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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

minutus - 11:36am Jul 17, 2000 EST (#177 of 11858)

I believe that the U.S. should have a missle defense system, but that going beyond the ABM treaty will seriously threaten a paranoid Russian military hierarchy which can only respond with nuclear weapons to a perceived first-strike threat. Why can't we modernize the ABM site in North Dakota and build another to defend Washington, as I believe the treaty allows? This would take care of many "rogue state" threats, although probably not as efficiently, and protect us against the Russians and Chinese. They are still the greatest threat. It would play well on the stage of world opinion as well and the Russians would probably respond by trying to abrogate the ABM treaty. Let's put that ball in their court.

Dave Carson St. Petersburg, FL

wrcooper - 12:02pm Jul 17, 2000 EST (#178 of 11858)

minutus 7/17/00 11:36am

minutus:

Why can't we modernize the ABM site in North Dakota and build another to defend Washington, as I believe the treaty allows?

Because it would cost a lot of money to build such a system, and it wouldn't really protect us.

If a penny-ante terrorist power wanted to nuke an America city, it would acquire a small device and smuggle it into the country and blow it up on the ground. That would be the easiest scenario by far. If the goal is to strike at the US with a nuclear weapon, why build an expensive and complex ICBM to do it? Such a delivery vehicle could be easily tracked, perhaps destroyed, and certainly identified as incoming from the homeland of the terrorist state. Such an assault would invite a nuclear response that would be far more terrible than anything such a small country could survive. It would be much easier and safer just to build a backpack-size bomb and set it off in midtown Manhattan. It would kill a bunch of Americans, destroy the center of the Great Satan's culture, and by the time that people figured out who planted it, the world community would have acted to forestall any US nuclear counterstrike. The terrorist would win. I don't personally see a rogue state doing anything like this; but it is conceivable that a well-funded fanatical international terrorist organization might. But such an organization would not acquire an ICBM that a missile defense system would protect against.

The BMD program was always about protecting our strategic nuclear strike force to insure the nation's retaliatory capability. It was part of the MAD madness. Reagan's idea of creating a missile defense umbrella over civilian populations was always a rhetorical pipedream. The military didn't take it seriously. Now we're being asked to swallow the whole ball of nonsense again.

As people have said repeatedly, this project is about filling the defense allocations trough. Its military value is nil. All that such a program would accomplish is to fatten the wallets of the contractors and beef us the Pentagon's clout.

We should be vigorously pursuing disarmament, using our current strategic advantage in geopolitics to force more disarmament concessions from the other nuclear powers. Let's decrease the stockpiles of nukes while we can, and not provide incentives for building them up. That's what this program would accomplish, which is just the opposite of what we want.

evenbetta - 01:14pm Jul 17, 2000 EST (#179 of 11858)

"The BMD program was always about protecting our strategic nuclear strike force to insure the nation's retaliatory capability. It was part of the MAD madness"

100% wrong. The concept moves away from MAD and into NUTS yes laugh all you want its called Nuclear Utilization Theory. (NUTS). That theory is based on serveral simple yet dangerouse conclusions a) that nuclear weapons exist-thus they will in time be used by RATIONAL actors.

b) If we are to involve ourselves in 'war' any war-then we must fight to survive and win.

c) Nuclear war is just another technological progression of war-thus one must fight nuclear war to win

End concept:

Nuclear warfare strategy must be utilized so that instead of reaching stalemate with another-or maintaining deterrence with another-nuclear warfare strategy must utilize nuclear weapons like any other weapons system. The must be utilized to win a war. The conflict can be survived and the objective rather then mutual destruction- is to win.

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