The world is still pleasurably suffering from Woah-bama whiplash. Did he really win? Are we all awake? And would anybody mind if he starts a few months early? The need for decisions is rapidly piling up - and one of President-Elect Obama's first choices is whether to bring to an end the strangest story ever told in American politics.
It is the tale of how a man with Alzheimer's Disease came up with a physically impossible fantasy based on a B-movie he once starred in - and how the US spent $160bn trying to make it come true. These billions succeeded only in making some defence companies very rich, and making Russia point its nukes at Poland and Britain once more. Oh, and if Obama doesn't decide to close this long-running farce now, it will make one more contribution to world history: the number of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the world will dramatically increase.
Here's how this story began - and continued into our time. In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan was increasingly worried a nuclear war with the Soviet Union was inevitable, until a long-suppressed memory resurfaced in his mind. In 1940, he had starred in a hokey movie called 'Murder in the Air'. He played a secret agent who had to protect a newly invented super-weapon called the "Intertia Projector" which fired an electrical current at any plane or missile approaching the United States, rendering it worthless. In the film, a scientist tells Reagan this weapon "makes the US invincible in war, and promises to become the greatest force for world peace ever discovered."
Why, Reagan wondered in the Oval Office, couldn't he have a real Intertia Projector? Let's create a machine that would detect any incoming nuke as it approached the US and zap it into nothing! The Cold War standoff would be over! Reagan was losing the ability to distinguish between reality and films: he repeatedly claimed he had been at the liberation of Auschwitz, when he had recreated it in Hollywood. After the Second World War, there had been a few studies trying to invent such a machine - but they all concluded it was "impossible." Nonetheless, Reagan decided in 1983 to call on America's scientists to make it happen.
Everyone was bewildered. Reagan's undersecretary of Defence, Richard DeLauer demanded to know how such a "half-baked political travesty" got into a Presidential address. As the Pulitzer-prize winning historian Frances Fitzgerald explains: "Most of the scientists and defence experts invited to the White House for dinner that evening expressed incredulity. An umbrella defence of the United States was a virtual impossibility... [But] when the experts insisted that science was not magic and that American technology could no do everything, they would be accused of lack of patriotism."
The lack of evidence didn't deter Reagan's team. The man he put in charge of the programme, James Abrahamson, declared: "I don't think anything in this country is technically impossible. We have a nation which can indeed produce miracles." The programme was dubbed 'Star Wars' - which was fitting, since it was science fiction. As the years passed, the US strategic planners developed ever-more-fevered fantasies of how the shield would allow them to strike anywhere in the world without any risk of retaliation.
By the time Reagan left office, there was a vast industry dedicated to chasing this will-o'-the-wisp. Huge defence contractors - including Boeing and Lockheed Martin - were making billions from it, and giving fat donations to politicians in both parties. In the decades since, the US has spent more and more, and asked the 'shield' to do less and less. Now they want it to just take out a single nuke - and it still doesn't work. The tests only succeed when the interceptors know where the missile is being fired from, where it is heading to, and the warhead continually broadcasts its location to the interceptor. Some success. They have been given a near-impossible-task: scientists compare it to hitting a bullet with another bullet.
But while the system's positive effects have failed to materialize, its negative consequences are real. America's strategic opponents have assumed the leading super-power couldn't possibly be spending this much on a pile of junk - so they are reacting on the assumption that the shield works. This means they are preparing bigger and more nukes, to preserve their ability to punch through the shield. They are retargeting their missiles at Poland, Britain and the Czech Republic, the countries hosting the dud-interceptors. If they believe they are being attacked, they will destroy us first, in order to destroy the 'shield' and have the ability to strike back. US intelligence has been blunt about what will happen if the interceptors continue to be constructed. China will increase its nuclear arsenal "tenfold", India and Pakistan would "respond with their own build-ups," and Russia's "only rational response... would be to maintain, and strengthen, the existing nuclear force."
So the US has spent $160bn, only to increase the nuclear danger to itself and the rest of us. Stars Wars is a perfect example of the magical thinking that now dominates the American right. Don't like global warming? Don't worry, it doesn't exist! Don't like evolution? It's a myth! Didn't find any WMD in Iraq? They must have been shipped to Syria! Want a magical nuclear shield? If you build it, it will work!
