eliminate him has become most ominous since the events of the past August 17 through October 14, centered around LTCM and other dubious and monstrous Wall Street investments in Russia's debt. If these desperadoes fail to destroy President Clinton, by impeachment, or assassination, they will fall back on their determination to force him into an adversarial posture, even actual warfare, against China and Russia, as they did Iraq, whether he wills it or not.

The important thing to emphasize, is that those pushing that present anti-China policy, are as certifiably mad as the current Nero of the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, who has spent the past five months spreading the hyperinflationary fires of doom throughout this planet. Do not waste your time and efforts trying to invent sane motives for what these lackeys and their masters do. They do not care in the least what happens to the United States, or the world; these poor deluded fools, these present-day Flagellant hordes of Wall Street and its camp-followers, hear only the beat of an unearthly drummer. They have but one purpose for their actions: "Whatever happens, we must have our way!" In the end, the last that will be seen or heard of them, will be a lunatic gleam in their eyes, and the dissonance of a Stoic's titter in their swan-song, as they cry, "After us, the Apocalypse;" with that, they will then vanish into the abyss.

Such is the motive for the lunatic behavior of the Principals Committee, and the meaning behind such follies as S. 257. That setting of the present strategic defense flap identified, turn now to focus on the technicalities of the ABM controversy as such.

2. The issues posed by S. 257

I begin the remainder of this report, by summarizing the recent weeks' history of the flap, point by point. My focal point is the subject of the currently legislated proposal to reopen the extant ABM treaty. After that, I summarize the technical and strategic issues involved, as defined by press dispatches received this Thursday.

Actions: [source: Washington Post, Washington Times, Congressional Record, Federal News Service: Transcript--State Department 2/10/99.] From yesterday's events in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. State Department briefing: Those events, including a summary of relevant background are as follows:
1. The Senate Armed Services Committee passed a one-paragraph Bill called the "National Missile Defense Act of 1999," S. 257, which reads:
  
  "It is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate)."
  
  Notably, this bill was introduced by Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), and Daniel Inouye (D-Hi.), but was opposed by all other Democrats excepting Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), who voted with the Republicans.
2. State Department spokesman James Rubin spoke at some length about an agreement signed by Presidents Yeltsin and Clinton to share sensitive Early Warning System data and information between the U.S. and Russia, at their meeting in September 1998;
3. The Washington Post ran a provocatively-styled, front-page article, claiming that the economic disaster in Russia is causing attrition in the satellite system, so that the Russian EWS capabilities are "blindfolded" a couple of hours every day, thereby increasing the risk of accidental nuclear retaliation. The Post claimed to have reports of two incidents--September 26, 1983, "just weeks after the KAL 007 was shot down," when there was an alleged "false alarm" that a U.S. missile was headed for Russia; and another case, in November 1995, when a Norwegian science rocket triggered a false alarm that was "reported all the way to Yeltsin."
Background:
1. It is not surprising to see this new bill pop up as a Senate Republican's project, since the neo-Conservative "think tanks" tied to Richard Perle, Mellon Scaife, and the Conservative Revolution more broadly, have been attacking Clinton for his new defense budget allocation of $6 billion for ballistic missile research. The terse, propagandistic S. 257, is much along the lines of the type of fiat legislation that characterized the recent Iraq Liberation Act, and the "Gulf of Tonkin" resolution decades earlier. Groups like the Center for Security Policy, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have all been screeching about the nuclear danger, claiming that the Clinton Administration has made the U.S.A. vulnerable to such attacks.
  
  In this circumstance, the role of the Heritage Foundation, in violently opposing the SDI prior to March 23, 1983, and in its frantic and substantially successful efforts to sabotage it after that latter date, are most notable elements of background to be considered, for any assessment of the intent and related implications of S. 257.
2. On the agreement between Yeltsin and Clinton in September 1998, State's Rubin argued that there is less of a risk of nuclear retaliation now, than in the 1980s period of the Cold War doctrine of massive retaliation, because both sides want to reduce the risk, and have direct discussions. Rubin said:
  
