Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft, deploying an enormous ray gun against an airborne armada was especially hilarious in 1983, the year he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, that vaporizer of foreign nuclear missiles.
Reckless foreign missile sales and human rights abuses continue, as do allegations of international drug trafficking.
Now, he continued, the cold war "became total, a competition for the loyalty and trust of all peoples fought out in all arenas of social achievement, in which science textbooks and racial harmony were as much tools of foreign policy as missiles and spies".
Such an agenda calls for a comprehensive approach that relies on a wider range of foreign policy tools than cruise missiles.
The American intelligence community's assessment will be contained in a new official intelligence report on the responses of foreign governments to a United States missile defense.
The American proposal could even increase the ratio of Soviet warheads to United States missile silos, said John Steinbruner, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.
Hours after the UK and France's actions at the EU meeting of foreign ministers on Monday, Russia announced delivery of the S-300 missiles to Syria.
Powell is wary, though, of making missile defense the tail that wags the dog of foreign policy.
About two hours later, two more missiles hit a village in South Waziristan, killing seven people, including a number of foreign militants, the officials said.
The missiles, believed to be shoulder-launched SA-16s, are displayed in a video allegedly made by a Chechen-dominated jihadist group of foreign fighters.
