International Network of Engineers and Scientists Against Proliferation

Critics won't be silenced

Regina Hagen

For quite some time now, the US government has tried to stop critics who say what they think of missile defense. On August 29, the Washington Post ran an article that started as follows. "The Pentagon And The Professor. There is a Web site in Russia that the U.S. government claims contains classified information. You can read it, but if you think about what you read there and conclude that the current U.S. national missile defense plans are bound to fail, the government will try to stop you. That is exactly what is happening to Theodore Postol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." This is no single incident. Fifteen Greenpeace activists and two journalists have been charged with conspiracy to violate a military safety zone and violating an order after they delayed a test of the U.S. missile defense system at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base July 14. If convicted, they could be jailed for up to 10 years and fined $250,000 each.

By attaching the label 'treason' to critical comments of concerned scientists and threatening non-violent protesters with horrendous fines, the US government hopes to silence the opposition to its missile defense plans. But hopefully the critics will not be easily intimidated.

International Day of Protest 2001

The Bush administration, the Pentagon, and their corporate allies are pushing hard to move the arms race into space. The first phase of deployment will likely be Theatre Missile Defense (TMD) systems that will virtually surround China and force them to build more nuclear weapons. 'Missile defense' will only make the world more insecure!

The space-based laser (SBL), now moving toward testing at NASA's Stennis Missile Center in Mississippi, will be the 'follow-on' technology to ballistic missile defense. The SBL, the real Reagan Star Wars system, will be used to knock out other countries' satellites giving the U.S. Space Command "control and domination" of space in order to protect corporate "interests and investments."

The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space invites you to join this year's International Day of Protest on October 13 by organizing an action in your community in solidarity with groups all over the world. Hold an event at a U.S. military base; DoE facility; NASA installation; U.S. Embassy; an aerospace corporation; federal building; or an academic institution that is working on military space. By early September, 250 endorsers and 92 actions planned in 18 countries were listed.