The Heritage Foundation’s high-definition documentary “33 Minutes: Protecting America in the New Missile Age” explains the history of missile defense, the present global nuclear threat, and what the U.S. must do to protect itself and the world. This film serves as a wake-up call to complacency and apathy. While many countries in the world may be against us, we’ve always counted on the tenacity of freedom-loving people to remind our leaders of the constitutional mandate to protect and defend.

Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, will hold a screening of the film on September 9 at 7 p.m., at Tate Hall. For more information, follow this link.

– Aviation Week reports that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is preparing to launch billions of dollars worth of missile defense projects, even as the MDA deals with contractors building parts that don’t hold up.

– The MDA awarded U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin awarded a $69.8 million contract to develop land-based version of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System.

– India seeks to develop laser-guided anti-ballistic missiles to combat incoming missiles. Earlier this year, India tested a missile interceptor defense shield, designed to detect and destroy incoming ballistic missiles, but the test failed after radar lost track of the Prithvi 2 target missile.

– Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly shared her opposition to the new START. An excerpt:

“The Russians are salivating at the thought that the New START proclaims their victory in their long-running battle to kill U.S. missile defenses. For decades, Russia’s primary goal was to stop the United States from building any anti-missile capability.

“Ronald Reagan’s adamant refusal to give up his Strategic Defense Initiative was the principal reason he won the Cold War (without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher said). But now Barack Obama is casually willing to abandon our right to build defensive weapons…New START doesn’t make nukes obsolete, it just tries to ensure that the U.S. and Russia have an equal capacity to destroy each other. Most important, New START does nothing whatever to protect us from a nuclear Iran or North Korea or Syria or even China.”

The Heritage Foundation’s James Carafano responds on The Daily Caller to an article written by Josh Rogin on the new START. An excerpt of his response:

“Josh Rogin took note when a major Tea Party group rallied against New START, the arms control treaty Obama signed with the Russians.

“He was right to pay attention. The Tea Parties have said little on defense issues. Some on the Left had high hopes, even as they trashed the Tea Parties, that the latter might actually join them in an effort to cut defense spending; bail on Afghanistan; and scale back on America’s overseas footprint.

“The arms-control Left was also probably hoping that Tea Party followers would become part of a bipartisan “anti-military” arms-control coalition.

“This hope appears dashed. Indeed, Liberty Central’s decision to oppose New START suggests that the Tea Partiers are part of the “peace through strength” coalition. In a related development, the First Coast Tea Party in Florida is hosting a screening of the pro-missile defense documentary “33 Minutes” on Sept. 7. These developments are big news.

“If Rogin had stuck to the story, rather than try to play arms-control expert, his piece may have been more accurate. He went on, however, to ridicule the anti-New Start argument, suggesting that the Tea Parties are out of their league and don’t know what they are talking about. The problem is, most of his “gotchas” are either misleading or just plain wrong.

“The Tea Parties are more right than Rogin…Rogin asserts that missile defense was never about defeating a Soviet/Russian nuclear strike. This is not quite right. The Reagan administration sought to couple missile defense and arms control in order to end the U.S.’s vulnerability to such a strike. While missile defense alone would not end this vulnerability, it was an essential part of Reagan’s ‘peace through strength’ policy. New START seeks to minimize the importance of missile defense and resurrect the old ‘Mutual Assured Destruction,’ or MAD, balance of terror — a policy that leaves the U.S. intentionally vulnerable to Russian missile strikes.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling blogs at The Foundry about support and opposition for the new START, lame duck session voting, the negotiating record, and other related issues. An excerpt:

“The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is scheduling a vote for mid-September on the treaty. Lugar told C-SPAN that “on the 15th and 16th of September we will have a markup of the Treaty in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. My prediction is that the markup will lead to the Senate committee sending to the floor the New START treaty.” The votes are present in the committee to discharge the treaty.

“Democrats plan to pass the treaty in committee and then await possible consideration after the November elections for a vote during the expected lame duck session of Congress before a new Congress is sworn in. When asked by Warren Strobel of McClatchy Newspapers if he believed that the treaty would pass, Lugar responded that ‘I am not predicting anything.’ This treaty does not have the confident support of many in the Senate because of the missile defense issue.

