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Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars

by Mel Hurtig

To say the Bush administration has shrewdly and cynically used the events of Sept. 11 to launch the most aggressive military build-up and unilateral foreign policy since the Cold War probably qualifies as understatement. Bush’s hubris knows no bounds and neither, it seems, does the U.S. budget for military boondoggles.

Political gadfly Mel Hurtig attacks the mother of all boondoggles – the U.S. weaponization of space through a Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system, or Star Wars – in his latest book. Rushing to Armageddon is a quickie polemic filled with quotes from military experts, hypocritical Canadian politicians afraid to give offence to our powerful neighbours, and concerned scientists, journalists, and peace activists who have a vested interest in not seeing the human race incinerated in a nuclear disaster.

The book is more of an extended, slightly disjointed, Harper’s Magazine-style forum, with Hurtig backing up his apocalyptic assertions with arguments culled from the anti-weaponization troops while shooting down the naïve or willfully misleading and disingenuous statements of Canadian politicians. He attacks the assertions of Prime Minister Paul Martin and his various Liberal ministers, but also Conservative leader Stephen Harper and, of course, George Bush Jr.

Hurtig suggests, and is backed up by many observers, including some of Martin’s own cabinet ministers, that a BMD system is costly and unworkable, but that Canada may sign on anyway in a political attempt to placate America for the former’s lack of participation in the invasion of Iraq. Some of the Pentagon’s own experts are quoted here as having concluded that the technology just isn’t there yet. Other observers say missiles in space will spark a new arms race. In short, argues Hurtig, the technology doesn’t work and the world will be more unstable as a result.

Three handy appendices give a brief history of the American BMD program, list valuable websites for exploring the subject further, and offer an executive summary of the anachronistic Cold War thinking that still dominates upper levels of the U.S. government. This document is an impassioned plea and an informative primer on the debate over placing weapons in space. In the absence of much mainstream media coverage of the subject, the book takes on even more importance.

 

Reviewer: Stephen Knight

Publisher: McClelland and Stewart

DETAILS

Price: $19.99

Page Count: 230 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-7710-4162-4

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 2004-11

Categories: Politics & Current Affairs