  "Just last September the two Presidents agreed to begin discussions on the exchange of information on missile launches and early warning. We have pushed aggressively to follow up on this agreement with detailed negotiating sessions occurring in Moscow at the senior levels and we have presented the Russian side and their experts with a clear and far-reaching vision of where this initiative might lead, and we are pushing this very aggressively. . . ." There was back-and-forth about whether Russia was dragging its feet on the cooperation, to which Rubin said that that is not really the case.
3. As of today, nowhere in the articles and discussions reported to date, is there any mention of the March 23, 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, even though the Washington Post has a nearly-full-page article about U.S.-Soviet tensions in the Yuri Andropov era when the "false alarm occurred." The issues of interpretation of the ABM treaty are identical to the challenge to that treaty which S. 257 not only plainly represents, but which have been heatedly referenced in Russian responses to discussions of S. 257 and putatively related matters of Clinton Administration policy.
4. As in the area of Iraq policy, these Republicans' S. 257 implicitly promotes the appearance of a curious blending of rivalry and collaboration, in the ongoing propaganda wars--resembling those between baboons and gibbons in a zoo--between certain stone-age tribalists prowling Capitol Hill and the Gore-Fuerth-tainted cannibals lurking behind the Principals Committee's military spokesman William Cohen.
History would not be history without its ironies. On that account, we should take note of the relevant role of that certain, slobber-mouthed British journalist, Christopher Hitchens, whose character and condition I assessed while viewing a CNN broadcast interview with that creature, earlier this week.

This is the same Hitchens, who had, just recently, catapulted himself into the middle of Clintongate, with a dubious affidavit accusing White House aide Blumenthal of palpably perjurious lying. Last week, this same yahoo wrote a fumbling article in which he dragged my past role in connection with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) into the general, major news-media gossip of the past days.[1]

In reference to the announcement that Clinton's Defense Budget was including $6-plus billions for ballistic missile defense, Hitchens described the spending for missile defenses as always one of my "pet" projects. Hitchens, currently posing around Washington as a "Brand X" lookalike for the departed, Hollinger Corporations' MI6-linked Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, concocted the rumor that I am demanding an SDI-like "payback" from Clinton, for my defense of the President from Evans-Pritchard's impeachment efforts.
The foundations for the post-1972 emergence of designs for strategic ballistic missile defense, including my own design for what became the SDI, are, summarily, as follows.
1. Any rational discussion of strategic ballistic missile defense and related matters, must begin with an acknowledgement of the essential lunacy, sometimes frankly named MAD (Mutual and Assured Destruction), underlying the presently prevailing, relevant U.S.-Russia treaty law affecting these areas, such as the SALT I and ABM treaties.
2. As President Ronald Reagan recognized and pointed out, in first announcing his SDI policy to a global television audience, these treaties commit the world to nuclear doomsday scenarios, scenarios played with the utter futility of "revenge weapons." The SDI was introduced by that President as a noble, but politically unsuccessful effort to free humanity of the now still-established "doomsday-scenario" lunacies of U.S. and other strategic doctrine.
3. The relevant lunacies, the treaty-agreements which Henry A. Kissinger had negotiated during the first administration of President Richard Nixon, had been designed in their original form by Leo Szilard, a leading agent of nuclear-terrorist Bertrand Russell, at the 1958 Quebec, Second Pugwash Conference. Aptly, Szilard's role at that conference supplied the model for the Kissinger-like, lunatic film character "Dr. Strangelove." Szilard's design, set forth at that conference, prompted the arms-control doctrines adopted by the official U.S.A. ACDA project involving such figures as Wall Street bankers' lawyer John J. McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, and Bundy's flunky, Henry A. Kissinger. This was an articulation of the same policy set forth publicly by Szilard's controller, Bertrand Russell, as his proposal for bringing about world government--i.e., "globalization"--through nuclear terror, a Russell policy set forth publicly in the September 1946 edition of editor Leo Szilard's The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
4. However, despite agreements in the direction of adoption of SALT I and the ABM treaty, which were put into motion in the setting and immediate aftermath of the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, the idea of defeating a large ration of an attacking flotilla of thermonuclear-armed strategic ballistic missiles remained prominently on the agendas of both U.S.A. and Soviet relevant planners. It was recognized, as early as 1962-1963, that, for reason of physical principles, high-speed interceptor rockets were inherently incapable--either physically or economically--of providing any reasonable degree of defense of a nation from massed strategic ballistic missile attack. From that time on, all competent studies in this area, both U.S.A. and Soviet, proceeded from the common recognition, based on elementary scientific considerations, that only a new generation of weaponry, merely typified by lasers, could provide a means for destroying a strategically significant ration of a full-scale strategic ballistic missile attack. It was also understood, as early as the 1962-1963 interval, that, for the indeterminate future, only the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union were--even potentially--capable of developing and deploying the kinds of strategically effective missile defenses based upon what came to be known as "new physical principles."
5. The exception which proves this rule, was defined by France's President Charles de Gaulle. This was developed as what became known as de Gaulle's nuclear Force de Frappe doctrine. De Gaulle developed this strategic posture out of recognizing the nature of the strategic motives of those combined British-American-Canadian (e.g., Wall Street lawyers and bankers) factions which were behind the successive, unsuccessful efforts to assassinate President de Gaulle himself, and the successful later efforts, the coup d'état of 1968-1969, to force him from office.
  
