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21st Century Star Wars And NATO's 60th Anniversary

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Message Rick Rozoff

Regular contentions by US civilian and military officials that the installation of projected third position interceptor missile facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic are aimed at so-called rogue states like Iran and North Korea are a geographical, geometrical and geopolitical absurdity.

In fact such plans are entirely aggressive in nature and present the potentially most dangerous threat the world has known.

Missile deployments in Poland and the linked missile radar site in the Czech Republic are an integral, indeed the central, component of a global (and more than global) US-dominated system to neutralize targeted nations' deterrence and retaliation capabilities, both before and after the fact, for uses of blackmail and actual implementation.

It's worthy of note that the two affected countries, Poland and the Czech Republic, are two of the three first nations incorporated into NATO since the end of the Cold War, at the Alliance's 50th anniversary summit in Washington in 1999 in an event that occurred as NATO was launching its first war (in or out of area), against Yugoslavia.

The third member inducted at the same time was Hungary, where protests have halted the construction of a projected NATO radar station.

In fact the American missile shield outposts in Eastern Europe are an overt effort to implement the Reagan era Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), infamously known as Star Wars.

The X-Band radar that is to be installed in the Czech Republic will be shifted from the US Marshall Islands where it is linked with the Reagan Test Site, and the missile center, at the Vandenberg Air Force Base, from which US (and allied) interceptor tests have been regularly conducted in conjunction with a Sea-Based X-Band Radar off the coast of Alaska and more interceptor missiles at Fort Greely in the Alaskan mainland is named the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile
Defense Site.

The floating X-Band Radar periodically moved off the shores of Alaska for these exercises weighs 2,000 tons
and is 30 stories high.

Its permanent base is in Hawaii where a local newspaper wrote, referring to the sea-based Aegis component of the system, in June of 2008:

"The Missile Defense Agency co-manages the Navy's Aegis program, partners with the Army on its ground-based Patriot missiles and has primary responsibility for other, developing anti-ballistic missile technologies. It's an evolution of the Strategic Defense Initiative begun by President Reagan and has an $8.7 billion budget this year."

Similarly, the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is based in Huntsville, Alabama, where the Pentagon employed former German missile scientists in the 1950s for its own Cold War programs and where last year the MDA completed its Von Braun III building, a $240-million, 900,000-square-foot facility.

The center is named, of course, after the founder of Nazi Germany's missile program.

Upon completion of the Von Braun III building in April of last year Alabama Senator Richard Shelby said that naming the complex after Dr. Wernher von Braun was "fitting."

"His spirit is with us here today," Shelby said, "and certainly his vision continues because of the work started here."

Despite the regular disclaimers that the current US global missile shield program is not a so-called Son of Star Wars, an Alabama newspaper reported in 2006 upon the completion of the earlier Von Braun II building in Huntsville that:

"On the back wall of the lobby area are five pages, hand-edited with scribbled notes and revisions, in a simple wooden frame. It is the Star Wars speech given by President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983...."

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Rick Rozoff has been involved in anti-war and anti-interventionist work in various capacities for forty years. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. Is the manager of the Stop NATO international email list at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/stopnato/
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