Reporter Julian Borger of the Guardian breaks a story in the parallel universe of Bushtopia that is every bit as weird and ominous: a switch in official strategy that follows the latent desire of the US Air Force to put offensive weapons in earth orbit.
"The new push to develop space weapons comes as the earth-based missile defence system , intended to hit an incoming missile with another missile and which was heavily promoted by the Bush administration, has been set back by technical problems and failed tests. The air force's intentions were spelt out last September by General Lance Lord, head of its space command, who said satellites had given US military power a decisive advantage with their spying, communications and targeting capacities. That advantage had to be maintained by space superiority".Here is an omnipotence that no other modern industrial power is likely to conceed to the United States. And Borger rightly points out that this will set off an arms race, that would place the moving shadow of "deathstars" above our world.
"The "Rods from God" scheme would aim tungsten, titanium or uranium cylinders at targets on the ground from a position in low earth orbit. By the time they hit the earth they would be traveling at around 7,500mph, with the impact of a small nuclear warhead."
If America weaponizes space, it is certain that countermeasures will be aimed at its own satellites, by others.
As Dr.Werner Von Braun, the NASA celebrity and Hitler's former rocket specialist, lay dying from cancer in the mid-1970s, he asked Dr. Carol Rosin to come to Fairchild (an aerospace industry) and "be responsible for keeping weapons out of space".Von Braun was convinced that there was a move afoot, a long-term strategy in military industrial circles, that would scare the public and decision-makers into building a space-based weapons system. And according to Dr, Von Braun, these planners were committed to using a string of bogeymen that would be held up to the public: the threat of communists, terrorists, rogue nations, ETs--anything to justify the space weapon initiative,
But as Dr, Von Braun stressed, again and again, "the effort to put weapons in space was not only based on a lie but would accelerate past the point of people even understanding it until it was already up there and too late". (Rosin)
It is into the web of fantastic and omnipotent schemes that the Bush Gang has drawn us. And what a psychological universe of paranoia and abusive power it is! It is every bit as unbalanced as the fictional parallel found in novelist Terry Southern's Dr. Strangelove, with its "love of the Bomb" and "Doomsday Machine".
What faces the world now is the taboo-smashing dementia of the Wolfowitz Doctrine; which is only the newest model of a proven psychosis. Under its presumptive weight, the United States will do whatever it takes to prevent the rise of a rival superpower; but it will eventually stoop to the destruction of regional powers, by means of terror weapons of its own. State terror, raised to these stakes, demurs when it comes to the normally understood concept of "victory" and maintains its pre-eminence by employing a revolutionary chaos that undermines other nations.
Edmund Burke, who spoke for England when it stood at the threshold of its supremacy, said this:
"I dread our own power and our own ambition. I dread being too much dreaded."But George W. Bush and his Pentagon Clique will settle for nothing less than to be dreaded too much.
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