“I Screwed Up” Won’t Cut it on Missile Defense

Conn Carroll / February 09, 2009

Heritage fellow James Carafano writes in the DC Examiner:

No issue carries greater potential for crisis than the growing threat of missile attack. Last week, Iran launched its first homemade satellite into space. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hassan Qashqavi assured an alarmed world that “Iran’s space advancement serves no military purpose.”

He is probably right… today. But Americans should be worried today, for the same reason they worried when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957: the launch demonstrates the increasing sophistication of a hostile nation’s ballistic missile program.

Layer that on top of Iran’s rapidly progressing nuclear program (which they also claim has no military purpose), and you have to wonder when Iran will drop the other shoe—a “surprise” test of its first nuclear weapon.
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