On December 4, defence minister Robert Hill announced that the Australian government will participate in making US President George Bush's trillion-dollar National Missile Defence (NMD) shield — better known as "Son of Star Wars" — a reality.
"The government is concerned that Australia might one day be threatened by long-range missiles with mass destruction", the minister declared. "Developing this capability will contribute to global, regional and Australia's security".
Hill asserted that the NMD program is "a non-nuclear defensive system" that "does not threaten other countries". Its purpose, he asserted, is "to negate a ballistic missile threat and therefore discourage other countries from investing in ballistic missile systems".
Foreign minister Alexander Downer, speaking on ABC TV's Lateline on December 4, repeated Hill's claim that "rogue states", and even terrorist organisations in the future, "might develop a ballistic missile system".
Hill and Downer lied at every turn.
Contrary to Hill's claim that the NMD will be "defensive", the entire rationale of the NMD — ever since it was first proposed during the presidency of Ronald Reagan in 1983 as the Strategic Defence Initiative — is to make it feasible for the US to launch its massive nuclear missile arsenal without any fear of retaliation.
The NMD will be an aggressive "first-strike" weapons system that will make a use of nuclear weapons more likely, not less. Its goal is to realise the dreams of the Bush administration's war hawks — to make Washington's military domination of the planet absolute, by finally eliminating the constraints imposed by the certainty of "mutually assured destruction" throughout the Cold War.
While Hill and Downer echo Washington's claim that the latest incarnation of Stars Wars is motivated by the threat of "rogue states" — such as North Korea and Iran — according to a 1995 declassified US intelligence report, "no country, other than the major declared nuclear powers, will develop or otherwise acquire a ballistic missile in the next 15 years" that could reach the US mainland. There is no evidence that any country has made any progress towards this since then.
However, the grain of truth in Hill's and Downer's claims is that the massive US conventional military forces, its huge nuclear arsenal, its development of "battlefield" nuclear weapons and exotic new non-conventional weapons, and Washington's stated preparedness to use nuclear weapons "preemptively", as outlined in Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, means that countries targeted for "regime change" have little incentive not to develop non-conventional weapons and delivery systems to ward off such attacks.
This is why the Australian Greens' warning that NMD research will fuel a new nuclear arms race is not "absurd", as Downer claims.
China, which the Bush administration characterises as a "strategic competitor", has just 20 or so missiles capable of reaching the US. At its current state of development, with the most optimistic assessments, the NMD technology that will deployed in the US next year and become operational in 2005 will only be able to cope with a couple of incoming missiles at a time. China will almost certainly build many more missiles, and of greater sophistication, in order to keep its nuclear weapons from becoming obsolete.
While the effectiveness of the thousands of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles possessed by Russia is not threatened in the medium term, the huge sums that Washington is ploughing into the NMD makes it clear that its eventual aim is to also neutralise Moscow's weapons. Russia will also not sit idly by while that takes place.
Canberra's endorsement of Washington's NMD plan should be opposed and campaigned against by the anti-war and labour movements. All cooperation with the US war machine, including via the US spy base at Pine Gap, should come to an end.
From Green Left Weekly, December 10, 2003.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.