  De Gaulle reacted to his certainty as a statesman and military strategist, that the purpose and outcome of the arms-control policies coming out of the negotiations around the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, was to create a "nuclear doomsday trap." The effect of this trap would be to eradicate all vestiges of the institution of the sovereign nation-state republic from all parts of this planet. De Gaulle's, "against all horizons" Force de Frappe was a counter-doomsday device, a nuclear counter-deterrent. It was designed to deter the BAC (British-American-Canadian) faction of Wall Street and the British monarchy from using their "nuclear doomsday trap" against France.
What President Reagan adopted and christened as the SDI was my creation. It was a strategic doctrine which I had featured as a "plank" in my 1979-1980 campaign for the Democratic Party's 1980 Presidential nomination, a policy around which I launched a relatively major, and influential international effort in mid-February 1982. It was the subject of a widely circulated report, first published in March 1982, calling for measures toward the elimination of Henry Kissinger's style in nuclear doomsday diplomacy. It was the subject of my personal back-channel discussions, on behalf of the U.S.A., with the Soviet Union, during February 1982-February 1983, a strategic initiative which gained impressive support from among military and scientific circles not only in the U.S.A. and western Europe, but elsewhere. The policy and its implications were widely circulated in the public domain from early 1982 through 1986.

3. The folly of S. 257

There was not only high-level international support, but also fierce opposition to my policy, inside the U.S. and elsewhere.

Prior to March 23, 1983, the strongest opposition to the future SDI came from (since deceased) retired Lt.-Gen. Daniel Graham. Graham, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), had been among the leaders in opposing such defense systems as early as the mid-1970s. Graham campaigned vigorously against me, and also against Dr. Edward Teller, on this issue, during a period of time from about mid-1982 until the President's announcement of March 23, 1983. Graham deployed both as a spokesman for an esoteric pseudo-scientific cult, the authors of his High Frontier tract, and as the leading representative of the Washington, D.C.-based front for the Mont Pelerin Society, the British-directed Heritage Foundation.

The explicitly anti-science, almost stone-age, "kinematic" weapons-systems policies, which the Heritage Foundation's Graham represented during 1982 and 1983, are the characteristic, anti-science, ideological characteristics of the ABM nonsense pushed by both the backers of S. 257 and Secretary Cohen's stated policies today.

Before beginning any discussion of the design of an anti-ballistic missile defense, there are interrelated sets of scientific and economic facts to be considered.

It is a fact rooted in elementary physical principles, that no possible version of so-called "kinematic" systems could be designed, within the range of systems based upon principles of molecular reactions, which would provide a strategically meaningful defense, by "kinematic" means, against the delivery of thermonuclear warheads. Except for the very special case of localized point-defense of a narrowly defined target-locality of the very highest conceivable priority for the defending force, it is cheaper, as a matter of principle of design, to overwhelm the defense with more missiles, than it is to kill each attacking missile.
Therefore, it remains the case, still today, that the design of any effective ballistic missile defense belongs to the highest category of the notion of a military principle of the flank. That is, the situation in which the offense can be effectively countered ["flanked"] only by a defense which attacks the offensive force itself from the domain of higher orders of applied physical principles than the offense represents.

