U.S. to Tell China It Will Not Object to Missile Buildup

The Bush administration, seeking to overcome Chinese opposition to its missile defense program, intends to tell leaders in Beijing that it has no objections to the country’s plans to build up its small fleet of nuclear missiles, according to senior administration officials.

One senior official said that in the future, the United States and China might also discuss resuming underground nuclear tests if they are needed to assure the safety and reliability of their arsenals. Such a move, however, might allow China to improve its nuclear warheads and lead to the end of a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing.

Good grief. Let’s encourage the world to build nuclear arsenals so that we can build a missile defense system that has never worked (except in rigged tests and even then not too well) and will never work. Let’s make the world more dangerous while spending ghastly amounts of money to gain a false sense of security in that more dangerous world. The Bush administration says that China is building anyway, so why not give the wink-wink, nudge-nudge in exchange for some political greasing of their pet project. Well, let China build, and then India will build, and then Pakistan will build, and so forth. All of this so that defense contractor executives can build larger homes and hire more lobbyists. Bush says building a missile defense system is the prudent thing to do. How prudent is feuling an arms race and possibly destablizing the already tenuous relationships in the East? What will happen if the referee leaves the game to go home and play with his toys? And how prudent is it to encourage those countries with missiles to point even more of those missiles at us just in case we catch a few of them? That doesn’t sound very conservative. Of course, these days being conservative seems to mean being a priapic war monger in some peoples minds.