Missile Defense Quotes

In our charade with ourselves we pretend that our war is not really war. We have changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department and call a whole class of nuclear missiles Peace Keepers!

Question: Which Mediterranean government shares all of Ronald Reagan's views on international terrorism, the present danger of Soviet advance, the hypocrisy of the United Nations, the unreliability of Europe, the perfidy of the Third World and the need for nuclear defense policy? Question: Which Mediterranean government is Ronald Reagan trying, with the help of George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, to replace with a government led by a party which professes socialism and which contains extreme leftists? If you answered 'the government of Israel' to both of the above, you know more about political and international irony than the President does.

Now, Reverend Father Abbot asked me to make the following announcements: "First, for the next three days we shall sing the Little Office of Our Lady before Matins, asking her intercession for peace. "Second, general instructions for civil defense in the event of a space-strike or missile-attack alert are available on the table by the entrance. Everybody take one.

Stress and nervous tension are now serious social problems in all parts of the Galaxy, and it is in order that this situation should not be in any way exacerbated that the following facts will now be revealed in advance. The planet in question is in fact the legendary Magrathea. The deadly missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defense system will result merely in the breakage of three coffee cups and a mouse cage, the bruising of somebody’s upper arm, and the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale.

The best defense industry is to build good relationships with your neighbors! The best missile, the best tank, the best atomic bomb is to be good friends with other countries! Enmity and its measures belong to the world of stupidity!

The USS Cole was a billion-dollar command and attack ship equipped with computer-linked radar that could follow more than one hundred airplanes, ships, and missile targets at once. It had relatively little defense, however, against three suicide bombers in a thousand-dollar skiff.

A few weeks later alarms went off in an air defense bunker south of Moscow. A Soviet early-warning satellite had detected five Minuteman missiles approaching from the United States. The commanding officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, tried to make sense of the warning. An American first strike would surely involve more than five missiles—but perhaps this was merely the first wave. The Soviet general staff was alerted, and it was Petrov’s job to advise them whether the missile attack was real. Any retaliation would have to be ordered soon. Petrov decided it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that the missile launches spotted by the Soviet satellite were actually rays of sunlight reflected off clouds.

When President Ronald Reagan demonstrated to Mikhail Gorbachev that the United States was capable of deploying an effective antimissile missile defense and sought Soviet cooperation in turning it against the extraterrestrials, all pretext of the Cold War ended and the great Soviet monolith in Eastern Europe began to crumble.

Stress and nervous tension are now serious social problems in all parts of the Galaxy, and it is in order that this situation should not be in any way exacerbated that the following facts will now be revealed in advance. The planet in question is in fact the legendary Magrathea. The deadly missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defense system will result merely in the breakage of three coffee cups and a mouse cage, the bruising of somebody’s upper arm, and the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale. In order that some sense of mystery should still be preserved, no revelation will yet be made concerning whose upper arm sustains the bruise. This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense since it is of no significance whatsoever.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2011, my pastor Peter Jonker preached a marvelous sermon on Psalm 65 with an introduction from the life of Seth MacFarlane, who had been on NPR’s Fresh Air program with Terry Gross. MacFarlane is a cartoonist and comedian. He’s the creator of the animated comedy show “The Family Guy,” which my pastor called “arguably the most cynical show on television.” Terry Gross asked MacFarlane about 9/11. It seems that on that day of national tragedy MacFarlane had been booked on American Airlines Flight 11, Boston to LA, but he had arrived late at Logan airport and missed it. As we know, hijackers flew Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. My preacher said, “MacFarlane should have been on that plane. He should have been dead at 29 years of age. But somehow, at the end of that terrible day, he found himself healthy and alive, still able to turn his face toward the sun.” Terry Gross asked the inevitable question: “After that narrow escape, do you think of the rest of your life as a gift?” “No,” said MacFarlane. “That experience didn’t change me at all. It made no difference in the way I live my life. It made no difference in the way I look at things. It was just a coincidence.” And my preacher commented that MacFarlane had created “a missile defense system” against the threat of incoming gratitude — which might have lodged in his soul and changed him forever. MacFarlane, “the Grinch who stole gratitude,” perfectly set up what Peter Jonker had to say to us about how it is right and proper for us to give thanks to God at all times and in all places, and especially when our life has been spared.

To win reelection, Medvedev had to win one vote: Putin’s. To win that vote, Medvedev above all else had to demonstrate his unique abilities to work with Obama to achieve results that were good for Russia. We had just handed the Russian president a defeat at the very moment when Medvedev believed Putin was deciding his fate. It played into the narrative of Medvedev’s critics back home that he was weak and susceptible to being pushed around by the Americans. The momentum for missile-defense

The U.S. government has dozens of extremely critical facilities there: the headquarters for North American Aerospace Defense, Strategic Missile Command, the Air Force Academy. . . .” “The Central Food and Seed Reserve,” Alexander suggested helpfully.

Dr. Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and a founder of the “Star Wars” missile defense system, proposed seeding the upper atmosphere with millions of tons of sulfur or other heavy metals to create a cloud cover to deflect sun rays and prevent further heating of the earth. Some scientists warned such a program would turn blue skies milky white and perhaps cause droughts and further ozone depletion. Teller admitted the difficulty in persuading the public to allow a program that would pollute the air with metal particles, many known to be harmful to humans.

When [Ivan] Ilyin wrote that the art of politics was “identifying and neutralizing the enemy,” he did not mean that statesmen should ascertain which foreign power actually posed a threat. He meant that politics began with a leader’s decision about which foreign enmity will consolidate a dictatorship. Russia’s real geopolitical problem was China. But precisely because Chinese power was real and proximate, considering Russia’s actual geopolitics might lead to depressing conclusions. The West was chosen as an enemy precisely because it represented no threat to Russia. Unlike China, the EU had no army and no long border with Russia. The United States did have an army, but had withdrawn the vast majority of its troops from the European continent: from about 300,000 in 1991 to about 60,000 in 2012. NATO still existed and had admitted former communist countries of eastern Europe. But President Barack Obama had cancelled an American plan to build a missile defense system in eastern Europe in 2009, and in 2010 Russia was allowing American planes to fly through Russian airspace to supply American forces in Afghanistan. No Russian leader feared a NATO invasion in 2011 or 2012, or even pretended to.