In physical terms, this means reliance on physical processes whose elementary characteristics are of several orders of magnitude higher in effective energy-flux density than any molecular-atomic reactions, and thus, reactions which are either within the sub-atomic and nuclear range, in the simple sense of those terms, or by virtue of being truly non-linear in the infinitesimally small characteristic unit of action. The task of the physical defense is to envelope and control the environment of the ballistic missile deployment in ways which predetermine the neutralization of a strategically significant ration of total assaulting missiles and related elements deployed.

Admittedly, a thermonuclear detonation is a nuclear process, but the conveyance of the warhead is a molecular-chemical process. It is the pre-exploded warhead and its carriers, which are the targets of strategic ballistic missile defense.

There are well-defined models for such higher-order flanking strategies. The paradigm is the 1792-1794 launching of a technological crash-program under the then commander of France's forces, Lazare Carnot. This Carnot model, based upon Carnot's own development of a Leibnizian principle of design of the machine, was the basis later adopted under Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams for Commandant Thayer's West Point Military Academy. It was the method adopted for the German-American aerospace program, and for the Manhattan Project. The specification of such a crash program was the central feature of my explicit proposals for the design. It was the basis for my 1979-1983 approach to designing the policy of strategic ballistic missile defense announced by President Reagan on March 23, 1983.

The only possible way in which an effective strategic ballistic missile defense could have been developed, within the bounds of the 1980s and early 1990s, was through a so-called "crash program" of a type comparable, in depth and breadth, to combining the lessons of the U.S. aerospace "crash programs" of the 1950s and 1960s with those of the Manhattan Project of the early 1940s. The specific distinction of such a crash program, is that it accelerates not only the rate of generation of validated discoveries of physical principle, but walks these discoveries into the machine-tool-design phase even before the validation of the discovery has been completed. Furthermore, production of finished product is under way before the machine-tool-design application of the discovered principle is completed.

A comparable case, is the U.S. economic war-mobilization of 1940-1944, which crashed through all previously imagined limits. Here, it was the emphasis upon the machine-tool-design principle of Carnot, which was crucial.

What the President had announced on March 23, 1983, was effectively killed, virtually within weeks of that announcement, chiefly through the combined influence of Anglo-American factions associated with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Heritage Foundation's circles. By the Autumn of 1983, all of those who had been key, from the inside of the Administration, in bringing that March 23, 1983 announcement into being, were in the process of being pushed out of their positions, as I, their outside collaborator, was. A rotten compromise, based on political conditions dictated by the Heritage Foundation's faction, was imposed, instead. The Republican Party's campaign committee had pushed it off the agenda for that campaign period--until Democratic candidate Walter Mondale fell into the trap of attacking President Reagan on this, within the second televised debate of that period. The circles associated with Dr. Edward Teller et al., were constrained to accepting make-shifts far from the original policy.

What was done, from the Republican side, to wreck President Reagan's original SDI policy, was, in the main, the nonsensical policy demanded, hysterically, by General Graham, during the period from approximately August 1982 into March 1983, when his attacks were chiefly personal attacks focussed upon me and Dr. Teller. Graham, relying entirely upon long-obsolete designs, such as that referenced in his High Frontier, from the early 1960s, insisted that ABM must be limited to use of off-the-shelf ("kinematic") technologies already on the shelves of leading defense contractors. His hatred was focussed against science. The suggestion of "crash programs" evoked public paroxysms of rage from his and his factional allies. That became the actual form of abortive implementation of the SDI under pressures from the Heritage Foundation and related circles of Professor Milton Friedman's admirers.

What S. 257 and Secretary Cohen have proposed, is even worse than Graham's rant. Their approach is worthless junk at best, and, at worst, the provocation of doomsday scenarios worse than the strategic ballistic missile risk existing during the 1970s and 1980s. Again, I emphasize, neither the authors of S. 257 nor Secretary Cohen have proposed an actual ABM defense; what they have proposed, out of nothing better than wild-eyed stone-age ideology blended with utter incompetence, is a scheme for provoking doomsday-scenario wars, throughout the planet, the kinds of wars which no one could win.

Take, as one example of the strategic principle involved, the case of the Schlieffen Plan, and its modification under the Kaiser at the outset of World War I. Had the plan been executed as designed, the German forces would have won the war on the Western front within weeks of the German assault; a peace with Russia would have followed. By modifying the war-plan, to the effect of destroying its crucial feature of war-winning competence, the war was turned into a prolonged stalemate, and, of course, subsequent defeat of Germany--solely as a result of a U.S. military mobilization. The Augustinian principle of justified warfare applies: don't start wars which are not both justified, and which you are competently committed to win.

