[jambutty]

Our illustrious leader is in talks with Bush (and apparently has been doing so since last August) about allowing a ballistic missile defence system to be based in the UK. However the talks are not as some people might imagine, the Americans negotiating with the UK to allow the system to be placed on UK soil but the other way around. We, meaning Dictator Blair, is lobbying the US to have this ‘defensive missile system here and so is Poland. He is asking Bush if he would like to put his anti-missile missiles on our soil. Talk about forelock tugging!

Just a small re-cap about ICBM’s – when one is launched it heads spacewards into the outer atmosphere and maybe even beyond these days, tootles along towards its target and then heads downwards and splats its target. So any intercepting would be done up there in the outer atmosphere or near space.

The idea of this missile defensive system is that if someone chucks an ICMB westwards, meaning towards the USA, it could be intercepted and destroyed long before it reaches USA soil. It has been claimed that a destroyed ICBM would break up and the falling debris would burn up before reaching earth. By their very nature an ICBM has nuclear material onboard and it is just as lethal in one lump as it is in powder. Even if all parts of the ICBM are vaporised during re-entry you cannot vaporise radiation. So maybe we wouldn’t get bits falling on our heads, we would have the atmosphere irradiated instead. Not much of a choice is it?

So the further away from a target that you can have a defensive system the greater chance you have of intercepting an ICBM before it does its business which would be great for the USA but not so great for their outer defences, meaning the UK or Poland. We would get any fallout.

The US has a defensive system in place in Alaska and California to protect them from attacks coming from their west (China – Russia and the far east) and not unnaturally they want to protect their east coast too but they want to do it some 3,000 miles away from the US, meaning on our soil. That gives them more time to make an interception. That’s a bit like during the Falklands conflict, a number of Frigates were stationed several miles away from the carrier group to protect them and the Frigates were deemed to be expendable in the event of an attack.

If anyone is daft enough to launch an ICBM attack against the states they would also strive to knock out any defences first. So by having these defensive missiles on our land we become an immediate target even if a pre-emptive strike does not materialise. We employed those tactics during the Iraq war. We hit their defensive radar and missile capabilities and destroyed them before launching a strike against Baghdad.

So in a nutshell Blair wants the UK and any other EU country to become a human shield for the USA.

I think that the Yanks should stay in their own backyard and not involve us in their world squabbles and keep their defensive missiles at home.