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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 - 09:41pm Feb 5, 2002 EST (#11289 of 11295)

Emperor of Umpires !

lchic - 01:21am Feb 6, 2002 EST (#11290 of 11295)

Powell Says U.S. Plans to Work Out Binding Arms Pact

By TODD S. PURDUM

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today that the United States expected to meet Russia's demand for a "legally binding" agreement on reducing nuclear warheads, whether that takes the form of a treaty approved by Congress or some less formal document, but he left most details unspecified and officials said they were still being worked out. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/06/international/06DIPL.html He did not address another Russian demand, that Washington destroy any excess warheads and not simply store them as the Bush administration has proposed.

Russian nuclear workers are
moving into Iran
supposedly as Teachers
- Yet imparting their secrets
re Nuclear weapons
(The Sunday Times)

lchic - 01:25am Feb 6, 2002 EST (#11291 of 11295)

.

lchic - 03:22am Feb 6, 2002 EST (#11292 of 11295)

I anticipate the Day when to command Respect in the remotest Regions it will be sufficient to say I am an American. — Benjamin Rush (1745-1813), 1800. http://www.jimpoz.com/quotes/freedom.asp

rshow55 - 06:00am Feb 6, 2002 EST (#11293 of 11295)

Like this quote, too:

" If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.

— President Thomas Jefferson. 1743-1826

rshow55 - 06:26am Feb 6, 2002 EST (#11294 of 11295)

Interesting discussions, in a complex set of circumstances with a lot at stake. I've been thinking of how to take my part, in a way consistent with the national interest, and in response to the issues raised. There are, of course, problems in arguments that depend, in essence, on numbers, on issues of "how much" -- when the numbers, very often, are classified.

Arguments in terms of "logical sequences" - - complete with words and pictures, can seem "perfectly clear" -- and yet be totally wrong - and deceptive -- because the implicit promise of numbers that make the logic possible is not met.

I found an interesting unclassified number that relates to the feasibilty of the Airborne Lasar (ABL) program, and the discussion of this board.

It is that the best light resolving power that has been achieved without adaptive optics has been limited by the atmosphere (not the optical quality of lenses and the stability of mountings) and is about 1 arc second. Here is Chaisson's language below a graph plotting Effective Light Resolution (in arc seconds) versus time (from 1400AD to the present) in the Prologue of Eric J. Chaisson's The Hubble Wars Harper-Collins, 1995

"Only two great advances in angular resolution mark the history of optical astronomy. Galileo's first use of the telescope provided a tenfold improvement in resolution, but no appreciable advances in resolution from ground-based observatories have occurred in the past several centuries (owing to their location under earth's atmosphere). While the use of special techniques - such as active and adaptive optics, to be discussed later in this book - has sometimes provided superb resolution toward bright objects in recent years (hence the slight tilt of the drawn rising curve to the right) it is only the Hubble Space Telescope that routinely grants us another full order-of-magnitude leap in resolving power. (The author first made this diagram for a talk given in Italy by the director of the Science Institute to help celebrate Galileo's epoch-making discoveries in the early seventeenth century.)

I'll be using the facts Chaisson refers to about resolution - they are unclassified, and acknowledged by a wide and expert public. The fact that the atmosphere distorts as much as it does, without adaptive optics, is relevant to the workability of ABL. What does the "adaptive optics" of this laser "weapon" adapt to in the first place? Where's the feedback loop with the resolution needed?

It is worth remembering that, for ABL to work as promised, the resolution of Space Telescope seems inadequate.

I'll be taking my time today, and trying to be fair, constructive, and responsive.

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