When what such an incompetent ABM policy as S. 257 specifies, is combined with the kinds of cabinet-warfare adventures which the Special Forces dogma of the Principals Committee's Secretary Cohen and Chairman Shelton have adopted, the worst possible strategic result is virtually ensured. The result is like standing in the midst of a drought-stricken tinder-box of forest, within a mountainous region, and setting fires around one's own forces deployed there. You have the means to start the fires, but have made no effective provision to escape from the trap you have created for both the forest and your own forces deployed there. No competent professional military commander would ever commit such a folly as Cohen and Shelton have done, with their present combination of Special Force and ABM dogmas.

When you drive somewhat able and proud nations to beyond their limits of tolerance, and create thus a situation in which they are forced to wage wars which they could not win, the result, in today's post-Soviet world, is nuclear and other doomsday scenarios.

This consideration is new only in the sense of the special conditions associated with the post-Soviet era. Otherwise, that special condition put to one side, this has always been the abhorrence for U.S. involvement in a land-war in Asia expressed by General Douglas MacArthur and others. It is the experience of the U.S. in its 1964-1975 Indo-China adventure, an experience from which Chairman Shelton has clearly learned far less than nothing of importance. It is also the experience of the Soviet Union in the prolonged mountain warfare in Afghanistan.

This is a lesson which competent military professionals would have learned early in their undergraduate education's exposure to the military writings of Machiavelli; but, Cohen and Shelton are clearly not really military professionals. It takes more than learning the thuggish arts of how to "get ugly," and how to kill, or how to behave as a pompous ass, to rival the military professional in the tradition of West Point and of the great commanders of all nations from modern history.

That lesson of history is: Never drive a nation you have already defeated, to the state of desperation, in which you offer it no option, but to resume warfare. In such a case, the nation is likely to resume warfare, but, out of its weakness and desperation, it will resort even to means which it itself would otherwise consider unthinkable. Pompous fools such as Al Gore, Cohen, Shelton, et al., if they are permitted to continue their present lunatic course, will force all of us--at least, those who survive, to learn again: Drive such desperate nations so, and you will reap the whirlwind.

If you wish to know, what nuclear doomsday scenarios are in practice, that experience may be bestowed upon you, if you continue to tolerate the kinds of folly represented by the Cohen-Shelton Special Forces dogma, and the implications of S. 257.

4. SDI as a peace-winning policy

The world has been living, for decades, within a modern Homeric epic.

By the time the mid-1970s had been reached, our nation's enemy was not the Soviet Union, but rather certain evil little giant girls, playing with dolls, which toyed with nations, snickering wicked giggles all the time. They toyed with, and tortured nations as if peoples were but playroom marionettes. The doll-house game these evil little giant girls played, in their satanic manner of giggling, was the game of doomsday. It was what President Reagan derided as a game of "revenge weapons;" it was a game which silly wicked girls like the Queen's own Henry Kissinger named "MAD:" Mutual and Assured Destruction. The evil little giant girls told the marionettes: "We are witches, come to warn you; you must try to destroy the other marionette before he destroys you, but you must not trigger a nuclear war, in which you would both assuredly be destroyed." Such were the strings of lies, by which the silly little giant witches wickedly manipulated those foolish marionettes.

The marionettes, doomed as if they might have been gladiators in the arena of evil ancient Rome, played the game as toys are wont to obey, and to be destroyed by their childish masters. So, two vast thermonuclear alliances played out their assigned roles, as marionettes, in the doll-house world of thermonuclear terror.

If one said to either of these sets of marionettes, "Why do you play this game?" they would respond, as they responded to my intervention, numerous times, with words to the effect: Don't bother us now; don't you see we are busy with this game?

Such was the Homeric epic of this modern age, when evil gods once again, toyed with the lives of men and nations, all for the sport of silly creatures, such as the Queen's own satanic Duke of Edinburgh, who had assigned themselves the role of playing the satanic game of "world religion." Such is still the living, epic tragedy of today.