“As Baker Spring has written for The Foundry, New START may increase the possibility of a nuclear exchange with Russia, and the Russians have conditioned support for the treaty on the U.S. agreeing to degrade missile defense capabilities.”

Darling points out the unfortunate fact that Russia got the U.S. to capitulate on missile defense, and even threatened to withdraw from START if we don’t reduce our capabilities. Additionally, Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have requested the negoitating record, and the Obama administration has denied the request.

“Missile defense is going to be a big issue in the debate on the New START treaty, and any prediction as to the possibility of this treaty passing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and then the full Senate is premature. Until Senators have a full grasp of the ramifications of the treaty for missile defense.”

Robert Monroe, a retired vice admiral in the U.S. Navy and former director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on why the U.S. Senate should block START ratification.

“It is the first major step in the implementation of Mr. Obama’s broader nuclear strategy. This strategy would gravely weaken American national security.

“The Obama administration’s nuclear policy is set out in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which was released in April, two days before the signing of New Start. The NPR is joined at the hip with New Start, and together they take this country down a dangerous path. For 65 years, the very existence of our nation has depended upon a strong nuclear deterrent. The new NPR wipes out this proven policy, substituting one of weakness in its place.

“Mr. Obama’s NPR treats nuclear weapons as an evil to be eliminated, rather than as the ultimate foundation of America’s security in a dangerous world. The review opens with Mr. Obama’s pledge to ’seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons’ and ‘to take concrete steps toward that goal, including by reducing the number of nuclear weapons and their role in national security policy.’”

In an ideal world, there’d be no need for nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we live in this world. Nuclear weapons provide the necessary leverage we need to limit global conflicts. As Monroe points out, such a weapon ended World War II. We must maintain an up-to-date arsenal of nuclear weapons to “encourage” countries like Iran and North Korea to think twice about unleashing their enmity on the world. But our president doesn’t see it that way.

“Mr. Obama’s NPR amounts to a road map for achieving a position of strategic inferiority. As other states improve their nuclear arsenals, we will be carrying out unilateral nuclear disarmament…How have we come to this?”

An excerpt of James Carafano’s article on Security Debrief:

“As Matthew Harwood’s August 5, 2010 article in Security Management reminds us, Homeland Security has not ‘taken seriously the threat that a high-altitude detonation of a nuclear weapon could fry the nation’s power grid[.]‘

“As the article notes, Dr. Michael J. Frankel ‘warned the Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security that a terrorist organization or a rogue state could detonate a nuclear weapon either above the United States or close to its shores, creating an electromagnetic pulse attack that could severely damage the country’s electronic infrastructure.’

“Frankel is executive director of the EMP Commission, which was created in 2001 to study the national security threat an EMP attack could pose to the United States.

“While most of its work is classified, the commission has released two unclassified reports: one in 2004 and another in 2008. According to the article ‘Frankel believes DHS has the expertise in-house to tackle EMP preparedness but needs a Senate-confirmed leader to lead the charge. Already DHS has taken action against nuclear terrorist attack scenarios but continues to ignore the threat of an EMP attack, he said, even though the commission provided the department with 75 unclassified recommendations to mitigate vulnerabilities and promote resiliency in U.S. critical infrastructures.’”

Former assistant secretary of state Stephen G. Rademaker wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post about a third voting option available to senators as they deliberate on the new START.

Rather than voting a straight yes, senators may vote yes, contingent on certain conditions. If treaty supporters have the required two-thirds vote, however, they can try to deny this option to senators who request more information before voting.

Rademaker illustrates the point by reminding us how the Senate voted on the 1999 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

“In that case, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) threatened to obstruct all work in the Senate unless the Republican leadership agreed to schedule a yes-or-no vote. The Republican leadership acquiesced. With senators forced to choose between just two options, 48 voted yes — while 51 voted no.

“Many arms-control supporters realized afterward that they had made a huge mistake. They came to compare their approach on the test-ban treaty unfavorably to the tack they had taken two years earlier on the Chemical Weapons Convention.

“When that convention was under consideration, they recognized from the outset that many senators had reservations. So supporters engaged in a formal process with potential opponents over a period of months, identifying their individual concerns and negotiating language to address those concerns in the resolution of approval. The convention was approved 74 to 26.”

