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Hillary Rodham Clinton, US Secretary of State, who met with the foreign ministers of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) here yesterday, proposed a strong missile shield to protect Gulf Arab states from Tehran and sought to work with them to help end the violence in Iran's ally Syria. Clinton said: "It is a US priority to help the GCC build a regional missile defense architecture" against what that country sees as a looming ballistic missile threat from Iran. Clinton said that she looked forward to discussing the wide range of common strategic concerns, including preventing Iran from acquiring a...

The Pentagon has mothballed a laser-equipped jumbo jet after 15 years and $5 billion worth of research to develop an airborne missile defense system. Budget cuts shot down the Airborne Laser Test Bed but some research into anti-missile lasers will continue, according to the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. "We didn't have the funding to continue flying the aircraft," agency spokeswoman Debra Christman told the Los Angeles Times (http://lat.ms/xEnw3z ). The plane, a Boeing 747 mounted with a high-energy chemical laser, has been sent into storage at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, the agency said. The base near Tucson, Ariz., serves...

Rachel Maddow had a very tough evening Friday. Before telling a 100 percent falsehood about Reaganomics on HBO's "Real Time," the MSNBC commentator said the Strategic Defense Initiative would never work because you can't shoot a missile out of the sky with another missile (Snip) You know what? Here's the country, here's the kind of thing you put over like a cake to protect the cake from flies. Missiles don't work that way. That’s the whole idea of SDI. We'll protect ourselves by shooting missiles at other missiles. It’s never worked in a test. We spent billions on it.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia's parliament moved closer to approving a landmark arms reduction treaty with Washington Friday by amending domestic legislation to stress that Moscow could withdraw from the pact if it felt threatened by the West. The amendments required for Russia to ratify the New START treaty do not change the pact itself and were introduced before the second of three ratification votes in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. The U.S. Senate included its own interpretations of the treaty -- the centrepiece of a "reset" that has improved long-strained relations between Moscow and Washington -- when...

Strategy: The heirs of Ronald Reagan abandon his legacy and dream of defending America from nuclear attack. Our security will rest on ambiguous language and vague assurances, not on the genius of U.S. technology. Peace in our time, or should we say appeasement in our time, as a sufficient number of GOP senators signed on the New START treaty to give the Democrats and President Obama the 67 votes needed for ratification. The Hill reported that Sen. Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., became the 10th Republican to support the treaty on Monday. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was No. 9, saying on Monday...

The nuclear-weapons treaty President Obama has negotiated with the Russians may help him make America's erstwhile Cold War adversary happy, but it won't help protect us from the rogue nations that threaten the United States today. Today, the Senate will begin debating the the New START treaty. Democrats want to jam it through with a flock of lame ducks. If ratified, it will force the U.S. to agree to strategic-nuclear-weapons parity with Russia, the direct descendant of a nation that threatened our country's existence for decades. Who would have thought in the year 2010 the United States would be renewing...

National Security: Think Moscow will violate the New START arms limitation treaty? A just-issued report says it never obeyed the first one. The motto of the Obama administration is blindly trust, don't verify and unilaterally disarm. You can forget about peace through strength, the Reagan doctrine that won the Cold War. Our policy is now peace through wishful thinking. If Neville Chamberlain and Jimmy Carter had a child, his name would be Barack Obama. The president is pushing ahead with what is called the New START Treaty to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but not those who would use...

National Security: The administration is ready to sign a treaty stripping us of our ability to defend ourselves against enemy nuclear missiles, including Iran's and North Korea's. In space, no one can hear you surrender. On Monday, the ground-based Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, part of the U.S. missile defense shield, successfully shot down a ballistic missile launched from a ship's deck off Kauai, Hawaii. The test simulated an Iranian SCUD launched from the deck of a ship off the U.S. coast, which, if armed with a nuke, could devastate the American heartland. The simulated Scud was launched from...

National Security: An unclassified Defense Department report says an Iranian missile could strike the U.S. by 2015. If only we were working as hard to defend ourselves as they are to destroy us. In any discussion of the Iranian nuclear threat, the assumption is always that Tehran's target is Israel. Iran's quite mad president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has pledged to wipe Israel off the map as part of his grand scheme to usher in the age of the 12th Imam. Tehran may have a bigger fish that it wants to fry, namely us. "With sufficient foreign assistance, Iran could probably develop...

