Word: shielding
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Pentagon officials were left scratching their heads late Tuesday over the latest ominous anti-U.S.-missile-shield pronouncement from the Russian foreign ministry. It warned of unspecified military action shortly after the nearby Czech Republic agreed to be the new home of an aging missile-defense radar system that has spent the last nine years at Kwajalein Atoll in the south Pacific. "We will be forced to react not with diplomatic, but with military-technical methods" if the shield is ever deployed, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The tracking radar slated to move to the Czech...
Defense Department officials were exasperated and frustrated as, once again, the Russian government denounced the expansion of the fledgling U.S. missile shield that U.S. officials maintain is designed only to protect parts of Europe as well as the United States. "No one's name [in the Russian government] is attached to it," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told TIME shortly after the Russians released their saber-rattling statement. "It's being reported as a foreign ministry statement - and it's got strange wording in it like 'We would be forced to react with military resources' or 'technical means' - what does that...
...Pentagon officials have wooed the Russians with enticements to get them to participate in the shield, saying that Tehran threatens Moscow as well as other Eurasian nations. Iran's newest missile, the intermediate range Shahab 3, can reach European capitals, although marrying it to a nuclear warhead remains a daunting technical challenge, U.S. officials say. Moscow has steadfastly declined to cooperate, saying the shield actually is a ploy to blunt Russia's own missile force. "This system is not designed to counter a Russian threat - this system is designed to counter what is an emerging threat from the Middle East...
...While President Bush is eager to cement the European element of the missile-defense shield before he leaves office, actually building and deploying it would fall to his successor. Presumptive Republican nominee Arizona Sen. John McCain backs the proposal, while Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has been less supportive. What really matters isn't what either does - or what the Russians say - but what the Iranians do. The closer Tehran is believed to having a nuclear weapon, Pentagon officials say, the more inevitable such a Euroshield becomes...
Five years ago this week, the United State Supreme Court delivered its most sweeping gay rights decision ever, striking down laws in Texas and other states that had criminalized sex between gays. The court erected a shield of privacy around sexual behavior for all consenting adults, and in doing so paved the way for other milestones in the gay rights legal movement, including judicial victories for gay marriage in Nov. 2003 in Massachusetts and this year in California...