US to spend $1 billion to install missile defense radar in Hawaii

A billion dollar antiballistic radar system is being planned for development in Hawaii in order to counter nuclear ICBM threats from somewhere. Even though, at the present moment, there aren’t any threatening postures from nations with ICBM tech, the need to spend 1$ billion on detecting and combatting those ICBMs is apparently greater than ever before, at least according to some congressmen.

RT reports

The flat-face surface radar would “counter evolving missile threats in the Pacific Region”, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) says. Although the timing of the radar’s construction seems curious given current efforts at rapprochement with North Korea, plans for the military installation actually predate the Trump administration. The radar system was mandated by the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, which was signed into law by Barack Obama in December 2016.

The system would be able to differentiate warheads from decoys on the potential incoming missiles launched towards the US before relaying the trajectory to interceptors in Alaska to take them out. The proposed radar would help identify long-range ballistic missile threats mid-way through flight.

Currently, the MDA is surveying two sites on the island of Oahu as the possible resting place of the radar that would be about 9 to 15 meters wide and 18 to 24 meters high, AP reported.

So far lawmakers have secured $61 million in funding for the planning stage of the project but have yet to appropriate funds to construct the $1 billion system, Democratic Senator Brian Schatz told AP.

The senator from Hawaii said that his state already boasts “robust capabilities” but aims to have “the most powerful combination of missile interceptors and radar systems anywhere.”

While the MDA is reportedly collecting public comments about the installation sites through July 16, it remains questionable whether the expansive project will materialize, after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump made history at a top-level summit in Singapore earlier this month, paving the way for reconciliation and denuclearization of the Peninsula.

Are the Americans looking for war? The current environment considers that the objective conditions for war including ICBMs is actually quite small, that is barring some crazy pretext and military action being taken by the West in order to justify their next piece of preemptive military action, no doubt to be of a ‘precise’ nature, as in Trump’s recent Coalition strikes in Syria.

The threat of facing off against these kinds of weapons is objectively on the decline as North Korea is looking for peace and offering to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and testing facilities, and as long as the JCPOA stays intact, the Iranians aren’t developing a nuclear weapons arsenal, so unless the US plans to engage in a hot war with the threats that it is presently identifying and economically countering, i.e. China and Russia, then there would really be little need to implement such a system at this point in time, when the federal budget has other needs and uses for those funds. But, security sells, even when volcanoes are the only active threat.