The silliest, and most satanic of those silly girls playing dollhouse with nations, was the brutish queen, Elizabeth II. The American fools said, "She is our nearest and dearest ally, to which we shall be ever faithful." The Soviet fools said, "We can deal with the British; it is the Americans who are behind everything." So, even after the Soviet Union is dead and gone, the world's biggest fools still regard that silly, mad, mean queen as the benign agency in the global strategic game. It was not the queen who actually embodied the power she used. Witch she was, and is still today; but, her source of power was the credulity she found among the American, Soviet, and other marionettes. Once these fools no longer believed in her satanic tricks, she would vanish, perhaps like Alice's "pack of cards," or perhaps down some well, perhaps in the fashion of fairy-story author Frank Baum's "Wicked Witch of the West."

That situation, as it was presented to me during the 1970s and 1980s, appeared to me as a true, Classical tragedy, but one being enacted in real life. In the application of the wisdom which all great statesmen are taught through their reflections on Classical tragedy, there are certain principles which must be summoned to free a nation, or nations, from such a tragedy.

In the U.S., it was said, the Soviet Union is the enemy which threatens us. Since wicked little giant girls had obliged the Soviet Union to play the marionette's role of the enemy which threatens us, Moscow's leaders believed in that myth, and acted it out within the limits of their abilities. So, in the Soviet Union, it was said, the United States is the threat. So, the Soviet Union was destroyed by itself, not by the United States; and, now, when the Soviet Union has been gone for nearly a decade, it is the United States which is destroying itself.

The destruction of both those super-powers was pre-arranged by the British monarchy and what that monarchy represents; but, the British did not bring this about by force, but only by witchcraft. The witch displayed the tea-leaves which said, that "world government," "free trade," "ecologism," and "globalization," were the only means to defeat the other superpower's designs by means other than thermonuclear war. Thus, the superpowers, like marionettes on a silly old witch-girl's strings, each destroyed itself, while the old witch almost cackled herself to death with pleasure to see such fools go down.

Dead boys, young and old, win and lose other people's wars, and never really know why. They are like Napoleon's doomed grenadier from the Heinrich Heine poem which Robert Schumann turned to song. Silly, tough boys, like that grenadier, are like the pathetic legionnaires of a doomed ancient Rome. Foolish old boys, like Chairman Henry Hugh Shelton, arising as if from an ancestor's mouldering grave, clad in mud- and blood-stained grey, marching to fight a new battle for an old Lost Cause, see war as a glory and horror unto itself.

The statesman confronted with such a tragedy in real life, must see the paradox; but, it is not enough to see that a paradox exists. Shakespeare's Hamlet saw the paradox, but preferred to embrace his doom, rather than confront the uncertainties within his own sick mind. The two superpowers we knew during the 1970s and 1980s have turned out, despite the exception of President Reagan's great moment, to be real-life Hamlets.

Deductive methods can craft catastrophes, and often do; only a specific quality of creative passion can mobilize a nation's leaders to overcome that folly within themselves, which is the origin of their otherwise inevitable, self-imposed doom. It is all too easy, too often, to find sophists enough to explain why we must fight war. "For what?" one asks. "Why, to defeat the enemy, of course," they reply with a sophist's smirk. Ask others, not that silly sophist, "Is this the cause for which we fought two wars against the British monarchy, and another, against that monarchy's treasonous puppet, the Confederacy?"

There is only one cause worth war. It is the fight to ensure that rise of civilization from the evil nightmare of oligarchical tyrannies, the same honorable, just cause for which the United States fought all its wars, including our Civil War, against the evil forces of the British monarchy and Prince Metternich's so-called Holy Alliance. Our object is not war, but a civilized peace, a peace which can sometimes not be gained except by means of war.

So, in that Augustinian tradition, late during 1982, Dr. Teller, speaking on the subject of what later became known as the SDI, referred to the higher objectives of peace which should guide us in looking beyond the immediate tasks of engaging the Soviet Union in a cooperative effort in developing a strategic ballistic missile defense. He referred to the use of these scientific and technological breakthroughs as means to realize "the common aims of mankind."

By the mid-1970s, we had overwhelming evidence of two global adversaries which must be overcome, if the future of the civilization were to be secured.

The first, most immediate enemy, was expressed by the two treaties recently adopted by the superpowers: SALT I and the ABM treaty. These treaties locked the world into the doomsday logic of MAD, and, by the lunatic litanies of "dual-use technologies" and "control of weapons of mass destruction," created barriers to any hope of significant scientific and technological progress for humanity for generations to come.

