Some of us are old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan wasn't Renaldo Maximus, but only an amiable dunce. The Washington insider who coined that phrase was a big shot in the LBJ and Carter administrations, if that says anything. Some of us also remember the 1980s when certain of our friends on the left called the president "Ronald Ray-gun." Get it?
President Reagan's critics called his Strategic Defense Initiative program Star Wars, and they didn't mean it in a good way. It was a chance to mock the president, once again. This man was from the movies. So he must get science and science fiction confused. Right?
But the people deep inside the Pentagon working on the Reagan administration's SDI program had a mission: Protect the United States from incoming missiles. More precisely, Soviet missiles, back when Soviets still walked the earth. American researchers studied lasers, particle beams, even ground- and space-based missiles. Or what they called hitting-a-bullet-with-a-bullet tech-nology. And what the Ted Kennedy types called crazy.
Looking back, Americans can be happy--once again--that Ronald Reagan won the 1980 presidential election and not Ted Kennedy.
By the time the first Gulf War rolled around, the American military was knocking Scuds (short-range ballistic missiles) out of the sky with Patriot missiles. And this missile-to-missile technology improves every year. Now we have the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) missile system, and it might one day protect not only South Korea and Guam from certain parties above the 38th parallel, but maybe the United States, too.
All this came to mind after reading this headline in Arkansas' Newspaper the other day:
Saudis intercept missile
targeting royal palace
Holy cow! Can you imagine the reaction of We the People in this country if our military had to knock down a missile before it destroyed the White House? That's what they're dealing with in Saudi Arabia.
The rebels next door in Yemen say that they were targeting "top leadership" at the royal palace in Riyadh. Yes, the rebels admitted the attack. They all but put out a press release.
It was the second time in two months that a rebel missile from Yemen had reached inside--way inside--Saudi Arabia.
Our able and well-informed ambassador to the UN, one Nikki Haley, said the missile and the technology to launch it probably came from Iran. There's still some investigating to be done, but "it bears all the hallmarks of previous attacks using Iranian-provided weapons," she said.
And in related news, North Korea says it will sink Japan "into the sea," and turn the United States into "ashes and darkness." Japan is buying missile defense systems from the United States.
The Pentagon put out a report this summer that said, "China continues to have the most active and diverse ballistic missile development program in the world."
Beijing tested a new ICBM in January. It had 10 warheads.
The other day, the deputy head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards warned Europe that it's within striking distance.
The New York Times reported this week that North Korea is trying to field submarines with missile technology.
Experts believe Iran and North Korea are working together on several missile programs.
India and Pakistan are in a missile arms race, aiming at and for each other.
Russia has more deployed nukes than the United States.
These are interesting times we live in, unfortunately. But they'd be much more interesting, and dangerous, if not for missile defense, which more and more countries will come to rely on in the years to come.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan. Once again, the Gipper has proved ahead of his time.
Editorial on 12/22/2017