Slashdot Mirror
US Warns on Russia's New Space Weapons (reuters.com)
The United States voiced deep suspicion on Tuesday over Russia's pursuit of new space weapons, including a mobile laser system to destroy satellites in space, and the launch of a new inspector satellite which was acting in an "abnormal" way. From a report: Russia's pursuit of counterspace capabilities was "disturbing," Yleem D.S. Poblete, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, told the U.N.'s Conference on Disarmament which is discussing a new treaty to prevent an arms race in outer space. A Russian delegate at the conference dismissed Poblete's remarks as unfounded and slanderous. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at the Geneva forum in February, said a priority was to prevent an arms race in outer space, in line with Russia's joint draft treaty with China presented a decade ago.
Our new Space Force is a reaction to Chinese and Russian attempts to militarize space.
For example, Russian Air Force is but a branch of the Russian AeroSpace Forces, since 2015 — when America was still run by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"Russia is ready to respond to any provocation, but the last thing the Russians want is another war. And that, if you like good news, is the best news you are going to hear."
A whiff of World War III hangs in the air. In the US, Cold War 2.0 is on, and the anti-Russian rhetoric emanating from the Clinton campaign, echoed by the mass media, hearkens back to McCarthyism and the red scare. In response, many people are starting to think that Armageddon might be nigh—an all-out nuclear exchange, followed by nuclear winter and human extinction. It seems that many people in the US like to think that way. Goodness gracious!
The curtain is falling on a country in serious trouble
But, you know, this is hardly unreasonable of them. The US is spiraling down into financial, economic and political collapse, losing its standing in the world and turning into a continent-sized ghetto full of drug abuse, violence and decaying infrastructure, its population vice-ridden, poisoned with genetically modified food, morbidly obese, exploited by predatory police departments and city halls, plus a wide assortment of rackets, from medicine to education to real estate That we know.
We also know how painful it is to realize that the US is damaged beyond repair, or to acquiesce to the fact that most of the damage is self-inflicted: the endless, useless wars, the limitless corruption of money politics, the toxic culture and gender wars, and the imperial hubris and willful ignorance that underlies it all This level of disconnect between the expected and the observed certainly hurts, but the pain can be avoided, for a time, through mass delusion.
This sort of downward spiral does not automatically spell "Apocalypse," but the specifics of the state cult of the US—an old-time religiosity overlaid with the secular religion of progress—are such that there can be no other options: either we are on our way up to build colonies on Mars, or we perish in a ball of flame. Since the humiliation of having to ask the Russians for permission to fly the Soyuz to the International Space Station makes the prospect of American space colonies seem dubious, it's Plan B: balls of flame here we come!
And so, most of the recent American warmongering toward Russia can be explained by the desire to find anyone but oneself to blame for one's unfolding demise. This is a well-understood psychological move—projecting the shadow—where one takes everything one hates but can't admit to about oneself and projects it onto another. On a subconscious level (and, in the case of some very stupid people, even a conscious one) the Americans would like to nuke Russia until it glows, but can't do so because Russia would nuke them right back. But the Americans can project that same desire onto Russia, and since they have to believe that they are good while Russia is evil, this makes the Armageddon scenario appear much more likely.
But this way of thinking involves a break with reality. There is exactly one nation in the world that nukes other countries, and that would be the United States. It gratuitously nuked Japan, which was ready to surrender anyway, just because it could. It prepared to nuke Russia at the start of the Cold War, but was prevented from doing so by a lack of a sufficiently large number of nuclear bombs at the time. And it attempted to render Russia defenseless against nuclear attack, abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, but has been prevented from doing so by Russia's new weapons. These include, among others, long-range supersonic cruise missiles (Kalibr), and suborbital intercontinental missiles carrying multiple nuclear payloads capable of evasive maneuvers as they approach their targets (Sarmat). All of these new weapons are impossible to intercept using any conceivable defensive technology. At the same time, Russia has also developed its own defensive capabilities, and its latest S-500 system will effectively seal off Russia's airspace, being able to intercept targets both close to
While you're at it, please ignore our new Space Force.
You do understand that the "Space Force" thing is likely a reaction to this kind of activity from the Russians and Chinese right? As campy as it sounds, it sure seems like an idea who's time has long since come.
The "Space Force" thing is likely a reaction of a person with declining mental faculties (see the very name "Space Force" as an example) who is determined to put his name on things and is unable to understand the bureaucratic inefficiency, financial strain, duplication of effort, and wastefulness that creating another military branch would bring. Especially one as ill-defined and rudimentary technologically as space warfare/space combat. Leave it under the auspices of the Air Force until technological capability or operational necessity warrant it's own independent command structure.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Just like star wars in the 1980's, this whole thing is a ruse. If the U.S. military is doing something in space, what makes anybody think it wouldn't be a well guarded secret? The US is either goading them into wasting money on something that doesn't matter, or creating an enemy to justify increased military spending, and probably both.
A quick internet search indicates that the US "black budget" for the military is more than $50 Billion US dollars annually. The entire Russian Federation military budget is much less than $100 Billion - probably closer to $70 bilion. Additionally, there's the $600 billion the US spends in its public military budget numbers.
Arms race - LOL.
Greed is the root of all evil.