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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?

rshowalter - 04:34pm Feb 13, 2001 EST (#683 of 689)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The idea that our nuclear controls are stable and hard to attack is based on some assumptions that are false but were never checked, and some other assumptions, that were true when the system was built, but tht no longer apply in the new internet world. Some of these mistakes are basic. But ANY mistakes involved with this system are hard for the "owners" of the system to admit, and hard to check for.

The military and intelligence culture, which is built for a world where deception is of essential military importance, is built for hiding things. Not built to permit logical sequences to be easily traced in unanticipated ways, which is essential for checking things. Code Name: Retract Larch .....NYT Magazine .... 12/03/2000

In addition, the training required to make people able to fight a nuclear war involves all the inflexibilities fundamental to military training in intense form. Here is the best explanation of the foundations of military training that I know. THE EATHEN by Rudyard Kipling

rshowalter - 04:43pm Feb 13, 2001 EST (#684 of 689)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

American nuclear policy, which explicitly allows the US to use first strikes with nuclear weapons beckq 9/25/00 5:03pm , looks horrific to much of the rest of the world.

World Court: ...Nuclear weapons, the ultimate evil, destabilise humanitarian law . . .. . .....Atomic warfare and humanitarian law therefore appear mutually exclusive, the existence of the one automatically implies the non-existence of the other

In addition, our nuclear policy tends to subvert all or our moral reasoning, undermining our whole culture.

I think Clinton made some mistakes that ANYBODY who thought hard about nuclear policy, American style, would be prone to make. . . . . . YOU WANT TO MESS UP YOUR MIND? CONVINCE YOURSELF THAT FIRST STRIKES WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARE ALL RIGHT UNDER SOME CIRCUMSTANCES . . . . ., and then try to put together a consistent set of moral standards.

Terrorists, who exemplify twisted moral standards in our eyes, often justify their actions by arguing

if it is all right for the US to use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons -- THEN WE CAN DO ANYTHING.

We might deal with them better, and have more international backing for doing so, if we admitted that it is NOT all right to use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons.

Nuclear destruction kills very many innocent people in ugly ways - leaving the dead unburied, to look like this: . Dead Men Talking ......In Tennessee, theres a field filled with rotting corpses . . . NYT Magazine ..... 12/03/2000 They could destroy whole nations, and under easily imaginable circumstances, could destroy the world.

There is ugliness here.

We need to look hard for ways to find new disciplined beauty, to replace this dangerous ugliness.

The administration seems well set out, at the level of organization, to do this, if it is possible to actually check the essential facts that make a life or death difference in these matters.

This situation is difficult under the best of circumstances. Lies, which the military and intelligence community are prone to, may make reasonable solutions essentially impossible, and are very dangerous here.

lunarchick - 05:31am Feb 14, 2001 EST (#685 of 689)
lunarchick@www.com

Germany-Russia

rshowalter - 07:36am Feb 14, 2001 EST (#686 of 689)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I made a proposal for getting nuclear weapons down rshowalt 9/25/00 7:32am that depends, in large part, on an insight from cryptography.

Encoding in clear can be safe, and under circumstances of distrust, can be essential.

With my partner, Dawn Riley, we did a demonstration.

rshowalter - 12:05pm Feb 14, 2001 EST (#687 of 689)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Security in Space --by Vladimir Kozin ..... a senior counselor at the Foreign Ministry of Russia . . . . The Moscow Times. . . . Feb. 12, 2001

mhunter20 - 12:17pm Feb 14, 2001 EST (#688 of 689)

<http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2001/02/12/006.html>

For this reason, I think that now is an appropriate time to propose to the new U.S. administration and to the world community at large the idea of concluding a multilateral agreement on the inviolability of manned spacecraft, non-military satellites and non-offensive military satellites — including reconnaissance, meteorological, navigation, communications and other vehicles. Essentially such an agreement would cover any spacecraft not involved in anti-satellite or anti-missile warfare.

IOW, anti-missile satellites are offensive and we will shoot them down.

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