Sure, maybe one day scientists will discover some technological way to evaporate nukes in the brief window before they strike. Maybe they will discover how to turn lead into gold - a pursuit that obsessed Europe's best minds for centuries. Maybe aliens will get in touch. But none of these assumptions are a sensible basis for government policy.
There is now a possibility this will end at last. After speaking to Obama on Tuesday, the Polish President Lech Kaczynski said the project was seriously in doubt. During the campaign, Obama offered a third-way dodge on Star Wars: he said he supported it but "only if the technology is proved to be workable." Well, we know it isn't workable. Obama is the first Presidential candidate of our time not to be taking money from the defence contractors. He has no political debt - but his country's is huge. Can it afford $10bn a year on this dangerous techno-trash?
In the primaries, Obama pledged to pursue real multilateral nuclear disarmament - but the shield-fantasy ensures the opposite will happen: a dramatic increase in the nukes scattered across the globe. Of course, if Obama ditches Star Wars, the neoconservatives will accuse him of "backing down" and "showing weakness". But is it really sensible to keep spending $10bn a year on an act of self-harm just to save face? The story that began with Reagan's dementia-fantasies should end with Obama's empiricism.
This decision isn't just about a bogus nuclear shield, crucial though that is. It is a test of whether the government of the United States has returned to the firm land of empirical reality - or whether it is still way out there in the blue, gasping for air among the ideological stars.
Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent newspaper. To read an archive of his articles, click here.
Follow Johann Hari on Twitter: www.twitter.com/johannhari101
towards 'Defense', hardly counting huge war expenditures, for efforts
going on for many years, the country is operating on a war footing.
If we don't manufacture consumer goods anymore, that could be
because we're (sort of) too busy building military gear. And we
just can't afford to build 'infrastructure' when we're occupied
building 'destroyers' & such. Y'know, the 'military-industrial
complex' thing. We should look to the incoming Demo
administration to approach this problem with a lot
of intensity & determination. Obviously, that includes
NOT doing MOST of the 'Star Wars' stuff.
incoming missiles, satellites, whatever. AND Iran has just shown US a brand
new long-range missile that could carry one of their up-an-coming nukes to
Israel & Europe, so maybe we ought to not shelve the program just yet.
On the other hand, provoking Russia continues to be a bad idea, as it is
likely that the will re-activate their side of the arms race out of spite,
which doesn't serve our purposes, other than to even further
enrich US defense industries. Look at this way, we have
to manufacture SOMETHING & weaponry is the
ultimate consumer item.
Because the Patriot missiles deployed in Israel during the first Gulf war did not work, despite "evidence" to the contrary apparently shown before our very eyes on the nightly news shows.
strictly controlled test arrangements. If only we could get someone
to shoot something at US for real? One can only hope (really!) that
our tests are carried out with 'utmost objectivity'. Hey, it could happen!
The thing is, politically, when Iran is doing its own thing, it's unlikely that
we are NOT going to keep at it also. That being said, one can only hope
that the Obama administration will (SERIOUSLY!) stop provoking Russia.
So proliferation is not as big a threat as the geo-political turmoil in the form of unnecessary confrontations and tertiary victimization of US allies - nor as big a threat as continuing to squander massive amounts of our treasury on a pipe dream.
Actually, you blew your whole argument here with this one... we've been able to turn lead into gold since the early 1970's using high-energy particle accelerators. Therefore, the conservatives MUST be right and the sun does revolve around the earth and the Flintstones reflects modern thinking about the Creation!
(Of course, from the way I understand it, if you try to turn 1 ounce of lead into gold, it takes about $20,000 worth of electricity to run the accelerator and you'll get about 1 microgram of highly radioactive gold which will transmute back to lead fairly rapidly... gives new meaning to the idea of money burning a hole in your pocket!)
While we're all looking at how the new administration is shaping up, it might be wise to try and persuade a guy like Joe Cirincione to come on board - forget persuasion, he would just need to be asked!