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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?

bigred152 - 07:59am Jan 22, 2001 EST (#578 of 588)

China: they're not behind it, and as yet haven't reported on the new President Bush .. because they don't know what his trade and foreign policy are to be. They do know that America is a wealthy country as cp to China. If America wants to keep that gap, it might be better to re-invest American wealth into productive ventures rather than games more suited to pinball-alley.

bigred152 - 08:00am Jan 22, 2001 EST (#579 of 588)

England and Australia - the people, don't like what Bush is proposing, because their countries will become actual targets in respect of North Yorkshire and Central Australia.

dirac_10 - 02:30am Jan 23, 2001 EST (#580 of 588)

We got lasers right now that we are sellin' to foreign gov'ts. that shoot down jets and non-ICBM rockets at 10 km.

I don't suppose anyone has a technical reason, given the above proven fact, that if we actually spent real money, we couldn't shoot down ICBM's at hundreds of km?

And does it ever occur to anyone, that they just might not tell the general public all the military secrets of the United States?

And if it won't work against Saddam, how come Russia and China are so worried? Are they stupid?

bigred152 - 08:56am Jan 23, 2001 EST (#581 of 588)

"I think that if I ever got near an assured income I'd write books along the order of great canvases, including everything in them‹huge symphonies that would handle poetry and prose as they present themselves from day to day and from one aspect of my life and interests to another. But that's all over, I think. They're going to blow everything up next time and I don't believe we have long. Always men have talked about THE END OF THE WORLD-‹it's nearly here. A few more straws in the wall . . . a loose brick or two replaced . . . then no stone left standing on another and the long silence; really forever. What is there to struggle against? Nobody can put the stars back together again. There isn't much time at all. I can't say it doesn't matter; it matters more than any thing‹but we are helpless to stop it now." Patchen http://www.tc.umn.edu/~hreh0001/pal.html

rshowalter - 12:04pm Jan 23, 2001 EST (#582 of 588)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

dirac, how 'bout some reference on those fancy lasars? I'm quite interested. Especially since the lasar development has been going on, at high priority, for so long.

For a brand new technology, ten or hundred or thousand fold increases in a figure of merit sometimes (though not often) happen with continuation of effort. That's rare.

Experience after the infancy of a technology usually has this pattern - initially, and at perhaps 10% of the project cost, 80% of maximum possible functionality is achieved. After that, incremental improvements come hard. So, after HOW LONG do we have military lasars? After HOW MUCH MONEY AND PRIORITY? How much power do they have? What is their range? How plausible is it that they be developed to shoot through the atmosphere to the extraordinary level of precisionthat missile defense requires?

10km shoot downs, after all this time, may be reason for pessimism, not optimism.

mhunter20 - 02:47pm Jan 23, 2001 EST (#583 of 588)

dirac_10 1/23/01 2:30am

We got lasers right now that we are sellin' to foreign gov'ts. that shoot down jets and non-ICBM rockets at 10 km.

In the visible spectrum? These lasers must be very, very, very intense.

If we had something like Tesla's death ray (was a beam sent from Shoreham, NY to Tunguska, USSR?) we could send the beam right through the Earth and potentially destroy missiles before they're even launched. There would be no atmospheric diffraction problem and no reflection problems (how do you destroy the missile without destroying the sattelite if the missile is coated with reflective paint?). Of course, if it existed, Tesla's death ray could also be used to attack as well as defend.

bigred152 - 04:16pm Jan 23, 2001 EST (#584 of 588)

Yorkshire-thread http://talk.guardianunlimited.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee7ddca/0

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