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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 - 11:39am Jan 26, 2002 EST (#11063 of 11101)

http://www.greenpeace.org/~comms/nukes/chernob/cherfoto.html http://www.belarusguide.com/chernobyl1/chfacts.htm http://www.cnic.or.jp/english/

creasa - 12:26pm Jan 26, 2002 EST (#11064 of 11101)

lchic,

I am from the Ukraine! I grew up in Odessa and lived in Kiev for 20 years. I moved to the USA in Jan. 2001. I read your post and you don't know what you are talking about. I will explian it in Russian:

No ty znaesh, rebyata mne ob'yasnili, chto ya ne ochen' udachno vybrala etot server, potomu chto na nego byvaet chasto trudno zayti. Vam , navernoe s Willi trudno eto ponyat', no eto Ukraina i rabotu etih tozhe obespechivayut provaydery. Vobschem tot zhe durdom, chto byl u Narika na firme, tol'ko v bol'shem masshtabe. Koroche ty mne posylay i tuda i tuda, ok?

Poka. Natasha

rshow55 - 12:50pm Jan 26, 2002 EST (#11065 of 11101)

If one doubted that the MD programs are based on fraud, or technical mistakes very near to fraud, long ignored - - reading the "collected works" of Mazza, and "jgeorge"'s other pseudonyms would remove any substantial doubt. Whatever the administration's missile defense program is about -- defending the United States isn't it.

Missile defense has been a bluff for a long time. Just happened on some old NASA pictures of the Echo 1 reflector balloon. (Echo 1, launched August 1960.) It was 100 feet in diameter, and made of an aluminum coated polyester that was diffusely reflective rather than shiny. For a good reason. Bell Labs knew very well that "angle of incidence equals angle of reflection" -- and knew how small the radar signiture of a shiny reflector would be. Even though amplifiers are much easier to keep on earth, rather than put in orbit, there was no way to rely on passive reflection for communication satellites. The reflectivity of spherical reflectors, even diffuse ones, was just too small.

Later, "successes" in distinguishing between "spherical balloon decoys" and "warheads" were shown in tests. The "successes" were less impressive than appeared - - all the radar had to do was track the target with by far the largest reflection signiture. Not so fancy.

Similar "successes" are being claimed today. A sort of engineering equivalent of "off balance sheet accounting.

Countermeasures for MD are easy -- easy enough that very good ones could probably be worked out as senior undergraduate engineering projects. The output of these projects could probably easily defeat MD efforts costs millions of times as much.

That's just the way the physics is.

MD11045 rshow55 1/25/02 2:34pm

. . . .

When the United States lies to itself and others on this subject matter, the security of the nation is weakened.

lchic - 03:47pm Jan 26, 2002 EST (#11066 of 11101)

George - Ukraine folks understand links/quotation creasa 1/26/02 12:26pm

lchic - 04:04pm Jan 26, 2002 EST (#11067 of 11101)

""IT'S THE holiday with a difference we've all been been waiting for. The Ukrainian company New Men Travel is launching an "extreme tour" of Chernobyl, site of the world's worst nuclear accident in 1986. It promises visitors radiation monitors, protective clothing and a close-up view of the sarcophagus surrounding the wrecked reactor. You can also get to see the "graveyard" of vehicles contaminated during the clean-up, the abandoned company town of Pripyat and a host of nuclear processing plants.

All this is for $460 if you take a private car and a personal English-speaking guide, or for $340 if you join a minibus tour. According to Dimitri Osyka from New Men Travel, some people might like to "touch the spot of one of the biggest ecological and human disasters". Radiation levels are such that "one short visit should not do any harm to a tourist", he says, though those taking the tour do so at their own risk. http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opfeedback.jsp?id=ns232799

rshow55 - 04:14pm Jan 26, 2002 EST (#11068 of 11101)

This thread has gone on a long time, and for most of that time (before the anthrax attack on the NYT, which was apparently done by an American) it involved broader topic definition than the current one. The previous topic definitions, and times these headings changed, are set out in MD10759 rshow55 1/14/02 1:48pm

A great deal of progress and dialog on nuclear weapons policy has gone on here. MD4585-4590 rshowalter 6/7/01 7:05pm

An important reference to the dialog, found by lchic, was

http://scienceforpeace.sa.utoronto.ca/WorkingGroupsPage/NucWeaponsPage/Documents/ThreatsNucWea.html

THREATS TO USE NUCLEAR WEAPONS: The Sixteen Known Nuclear Crises of the Cold War, 1946-1985 by David R. Morgan

The amount of effort, in an attempt to increase international understanding, and come to a "shared goal," expressed by gisterme , of "no nukes in the world" can partly be seen by looking at the long list of citations to many distinguished efforts, usually long postings, by gisterme set out in MD4591-4596 rshowalter 6/7/01 8:10pm

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