Word: shield
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Last Thursday, President Obama announced that he is scaling down plans to deploy a missile shield involving complex Eastern European bases on Polish and Czech ground. The expensive and technologically advanced long-range missile shield will be replaced by a more efficient and technologically feasible system of sensors and interceptors. We believe the decision was a sensible one, especially since the new plan relies on technology that has been tested and proven efficient, whereas the older plan relied on dubious, expensive technology that was still being developed...
...Part of the furor over Obama's decision results from the fact that ever since President Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, a.k.a. Star Wars) 26 years ago, the notion of a global missile shield has become an obsession for many of his ideological acolytes. They tend to view any retreat as surrendering to the forces of evil, even though Obama's decision was blessed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates - who had originally recommended the European scheme in 2006 while serving as Defense Secretary to President George W. Bush. In justifying the move, Gates and others cite intelligence...
...York Times proclaimed in a front-page headline Friday that Obama's decision "Scales Back Reagan's Vision," although, as the Times reported in 1991, that was done by the first President Bush. "President Bush's decision to reduce the goals of the 'Star Wars' program from an impenetrable shield to a limited defense against missile attacks is a milestone in the government's slow rejection of Ronald Reagan's grandiose aims," the paper reported 18 years ago. That was back when SDI morphed into a scaled-down version dubbed Global Protection Against Limited Strikes (GPALS...
...spent well north of $100 billion in the effort to create a technological shield to protect its mainland from incoming missiles - much of it on long-forgotten and never used systems such as Nike, Nike Zeus, Nike-X, Sentinel and Safeguard. The grandest of these, the Safeguard system, was built nearly 40 years ago in Nekoma, N.D. Huge earth-moving machines dug up 1.75 million cu. yd. of rich, black loam from the 470-acre site. Contractors built the base with 160,000 cu. yd. of concrete and 12,000 tons of steel. They crowned their work with a partly...
Read "Obama Shelves U.S. Missile Shield: The Winners and Losers...