Like the US, Britain is offering a range of practical security-related assistance measures, including tracking down Gaddafi's vast missile stores.
The language was positively Clintonian, but as many conservatives were quick to note, Mr. Bush had not actually changed any of the Republican Party's core principles -- from its opposition to abortion, to its support for large tax cuts, to its backing of a vast missile defense system, to its search for conservative Supreme Court justices.
The vast and expensive missile defense program -- costing about $150 billion since its inception -- has thus far produced remarkably meager results.
Though the announcement did not say so, the classified strikes took place in Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, and the vast majority used missiles fired from unmanned drone aircraft, though a few used piloted jets or cruise missiles fired from the sea.
Syria already has a vast arsenal of missiles able to reach Turkey or strike Israel, and in the past it has provided Hezbollah with missiles.
The Chinese military is deploying vast numbers of missiles (including carrier killers), hard-to-find submarines, long-range sensors to track and target U.S. forces, anti-satellite weapons, digital networks to coordinate attacks and cyberwar weapons to crash U.S. networks.
North and South Waziristan are where the vast bulk of US missile strikes by drone aircraft have taken place.
Here and at a score of other sites now being pored over by United Nations weapons inspectors lies a vast scrapyard of rusting missile casings, fermenters, pressure vessels, pipes, valves, fuel tanks and control panels.
But analysts say he is unlikely to weaken sanctions or reduce diplomatic pressure, given the much higher risks presented by North Korea after a decade of nuclear tests and vast improvements in its missile technology.
In the vast literature the Cuban missile crisis has spawned - military, political, diplomatic - there is very little on its effect at the time on ordinary lives, in homes, school, and the workplace, on the fear and widespread numb incomprehension in the population at large.
The vast majority of those missiles are in government arsenals, but munitions specialists say that shoulder-fired missiles like the Stinger and the SA-7 are so small and portable that many are diverted from government stocks each year and sold on the black market.