According to Rademaker, Republican senators asked the administration to share the negotiating record for the new START, and the administration has refused. They asked Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair John Kerry to call a list of nine witnesses to testify, and only one of the nine was invited.

“[I]f treaty critics aren’t going to be accommodated on questions of process, they almost certainly aren’t going to be accommodated on substance. This is regrettable, because while the critics have raised serious substantive concerns, most of those concerns could be addressed in a properly crafted resolution of approval.”

Whatever concerns Republicans have about the treaty can be addressed with resolutions that limit restrictions. But the majority is playing hard politics, with little inclination to achieve a strong bipartisan vote on START.

Henry Sokolski , executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C., has written an article for Armed Forces Journal on our current missile defense capabilities. An excerpt:

“In an effort to reduce U.S. military reliance on nuclear weapons, the Obama administration is emphasizing how much more America can rely on advanced non-nuclear weapons to defend its interests, allies and friends. There’s only one problem: The White House’s plans to deploy these forces — including new non-nuclear missile defenses and long-range conventional ballistic missiles — don’t quite add up.

“The missile defense system the Obama administration has advocated may be incapable of countering the missile threat the Pentagon is projecting. Meanwhile, the long-range conventional ballistic missile system it’s working on is unlikely to be able to reach anything but a mere handful of targets.

“None of this, however, is inevitable. Both programs can be enhanced, but only at the risk of upsetting America’s two largest potential rivals: China and Russia. Still, enhancing these programs will limit the harm either competitor might otherwise be able to inflict on the U.S. and its allies. More important, it would put the U.S. in a far better position to get Beijing and Moscow to agree to deep ground-based missile reductions and to cooperate on missile defenses, which, in turn, would make all parties far safer.

“This is conceivable if the U.S. had the right offensive and defensive programs in place. Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet.

“Take the administration’s missile defense efforts. The Pentagon announced last fall it was deploying the first fully tested version of a system known as the Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) to neutralize Iran’s shorter range rockets. After 2018, it says it will begin deploying an entirely new variant to neutralize Iran’s intermediate and intercontinental-range ballistic missiles. U.S. intelligence agencies last fall said Iran was most likely to deploy these sometime after 2020.

“This all seemed sound enough until Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced in April that, with sufficient foreign assistance, Iran’s longest range rockets could fly by 2015 — five years earlier than originally projected. Some outside experts have doubted that the much ballyhooed advanced variant of the SM-3 — the SM-3 Block II B — could be effective against intercontinental ballistic missiles on any timeline. There has never been any question, though, of the Pentagon being able to field it before 2015. It can’t.”

During START negotiations, missile defense experts were concerned about a rumored link between offensive and defensive missile strategy. As it turns out, those concerns were warranted. The preamble to the new START includes language that reads as experts suspected.

The Heritage Foundation’s Kim Holmes discusses this issue in a Washington Times op-ed. An excerpt:

“Treaty supporters in the U.S. say this language is merely rhetorical; it won’t restrict our ability to defend against missiles from Iran, North Korea or elsewhere. It’s stunning how easily they dismiss Russia’s interpretation. They should review a little history. The Russians may know something they don’t.

“For example, under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty with the Soviet Union, the U.S. consistently placed limitations on ‘theater’ (shorter-range) air and missile defense systems the treaty did not officially cover. Why? Because Pentagon attorneys feared controversy with the Soviets. Their guidance led the U.S. to ‘dumb down’ the Patriot missile so that it could intercept only ’slow and low’ missiles, though nothing in the ABM Treaty required such design and testing limits. As a result, former Strategic Defense Initiative Director Henry F. Cooper confirmed later, ‘In the 1970s, no ballistic missile defense capability was given to [the developmental] SAM-D, now called Patriot.’

“So what’s wrong with shaving a little capability? … It ultimately costs lives.”

Unfortunately, the U.S. has a history of appeasing Russia when it comes to missile defense. Holmes provides several examples of our country intentionally downscaling missile defense capacity. The new START is a repeat of earlier restrictions on U.S. missile defense. While Russia is being honest about those restrictions, President Barack Obama and his administration deny them.