The second, was a rampant injustice unleashed against the majority of the nations of the world, in Central and South American, in Africa, and throughout much of Asia. The introduction of Hitler-modelled policies of "population control," introduced to U.S. policy by Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's 1974 NSSM (National Security Study Memorandum), meant that our nation had chosen to join the Anglo-Dutch monarchies' Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Bernhard, and creatures such as Canada's Maurice Strong, in becoming Adolf Hitler's successors, as the common enemies of mankind.

The need, so defined, was to develop a policy, based not only upon eliminating the hazard of mutual thermonuclear terror, but of crafting such cooperation between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R., in such a way as to lead into a system of positive partnership around what Teller so aptly described in late 1982 as "the common aims of mankind."

Today, the Soviet Union has evaporated, but its principal heirs remain. We now have the opportunity to end that Kissinger era of "revenge weapons" against which President Reagan warned in March 1983. We now have the opportunity to move toward what Edward Teller, in late 1982, had proposed as "the common aims of mankind." If we can but rally our western European allies, centered around Germany's failing economy, and, with Europe, establish a new and just order of economic development, together with a Eurasia group of nations centered around China, Russia, and India, we can realize those aims of peace which slipped through our grasp during the middle 1980s.

The issue of SDI, as I proposed this in 1979 and 1982, and as President Reagan offered this to Moscow in March 1983, is still high on the agenda of nations today, but the circumstances are different. What remains the same, then and now, is that we must never permit any weapons-system to become so much a power over mankind's fate, that such weapons might doom us.

The proposal that "weapons of mass destruction" could be banned, is a silly child's fantasy. Dangerous military potentials can be controlled in but one way; they must be outflanked by the continued development of absolutely superior technologies of counterforce.

The strategic issue of military conflict we face today, is not the issue of a superpower conflict. The strategic issue today, is the menace of the kinds of "doomsday" scenarios which the British monarchy and foolish and wicked Vice-President Al Gore's Wall Street cronies are currently forcing upon the world. The logic of the Gore-Fuerth-Cohen-Shelton policies, is to drive the world into developing innovative forms of "doomsday options" as the deployable form of deterrent to stop Al Gore, the British monarchy, and their Wall Street allies. The provocation represented by Gore and his British and Wall Street cronies, is the strategic threat which must be eradicated in defense of our national security.

Meanwhile, there is another, looming issue. We must not permit the world, ever again, to be locked into a state of relative technological stagnation in which nations are forced to resort to "doomsday options." We must never permit, ever again, a state of affairs in which we prevent the development of superior technologies, based upon higher physical principles, by means of which the defense might gain the assured ability to defeat any deployed offensive capability. In that sense, the principle of SDI lives on today, and will persist, in one form or another, forever.

The principle of all moral varieties of modern statecraft, has been that war must never be used except as it becomes the only acceptable option to be used as an instrument of a just peace. From a military standpoint, this must be an approach to peace which never lets down our guard against the contingency of being forced to fight actual warfare. In short, given all relevant considerations, the launching of a "crash program" approach to overturning the doomsday logic underlying of SALT I and the ABM treaty, was the only way in which to overcome the two leading dangers facing the planet as a whole.

That is still the case today. The specific measures to be taken have changed over the course of the intervening decade and a half, but the principle remains the same.

5. The new option, today

See, briefly, what is similar to the SDI proposal originally stated by President Reagan, in today's situation, and what is also radically different about the present strategic situation.

At this moment, there are silly fools arguing that Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's actions of late 1998 defeated the threat of financial crash and a new great depression. There is absolutely no truth to that lying propaganda of the Al Gore Presidential-nomination campaign and Gore's Wall Street cronies. Very soon, on the day when the looming inevitable next explosion erupts, the ever-ungrateful lunatics of Wall Street itself will curse their hero of the previous moment, Alan Greenspan, as the most hateful creature on this planet. There is no prosperity in the United States; year by year, things have been becoming worse than ever, and it still goes so.

The same lunacy lately expressed by Vice-President Gore and his far-right cronies, was already key to the 1974-1986 political conflict over strategic ballistic missile defense. Reflecting the position of spokesman which he had assumed during his term as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt.-Gen. Daniel Graham continued to emphasize the essence of his faction's point of view, from the time of his opposition to the reports of the Air Force's Major-Gen. George Keegan, during the mid-1970s, through his role as a London-directed Heritage Foundation mouthpiece, during the 1980s.

