2008 Woodie Awards
Military missile demonstrations send wrong signal
Danny O'Gara
Issue date: 2/29/08 Section: OpEd Page
Eerily coinciding with a rare lunar eclipse, the Pentagon took the extraordinary and unprecedented step of shooting down an intelligence satellite dubbed USA-193 Feb. 20 with a missile fired from an ocean-based destroyer. The nominal purpose of the mission was to save innocent civilians from the potentially hazardous fuel that the satellite was carrying, which would have turned into toxic gas upon hitting the earth-none of which had been used because USA-193 malfunctioned shortly after deployment. Claiming that the satellite shoot-down was nothing more than an attempt by President George W. Bush's administration to test our quixotic missile defense system, both China and Russia decried this latest perceived American attempt at space domination. The powers that be at the Pentagon brushed aside such criticism from those two constant antagonists, claiming that the mission had no devious intentions.
The Pentagon was surely right to try to save us innocents from such a terrible menace, right? The problem I have with this mission was that there really was no imminent threat from USA-193. While Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright claimed that the gas could spread over an area "roughly the size of two football fields," the gas was not really all that potent. Cartwright pointed out, "If you stay very close to it and inhale a lot of it, it could in fact be deadly." But as Gail Collins of The New York Times correctly theorized, does it not seem unlikely that people would stay very close to a burning hunk of metal the size of a bus that just fell out of the sky? Wouldn't the same military that is proposing to shoot down the satellite with a surgical missile strike be able to predict where it would land and make sure the area is safe?
Cartwright himself admitted that the most likely outcome of exposure to these toxic fumes was a trip to the doctor. Well, all these concerns were promptly ignored and USA-193 was indeed shot down with the Pentagon later estimating that the satellite's fuel tank had in all likelihood been safely blown to bits, reduced to nothing more than space garbage. So now that humanity has been saved from a trip to the doctor, what did all this cost American taxpayers? A mere $60 million, which seems rather insignificant considering the Department of Defense is requesting $622 billion for the 2008 fiscal year. $60 million seems like a trivial amount of money to spend to test a missile defense system that could conceivably save us from a nuclear attack in the future. It also seems highly hypocritical of the Chinese to lament our satellite destruction when they carried out a similar mission last year.
The Pentagon was surely right to try to save us innocents from such a terrible menace, right? The problem I have with this mission was that there really was no imminent threat from USA-193. While Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright claimed that the gas could spread over an area "roughly the size of two football fields," the gas was not really all that potent. Cartwright pointed out, "If you stay very close to it and inhale a lot of it, it could in fact be deadly." But as Gail Collins of The New York Times correctly theorized, does it not seem unlikely that people would stay very close to a burning hunk of metal the size of a bus that just fell out of the sky? Wouldn't the same military that is proposing to shoot down the satellite with a surgical missile strike be able to predict where it would land and make sure the area is safe?
Cartwright himself admitted that the most likely outcome of exposure to these toxic fumes was a trip to the doctor. Well, all these concerns were promptly ignored and USA-193 was indeed shot down with the Pentagon later estimating that the satellite's fuel tank had in all likelihood been safely blown to bits, reduced to nothing more than space garbage. So now that humanity has been saved from a trip to the doctor, what did all this cost American taxpayers? A mere $60 million, which seems rather insignificant considering the Department of Defense is requesting $622 billion for the 2008 fiscal year. $60 million seems like a trivial amount of money to spend to test a missile defense system that could conceivably save us from a nuclear attack in the future. It also seems highly hypocritical of the Chinese to lament our satellite destruction when they carried out a similar mission last year.
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