13 December 2018
Ding Dong Merrily On High
Take cover!
By Neil Tidmarsh
Look up there – those lights in the night sky – flashing all kinds of colours through the December darkness… What are they? Are they your neighbour’s Christmas lights, strung across his roof and the trees in his garden? Or are they the Northern Lights? Or is it the Geminid meteor shower? Or Father Christmas and his sledge and his reindeer?
Or is it an intercontinental ballistic missile?
No, no, of course not. What a stupid suggestion. Even more stupid than the idea that it might be Father Christmas (who must exist, after all, as someone was arrested in Cleburne, Texas, USA, this week for claiming in public that there is no Santa Claus). There’s the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty of 1987, for a start, and 2015’s anti-nuke deal with Iran, and the bromance between President Trump and Kim Jong-un which blossomed in Singapore last June with promises to ditch North Korea’s dangerous arsenal. Isn’t there?
Well…
This week, the White House finally admitted that Kim has made little effort to denuclearise his country since that meeting. National security adviser John Bolton declared that the North Koreans “have not lived up to the commitments so far”. In fact, new satellite photos – commissioned by CNN and analysed by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies – appear to show that the missile base at Yeongjeo-dong (capable of launching nuclear strikes at the US mainland) not only “remains active” but is also being expanded; a new missile base is being built seven miles away. The Middlebury Institute report stated “Whatever Kim says about his desire for denuclearisation, North Korea continues to produce and deploy nuclear-armed missiles”.
Also this week, secretary of state Mike Pompeo again accused Russia of being in “material breach” of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty (signed by Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987), and repeated the warning that the USA will pull out of the treaty if Russia does not return to “full and verifiable compliance” within 60 days. Washington claims that Russia’s testing of its SSC-8 cruise missile has violated the treaty (while Moscow claims that the USA bases in Poland and Romania also violate the treaty). It has been suggested that the White House wants to be free of the treaty’s constraints in order to be able to counter any threat from China, which isn’t a signatory to the treaty.
Russia responded by announcing that its Peresvet system – a defence system which uses laser weapons to destroy attacking missiles, planes and drones – became fully operational at the weekend. That puts it ahead of the USA – the US navy is still testing its laser defence system, which won’t come into service until some time next year. Russia also sent two nuclear-capable planes on a flight of over 6000-plus miles to Venezuela. The Tupolev Tu-160 bombers can carry cruise missiles with a range of almost 3500 miles, and they’re currently sitting on the tar-mac of a runway at an airport near Caracas. How far is that from the USA? Further than Cuba, for sure, but closer than 3500 miles? Time for worried US citizens to check the atlas.
Meanwhile, in Iran – the anti-nuke deal of 2015 bans the development of nuclear warheads, but it doesn’t ban the testing of ballistic missiles. This week, Iran fired a ballistic missile in the latest test in a programme which has already included as many as fifty tests this year. The missile was described by Iran’s Fars news agency as “significant”. It has a range of 3000km, which means it could reach Israel… and western Europe? How far is it from Iran to Britain? Time for worried Europeans to check the atlas.
Then again, perhaps those lights in the night sky are something else altogether. Something even more sinister and worrying than a ballistic missile.
Two days ago, Nasa announced that the Voyager Two space probe – now 11 billion miles from Earth and travelling at a speed of 35,000 miles per hour – has left the ‘heliosphere’, the region of our sun, and is on its way to other stars. It’s only the second man-made object to make its way into interstellar space; Voyager One preceded it six years ago. Both probes were launched in 1977; they carry information about the human race and planet Earth, to enlighten any aliens they encounter out there in other solar systems. This information includes recordings of music and messages of greeting in 50 or so languages, photographs of life on Earth, and a declaration by US president Jimmy Carter that “we hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations.” Oh, and a map showing them how to find us.
Is that wise? I was reminded of a recently published book, The Red Atlas, by John Davis and Alexander Kent, which reprints the alarmingly accurate and detailed maps of the USA and Europe which the Soviet army put together in preparation for a Russian invasion of the West in the event of World War III breaking out.
Won’t the Voyagers’ maps make it easy for those aliens to invade us? And you can be sure that such advanced civilisations will have weapons which will make even our own doomsday bombs look pathetic and primitive. The forty-year old maps might be out of date, but once the space invaders get here they’ll have no difficulty in locating those missile bases – whether Russian or North Korean or Iranian or American – and knocking them all out in the blink of an alien’s reptilian eye-lid. Wait – perhaps an alien invasion isn’t such an alarming prospect after all – the instant denuclearisation of planet Earth…
Either way, they’ll probably be too late. The Voyagers won’t reach the first star for another 40,000 years. What’s the betting we’ll have blown ourselves and our planet to kingdom come long before then?