By tracing the early history of USCYBERCOM it is possible to understand some of the reasons why the military has focused almost completely on network defense and cyber attack while being unaware of the need to address the vulnerabilities in systems that could be exploited in future conflicts against technologically capable adversaries. It is a problem mirrored in most organizations. The network security staff are separate from the endpoint security staff who manage desktops through patch and vulnerability management tools and ensure that software and anti-virus signatures are up to date. Meanwhile, the development teams that create new applications, web services, and digital business ventures, work completely on their own with little concern for security. The analogous behavior observed in the military is the creation of new weapons systems, ISR platforms, precision targeting, and C2 capabilities without ensuring that they are resistant to the types of attacks that USCYBERCOM and the NSA have been researching and deploying. USCYBERCOM had its genesis in NCW thinking. First the military worked to participate in the information revolution by joining their networks together. Then it recognized the need for protecting those networks, now deemed cyberspace. The concept that a strong defense requires a strong offense, carried over from missile defense and Cold War strategies, led to a focus on network attack and less emphasis on improving resiliency of computing platforms and weapons systems.

It is numbers like 545 billion that we are dealing with when we talk about a Defense Department overrun of $750 billion for the next four years. A really fancy single-user computer (the kind I wouldn’t mind having) costs approximately $75,000. With $750 billion to throw around, we could give one to every person in New York City, which is to say, we could buy about ten million of them. Or, we could give $1 million to every person in San Francisco, and still have enough left over to buy a bicycle for everyone in China! There’s no telling what good uses we could put $750 billion to. But instead, it will go into bullets and tanks and fighters and war games and missile systems and jet fuel and marching bands and so on. An interesting way to spend $750 billion, but I can think of better ways.

The deadly missile attack shortly to be launched by an ancient automatic defense system will result merely in the breakage of three coffee cups and a mouse cage, the bruising of somebody’s upper arm, and the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale. In order that some sense of mystery should still be preserved, no revelation will yet be made concerning whose upper arm sustains the bruise. This fact may safely be made the subject of suspense since it is of no significance whatsoever.

Military dictatorships love their tanks, don’t they? They appreciate the spectacle of rolling them through the center of cities. It’s great optics for control. Countries like ours, Western democracies, on the other hand, we don’t have a taste for tanks. It gives citizens the jitters, makes them feel like they’re being invaded, conjures up China or the Soviet Union. We prefer the spectacle of air and sea. Hell, we salute jets when they’re flying overhead. Those are optics of freedom, not oppression.” Kurt rolled a pen between his fingers. His voice grew thoughtful. “It’s ironic. You should be far more afraid of missiles than tanks, but there’s a lot of showmanship in this business. I think countries find the defense that fits their character.

The gross domestic product of the United States in 2001 was about $10.6 trillion. The budget of the federal government was about $1.8 trillion. In fiscal 2001, the government enjoyed a $128 billion operating surplus. Yet counterterrorism teams at the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. working on Al Qaeda and allied groups received an infinitesimal fraction of the country’s defense and intelligence budget of roughly $300 billion, the great majority of which went to the Pentagon, to support conventional and missile forces. Bush’s national security deputies did not hold a meeting dedicated to plans to thwart Al Qaeda until September 4, 2001, almost nine months after President Bush took the oath of office. The September 11 conspiracy succeeded in part because the democratically elected government of the United States, including the Congress, did not regard Al Qaeda as a priority.

By the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Eisenhower’s test ban had failed, and the United States and the Soviet Union had both returned to nuclear weapons testing. Twice during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, on October 20 and October 26, 1962, the United States detonated two nuclear weapons—code-named Checkmate and Bluegill Triple Prime—in space. These tests, which sought to advance knowledge in ARPA’s pursuit of the Christofilos effect, are on the record and are known. What is not known outside Defense Department circles is that in response, on October 22 and October 28, 1962, the Soviets also detonated two nuclear weapons in space, also in pursuit of the Christofilos effect. In recently declassified film footage of an emergency meeting at the White House, Secretary of Defense McNamara can be heard discussing one of these two Soviet nuclear bomb tests with the president and his closest advisors. “The Soviets fired three eleven-hundred-mile missiles yesterday at Kapustin Yar,

We copy editors sometimes get a reputation for wanting to redirect the flow, change the course of the missile, have our way with a piece of prose. The image of the copy editor is of someone who favors a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys pointing out other people's errors, a lowly person who is just starting out on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impression, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer and instead got stuck dotting the i's and crossing the t's and otherwise advancing the careers of other writers. I suppose I have been all of these. But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work ,taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject the for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn't poking up—unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out.

Thoughts for the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review If you had been a security policy-maker in the world’s greatest power in 1900, you would have been a Brit, looking warily at your age-old enemy, France. By 1910, you would be allied with France and your enemy would be Germany. By 1920, World War I would have been fought and won, and you’d be engaged in a naval arms race with your erstwhile allies, the U.S. and Japan. By 1930, naval arms limitation treaties were in effect, the Great Depression was underway, and the defense planning standard said ‘no war for ten years.’ Nine years later World War II had begun. By 1950, Britain no longer was the world’s greatest power, the Atomic Age had dawned, and a ‘police action’ was underway in Korea. Ten years later the political focus was on the ‘missile gap,’ the strategic paradigm was shifting from massive retaliation to flexible response, and few people had heard of Vietnam. By 1970, the peak of our involvement in Vietnam had come and gone, we were beginning détente with the Soviets, and we were anointing the Shah as our protégé in the Gulf region. By 1980, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in the throes of revolution, there was talk of our ‘hollow forces’ and a ‘window of vulnerability,’ and the U.S. was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen. By 1990, the Soviet Union was within a year of dissolution, American forces in the Desert were on the verge of showing they were anything but hollow, the U.S. had become the greatest debtor nation the world had ever known, and almost no one had heard of the internet. Ten years later, Warsaw was the capital of a NATO nation, asymmetric threats transcended geography, and the parallel revolutions of information, biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and high density energy sources foreshadowed changes almost beyond forecasting. All of which is to say that I’m not sure what 2010 will look like, but I’m sure that it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly. Lin Wells

