Cancel Missile Shield

The Bush administration wanted a missile shield 'protecting' eastern european countries that had broken with Russia. Since there seemed little danger of missiles being lobbed into eastern europe it seemed to be pointless other than 'extending' US influence.

Breaking news: Obama says shield will be canceled.

News Alert - http://www.washingtonpost.com?referrer=email
6:44 a.m. ET Thursday, September 17, 2009

Czech Premier: Obama Scrapping Missile Shield  - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/17/AR2009091700639.html

The Czech prime minister says President Barack Obama has told him that the U.S. is abandoning plans to put a missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com - http://www.washingtonpost.com?referrer=email

I tried three constructions at approximately 8:30 September 17, 2009: obama missile shield, missile shield, and cancel shield. The initial searches produced: 559 messages for obama missile shield; 1,500 messages for missile shield; and 39 messages for cancel shield. So I had Archivist search for "missile shield.".

At about 11:00 a.m. Obama gave the rationale for changing the missile defense. This is the report of ABC news. The announcement was quickly posted to YouTube as well.

This is the distribution for the time messages were collected.

There was a big spike on September 17. The peak was at 5:00 a.m. Who in the world was sending messages at that time; I am not sure about the time zone, but it seemed pretty strange. When you check the tweets you find that European news media were reporting the change, and by shortly after 5:00 a.m. US time they were reporting that the Chech prime minister had announced the change in US policy. There is a bump in the middle of the morning that might be associated with the Obama announcement. When you look at the tweets you see that references to Obama announcing start about 10:20 a.m. So the bump is probably related to that.

Messages were collected from September 17 through September 28. That yielded 6657 messages, and by the 28th it was down to very few a day. So I stopped collecting at that point.

The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: missile shield.txt