Foreword

"What if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by

an outer -- power from outer space -- from another planet."

-- The Honorable Ronald Reagan,

President of the United States of America

(from a speech given in 1988).

Nature abhors a vacuum; particularly a political vacuum. The collapse of the Soviet

empire has provoked such a vacuum.

The Russian nuclear missile threat has diminished. Sunken Soviet submarines lay on the

ocean floor, slowly bleeding their radioactivity into the sea. The hastily contrived tomb of what

was once Chernobyl crumbles away, creating homes for vermin and winged predators.

With the demise of the Russian nuclear missile force, the attention of American defense

scientists and engineers suddenly turned away from Earth to the stars. We're now told that

asteroids and comets crashing through the heavens will wreak havoc on Earth, ending life as we

know it.

Nemesis. Is the impending terrestrial collision with a five-mile wide asteroid called

Nemesis real, imagined, or a handy means of disguising something else? Something so horrific

that even the ones standing watch would rather not comprehend. Why else would the defense

establishment continue to pump the nation's increasingly scarce financial resources into Star

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Wars technology ostensibly meant to counter a Soviet missile onslaught, now believed to be

have been forever abated.

The juxtaposition of Nemesis and the demise of the Soviet empire must be placed in its

proper context. Certain disparate events from the last several decades need to be analyzed.

The United States Navy suddenly intensified its series of geomagnetic profiling flights in

the late sixties. Using specially equipped Lockheed P-3B Orions, these flights paid special

attention to the Caribbean Sea and the persistent rumors of magnetic anomalies in this region.

Aviators reported that their compasses could not be depended upon when flying routes through

this area. Some actually became disoriented, crashing into the sea.

About the same time, the United States government launched an extraordinary effort to

probe the hydrosphere, the Earth's vast and unforgiving oceans. It was called the "last frontier."

These studies were also concentrated in an area located off the coast of the United States in the

Caribbean, just south of Bermuda.

Research funds poured forth as though someone had opened King Midas' vaults. Then,

just as quickly, the funding dried to a meager trickle. There continued to be rumors from time to

time of secret projects. Occasionally, a scientific paper would disclose an event that suggested

massive oceanographic research was still underway.

In the early seventies the public was surprised by the accidental unveiling of the Glomar

Challenger. The Glomar Challenger was a mysterious ship, ostensibly designed to conduct deep

ocean drilling. Its cover as a deep sea drilling platform was blown when newspapers published

accounts of non-drilling equipment on its decks. When confronted, the American government

retorted that the Glomar Challenger had a simple mission: retrieve sunken Russian submarines.

It seemed that the borders of the last frontier had shut for all time, but not without the

news of the so-called "Morrow Affair," news that was quickly disavowed. Even today the

official word is that there was no Morrow Affair, that no anomalous magnetic signature was ever

recorded in the Caribbean or anywhere else, for that matter, and that the Glomar Challenger was

built only to salvage sunken Soviet submarines.

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 About the same time, NASA began several ambitious programs to explore deep space.

Radio telescopes probed the heavens for errant radio signals. Called SETI, the program searched

for intelligent life. Plans for Hubble were started and deep space probes were accelerated. It

seemed the nation urgently needed to prove that life was unique to this planet. The event called

Roswell continues to dominate national debate, despite the government's best efforts to cover it

up -- it was after all "just a weather balloon."

Attention has been given to the heavens not for just scientific reasons, but for military

ones as well. The need for a manned space station became a critical component of the military

mission -- the need for "high ground." The United States military concerned itself with attacks

from putative Russian missiles fired from orbiting launch stations -- an event leading to the

development of Star Wars technology.

With the advent of the nineties the Russian military system collapsed, suddenly the

Russian bear wasn't so fearsome anymore. The demise of the ursine threat did not abate the need

for this missile-intercepting technology. Despite the urgent need for deficit reduction and the

fundamental redirection of all the world's major economies, neither Star Wars nor Space Station

Freedom has suffered deep cut-backs.

Nemesis now sits where Khrushchev once banged his shoe on the lectern wood.

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