M113 Family of Vehicles Mission Provide a highly mobile, survivable, and reliable tracked-vehicle platform that is able to keep pace with Abrams- and Bradley-equipped units and that is adaptable to a wide range of current and future battlefield tasks through the integration of specialised mission modules at minimum operational and support cost. Entered Army Service 1960 Description and Specifications After more than four decades, the M113 family of vehicles (FOV) is still in service in the U.S. Army (and in many foreign armies). The original M113 Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) helped to revolutionise mobile military operations. These vehicles carried 11 soldiers plus a driver and track commander under armour protection across hostile battlefield environments. More importantly, these vehicles were air transportable, air-droppable, and swimmable, allowing planners to incorporate APCs in a much wider range of combat situations, including many "rapid deployment" scenarios. The M113s were so successful that they were quickly identified as the foundation for a family of vehicles. Early derivatives included both command post (M577) and mortar carrier (M106) configurations. Over the years, the M113 FOV has undergone numerous upgrades. In 1964, the M113A1 package replaced the original gasoline engine with a 212 horsepower diesel package, significantly improving survivability by eliminating the possibility of catastrophic loss from fuel tank explosions. Several new derivatives were produced, some based on the armoured M113 chassis (e.g., the M125A1 mortar carrier and M741 "Vulcan" air defence vehicle) and some based on the unarmoured version of the chassis (e.g., the M548 cargo carrier, M667 "Lance" missile carrier, and M730 "Chaparral" missile carrier). In 1979, the A2 package of suspension and cooling enhancements was introduced. Today's M113 fleet includes a mix of these A2 variants, together with other derivatives equipped with the most recent A3 RISE (Reliability Improvements for Selected Equipment) package. The standard RISE package includes an upgraded propulsion system (turbocharged engine and new transmission), greatly improved driver controls (new power brakes and conventional steering controls), external fuel tanks, and 200-amp alternator with four batteries. Additional A3 improvements include incorporation of spall liners and provisions for mounting external armour. The future M113A3 fleet will include a number of vehicles that will have high speed digital networks and data transfer systems. The M113A3 digitisation program includes applying hardware, software, and installation kits and hosting them in the M113 FOV. Current variants: Mechanised Smoke Obscurant System M548A1/A3 Cargo Carrier M577A2/A3 Command Post Carrier M901A1 Improved TOW Vehicle M981 Fire Support Team Vehicle M1059/A3 Smoke Generator Carrier M1064/A3 Mortar Carrier M1068/A3 Standard Integrated Command Post System Carrier OPFOR Surrogate Vehicle (OSV) Manufacturer Anniston Army Depot (Anniston, AL) United Defense, L.P. (Anniston, AL)

The progressive socialists normally operate—to borrow a Fabian socialist term—by stealth. But Obama himself accidentally revealed his duplicitous program in a now notorious “open microphone” incident with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. Americans were momentarily stunned to hear the two in private conversation on the sidelines of a March 26, 2012, Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul, South Korea: Obama: “On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space.” Medvedev: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…” Obama: “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.” Medvedev: “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

One American political figure saw Russia for the growing menace that it was and was willing to call Putin out for his transgressions. During President Obama’s reelection campaign, Mitt Romney warned of a growing Russian strategic threat, highlighting their role as “our number one geopolitical foe.”[208] The response from President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and other Democrats was not to echo his sentiment, but actually to ridicule Romney and support the Russian government. President Obama hurled insults, saying Romney was “stuck in a Cold War mind warp” [209] and in a nationally televised debate mocked the former governor, saying “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back…” [210] When asked to respond to Romney’s comment, Secretary Clinton refused to rebuke the over-the-top and false Obama campaign attacks. Instead, she delivered a message that echoed campaign talking points arguing that skepticism of Russia was outdated: “I think it’s somewhat dated to be looking backwards,” she said, adding, “In many of the areas where we are working to solve problems, Russia has been an ally.”[211] A month after Secretary Clinton’s statement on Romney, Putin rejected Obama’s calls for a landmark summit.[212] He didn’t seem to share the secretary’s view that the two countries were working together. It was ironic that while Obama and Clinton were saying Romney was in a “Cold War mind warp,”[213] the Russian leader was waging a virulent, anti-America “election campaign” (that’s if you can call what they did in Russia an “election”). In fact, if anyone was in a Cold War mind warp, it was Putin, and his behavior demonstrated just how right Romney was about Russia’s intentions. “Putin has helped stoke anti-Americanism as part of his campaign emphasizing a strong Russia,” Reuters reported. “He has warned the West not to interfere in Syria or Iran, and accused the United States of ‘political engineering’ around the world.”[214] And his invective was aimed not just at the United States. He singled out Secretary Clinton for verbal assault. Putin unleashed the assault Nov. 27 [2011] in a nationally televised address as he accepted the presidential nomination, suggesting that the independent election monitor Golos, which gets financing from the United States and Europe, was a U.S. vehicle for influencing the elections here. Since then, Golos has been turned out of its Moscow office and its Samara branch has come under tax investigation. Duma deputies are considering banning all foreign grants to Russian organizations. Then Putin accused U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of sending a signal to demonstrators to begin protesting the fairness of the Dec. 4 parliamentary elections.[215] [Emphasis added.] Despite all the evidence that the Russians had no interest in working with the U.S., President Obama and Secretary Clinton seemed to believe that we were just a Putin and Obama election victory away from making progress. In March 2012, President Obama was caught on a live microphone making a private pledge of flexibility on missile defense “after my election” to Dmitry Medvedev.[216] The episode lent credence to the notion that while the administration’s public unilateral concessions were bad enough, it might have been giving away even more in private. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Putin didn’t abandon his anti-American attitudes after he won the presidential “election.” In the last few weeks of Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Putin signed a law banning American adoption of Russian children,[217] in a move that could be seen as nothing less than a slap in the face to the United States. Russia had been one of the leading sources of children for U.S. adoptions.[218] This disservice to Russian orphans in need of a home was the final offensive act in a long trail of human rights abuses for which Secretary Clinton failed to hold Russia accountable.

