Trading fur coats

The Nuclear Winter soothsayers are back with a somewhat modified horoscope. It won't be quite as cold as in the previous version, and they have fed some different data to their com-puterized apocalypse, but "the basic physics of the phenomenon has remained unchanged" [who's arguing with that?].

An item in this issue reports some of the physical fallacies in the updated horoscope; but to this day little notice is taken of the methods by which this propaganda is pushed by the media machine and little or no publicity is given to the real scientists, whose fatal objections go unanswered in this "update."

The political thrust (was there ever any other?) of Horo-scope I was the lie that defense of freedom is unsurvivable. Horoscope II comes at a time when survivability is no longer an issue for those who decree what is to be debated. Defense of freedom, they now tell us, is unnecessary, for communism and the USSR are crumbling; there are no more military threats. And like imbeciles who trade their fur coats for swimming suits in a January thaw, the adherents of this thesis haggle over what the "peace dividend" is to be spent on.

Their argument is both false and irrelevant. It is false because the Soviet army is now in better shape with more modern arms than it was when Gorbachev came to power; because hundreds of Soviet nuclear missiles remain targeted at the Free World; because Soviet forces have withdrawn from no colonies except Afghanistan (where their viceroys receive ample weapons while the US has cut supplies to their opponents); because their Cuban surrogates remain in Angola and other outposts; because the flow of Soviet weapons to Central America continues.

But suppose the Soviet threat were indeed gone forever; is there to be no defense against Libyan, Iraqi, Syrian, or Iranian fanatics? The Iraquis have already demonstrated their long-range missiles, a far more difficult feat than to equip them with nuclear warheads.

The answer to both and any other threats, of course, is SDI, the space shield. It protects American lives instead of avenging them; it kills the enemy's missiles, not their people.