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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?

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rshow55 - 01:52pm Jan 27, 2002 EST (#11084 of 11101)

MD10801 rshow55 1/16/02 8:47am

This Missile Defense thread is extensive, and represents an effort to set down, using techniques the internet makes possible, an open corpus, with many crosslinks, adapted to assist in the focusing of a complex, difficult issue toward closure. It is set up as a prototype - illustrating patterns that may be useful for communication between staffed organizations.

A fairly compact ongoing summary of this thread from September 25, 2000 to date, which is too large for easy reading, but not for sampling, is set out with many links in Psychwar, Casablanca, and Terror -- from #151 on. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/159

lchic - 02:39pm Jan 27, 2002 EST (#11085 of 11101)

< noted Casablanca's surfaced in the Enron discussion thread | must be significant to US culture >

rshow55 - 02:59pm Jan 27, 2002 EST (#11086 of 11101)

Casablanca is common ground, something culturally literate Americans know -- and that people the whole world over understant, at the level of sympathy, and intellectually, too. I used the movie as a point of departure in PSYCHWAR, CASABLANCA, AND TERROR , which tells a key story about the Cold War, interesting to American, Russians, and others. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/0

Especially the core story part, from posting 13 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/12 to posting 23 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/22 There is a comment in #26 that I feel some may find interesting, as well.

This core part is about 7 pages.

If people were agreed on some key FACTS about what happened during the Cold War (not how they feel about these facts, but the facts themselves) we'd all be safer, and some current impasses would resolve.

These are facts that need to be CHECKED -- and crossreferenced. The Enron matter is showing something about how important checking is - - and how expensive deception can be, and how dangerous.

rshow55 - 03:04pm Jan 27, 2002 EST (#11087 of 11101)

Another body of key facts involves a technical dream - - that Americans, Russians, and others feel differently about.

Some Americans like the dream. Russians, Chinese, and most europeans do not.

But the dream, like all dreams that people work for, can only be made to work, whether you are for the dream or against it, if it is consistent with the facts.

. The dream is the idea that American military forces, and the United States as a nation, can be made immune to missiles, long range or short range, carrying nuclear weapons or other destructive means, and that the United States, at the same time, can have decisive weapons, including missiles, and "space based" weapons, that will permit it to dominate all other nations with impunity.

That "dream" -- whether you are for it or against it, depends, for its practicality, on technical facts.

One cannot, as a matter of logic, rule out the dream "in general." But one CAN rule out specific means proposed to implement it. One can rule these implementations out (barring miracles that can be specified) using information in the open literature.

Some of that information has been set out on this thread. It can be checked.

Facts are safer than scenarios based on fictions. It is in the interest of virtually all Americans, and in the interest of the rest of the world, to evaluate this "missile defense" dream.

None of the "missile defense" proposals that the Bush administration inherited, and has now embraced, make technical sense. This can be checked, and should be. MD11045 rshow55 1/25/02 2:34pm

If there was diplomatic interest in getting this done, from a number of countries, the checking would follow in due course. It would, in gisterme's phrase, "save American taxpayers a lot of money."

And we'd all be safer, worldwide.

rshow55 - 03:20pm Jan 27, 2002 EST (#11088 of 11101)

As Minister Ivanov pointed, out, we need international cooperation to control weapons that we have every reason to fear. MD11057 rshow55 1/26/02 10:45am

Which means we have to be reasonable and law abiding outselves.

lchic - 03:37pm Jan 27, 2002 EST (#11089 of 11101)

One of those Russian Ministers is no more - downed over Chetnya.

Interestingly 'the people' in one area of Sir Lanka determined to 'meet' the TamilTigers .. going tourist style to picnic in their territory.

Most things on this board relate to mind re-alignment .. for as Maslow pointed out, peoples hierachy of wants are the same.

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