had approximately ten operational nuclear warheads. Two months earlier Lanphier had argued before Congress that if Convair had been allowed to start building Atlas missiles in 1957 it would have four hundred of them by now. One month before the shoot-down he made a specific plea for an order for one hundred Atlases and twenty Titans. After May 1, he never had to plead again. A contract with Convair was signed and by 1963 the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command had thirteen Atlas missile squadrons with one hundred thirty-seven ICBMs between them. Twenty-six years later, each superpower had roughly nine thousand warheads. Harold Macmillan called the U-2 affair “a very queer story.” For the defense industry, it was also a very happy one. *

While most physicists had long been accepting military R & D funds, they reacted differently to SDI, fomenting a coordinated effort to block the program. By May 1986, sixty-five hundred academic scientists had signed a pledge not to solicit or accept funds from the missile defense research program, a pledge that received abundant media coverage.

President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), announced in 1983 and calling for a nationwide missile defense using very sophisticated technology, both angered and, I believe, terrified the Soviets. As I joked at the time, there appeared to be only two people on the planet who actually thought SDI would work—Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets were under enormous economic pressure by that time and knew they could not compete with such a system.

But there were others with reason to be thankful for the disappearance of that peculiar airplane—intelligence professionals enjoying the unprecedented influence conferred on them by the cold war’s cult of secrecy; military brass sitting atop armed forces that still consumed a tenth of the nation’s gross domestic product seven years after the end of the Korean War; and above all the missile manufacturers—Convair, Douglas, Lockheed, the Martin Company—girding themselves for an open-ended arms race to outproduce the Soviets in the technologies of an exotic new national defense that only Eisenhower seemed ready to resist. It is no surprise that many believed Article 360’s loss was no accident on America’s part; nor that some still do. *

For what the world spends on defense every 2.5 hours, about $300 million, smallpox was eliminated back in the late seventies. For the price of a single new nuclear-attack submarine, $726 million to $1 billion, we could send 5 to 7.5 million Third World children to school for a year. For the price of a single B-l bomber, about $285 million, we could provide basic immunization treatments, such as shots for chicken pox, diphtheria, and measles, to the roughly 575 million children in the world who lack them, thus saving 2.5 million lives annually. For what the world spends on defense every forty hours, about $4.6 billion, we could provide sanitary water for every human being who currently lacks it. Looking at it another way, the roughly $290–$300 billion that the United States [spent] on defense in 1990 is greater than the total amount that Americans contribute to charity each year, about $100 billion, plus total federal, state, local, public, and private expenditures for education, roughly $150 billion, plus NASA’s entire budget of $7.6 billion, plus federal and state aid to families with dependent children, $16.3 billion, plus the cost of the entire federal judiciary and the Justice Department combined, $5.5 billion, plus federal transportation aid to state and local governments, $17.5 billion. … A single Stinger missile costs $40,000, or roughly 30 percent more than the income of the average American family, nearly twice more than the income of the average black American family, and about 400 percent more than the so-called poverty line … [and] the price of 2,000 rounds of 7.62-mm rifle or machine-gun ammunition, about $480.00, is slightly more than what the average Social Security beneficiary receives every month.” How do we wrap our minds around these priorities? Or

Unlike others who carried out high-risk actions, Plowshares activists did not adopt a hit-and-run strategy. Their project was one of moral and spiritual witness. As such, they awaited their capture at the scene of an action, using the trial and surrounding publicity, even jail time, as further opportunity to spread their political message. During these trials, Plowshares activists and other pacifists (including, for instance, those who engaged in antiwar civil disobedience during Gulf Wars I and II) have cited international law and the necessity defense as justification for their actions—sometimes resulting in lower sentences or even acquittals. While most Plowshares activists came from a religious background, the antinuclear and antiauthoritarian politics were also salient; for instance, Jewish secular anarchofeminist Katya Komisaruk dismantled a military computer designed to guide nuclear missiles as part of her involvement in Plowshares. She served five years in prison.

The technological battles of today will determine the outcome of any future world war. It will be won with new weapons—lasers and charged particle weapons for defense, “stealth” technology to make attacking aircraft invisible, and space satellites for navigation and missile firing. Computer capability may be the most important element of all to winning the conflict, being the controlling technology, insuring the accuracy of weapons firing.

McNamara’s attempt to gain supporters failed. “I do not think there is a military problem there,” argued the secretary of defense. As

His job had been to read intercepts, to categorize them. Someone else, higher up the chain, would decide what they meant. In sixteen years, he must have read over fifty thousand intercepts. While some related to important developments like troop movements along the frontier, or the location of NATO defensive missile systems in former socialist states, the vast majority were exceedingly mundane. They covered topics like the seating arrangement at a formal function in Paris, or the maintenance records for water heaters at a military housing facility in Berlin, or parking permits for visitors at the American embassy in Madrid. Igor read them all, and in sixteen years, no one ever asked his opinion on them.

Congress was enthusiastic about its defense of Israeli actions, with strong bipartisan statements of support for Israel as well as authorization for $225 million in missile defense aid in addition to the annual aid already allotted to Israel.104 The pro votes in Congress were, again, overwhelming.

