Star Wars and National Missile Defense: Unnecessary Yesterday, Unnecessary Today Ever since nuclear weapons of mass destruction have existed, people have been attempting to create ways to prevent a war that would bring about a worldwide Arma-geddon. Many of todays top military and government officials have been studying ways in which the United States can protect itself from a nuclear missile attack. What they have come up with is the National Missile Defense program, or NMD. The NMD would consist of a network of satellites, early-warning devices, and missiles pro-grammed to spot an incoming nuclear missile. When a nuclear missile is detected, the NMD would automatically launch the computer-guided interceptor missiles to seek out and destroy the incoming nuclear missile. This program, however, should not be im-plemented or researched any further. There are a few factors to support this claim. First, the NMD program is very costly. According to the website of the Federation of American Scientists, the projected total costs by the year 2005 will be close to $14 bil-lion dollars, obviously a large amount of money that could be well spent elsewhere. Second, the NMD program is ineffective. There are many ways for a rouge state or a terrorist group with nuclear capabilities to get around the NMD. Third, an American development of a NMD program would be a violation one of the most important inter-national nuclear weapons agreements of the nuclear age: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM).During the height of the cold war, the threat of a nuclear attack was real. Many citizens were afraid that an enemy state, most likely the Soviet Union, would launch nuclear missiles at the US. This fear was almost realized during the Cuban Missile cri-sis in 1962. Fortunately, that crisis passed without any nuclear missiles launched. The fear of an attack, however, stayed with many people. It became the goal of the United ...
