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Missile Defense

Nazi engineer and Disney space advisor Wernher Von Braun helped give us rocket science. Today, the legacy of military aeronautics has many manifestations from SDI to advanced ballistic missiles. Now there is a controversial push for a new missile defense system. What will be the role of missile defense in the new geopolitical climate and in the new scientific era?

rshowalt - 02:29pm Nov 8, 2000 EDT (#483 of 484)

http://www.gsinstitute.org/news_arch/scheer.html

Do As We Say, Not As We Do Defense: The world can see through our hypocritical preaching about nuclear arms control.

By Robert Scheer The Los Angeles Times Tuesday, March 28, 2000

rshowalter - 06:08pm Nov 8, 2000 EDT (#484 of 484)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

kalter , I may have unfairly read the subtlety of your intention. But the point about morality stands. So, I believe, do the points about military effectiveness and overall practicality.

Militarily, nuclear weapons are useless if the purpose of military action is the use of force to shape working civil societies. After the nukes go off, there is only a wasteland of stinking unburied bodies, or, if people survive, the horrors of the dead connected with the horrors of fights to the death, without hope and without reasonable end.

On the side of practicality, the controls on these things, in the internet age, are simple unstable, and we should take them down for the same reason that we remove asbestos from buildings - as risk control - EXCEPT THAT, THIS TIME THE RISK BEING CONTROLLED IS MUCH GREATER.

If there were even a passably open forum, where all sides could speak about nuclear weapons - you'd have a hard time finding many coherent arguments for them. They remain because of an impasse in human psychology and and negotiating technique that could be solved, fairly quickly, by sophistication, good faith, and some hard work.

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