We are innocent, They are guilty. We tell the truth—inform. They lie—use propaganda. We only defend ourselves. They are aggressors. We have a defense department. They have a war department. Our missiles and weapons are designed to deter. Their weapons are designed for a first strike.

What will be the importance of aircraft in the year 2000? For defense? For commerce? It may seem traitorous from an aircraft designer, but I see a diminished role for the manned military aircraft and more reliance on remotely piloted vehicles and missiles.

Now look at verse 22.” Ibrahim continued reading. “‘With pestilence and with blood I will enter into judgment with him; and I will rain on him and on his troops, and on the many peoples who are with him, a torrential rain, with hailstones, fire and brimstone.’” “Here the Lord talks of the judgment he will bring against Gog, the Russian dictator, and his allies. This will be the most terrifying sequence of events in human history to date. On the heels of a supernatural global earthquake that will undoubtedly take many lives will come a cascading series of other catastrophes. Pandemic diseases, for example, will sweep through the troops of the Russian coalition. And the attackers will face other judgments such as have rarely been seen since the cataclysmic showdown in Egypt between Moses and Pharaoh. Devastating hailstorms will hit these enemy forces and their supporters. So, too, will apocalyptic firestorms that will call to mind the terrible judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah. The Scriptures indicate that the firestorms will be geographically widespread and exceptionally deadly.” Birjandi took a sip of tea as he let the implications of the words sink in. “Think about it, gentlemen. This suggests that targets throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union, and perhaps throughout some of Russia’s allies, will be supernaturally struck on this day of judgment and partially consumed. These could be limited to nuclear missile silos, military bases, radar installations, defense ministries, intelligence headquarters, and other

Mountains. The U.S. government has dozens of extremely critical facilities there: the headquarters for North American Aerospace Defense, Strategic Missile Command, the Air Force Academy. . . .” “The Central Food and Seed Reserve,” Alexander suggested helpfully. Cyrus frowned disdainfully at this, but he didn’t discount it, either. “Shang could be targeting any one of them. Or something else entirely. It is imperative that we find out what—and that we do it quickly. Which is why you need to get close to Jessica Shang, Benjamin.” “How am I supposed to do that?” I asked, unable to hide how daunted I felt. “I won’t even be able to get into her hotel.” “You’ll be attending ski school with her,” Alexander explained. “Leo Shang originally enrolled her in private lessons—but those were recently changed to group lessons. We’re not sure why, but we assume that was Jessica’s doing.

In some ways, the Saudi response to Iran has followed its long-established security policies; spend billions of dollars on advanced weapons and turn to traditional partners for support. In 2019, Riyadh made the first payments on an estimated $15 billion contract for Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) air defense system. That summer, Saudi Arabia reopened the Prince Sultan Air Base for the deployment of US aircraft, air defense missile batteries, and several thousand soldiers and airmen. Yet in other ways the Saudi response under King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman has been unconventional and may become even more so. Launching an independent air campaign in Yemen or investing seriously in a domestic defense industry were new approaches. Most worryingly, as the former head of Israel’s National Security Council Yaakov Amidor warned—a nuclear armed Iran would not only surround Israel with a “ring of fire,” it would very likely drive Turkey and Saudi Arabia to seek their own nuclear weapons.

That conclusion can be substantiated by their actions in office; the abrogation of the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the vast buildup in military expenditures at the expense of other priorities that the majority might consider more important; the installation of a world-wide system of regional defense commands, and the insistence on developing weapons of incredible destruction for use in space.

The Royal Navy had deployed a large surface task force 8,000 miles from home without effective protection from air attack. Listening to false prophets, they had retired their large aircraft carriers as obsolete, depriving the fleet of airborne early warning and supersonic interceptors. To save money they had not funded the installation of existing cruise missile defenses nor made the investment in three-dimensional air defense radars for their ships. Now they began to pay a mounting price in blood and treasure.

A scientific discovery in our time is likely to be not the work of a solitary researcher or a small team working with improvised equipment, but the product of a big team in an expensive lab operating with government funds. In such conditions the scientist is less and less likely to speak out against government policies. Today, for example, there is scarcely a physicist who thinks the Strategic Defense Initiative or its successor, National Missile Defense, can be made to work in anything like the way the Defense Department claims. Some disbelievers, however, accept government funds for the project in hopes of making an ancillary contribution to science, and cover their doubts with silence. The public has been lied to as a result, and billions of dollars have been wasted on an illusion.

Khrushchev backed down, Kennedy wisely instructed his staff not to betray any hint of gloating—a provocation to Soviet credibility and pride could lead to a later war. Similarly, he rejected additional plans for an invasion, which Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put before him in case the Soviets did not honor a promise to remove their missiles. Kennedy continued to see an invasion as carrying huge risks: “Consider the size of the problem,” he told McNamara, “the equipment that is involved on the other side, the Nationalists [’] fervor which may be engendered, it seems to me we could end up bogged down. I think we should keep constantly in mind the British in the Boer War, the Russians in the last war with the Finnish and our own experience with the North Koreans.” Given his concerns about getting “bogged down” only ninety miles from U.S. shores, would Kennedy have been as ready as Lyndon Johnson to put hundreds of thousands of ground troops into Vietnam?

John Hughes, special assistant to Defense Intelligence Agency director Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll during the Crisis, wrote later that the greatest barrier to developing strategic warning is ‘the tendency of the human mind to assume that the status quo will continue … Nations do not credit their potential opponents with the will to make unexpected acts.

