Five Degrees
I awakened at 5AM. I dressed and arrived here at Starbucks. I watched a large bright white moon to the west while I drove. It’s five degrees farenheit outside. Two stars, one large and the other more faint hang in the east against the inky black sky. It is 6:30AM now and the big fat moon, now a dingy yellow, rests on the horizon to the west. To the east the horizon glows faintly orange as the earth rotates bringing us to the sun. I went outside to have one more look at that moon and the two stars. That show was worth rising early to see. Be there or miss the show.
This brings me to the Presidents Star Wars speech to the generals and the staff at the pentagon this past Thursday. The President announced his intentions
to accelerate development on a space based missile defense shield. The meeting with Pentagon staff had been announced at the last-minute. The Presidents idea was the same as the Strategic Defense Initiative announced by Ronald Regan in 1983. That program managed a qualified success. If my memory is correct the problem involves striking a bullet with another bullet. In the SDI era only a low percentage of the tests were considered a success, and those were under ideal conditions. How does one counter a burst of projectiles from multiple reentry warheads, and each projectile is a city killer?
“Our goal is simple: to ensure that we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States anywhere, any time, any place,”
—-President Donald J. Trump, January 17, 2019
In my imagination I go back to the late iron age, to the plains of Troy. Each Greek hoplite warrior has a spear for throwing at the Trojan enemy. What happens when all spears are thrown in unison along the line of battle? Some are bound to get through and strike targets no matter the defense.
My reasoning explains the look on the faces of the assembled officers and employees at the Pentagon who were marshaled into the meeting to sit through the President’s address. The faces say WTF am I doing here, listening to this? How many billions are to be spent on this space-based warning sensors, space based interceptors, this weaponization of space? And the countries against which this is intended, (China, Russia, North Korea, Iran), will they not be further provoked to multiply their doomsday weapons?
I think that we’d be better off to reduce tensions with these countries, work on the long-standing problems between us, offer concessions which we can afford and which benefit their people’s. I return to Wittgenstein’s great exhortation: Let us be human.
Do we not desire our grandchildren to be able to step outside when they happen to rise before dawn, to be able to gaze at a fat moon to the west, to see the two bright twin stars in the east? We must chose between that and a misplaced infantile demand for a skynet that will succeed only in driving us to war.
It is still 5 degrees outside. The sun is soon to appear on the horizon to the east. The low clouds on the horizon will blaze with fire.
CODA
This network of orbiting early warning detectors, a wall in space, is analog to the wall that the President insists that we build at the border of our country and our neighbor to the south, Mexico. The desire for walls is a bad sign, —an indicator of a wall in the mind.