Word: maginot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unfortunately a feasible ABM system remains a dream. It is the modern-day version of the French Maginot line--a large and expensive shield that will give us the illusion of safety, but will fail us should the final crisis ever come. Even the attempt to erect a ballistic missile defense will prove disastrous to national security. If we press ahead with Reagan's "star wars" concept, we will alienate our allies, spark a new arms race, and waste billions of dollars that could be better spent on conventional defense or social programs...
...President wants us to pursue the mirage of absolute security in an age when weapons of mass destruction make such security impossible. Only myopic could lead us to break a successful arms accord, destroy our European alliance, and spark an arms race for the sake of a new Maginot line which would never work. Spending tens of billions of dollars researching a fatally flawed idea, and perhaps hundreds of billions implementing it would indeed require blindness on a national scale...
...arrogance and scholarship as well as for his height (6 ft. 5 in.). As an officer in the late 1920s, he insisted on wearing his beret tilted unconventionally to the right, and championed the superiority of tanks to fixed defenses, an unfashionable notion in the France of the Maginot Line. When his homeland was invaded in 1940 De Gaulle, then 49, put his theories into action: he threw together an armored division and won two important battles against the Germans before they overwhelmed the French positions...
...Editors: President Reagan's star wars approach to national defense [April 4] brings to mind the enormous exertions of the French in protecting themselves against Hitler. The Maginot Line didn't work then, and a Maginot mentality will not work now. It is a false road to peace. Chandler Smith University of Missouri Kansas City...
Throughout history the military has created massive and invariably useless systems of defense, including walled cities and the Maginot Line. These protective schemes have always fallen to a determined enemy who had a better idea...