The first phase of the war was led by the IAF. It targeted Hamas rocket launchers, commanders and command posts that Hamas deliberately embedded in Gaza’s densely populated civilian neighborhoods. It placed its main headquarters in a hospital and its stockpiles of rockets and missiles in hospitals, schools and mosques, often using children as human shields. Before bombing these Hamas targets, in an effort to minimize civilian casualties the IDF issued warning to civilians to evacuate the premises. Hamas continued to rocket Israeli cities. I instructed the army to prepare for a ground operation to take out the tunnels. Our soldiers would be susceptible to Palestinian ground fire, booby traps, land mines and antitank missiles, some fired by terrorists emerging from underground. As casualties would inevitably mount on both sides in this door-to-door warfare, I realized that Israel would face growing international criticism. But there was no other choice. I called Obama, the first of many phone conversations we had during the operation. He said he supported Israel’s right of self-defense but was very clear on its limits. “Bibi,” he said, “we won’t support a ground action.” “Barack, I don’t want a ground action,” I said. “But if our intelligence shows that the terror tunnels are about to penetrate our territory, I won’t have a choice.” I repeated this conversation with the many foreign leaders whom I called and who called me, thus setting the international stage for a ground action. Most accepted what I said. The same could not be said for the international media. It hammered Israel on the growing number of Palestinian casualties from our air attacks, conveniently absolving Hamas of targeting Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians. The media also bought Hamas’s inflated numbers of Palestinian civilian casualties, and even its staging of fake funerals. We unmasked many of those being claimed as civilians as Hamas terrorists by providing their names, unit affiliation and other identifying data. I visited the IDF’s Southern Command to meet the brigade commanders who would lead the ground action. They were feverishly working on the means to locate and destroy the tunnels. They were brave, resolute and smart. They knew very well the dangers they and their men would face. So did their soldiers, many of whom did not return.

Zelensky wanted—he needed—air defenses. F-16 fighter jets, to maintain air supremacy against the far larger Russian Air Force. A no-fly zone. Tanks. Advanced drones. Most important, long-range missile launchers. There was one in particular that the Pentagon, with its penchant for completely unintelligible acronyms, called the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). Zelensky wanted to arm these launchers with one of the crown jewels of the U.S. Army, a missile known as ATACMS that could strike targets nearly two hundred miles away with precision accuracy. That, of course, would give him the capability to fire right into command-and-control centers deep inside Russian territory—exactly Biden’s worst fear. In time, Zelensky added to his list of requests another weapon that raised enormous moral issues: He sought “cluster munitions,” a weapon many of the arms control advocates in the Biden administration had spent decades trying to limit or ban. Cluster bombs are devastating weapons that release scores of tiny bomblets, ripping apart people and personnel carriers and power lines and often mowing through civilians unlucky enough to be living in the area where they are dropped. Worse yet, unexploded bomblets can remain on the ground for years; from past American battlefields—from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq—there were stories of children killed or maimed after picking one up years later. Blinken told colleagues he had spent much of his professional life getting weapons like this banned. Yet the Pentagon stored them across Europe because they were cruelly effective in wiping out an advancing army. And anyway, they said, the Russians were using cluster munitions in Ukraine. With each proposal it was Biden who was most reluctant: F-16s were simply too provocative, he told his staff, because they could strike deep into Russia. The cluster munitions were simply too dangerous to civilians. Conversations with Zelensky were heated. “The first few calls they had turned pretty tense,” one senior administration official told me. Part of the issue was style. Zelensky, in Biden’s view, was simply not grateful for the aid he was getting—a cardinal sin in Biden’s world. By mid-May 2022, his administration had poured nearly $4 billion to the Ukrainian defenses, including some fifty million rounds of small ammunition, tens of thousands of artillery rounds, major antiaircraft and anti-tank systems, intelligence, medical equipment, and more. Zelensky had offered at best perfunctory thanks before pushing for more.

The world is listening. Israeli arms sales in 2021 were the highest on record, surging 55 percent over the previous two years to US$11.3 billion. Europe was the biggest recipient of these weapons, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, followed by Asia and the Pacific. Rockets, aerial defense systems, missiles, cyberweapons, and radar were just some of the equipment sold by the Jewish state. The result is that Israel is now one of the top ten weapons dealers in the world, having sold a range of equipment to nations including India, Azerbaijan, and Turkey that worsened conflicts in their own regions. The Israeli government approved every defense deal brought to it since 2007, according to details uncovered in 2022 by Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack.

The incoming North Korean warhead will be traveling at speeds of around 14,000 miles per hour, while the interceptor’s kill vehicle will be traveling at speeds of around 20,000 miles per hour, making this action, if successful, “akin to shooting a bullet with a bullet,” according to the Missile Defense Agency’s spokesperson.

All forms of passive defense, however, were irrelevant to wire-guided missiles or aimed ballistic projectiles, whether anti-tank missiles or rocket-propelled grenades.

Gise had deep experience in the way the government worked and was privy to some of the most advanced and secretive technology of his day. During those summers on the ranch, Bezos says that his grandfather would tell him stories about the missile defense systems he worked on during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. That made a deep impression on the young Bezos. Today, among the Silicon Valley titans, he is one of the most pro-government CEOs. Amazon’s cloud computing business has won multibillion-dollar contracts from the Pentagon and the CIA. The significance of that business to Amazon is one reason why, in 2018, Bezos put his new second headquarters in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., and why he paid $23 million for an old textile museum in D.C.’s swish Kalorama area—his neighbors are the Obamas and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

Israeli caution toward Russia in 2022 was unsurprising because Israeli surveillance firm Cellebrite had sold Vladimir Putin phone-hacking technology that he used on dissidents and political opponents for years, deploying it tens of thousands of times. Israel didn’t sell the powerful NSO Group phone-hacking tool, Pegasus, to Ukraine despite the country having asked for it since 2019: it did not want to anger Moscow. Israel was thus complicit in Russia’s descent into autocracy. Within days of the Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, the global share prices of defense contractors soared, including Israel’s biggest, Elbit Systems, whose stock climbed 70 percent higher than the year before. One of the most highly sought-after Israeli weapons is a missile interception system. US financial analysts from Citi argued that investment in weapons manufacturers was the ethical thing to do because “defending the values of liberal democracies and creating a deterrent … preserves peace and global stability.”19 Israeli cyber firms were in huge demand. Israel’s Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said that Israel would benefit financially because European nations wanted Israeli armaments.20 She said the quiet part out loud, unashamed of seeing opportunity in a moment of crisis. “We have unprecedented opportunities, and the potential is crazy,” an Israeli defense industry source told Haaretz.21

What’s facing it, firing-arc-wise? I’ve lost engine control, so I can’t rotate us.” “Railguns fourteen, sixteen, twenty through twenty-six, and thirty. One bombardment cannon that I do not think would have the accuracy you are looking for. The singularity shotgun, a plague dropper, five different pain inducers. Two missile tubes, four particle beams, one inferno lance, a magnetic flux projector, an x-ray array that you have marked as ‘no,’ the third and fifth segments of the pulse field generator, and the point defense flak cannon that you have named Larry.