On the issue of strategic ballistic missile defense, Graham, despite his three stars, never expressed a professional military standpoint, but only a wild-eyed variety of obsessive ideological conceit. His perverted views on matters of both science and technology, in particular, and on military policies in general, were the clear result of his brainwashing, like that of other Heritage Foundation ideologues, in what Pope John Paul II has denounced as "the structures of sin," the gnostic Mont Pelerin Society ideologies of Friedrich von Hayek, Professor Milton Friedman, et al.

Graham's 1982 quixotic travel itinerary, in his campaign against me, was centered on his appeal to a queer doctrine, a wild-eyed neo-Kantian irrationalism which was widespread among Republicans at that time. His itinerary that year featured an axiomatically irrational formulation, which purported to prove the existence of some putatively unfathomable, but politically absolute separation of science from technology. Usually, as Graham also argued for this esoteric dogma, the assertion was, that there must be a categorical separation between "pure science" and "applied science." On this premise, Graham argued, that military policies, including any design for ballistic missile defense, must be based on "applied science," with no interference from "pure science" permitted.

This argument by Graham boiled down to an obvious doctrine of faith in that cupidity which some prosecutors have proposed constitutes purely and simply prosecutable venality. Some might have suspected the influence of "double dipping" in Graham's position on the matter. Graham was so silly, on this account, as to propose that ballistic missile defense must be limited to the "kinematic systems" which existing defense contractors already owned, gathering dust on their warehouse shelves. What Graham boosted as his long technologically obsolete "High Frontier" alternative, had, in fact, already gathered a lot of dust.

Much could be said on the sundry implications of Graham's gnostic teachings. Most of that I put to one side here, to focus, in conclusion, on the most crucial of the policy-shaping issues.

Look first at the assertion that there must be a hermetic separation of "pure" from "applied" science. It is important to recognize that such a view is a specifically Kantian form of pure and applied lunacy. The test of truth of any newly discovered physical principle is its validation by crucial-experimental methods. It is upon the authority of precisely such validation, that all valid technologies are derived directly from a discovery of a physical principle. Any notion of the possibility of separating the feasibility of any technology from "pure science," is either lunacy, if the advocate is literate, or the kind of lunacy which illiteracy itself represents.

It is precisely the arbitrary argument employed by Graham et al., which separates unprincipled ideologues such as Graham, from the methods of thinking and argument employed by truthful professionals in any and all fields of application. This is to be recognized as the same principle employed by the Mont Pelerin Society's adopted satanic saint, Bernard de Mandeville, and by David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Immanuel Kant, in denying categorically the existence of truth in any field. This esoteric nonsense is the essential argument upon which today's lunacy of both right-wing "conservatism" and Vice-President Al Gore commonly rest. The other name for such lunacy, is "The Third Way."

In the real world, which Cohen and Shelton abhor, as did Danny Graham back then, the relationship between fundamental scientific progress, sometimes misnamed as "pure science," and increase of the productive powers of labor, is a direct, fully transparent connection. In summary, as Carnot's elaboration of the principle of the machine defines this connection, it is the design of the crucial experiment which validates a discovered physical principle, which is the direct means of transmission of "pure science" into higher levels of technologies. This is also the fundamental principle of modern military science, especially since Carnot, as also since France's Louis XI and Leonardo da Vinci before Carnot.

In these times, the same principle of Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, of non-linearity in the infinitesimally small, which determines the orbital trajectories of planets and comets, opens up to us powerful, intrinsically non-linear, forces lodged within the nuclear and yet much smaller domains of physical characteristics. There is no weapons-system which might exist, which could not be outflanked, if an always available, still-deeper principle of action were adduced and mastered according to this ordering of the universe. That is the way successful economies function; that is the essential physical principle of modern military science.

The converging views of S. 257 and the Special Forces dogma of Cohen and Shelton, show that sometimes the most dangerous thing about any politician, is not what they say, but the way in which they don't think.

[1] Christopher Hitchens, "Clinton's Star Wars Sequel: The President Pays Off the Military," Salon internet magazine, Jan. 19, 1999.