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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.

lchic - 07:58pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10889 of 10921)

Just raise the point here (on the never-let-a-chance-go-by philosophy) ... if America can't regulate and run a little company like Enron -- how much faith can regular people have in it's running of the Big-ly dangerous nuclear mess?

rshow55 - 08:00pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10890 of 10921)

MD9348 rshowalter 9/18/01 6:32am

rshow55 - 08:05pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10891 of 10921)

I believe that everybody concerned about matters of defense, and especially nuclear deployments, should consider carefully the concerns about the “military-industrial complex” set out in the FAREWELL ADDRESS of President Dwight D. Eisenhower January 17, 1961. http://www.geocities.com/~newgeneration/ikefw.htm

With circumstances that appear to show a disproportion and operational mismatch between means and ends, the speech seems to me to raise issues of crucial importance today.

Indeed, when one looks at many things that have happened since 1961, it seems to me that Eisenhower was right to be concerned, and that in many ways his worst fears have been realized. Things have gone far, far worse in the world, in some important ways, than many hoped. Many, even most people believed that by the end of the 20th century, we'd live in a far more prosperous world than the one that now exists. C.P. Snow felt so -- and many in his generation felt so.

rshow55 - 08:12pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10892 of 10921)

Hitler's people would have felt right at home with the manipulations central to the workings of Enron . The use of "free markets" with private information and private maneuvering -- backed by information flows, and forces, from government.

So would any number of people at CIA, or the old KGB, or any other reasonably competant intelligence service.

And the patterns by which Enron bought so much influence - in the Bush administration, among Democratic politicians, and elsewhere, were essentially the same patterns by which corruption happens elsewhere -- notably, and very completely, in Germany.

People who love America should want to guard against such patterns - not justify them, and hide them.

rshow55 - 08:16pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10893 of 10921)

Psychwarfare, Casablanca -- and terror http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/267

rshow55 - 09:28pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10894 of 10921)

md10638 rshow55 1/3/02 7:02pm . . . from an undelivered speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

guy_catelli - 10:08pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10895 of 10921)
the trick of Mensa

have you no shame? at long last, have you no shame?

lchic - 10:47pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10896 of 10921)

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch, special counsel in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings.

lchic - 11:06pm Jan 19, 2002 EST (#10897 of 10921)

Who put the MISS in Miss -ile Defence?

Complaints lodged with the _______ have received no response. These include concerns about men being subjected to body searches by women prison officers, unacceptable to Muslims.

dejaxxvu - 12:47am Jan 20, 2002 EST (#10898 of 10921)

Does Nuclear Culture have Gender?

Do Bears feature?

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