The US government served as both a munificent venture capitalist that did not expect a return (not even co-ownership) yet acted as an inexpensive testbed. In 1965 Hewlett-Packard employed about 9,000 people, Fairchild had 10,000, and Lockheed’s Missile Division had 28,000 employees. The defense industry was still dominant.

General Hamza, I am pleased that we have finally secured Jerusalem. General Malik, you bring up a major concern. Have we been able to get our laser defense systems operational yet?” “Yes, we have about 40% of them back online. The Americans were able to destroy ten of our sixteen ground-based sites with cruise missiles. The majority of our mobile defense systems are at the frontline, leaving us vulnerable. We have started to pull some of them to help protect our critical infrastructure. The Russians are helping by connecting their power transmission nodes into ours. As they are able to provide more electricity, we should have the rest of our laser batteries operational,” explained General Malik with an optimistic look on his face. “It was a smart move on the Americans’ part to destroy our power plants. Aside from shutting down our laser defense systems, it has plunged most of the Republic into the dark.” “Fortunately, we also have a lot of industrial grade generators and two Russian nuclear powered ships in port--they are providing a substantial amount of power,” said Admiral Mustafa.

Joe Pike watched his friend Elvis Cole leave the Burger King parking lot, then entered the longitude and latitude into his GPS. Pike was not using a civilian GPS. He used a military handheld known as a Defense Advanced GPS Receiver, which was also known as a dagger. The DAGR was missile-guidance precise, could not be jammed, and contained the cryptography to use the Army and Air Force GPS satellite system. The DAGR was illegal for civilians to own, but Pike had used it in remote locations throughout Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central and South America. These were military contract jobs for multinational corporations, mostly, but also the United States government. The government gave the DAGR to him even though it was a crime for him to own it. Governments do that. Thirty-two

Yes, writing is a weapon, Delphine, a bloody weapon of mass destruction. Writing is even more powerful than anything you can imagine. Writing is a weapon for defense, shooting, alarm. Writing is a grenade, a missile, a flame-thrower, a weapon of war. It can lay things waste; it can also rebuild.

The China National Space Agency (created in 1993) may be the formal NASA equivalent, facilitating international agreements and cooperation, but it still operates in tandem with the PLA and is involved in the defense industry.12 The China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a state-owned company, specializes in tactical ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, land-attack cruise missiles, anti-satellite interceptors, and small tactical satellites. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation produces launch vehicles and large satellites. Both of these organizations operate closely together.

Joy explodes throughout the book of Psalms like fireworks, and is the most potent anti-missile defense system there is.

The Obama administration submitted a budget request to Congress in 2012 that called for cutting in half U.S. funds for Israeli missile defense—this at a time when Israel faced the threat of rocket attacks from Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the midrange missile technology developed by Iran.30 • In 2013 Obama nominated former U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense. Hagel had voted against tougher sanctions against Iran, was one of four senators to refuse to sign a letter condemning anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, and chaired an organization that denounced Israel for practicing “apartheid.

Seoul: N.Korea again fires short-range projectiles 472 words SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea on Saturday continued its string of rocket and missile firings, launching three short-range projectiles into the waters off its east coast ahead of a major holiday celebrated by both Koreas, a South Korean defense official said.

Government sales constituted 100 percent of the market for integrated circuits until 1964, and the federal government remained the largest buyer of chips for several years after that. The military had started funding research on new types of electric circuits in the early 1950s, when the tyranny of numbers first emerged. The problems inherent in complex circuits containing large numbers of individual components were particularly severe in defense applications. Such circuits tended to be big and heavy, but the services needed equipment that was light and portable. “The general rule of thumb in a missile was that one extra pound of payload cost $100,000 worth of extra fuel,” Noyce recalled. “The shipping cost of sending up a 50-pound computer was too high even for the Pentagon.” Further, space-age weapons had to be absolutely reliable—a goal that was inordinately difficult to achieve in a circuit with several thousand components and several thousand hand-soldered connections. When the Air Force ordered electronic equipment for the Minuteman I, the first modern intercontinental ballistic missile, specifications called for every single component—not just every radio but every transistor and every resistor in every radio—to have its own individual progress chart on which production, installation, checking, and rechecking could be recorded. Testing, retesting, and re-retesting more than doubled the cost of each electronic part.

Bill Maher, on a program called Politically Incorrect said “lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building—say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.” Maher was fired and the program was terminated. Some portion of the media should have risen up in outrage, not necessarily to defend Maher and get him his job back, but in defense of speaking the truth. They did not.

