If you want to know how stupid Bush’s decision to push ahead with building a missile defense system in Eastern Europe really is, check out what Vladimir Putin said last week–comparing the US proposed missile shield to the Cuban missile crisis of the 1960s. Barely reported in the US media, the Russian President told reporters at a press conference at the end of a Russian-European Union Summit in Portugal that “Analogous actions by the Soviet Union, when it deployed missiles in Cuba, prompted the ‘Caribbean crisis.”
Though he doesn’t mention Putin’s remarks, Joseph Cirincione–an expert on National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress–provides cogent evidence against the Administration’s allegation that an American radar in the Czech republic would not threaten Russia’s nuclear posture, and he presents some excellent policy proposals that and sane Presidential candidate should consider seriously.
The longest article about the many eminent scientists who believe that Russia’s fear of missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland is well-founded is an AP story by Desmond Butler. I read Butler’s article in The Moscow News, #39, October 5/11, 2007–an English-language paper published in Moscow. Whether or not it was published widely in the US I do not know, though it’s sort of alarming that I had to read this important story in a newspaper published in Russia.
