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Russia To Help NATO Build Anti-Missile Network
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that Russia has agreed to cooperate with NATO on erecting a US-planned anti-missile network in Europe protecting the continent against possible ballistic missile attacks from Iran or elsewhere. The anti-missile coverage would be anchored by a US land- and sea-based deployment, reconfigured by Obama from earlier plans devised under the Bush administration. The new idea would be to link individual national missile defenses into the US network and place them all under a NATO command and control center with authority to respond to an attack. 'We see Russia as a partner, not an adversary,' says President Obama, hailing the NATO-Russian accord. President Dmitri Medvedev warned that Russia's cooperation must be 'a full-fledged strategic partnership between Russia and NATO' and not just a nod in Moscow's direction to spare Russian feelings while Europe tends to its own defenses in tandem with the United States."
Sounds like a good PR move to me.
"What's that? If Help the West invest time and money into a overly-complex and bureaucratic system that will never work, I can look like I'm cooperating and moving forward? Sounds like a deal to me!"
There doesn't need to be a Cold War, but Russia doesn't exactly want a Western hegemony.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
That response by Russia should have raised suspicions about the Kremlin's actually sabotaging the design of the missile system. After all, if the Kremlin is not committed to using the system, why would the Kremlin bother to ensure that the system can actually work?
Worse, "President" Medvedev has accused the Europeans of using the shield to neutralize Russian nuclear missiles. If the Kremlin were a true supporter of NATO, why would the Russian "president" still present Russia as an adversary of the West?
It is good to see such international cooperation on a global issue. Russia's foreign policy positions seem to contrast with what was accomplished at the summit; I wonder what the sentiment about this settlement is in Russia. The next question is if this network can be expanded beyond NATO. Imagine a network which protected Asia, Oceania, and Africa as well. Whether that is politically possible or not is in question, but I believe with enough time we could see the day. Or everyone could nuke each other with their counter-counter-nuke tech.
I hope the designers of this system know what they are doing. A very obvious design goal would be to make it so that a computer virus loaded in one country couldn't shut down the ballistic missile defenses of another. After all, if one country writes most of the software they could easily insert back doors to allow them to shut down any node of the system at will.
Heck, this system will uses lots of RF antennas for input (such as the tracking radars)...a good back door could be triggered remotely, so long as you were running the same firmware revision as before. So even if you cut the cables linking the control centers together, one country could still remotely disable the defenses of another.
You do realize that the agreement that was just signed simply ties the current and future European systems (Dutch, German, and Spanish SM-3; German-US-Italian MEADS; French SAMP/T; and US SM-3s in Eastern Europe) to the current and future US sensor network? And you realize that the current network already ties in mobile THAAD batteries, SM-3 equipped AEGIS Cruisers and Destroyers (US and Japanese), and the GBI bases in Alaska and California?
And that the whole thing is in it's simplest form a giant systems integration problem, one similar to what the US has already done?
"If the Kremlin were a true supporter of NATO, why would the Russian "president" still present Russia as an adversary of the West?"
Precisely, the Kremlin believes that they need a credible foreign threat to keep themselves in power. Truly cooperating with the West would remove that and they'd be left with defending their regime using the same yardsticks as democratic regimes.
and because they want to know how it works and make sure the US system is connected so when they send a worm down the line, it takes everyone out of the loop. Putin still scares me and seems like he's too much like a James Bond villain than anyone out to do his people any good.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Obama is an appeaser in the Neville Chamberlain mold.
There's an important distinction: Chamberlain loved his country. Obama loves the world.
The Chinese aren't *religious* fundamentalists. But they do have an ideological thing going, (and for some, also a combination racial superiority/persecution complex). This doesn't mean they will or won't fight, but it changes the timing and targets if they do fight.
It's a tricky thing to be one of China's geographical neighbors or near-neighbors, now and for the forseeable future. Which means that if we're talking about China, it's actually a case of Russia needing the US as allies, not the other way around. There are vast regions north of present day China that are now nominally independent or part of Russia, all of which China has at one point insinuated that it has owned before and should own again. (It's a tenuous connection for a lot of it; a lot of it was only Chinese in the sense that it was Mongolian at a time where the Mongols had conquered China...).
Likewise South Korea, southeast Asia in general, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Japan... these places are all understandably edgy about China's growth. They're all either physically close or economic competitors or both. Many of them, China could indeed "afford" a war against if that war was only the two of them fighting. Remember from how China did (and still does) handle its western and southern borders; the Han don't do the bomb/rebuild/leave thing the US does. The Han invade, conquer, settle their entire army there (as done in their western region), and then ship in as many more Han are necessary to make the place majority Han (as they're doing to Tibet). If they were to end up in a war against, say, North Korea, you can be assured that the same general approach would be used; large numbers of North Koreans would die in the war, and the survivors would completely displaced by Han settlers.
Right, but due to the ABM treaty (which GWB pulled out of) the US and USSR were only allowed *one* location to be protected by an ABM system. The SU picked Moscow, and the US picked some base in BFE, North Dakota, from what I recall.
Slightly different from a country or continent wide "shield", in that it hardly tips the balance of MAD, even if the system is 100% effective.
Sent from my PDP-11
There are threats, alright. There are threats out there that are destabilizing that region, and the whole world. Primarily, the United States and Israel.
"The systems are advertised as defense against an Iranian attack. But that cannot be the motive. The chance of Iran launching a missile attack, nuclear or not, is about at the level of an asteroid hitting the earth -- unless, of course, the ruling clerics have a fanatic death wish and want to see Iran instantly incinerated along with them. The purpose of the US interception systems, if they ever work, is to prevent any retaliation to a US or Israeli attack on Iran -- that is, to eliminate any Iranian deterrent. Anti-missile systems are a first-strike weapon, and that is understood on all sides. But that seems to be one of those facts best left in the shadows. "
http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20090921(1).htm