What Reagan's "star wars"
ter March Movement in 1961, the Committee of a Hundred wanted to get 50,000 volunteers to block seven NATO airfields and to get commandos to force their way speech meant for Denmark through to the nuclear weapons. In fact, less than a thousand people participated, and 591 of them were arrested. Most of them, moreover, paid their fines, rather than going to prison, as was the plan.
Even the occupation of nuclear-power
Denmark retains the ultimate sovereignty over an increasingly restive Greenland, in which the United States maintains a major nuclear-warfare base at Thule
Europe where the Reagan government's talk building sites has gotten broad active supabout "winnable atomic wars" has aroused the most alarm. It would be completely port only at certain phases of the resistexposed in any major East-West war, with nothing to gain and everything to lose.
ance — as long as the sites were not forc-
The following article is from the April 21 issue of Klassenkampen, the paper of ibly cleared by the police.
the Danish section of the Fourth International.
In order to mobilize the masses of people, we have to take the struggle into the places where people work - into the schools and factories.
Strikes, political warning and protest strikes, are the appropriate weapons for fighting the arms threat and raising the peace movement to a higher level. Hundreds of thousands of people can participate in strike actions.
Individuals are not so exposed to repression.
Strikes in the high schools and universities, warning strikes in the factories have a great power to move the broad sections of the population that sympa-
16 also one of the countries in Western Bjarne BONNE
On Wednesday, March 23, the American president announced in a TV speech direct from the White House that in the coming years the U.S. was going to build a totally new weapons system in space that would make it possible before the end of the century to shoot down Soviet missiles before they could reach their targets.
Americans with a macabre sense of humor called Reagans's address "the Star Wars Speech." Hundreds of laser cannon, particle-beam weapons, and so-called "directed energy" weapons would be placed on satellites around the earth. If an atomic war broke out, within the first five minutes up to 1,000 Soviet missiles would be targeted and destroyed
At first it seems unbelievable that the U.S. intends to do this. But in this fiscal year, the American government has al loted a billion dollars for research on energy weapons. In the Defense De. partment's five-year plan for fiscal years 1985-1989, energy weapons are one of the areas that are to be given special im-
Five days after Reagan's speech, the a very significant time.
American magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology published an article explaining that the Thule base in Greenland will be central in a large-scale expansion of the U.S.'s early warning system.
About 80 million dollars more are to used to expand the BMEWS, which is a giant radar station designed to spot
Today its range extends 5,000 kilometers out into space and can spot objects the size of a football.
The rest of the money will be used to build a satellite station called "Detachname for what was earlier called the "OL-5."
That sounds so peaceful! What does it have to do with "Star Wars?" a bit. In order to be realizable, Reagan's plan requires that the U.S. be able to pinpoint attacking missiles very quickly. The BMEWS station at Thule will be a link in the system for aiming energy
And since this task is much more demanding than simply spotting an attack and issuing a warning, it becomes clear why the U.S. plans to expand this
Satellite communications are key to the whole energy-weapon system, and a lot of the satellite orbits pass over the North Pole. This means that Thule is well placed to be a link in this system.
But should Reagan be taken seriously when he talks cheerfully about "a whole new possibility for saving lives instead of avenging them."
From a strictly technical point of view - No. Lasers have been a favorite dream among military people for decades. Billions have been invested in research on them with little practical result so far. For this very reason, there have been big ups and downs in the grants for this work fact that the grants for laser research are going up again is not the result of any technological breakthrough, but of a purely administrative decision. In particular, with respect to the spacewar project, there are loads of questions that have not yet been answered.
How can the massive energy sources these weapons require be put on small
How can it be assured that they can really shoot the missiles down in the small amount of time available? A hit ratio of 99 percent would be exceptional with respect to all other known weapons, but the one percent misses would mean that millions of kilotons of nuclear-blast power would strike the U.S.
Moreover, from the standpoint of Europeans, we might add that this system will be useless against weapons that do not go outside the atmosphere, that is, short-range missiles, bombers, and Cruisetype missiles. These represent the lion's share of the weapons that would hit Euraside the possibility that Reagan is ignorant enough to believe what he says, we have to look for other explanations for the "Star Wars" speech.
From this standpoint, the speech came at
In recent weeks, the U.S. congress has been discussing a resolution on the country's nuclear policy that involves a drastic break from the present arms
The so-called "Freeze Resolution" calls for the U.S. and the Soviet Union to reach a mutual agreement for the development, deployment of more nuclear weapons as the first step toward reducing the nuclear arsenals of both countries.
Reagan is a fierce opponent of the proposal, which would mean a stop to an armaments program of historic dimen-
In fact, this program is already in trouble because the U.S. simply has not got the money to increase defense expenditures by 14 percent in 1983.