Word: pentagons
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Missile defense continues to ebb and flow with the perceptions of nuclear threat. Since 2002, the Pentagon has pumped more than $60 billion into new antimissile missiles now on guard against North Korean launches in the Pacific. But the system--likened to hitting a bullet with a bullet--too often fails what are essentially open-book tests. That it could annihilate an actual warhead is still an article of faith...
...long argued that no sanctions will prompt a regime that has invested so much in developing a nuclear program to simply reverse course; rather, they see the choices as boiling down to one between military strikes and accepting a nuclear-armed Iran. But military strikes are opposed by the Pentagon for two reasons: even in the best case they would simply delay Iran's nuclear progress, and they would prompt a backlash that could dramatically destabilize the region. Indeed, as a result, Iran could even move from its current ambiguous policy toward a clearly enunciated and accelerated nuclear-weapons program...
...Cohesion among the ethnic groups, which spent considerable time fighting one another as well as the junta, could change the nature of battle in Burma. At the KIA's self-styled Pentagon, a collection of simple concrete buildings on a breezy hilltop, members of other ethnic groups have come to be schooled in military tactics from one of the most tenacious rebel militias. One youth leader from the western state of Arakan spoke to me in smooth, American-inflected English. "I need to do something practical," he said. "I need to prepare for war. Politics in this country is crap...
...implications for national policy should be drawn out: If the government could not protect the Pentagon with roughly an hour’s notice, maybe we should not let it abrogate the rule of law in the name of rapid and effective national defense. If our hair-trigger responses could not stop the hijackers, maybe we should slow things down and focus on wisdom rather than speed. We now know that decisions made rashly in the aftermath of 9/11 (spying on citizens, torturing suspects, detaining without trial men of unproven guilt) were of dubious effectiveness. Just as significantly, no obvious...
...canisters he handled, he says, were labeled "112" for Project 112, a top-secret Cold War U.S. military program conducted between 1962 and 1973 that involved experiments with chemical and biological weapons. Project 112's records were finally declassified at the start of this decade, but the Pentagon as yet does not acknowledge a link between the chemical tests and the spate of illnesses suffered since then by servicemen like Marrero, who is still fighting to get his veteran's medical benefits. "I'd always ask how safe that stuff was and those Navy chemical guys always told...