Washington, DC. President George W. Bush stood strong and called out President Putin today on Missile Defense before leaving to Germany where they are going to meet at the Group of 8 Leading Industrial Nations summit meetings, next week.
“The Cold War is over,” President Bush stated. “We’re now into the 21st century, where we need to deal with the true threats, which are threats of radical extremists who will kill to advance an ideology, and the threats of proliferation,” he further commented. “I’m deeply concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon that could fly toward Europe, or, for that matter, toward any other allies,” Bush said. “And we don’t want to ever have ourselves in a position where the world could become blackmailed. And, therefore, one way to deal with this issue is through a missile defense system.” The President closed his comments by saying of the third missile defense site in Europe, “We think it’s the right thing to do.”
There is no question it is the right and important thing to do, as our countrys homeland, our public and that of all of the European population will have an option that we all dont have today to defeat a ballistic missile or threats of ballistic missiles carrying nuclear weapons in the 21st century.
For the only international voice of President Putin and Russia to stand loudly and say that missile defense to protect Europe will cause a powder keg of new weapons and initiate a new arms race, is purely a tactical way to intimidate and dominate their neighboring democratic led countries and former Soviet block satellite states.
Three main points need to be brought to international light in this exchange of comments:
1) Russia supports and believes in Missile Defense as they have the most capable and longest deployed missile defense system in the world today, protecting two-thirds of their population. Their system uses nuclear tipped missiles that detonate nuclear explosions in space and the upper atmosphere.
2) Russia has not criticized, nor voiced out internationally against the deployed 17 ground-based interceptors at the United States Missile Defense Site in Fort Greeley, Alaska and the United States Sea- Based X-Band Radar located near Adek, Alaska, which represent the same two systems that are proposed for Europe. It is of equal note that these U.S. Missile Defense assets in Alaska are in proximity of Russia with the SBX being much closer to the Russian border then the proposed European third missile defense site in Poland and proposed radar site in Czech Republic.
3) The United States Administration under George W. Bush in 2005 put forward an executive order to reduce the number of our countrys strategic weapons by half by 2012. This will mark the lowest number of nuclear weapons since the 1950s under President Dwight Eisenhower. There cannot be a new arms race with the United States if one side is reducing.
We strongly applaud and appreciate our Presidents leadership and initiative for standing up on this important issue to the sways of international opinion and that of the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
