WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 24th January, 2019) The new US Missile Defense Review is an unworkable farce whose real goal is to pour billions of Dollars more into the pockets of giant defense contractors, Helen Caldicott, founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility, told Sputnik.
US President Donald Trump unveiled the new Department of Defense missile defense policy review in a ceremony at the Pentagon last week. The new US missile defense strategy calls for pursuing space-based inceptors and deploying more systems in Europe and the middle East.
"It really is a farce orchestrated to put more billions into the pockets of the wicked arms manufacturers," Caldicott, a leading medical expert on the dangers of nuclear war said.
The review will have a very negative impact on negotiations for arms control, including the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) talks with Russia, Caldicott cautioned.
"Of course this crazy old idea will have extremely serious consequences upon US/Russian relationships. We need to liaise with Russia as this is the only country that can totally obliterate America in a matter of hours," she said.
Caldicott also observed that Trump had more constructive instincts to try and seek improved relations with Russia than most of his critics or his own advisers.
"In that sense... President Trump is on the right track. We desperately need to invest ourselves in friendly international relationships instead of this incessant pathological concept of killing which pervades - incidentally orchestrated by men and their, shall I say it, testosterone levels," she said.
The review seeks to perpetuate unscientific myths about missile defense that had been widely held in the United States since the days of President Ronald Reagan nearly 40 years ago, Caldicott observed.
The review revives an old and discredited theoretically strategy that was advocated by Edward Teller, so-called "father of the hydrogen bomb," or thermonuclear weapons that missile interceptors could successfully defend the United States from full scale missile attacks, Caldicott recalled.
Caldicott is the author of many books, including The New Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military Industrial Complex; War In Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space; and Sleepwalking to Armageddon: The Threat of Nuclear Annihilation.
The Smithsonian Institution has named her one of the most influential women of the 20th century.