Arms Deal: President Obama signs away U.S. nuclear security and gives the Russians a veto over whether we can defend ourselves. Our nuclear umbrella is in tatters as another piece of paper proclaims peace in our time. Completing a process of disarmament and appeasement that manifested itself in the dismantling and defunding of U.S. military power that began with his inauguration, President Obama signed a new strategic arms limitation treaty with a grinning and very happy Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday in the Czech capital. How fitting this document was signed in Prague, which isn't far from Munich where...

It sounds like something from a James Bond movie: a massive satellite, the largest ever launched, equipped with a powerful laser to take out the American anti-missile shield in advance of a Soviet first strike. It was real, though—or at least the plan was. In fact, when Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev walked out of the October 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, because President Ronald Reagan wouldn't abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, the Soviets were closer to fielding a space-based weapon than the United States was. Less than a year later, as the world continued to criticize Reagan for...

THE CASE FOR SPACE-BASED DEFENSE The growing interest in nuclear technology by countries such as Iran presages the possibility that one or more nations may attempt to harness such a capability in the form of an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) attack against the United States, a prominent political scientist has warned. Such a scenario, writes Brian Kennedy of the Claremont Institute in the November 24th edition of the Wall Street Journal, is not far-fetched. "It would require the Iranians to be able to produce a warhead as sophisticated as we expect the Russians or the Chinese to possess. But that is...

The Obama adminstration must react responsibly to China’s declaration that military operations in space are inevitable, a top China expert says. “How will the US react to Chinese diplomatic efforts in light of the PLA’s blunt statements on space warfare? This is something the Obama administration has to take into account,” said Dean Cheng, China specialist at Washington’s Heritage Foundation. “Are we going to see outrage, any meaningful reactions to the Chinese statements or again that it was someone speaking out of school and we just aren’t sure.” Cheng was referring to what appears to mark a major shift...

William K. Black's Proposal for “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” /snip SDIs should: 1. Not be permitted to acquire other firms 2. Not be permitted to grow 3. Be subject to a premium federal corporate income tax rate that increases with asset size 4. Be subject to comprehensive federal and state regulation, including: a. Annual, full-scope examinations by their primary federal regulator b. Annual examination by the systemic risk regulator c. Annual tax audits by the IRS d. An annual forensic (anti-fraud) audit by a firm chosen by their primary federal regulator e. An annual audit by a firm chosen by their...

Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after midnight I was informed in a telephone call by President Barack Obama that (his) administration had decided to pull out from the planned missile defense shield installations" in the Czech Republic and Poland, the...

Defense: A ballistic missile launched from Alaska is shot down by an interceptor launched from California. With threats from North Korea to Iran, it's time to ignore the skeptics and fully fund missile defense.It was the most realistic and most successful missile defense test ever in a Strategic Defense Initiative that could one day save an American city from a rogue missile strike. Yet the "yeah, but" media greeted this triumph with claims the concept is still unproven. It was as if the Wright brothers had announced man's first flight, only to be greeted with cries that they hadn't built...

Vicenza, Italy. President Obama’s decision to cancel our European ground-based missile defense system will prove to be very costly and his public rationale -- changed intelligence and improved technologies -- is far from the whole truth. This is a geopolitical disaster and risks our security as well. Last year, President Bush said “Iran is pursuing technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles of increasing range that could deliver them.” His administration successfully negotiated with Poland and the Czech Republic to install a ground-based anti-missile defense system in those countries to counter the accelerating Iranian threat.

Security: An Iranian mullah once said "a world without America and Zionism" was a real possibility. Our sellout of Eastern Europe and missile defense brings that dream closer to reality. It would take only one warhead."Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?" Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked at a "World Without Zionism" conference in Tehran in 2005. "But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved." He added that Iran had a strategic "war preparation plan" for what it called "the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization." A...

Strategic Defense: A new report says the United States must develop robust missile and space defenses to counter China. If you think the current economic crisis is something, imagine the effects of a nuke over Iowa.Imagine a world in which you can't get money from your bank or can't get a loan. You can't get money from your ATM even if it's within walking distance. You can't drive to one because your car won't work. No, it's not what would happen if the Congress doesn't pass a bailout bill. This is a small snapshot of what would happen if a...

Strategic Defense: With Iran on the verge of a deliverable nuke, the administration tells our allies in the dead of night that we will scuttle missile defense plans in Eastern Europe to please the Russians.Czechs are used to betrayal by their Western allies. It was at Munich in 1938 that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sealed their doom in exchange for a piece of paper promising "peace in our time." The fact that this further gutting of missile defense came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939, is an eerie coincidence. "Just after...