This editorial appears in the March 16, 2018 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
‘Experts Aghast!’
[Print version of this editorial]
March 8—Your friendly fake-news media is now telling you, in regard to President Putin’s annual address to Russia’s Federal Assembly just one week ago, that “Oh, we knew about it all along—and anyway, it’s not true.” But in the unguarded early hours right after that speech, they inadvertently let some of the truth slip out. NPR titled a March 1 wire, “Experts Aghast at Russian Claim of Nuclear-Powered Missile with Unlimited Range.” They quoted Edward Geist, a researcher specializing in Russia at the Rand Corporation, “I’m still kind of in shock. My guess is they’re not bluffing, that they’ve flight-tested this thing. But that’s incredible.”
And that’s just what EIR has confirmed: that the leading Western scientists and Russian specialists who are paid to know about these things, knew nothing. They were completely in the dark.
Now that State of the Nation message of President Putin has many implications, and they’re still only just beginning to hit home. First and probably most important, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has stressed—whatever anyone may imagine otherwise, the “unipolar world” fantasy is dead. The 2016 election of Donald Trump was a body-blow to the notion that American “muscle” would dominate the world militarily in behalf of British “brains,” but now it is dead forever.
And then, ask yourself what our intelligence agencies were doing with their untold billions of dollars, besides tapping everyone’s phones? In searching for the Russians under our beds and in our White House, they seem to have missed everything of importance about what real Russians have been doing for up to 15 years.
Now move on to some of the most obvious implications for space exploration and, bound up within it, for the future of the world economy. Taken as a whole, the final third of President Putin’s speech, the part which laid out new weapons systems (especially its closing sentences), made it clear that humanity is within close reach of a nuclear-powered space plane, which would provide vastly better access to space than rockets, the space shuttle, or anything else available today. The original space plane was the brainchild of the late Austrian scientist Eugen Sänger, whose approach was supported by Lyndon LaRouche and such other experts as the late lamented U.S. “astronaut’s astronaut,” John Young. But a nuclear-powered space plane, which now comes into prospect, is far superior to the conventional fuel-burning designs of the past and present—until we have a fusion-powered space plane. (It is of interest, though, that China flight-tested a scaled-down version of a conventional space plane on March 2.)
How about nuclear power? U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and also the Canadian government, are trying to progress towards eventual assembly-line production of small modularized nuclear reactors. These will have enormous importance especially for less-developed areas in Asia, Africa, and Ibero-America. But Putin’s Russia seems to have the jump on us here as well. President Putin said that Russia had developed a “small-scale heavy-duty nuclear energy unit that can be installed in a missile like . . . the American Tomahawk missile. ” Anyone happen to know the diameter of a Tomahawk missile? It is 20 inches. He also said that the nuclear energy unit made for Russia’s new undersea drone was more powerful than those of their nuclear submarines, while a hundred times smaller.
Two additional advances announced by President Putin bear especially on the drive for fusion power under Lyndon LaRouche’s “Four Laws,” which are the basis of the LaRouche PAC 2018 campaign. First, although no details were given, there have been advances in lasers. Second, in speaking of the new Mach 20 guided atmospheric delivery vehicle, Putin said, “The use of new composite materials has made it possible to enable the gliding cruise bloc to make a long-distance guided flight practically in conditions of plasma formation.” Indeed those conditions at Mach 20 are closely comparable to those in the “fireball” re-entry of the Space Shuttle to earth atmosphere—but the latter can only be sustained for a brief period. Here Putin’s remarks seem to indicate that there have been new advances in the physics of the gaseous/plasma shock-front, building on the progress begun in the past by Bernhard Riemann and carried forward later by Ludwig Prandtl, Adolf Busemann and others.
To now sum all this up from a different, cultural point of view: we are now entering into a new period of rapid technological attrition—one different from, and yet in a way comparable to the period from the launching of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, until John F. Kennedy’s assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, or somewhat later, when only a minority of our presently living citizens had yet been born.
These issues point to the deeper considerations underlying Lyndon LaRouche’s Strategic Defense Initiative and his (and the late Edward Teller’s) initiative for the Strategic Defense of the Earth. Those ideas of LaRouche are the basis on which the coming negotiations with Putin’s Russia and other nations must be based. Undergirding it all is the truth of the distinction of the human species from all others known.