Naturally, von Neumann’s picture of the player as a completely intelligent, completely ruthless person is an abstraction and a perversion of the facts. It is rare to find a large number of thoroughly clever and unprincipled persons playing a game together. Where the knaves assemble, there will always be fools; and where the fools are present in sufficient numbers, they offer a more profitable object of exploitation for the knaves. The psychology of the fool has become a subject well worth the serious attention of the knaves. Instead of looking out for his own ultimate interest, after the fashion of von Neumann’s gamesters, the fool operates in a manner which, by and large, is as predictable as the struggles of a rat in a maze. This policy of lies—or rather, of statements irrelevant to the truth—will make him buy a particular brand of cigarettes; that policy will, or so the party hopes, induce him to vote for a particular candidate—any candidate—or to join in a political witch hunt. A certain precise mixture of religion, pornography, and pseudoscience will sell an illustrated newspaper. A certain blend of wheedling, bribery, and intimidation will induce a young scientist to work on guided missiles or the atomic bomb. To determine these, we have our machinery of radio fan ratings, straw votes, opinion samplings, and other psychological investigations, with the common man as their object; and there are always the statisticians, sociologists, and economists available to sell their services to these undertakings. Luckily for us, these merchants of lies, these exploiters of gullibility, have not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection as to have things all their own way. This is because no man is either all fool or all knave. The average man is quite reasonably intelligent concerning subjects which come to his direct attention and quite reasonably altruistic in matters of public benefit or private suffering which are brought before his own eyes. In a small country community which has been running long enough to have developed somewhat uniform levels of intelligence and behavior, there is a very respectable standard of care for theunfortunate, of administration of roads and other public facilities, of tolerance for those who have offended once or twice against society. After all, these people are there, and the rest of the community must continue to live with them. On the other hand, in such a community, it does not do for a man to have the habit of overreaching his neighbors. There are ways of making him feel the weight of public opinion. After a while, he will find it so ubiquitous, so unavoidable, so restricting and oppressing that he will have to leave the community in self-defense.

In Libya in 2011, fourteen NATO members and four partner countries prevented Muammar Qaddafi from carrying out a promise to slaughter tens of thousands of his own people—and then they removed him from power. France, Britain, Italy, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, and others struck 90 percent of all NATO targets. Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, Greece, and Romania enforced an arms embargo at sea. Sweden, not a NATO member, contributed naval and air force personnel and equipment. The United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, and Morocco also contributed.18 There was not a single U.S. casualty.19 The point is not that Washington should persuade others to do all the heavy lifting. NATO jets were able to hit their targets only because U.S. cruise missiles had already wiped out Libya’s air defenses. When Europeans ran short on precision-guided missiles, Washington sent them more.20 Without the United States, there would have been no mission. Critics carp that while NATO rid the world of a dangerous monster, it hasn’t created a stable Libya. That charge misses the point. From a Moneyball perspective, the goal was not to bomb Libya into democracy, start a war, or launch another improvisational bout of nation-building. It was to give Libyans a chance to escape the fate Qaddafi intended for them, and to enable them to begin the long-term process of building their own future.

It was the French who fired the first shot. That evening Rafale fighters bombed a convoy of Gaddafi’s tanks and armored vehicles just outside Benghazi. Operation Odyssey Dawn had begun. A short while later 110 cruise missiles were launched from U.S. ships in the Gulf, targeting radar, communications, fuel storage and air defenses around Tripoli and Misrata, followed by air strikes from British Tornados.

Many will agree with Valeriano and Maness. After all, nuclear weapons and tanks are thought to be irrelevant. The sheer destructiveness of modern war has supposedly rendered it unthinkable. But the destructive power of a weapon is precisely what makes it useful, especially when your objective is the total capitulation of your enemy. With better missile weapons, and better anti-missile weapons, Russia has begun to inch towards strategic nuclear supremacy. This is the kind of supremacy where America’s strategic deterrent is either destroyed in a first strike, or destroyed by Russian interceptor rockets. Meanwhile, the United States has an ABM defense so feeble, so decrepit, there is little chance it could stop a Chinese rocket let alone an advanced Russian Topol-M.

The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.

Although a new highway program was politically very contentious, President Eisenhower appointed an advisory committee of executives linked to General Motors, Bechtel engineering, the trucking lobby, and the Teamsters Union (to which truckers belonged) to negotiate the various special interests involved.In 1956 Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act providing for 42,500 miles of a 'National System of Interstate and Defense Highways' across the country at an estimated cost of $27 billion. . . . Journalist Helen Leavitt thought that Congress had been bought and bullied. In her brilliant book Superhighway--Superhoax, she noted that there was no real concern for national defense, since overpasses designed for fourteen-foot vertical clearance were too low to permit the passage of many Army, Navy, and Air Force weapons loaded on transporters, including Atlas missiles. The highway builds had never even consulted the Defense Department.

On August 8, McCone met the president at the White House to discuss the wisdom of dropping hundreds of Chinese Nationalist soldiers into Mao’s China. The president had approved the paramilitary operation. McCone was dubious. Mao had surface-to-air missiles, and the last U-2 flight that the CIA had sent over the Chinese mainland, McCone told the president, had been spotted and tracked by Chinese communist radars twelve minutes after takeoff from Taiwan. “That’s humorous,” said Kennedy’s national-security aide, Michael Forrestal, the son of the late defense secretary. “We’ll give the President another U-2 disaster.” And what would the cover story be this time? the president joked. Everyone laughed. One month after this meeting, Mao’s forces shot down a U-2 over China.

On August 10, John McCone, Robert Kennedy, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara met in Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s ornate conference room on the seventh floor of the State Department. The subject was Cuba. McCone remembered “a suggestion being made to liquidate top people in the Castro regime,” including Castro and his brother Raul, the Cuban defense minister, who had just returned from a weapons-buying trip to Moscow. He found the idea abhorrent. The director saw a greater danger ahead. He predicted that the Soviet Union was going to give Castro nuclear weapons—medium-range ballistic missiles capable of striking the United States. He had been worrying about that possibility for more than four months. He had no intelligence, nothing to go on save gut instinct. McCone was the only one who saw the threat clearly. “If I were Khrushchev,” he said, “I’d put offensive missiles in Cuba. Then I’d bang my shoe on the desk and say to the United States, ‘How do you like looking down the end of a gun barrel for a change? Now, let’s talk about Berlin and any other subject that I choose.’” No one seems to have believed him. “The experts unanimously and adamantly agreed that this was beyond the realm of possibility,” notes an agency history of McCone’s years. “He stood absolutely alone.