Well, here we go again. You get a new president, a little tiff goes down with a Communist nation and wham — in comes the Cold War doom and gloom.

As if the whole thing with China isn’t blown out of proportion enough, now we have to contend with irrationality in the White House. (Scratch that — there has never been rationality in the White House.) George Bush has proposed the absolution of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was the foundation of U.S. and Soviet (and now Russian) nuclear policy.

For those unfamiliar with the treaty, it banned production of long-range missiles and missile systems used as defensive measures to intercept incoming warheads or ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). The policy this agreement was based upon was something called MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, the widely-held agreement that if the Soviets launched a nuclear strike against the U.S. it would be detected, and the U.S. would respond with an all-out nuclear attack.

In other words, if any missiles go off, good-bye inhabitable planet.

The argument was that a defense system of missiles capable of intercepting long-range nuclear missiles would give one side an unfair advantage. Then that side could easily strike first and play defense for victory. Ronald Reagan tried to circumvent this with his “Star Wars” plan to put satellites into orbit that could shoot down incoming missiles. Anyway, the whole reason George Bush wants out of the treaty is to build a new batch of intercepting defense missiles that theoretically could stop incoming warheads.

While this may sound like a prudent plan to some, for others it seems rather wasteful and absurd. Let us take a moment to examine exactly what this missile array would necessitate.

First, the funding to even get the project off the ground. Now, realistically, simply for research and development of the weapons, that has to figure around a couple hundred million dollars. The one thing that stands in the way of even developing successful prototypes is that they are nearly impossible to test. Short-range interception missiles such as the Patriot Missile were effective in defending Israel during the Gulf War. Long-range missiles are not only much more difficult to build and develop but also much more expensive to operate. These proposed super long-range interceptors also would have to be able to track many, many targets at one time. One ICBM can hold hundreds of individual warheads of various strengths, and multiple missiles would add up into a whole lot of individual targets to track down. This is a nearly impossible task to achieve with any margin of error.

Now I must say that logistically, there would have to at least be twice as many intercepting missiles as there would be possible incoming missiles, so that makes a few hundred thousand defense missiles.

Now, if these things actually worked and they were built, what is the realistic chance that they would need to be used? Of course at this point critics of my point of view are saying, “But that is the point — that these would be deterrents because the world would know we would win.”

Let us examine this logically from a slightly less paranoid point of view. As the situation stands right now, I can’t really say that anyone would believe they could attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons and not see some kind of counterattack. Therefore, why even consider this in the first place, if the situation that exists today already achieves the goal?

My answer is rather simple: the military industrial complex. George Bush is a person who wholeheartedly wants to strengthen and build the military while giving money and government contracts to big business.

What better way to achieve it than to spend millions or billions on a system that probably won’t work but will certainly stand as a flexion of U.S. military and economic muscle? It will do exactly what he says the Democrats have been doing so much of for the last eight years — spend tax dollars unnecessarily.

Well, here is a novel idea. Maybe both parties are only concerned with spending public dollars toward private interests to keep the economy stimulated. I think it is, and has been, the job of government to keep the circulation of the capitalist system going for the last 150 years. In true Keynesian economic fashion, Bush is spending money to increase the wealth of the rich while saying he is doing something for the good of the whole nation.

This plan of missile armament also is unwise because of the fact that an increase in our military could lead to an all-out 21st century arms race and Cold War with China. I think everyone in the universe knows that is not a good idea. It seems rather ignorant and ludicrous that increasing arms leads to long-term peace.

If we really want to prevent war, we should take a step toward more open involvement and cooperation between nations outside of simple “free trade.” Then again, why has anything the government has done made sense? Try and have a nice summer.